Clive Barker (ebook)

Volume Two

Dread

A young student, Steve, becomes acquainted with an older student named Quaid. Quaid is an intellectual with a morbid fascination with fear. He eventually shows Steve how he, Quaid, kidnapped a vegetarian woman and imprisoned her in a room without any food but for a steak, only releasing her when she finally overcame her dread of eating meat in order to prevent starvation; she eats the meat even though it has spoiled. Steve becomes Quaid's next candidate for his experiments, held captive in a dark, silent room, forcing him to relive a childhood period of deafness that terrified him. Steve is driven insane by this forced sensory deprivation and eventually returns to Quaid's house and butchers him with an axe. Quaid's experiments, all along, were to try to help him understand the nature of fear, but ironically his experiments in phobias made his own worst fears come to life.

Hell's Event

Every one-hundred years, a race is held in London. Satan sends one of his representatives to run it against the (unsuspecting) human runners. If Satan's minion wins, then he, Satan, gets to rule the Earth. An athlete taking part in the event, Joel, begins to realise the true meaning of things and what is at stake when his fellow human competitors begin to fall, savaged by some unseen beast. We also learn of the deal a satanist, Gregory, makes with Hell. He has staked his life and soul on this race. Meanwhile, Joel does not win the race due to a struggle with Hell's shape-shifting runner, who bites off Joel's face. However, the last surviving runner jogs past them to the finishing line. Hell loses out once again. Gregory is hardly surprised when he is punished for his overconfidence by being gruesomely slain.

Jacqueline Ess: Her Will And Testament

Jacqueline Ess is a housewife who attempts suicide after becoming bored with her life. She recovers only to find that she has an ability to change people's body shapes simply with her mind. She accidentally kills her therapist and then - somewhat less accidentally - kills her husband, simply by willing their bodies into tearing apart or folding in on themselves. One man becomes obsessed with her and tracks her down. Jacqueline eventually becomes a prostitute, her abilities giving her the power to give men the ultimate sexual experience, albeit one that always proves fatal. She has by now lost control of herself and has to be watched while sleeping in case she unconsciously mutilates her own body. The man obsessed with her eventually makes love to Jacqueline and they willingly die together by Jacqueline's powers.

The Skins of the Fathers

Davidson is stuck in Arizona after his car breaks down. He then witnesses a bizarre parade of freakish monsters. It turns out that these creatures mated with a woman in a nearby town six-years previously and are intending on reclaiming the child, which they promptly achieve. Davidson reaches the town where a posse of gun-toting locals are eager to set out to slay the monsters. Everything goes wrong, however, and Davidson and just a few other survivors end up with a horrific fate; they sink in quicksand which then hardens when they are half-buried (one man is left with just his face exposed, the rest of him in the solidified ground) and are left for dead in the burning desert heat.

New Murders in the Rue Morgue

Lewis is a seventy-three-year-old man who goes to Paris after his friend, Phillipe, is arrested for butchering a young woman. Phillipe eventually commits suicide in his cell after babbling about an orangutan who committed the murder he had been arrested for. Lewis does not believe it until he sees the primate - dressed like a human, completely shaved, and wielding a razor - for himself. The beast had been raised by Philippe, a notorious eccentric, as a strange experiment on the classic Edgar Allan Poe story.

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