Cabal. Clive Barker

       I The Truth

      Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than: ‘I’ll never leave you’.

      What time didn’t steal from under your nose, circumstance did. It was useless to hope otherwise; useless to dream that the world somehow meant you good. Everything of value, everything you clung to for your sanity would rot or be snatched in the long run, and the abyss would gape beneath you, as it gaped for Boone now, and suddenly, without so much as a breath of explanation, you were gone. Gone to hell or worse, professions of love and all.

      His outlook hadn’t always been so pessimistic. There’d been a time – not all that long ago – when he’d felt the burden of his mental anguish lifting. There’d been fewer psychotic episodes, fewer days when he felt like slitting his wrists rather than enduring the hours till his next medication. There’d seemed to be a chance for happiness.

      It was that prospect that had won the declaration of love from him; that: ‘I’ll never leave you,’ whispered in Lori’s ear as they lay in the narrow bed he’d never dared hope would hold two. The words had not come in the throes of high passion. Their love life, like so much else between them, was fraught with problems. But where other women had given up on him, unforgiving of his failure, she’d persevered: told him there was plenty of time to get it right, all the time in the world.

      I’m with you for as long as you want me to be, her patience had seemed to say.

      Nobody had ever offered such a commitment; and he wanted to offer one in return. Those words: ‘I’ll never leave you’. Were it.

      The memory of them, and of her skin almost luminous in the murk of his room, and of the sound of her breathing when she finally fell asleep beside him – all of it still had the power to catch his heart, and squeeze it till it hurt.

      He longed to be free of both the memory and the words,