The Hellbound Heart (2 page)

"Show me. "

They needed no further invitation to raise the curtain. He heard the door creak as it was opened, and turned to see that the world beyond the threshold had disappeared, to be replaced by the same

panic-filled darkness from which the members of the Order had stepped. He looked back towards the Cenobites, seeking some explanation for this. But they'd disappeared. Their passing had not gone unrecorded however. They'd taken the flowers with them, leaving only bare boards, and on the wall the offerings he had assembled were blackening, as if in the heat of some fierce but invisible flame. He smelled the bitterness of their consumption; it pricked his nostrils so acutely he was certain they would bleed.

But the smell of burning was only the beginning. No sooner had he registered it than half a dozen other scents filled his head. Perfumes he had scarcely noticed until now were suddenly overpoweringly strong. The lingering scent of filched blossoms; the smell of the paint on the ceiling and the sap in the wood beneath his feet-all filled his head. He could even smell the darkness outside the door, and in it, the ordure of a hundred thousand birds.

He put his hand to his mouth and nose, to stop the onslaught from overcoming him, but the stench of perspiration on his fingers made him giddy. He might have been driven to nausea had there not been fresh sensations flooding his system from each nerve ending and taste bud.

It seemed he could suddenly feel the collision of the dust motes with his skin. Every drawn breath chafed his lips; every blink, his eyes. Bile burned in the back of his throat, and a morsel of yesterday's beef that had lodged between his teeth sent spasms through his system as it exuded a droplet of gravy upon his tongue.

His ears were no less sensitive. His head was filled with a thousand dins, some of which he himself was father to. The air that broke against his eardrums was a hurricane; the flatulence in his bowels was thunder. But there were other sounds-innumerable sounds-which assailed him from somewhere beyond himself. Voices raised in anger, whispered professions of love, roars and rattlings, snatches of song, tears.

Was it the world he was hearing-morning breaking in a thousand homes? He had no chance to listen closely; the cacophony drove any power of analysis from his head.

But there was worse. The eyes! Oh god in heaven, he had never guessed that they could be such torment; he, who'd thought there was nothing on earth left to startle him. Now he reeled! Everywhere, sight!

The plain plaster of the ceiling was an awesome geography of brush strokes. The weave of his plain shirt an unbearable elaboration of threads. In the corner he saw a mite move on a dead dove's head, and wink its eyes at him, seeing that he saw. Too much! Too much!

Appalled, he shut his eyes. But there was more inside than out; memories whose violence shook him to the verge of senselessness. He sucked his mother's milk, and choked; felt his sibling's arms around him (a fight, was it, or a brotherly embrace? Either way, it suffocated). And more; so much more. A short lifetime of sensations, all writ in a perfect hand upon his cortex, and breaking him with their insistence that

they be remembered.

He felt close to exploding. Surely the world outside his head-the room, and the birds beyond the

door-they, for all their shrieking excesses, could not be as overwhelming as his memories. Better that, he thought, and tried to open his eyes. But they wouldn't unglue. Tears or pus or needle and thread had sealed them up.

He thought of the faces of the Cenobites: the hooks, the chains. Had they worked some similar surgery upon him, locking him up behind his eyes with the parade of his history?

In fear for his sanity, he began to address them, though he was no longer certain that they were even within earshot.

"Why?" he asked. "Why are you doing this to me?"

The echo of his words roared in his ears, but he scarcely attended to it. More sense impressions were swimming up from the past to torment him. Childhood still lingered on his tongue (milk and frustration) but there were adult feelings joining it now. He was grown! He was mustached and mighty, hands heavy, gut large.

Youthful pleasures had possessed the appeal of newness, but as the years had crept on, and mild sensation lost its potency, stronger and stronger experiences had been called for. And here they came again, more pungent for being laid in the darkness at the back of his bead.

He felt untold tastes upon his tongue: bitter, sweet, sour, salty; smelled spice and shit and his mother's hair; saw cities and skies; saw speed, saw deeps; broke bread with men now dead and was scalded by the heat of their spittle on his cheek.

And of course there were women.

Always, amid the flurry and confusion, memories of women appeared, assaulting him with their scents, their textures, their tastes.

The proximity of this harem aroused him, despite circumstances. He opened his trousers and caressed his cock, more eager to have the seed spilled and so be freed of these creatures than for the pleasure of it.

He was dimly aware, as he worked his inches, that he must make a pitiful sight: a blind man in an empty room, aroused for a dream's sake. But the wracking, joyless orgasm failed to even slow the relentless display. His knees buckled, and his body collapsed to the boards where his spunk had fallen. There was a spasm of pain as he hit the floor, but the response was washed away before another wave of memories.

He rolled onto his back, and screamed; screamed and begged for an end to it, but the sensations only rose higher still, whipped to fresh heights with every prayer for cessation he offered up.

The pleas became a single sound, words and sense eclipsed by panic. It seemed there was no end to this, but madness. No hope but to be lost to hope.

As he formulated this last, despairing thought, the torment stopped.

All at once; all of it. Gone. Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. He was abruptly bereft of them all. There were seconds then, when he doubted his very existence. Two heartbeats, three, four.

On the fifth beat, he opened his eyes. The room was empty, the doves and the piss-pot gone. The door was closed.

Gingerly, he sat up. His limbs were tingling; his head, wrist, and bladder ached.

And then-a movement at the other end of the room drew his attention.

Where, two moments before, there had been an empty space, there was now a figure. It was the fourth Cenobite, the one that had never spoken, nor shown its face. Not a he now saw: but she. The hood it had worn had been discarded, as had the robes. The woman beneath was gray yet gleaming, her lips bloody, her legs parted so that the elaborate scarification of her pubis was displayed. She sat on a pile of rotting human heads, and smiled in welcome.

The collision of sensuality and death appalled him. Could he have any doubt that she had personally dispatched these victims? Their rot was beneath her nails, and their tongues-twenty or more-lay out in ranks on her oiled thighs, as if awaiting entrance. Nor did he doubt that the brains now seeping from their ears and nostrils had been driven to insanity before a blow or a kiss had stopped their hearts.

Kircher had lied to him-either that or he'd been horribly deceived. There was no pleasure in the air; or at least not as humankind understood it.

He had made a mistake opening Lemarchand's box. A very terrible mistake.

"Oh, so you've finished dreaming," said the Cenobite, perusing him as he lay panting on the bare boards.

"Good."

She stood up. The tongues fell to the floor, like a rain of slugs.

"Now we can begin," she said.

1

"It's not quite what I expected," Julia commented as they stood in the hallway. It was twilight; a cold day in August. Not the ideal time to view a house that had been left empty for so long.

"It needs work," Rory said. "That's all. It's not been touched since my grandmother died. That's the best part of three years. And I'm pretty sure she never did anything to it towards the end of her life."

"And it's yours?"

"Mine and Frank's. It was willed to us both. But when was the last time anybody saw big brother?"

She shrugged, as if she couldn't remember, though she remembered very well. A week before the wedding.

"Someone said he spent a few days here last summer. Rutting away, no doubt. Then he was off again. He's got no interest in property."

"But suppose we move in, and then he comes back, wants what's his?"

"I'll buy him out. I'll get a loan from the bank and buy him out. He's always hard up for cash."

She nodded, but looked less than persuaded.

"Don't worry," he said, going to where she was standing and wrapping his arms around her. "The place is ours, doll. We can paint it and pamper it and make it like heaven."

He scanned her face. Sometimes-particularly when doubt moved her, as it did nowher beauty came close to frightening him.

"Trust me," he said.

"I do."

"All right then. What say we start moving in on Sunday?"

2

Sunday.

It was still the Lord's Day up this end of the city. Even if the owners of these well-dressed houses

and-well-pressed children were no longer believers, they still observed the sabbath. A few curtains were twitched aside when Lewton's van drew up, and the unloading began; some curious neighbors even sauntered past the house once or twice, on the pretext of walking the hounds; but nobody spoke to the new arrivals, much less offered a hand with the furniture. Sunday was not a day to break sweat.

Julia looked after the unpacking, while Rory organized the unloading of the van, with Lewton and Mad Bob providing the extra muscle. It took four round-trips to transfer the bulk of the stuff from Alexandra Road, and at the end of the day there was still a good deal of bric-a-brac left behind, to be collected at a later point.

About two in the afternoon, Kirsty turned up on the doorstep.

"Came to see if I could give you a hand," she said, with a tone of vague apology in her voice.

"Well, you'd better come in," Julia said.

She went back into the front room, which was a battlefield in which only chaos was winning, and quietly cursed Rory. Inviting the lost soul round to offer her services was his doing, no doubt of it. She would be

more of a hindrance than a help; her dreamy, perpetually defeated manner set Julia's teeth on edge.

"What can I do?" Kirsty asked. "Rory said-"

"Yes," said Julia. "I'm sure he did."

"Where is he? Rory, I mean."

"Gone back for another vanload, to add to the misery."

"Oh."

Julia softened her expression. "You know it's very sweet of you," she said, "to come round like this, but I

don't think there's much you can do just at the moment."

Kirsty flushed slightly. Dreamy she was, but not stupid.

"I see," she said. "Are you sure? Can't...I mean, maybe I could make a cup of coffee for you?"

"Coffee," said Julia. The thought of it made her realize just how parched her throat had become. "Yes,"

she conceded. "That's not a bad idea."

The coffeemaking was not without its minor traumas. No task Kirsty undertook was ever entirely simple. She stood in the kitchen, boiling water in a pan it had taken a quarter of an hour to find, thinking that maybe she shouldn't have come after all. Julia always looked at her so strangely, as if faintly baffled by

the fact that she hadn't been smothered at birth. No matter. Rory had asked her to come, hadn't he? And that was invitation enough. She would not have turned down the chance of his smile for a hundred Julias.

The van arrived twenty-five minutes later, minutes in which the women had twice attempted, and twice failed, to get a conversation simmering. They had little in common. Julia the sweet, the beautiful, the winner of glances and kisses, and Kirsty the girl with the pale handshake, whose eyes were only ever as bright as Julia's before or after tears. She had long ago decided that life was unfair. But why, when she'd accepted that bitter truth, did circumstance insist on rubbing her face in it?

She surreptitiously watched Julia as she worked, and it seemed to Kirsty that the woman was incapable of ugliness. Every gesture-a stray hair brushed from the eyes with the back of the hand, dust blown from a favorite cup-all were infused with such effortless grace. Seeing it, she understood Rory's doglike adulation, and understanding it, despaired afresh.

He came in, at last, squinting and sweaty. The afternoon sun was fierce. He grinned at her, parading the ragged line of his front teeth that she had first found so irresistible.

"I'm glad you could come," he said.

"Happy to help-" she replied, but he had already looked away, at Julia.

"How's it going?"

"I'm losing my mind," she told him.

"Well, now you can rest from your labors," he said. "We brought the bed this trip." He gave her a

conspiratorial wink, but she didn't respond.

"Can I help with unloading?" Kirsty offered.

"Lewton and M.B. are doing it," came Rory's reply.

"Oh."

"But I'd give an arm and a leg for a cup of tea."

"We haven't found the tea," Julia told him.

"Oh. Maybe a coffee, then?"

"Right," said Kirsty. "And for the other two?"

"They'd kill for a cup."

Kirsty went back to the kitchen, filled the small pan to near brimming, and set it back on the stove. From the hallway she heard Rory supervising the next unloading.

It was the bed, the bridal bed. Though she tried very hard to keep the thought of his embracing Julia out of her mind, she could not. As she stared into the water, and it simmered and steamed and finally boiled, the same painful images of their pleasure came back and back.