Barker, Clive - The Hellbound Heart

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The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker
Copyright 1986
I long to talk with some old lover's ghost
Who died before the god of Love was born.
-John Donne, Love's Deitie
ONE
So intent was Frank upon solving the puzzle of Lemarchand's box that he
didn't hear the great bell begin to ring. The device had been constructed by a
master craftsman, and the riddle was this-that though he'd been told the box
contained wonders, there simply seemed to be no way into it, no clue on any of
its six black lacquered faces as to the whereabouts of the pressure points
that would disengage one piece of this three-dimensional jigsaw from another.
Frank had seen similar puzzles-mostly in Hong Kong, products of the
Chinese taste for making metaphysics of hard wood-but to the acuity and
technical genius of the Chinese the Frenchman had brought a perverse logic
that was entirely his own. If there was a system to the puzzle, Frank had
failed to find it. Only after several hours of trial and error did a chance
juxtaposition of thumbs, middle and last fingers bear fruit: an almost
imperceptible click, and then-victory!-a segment of the box slid out from
beside its neighbors.
There were two revelations.
The first, that the interior surfaces were brilliantly polished. Frank's
reflection-distorted, fragmented-skated across the lacquer. The second, that
Lemarchand, who had been in his time a maker of singing birds, had constructed
the box so that opening it tripped a musical mechanism, which began to tinkle
a short rondo of sublime banality.
Encouraged by his success, Frank proceeded to work on the box
feverishly, quickly finding fresh alignments of fluted slot and oiled peg
which in their turn revealed further intricacies. And with each solution-each
new half twist or pull-a further melodic element was brought into play-the
tune counterpointed and developed until the initial caprice was all but lost
in ornamentation.
At some point in his labors, the bell had begun to ring-a steady somber
tolling. He had not heard, at least not consciously. But when the puzzle was
almost finished-the mirrored innards of the box unknotted-he became aware that
his stomach churned so violently at the sound of the bell it might have been
ringing half a lifetime.
He looked up from his work. For a few moments he supposed the noise to
be coming from somewhere in the street outside-but he rapidly dismissed that
notion. It had been almost midnight before he'd begun to work at the
birdmaker's box; several hours had gone by-hours he would not have remembered
passing but for the evidence of his watch-since then. There was no church in
the city-however desperate for adherents-that would ring a summoning bell at
such an hour.
No. The sound was coming from somewhere much more distant, through the
very door (as yet invisible) that Lemarchand's miraculous box had been
constructed to open. Everything that Kircher, who had sold him the box, had
promised of it was true! He was on the threshold of a new world, a province
infinitely far from the room in which he sat.
Infinitely far; yet now, suddenly near.
The thought had made his breath quick. He had anticipated this moment so
keenly, planned with every wit he possessed this rending of the veil. In
moments they would be here-the ones Kircher had called the Cenobites,
theologians of the Order of the Gash. Summoned from their experiments in the
higher reaches of pleasure, to bring their ageless heads into a world of rain
and failure.
He had worked ceaselessly in the preceding week to prepare the room for
them. The bare boards had been meticulously scrubbed and strewn with petals.
Upon the west wall he had set up a kind of altar to them, decorated with the
kind of placatory offerings Kircher had assured him would nurture their good
offices: bones, bonbons, needles. A jug of his urine-the product of seven
days' collection-stood on the left of the altar, should they require some
spontaneous gesture of self-defilement. On the right, a plate of doves' heads,
which Kircher had also advised him to have on hand.
He had left no part of the invocation ritual unobserved. No cardinal,
eager for the fisherman's shoes, could have been more diligent.
But now, as the sound of the bell became louder, drowning out the music
box, he was afraid.
Too late, he murmured to himself, hoping to quell his rising fear.
Lemarchand's device was undone; the final trick had been turned. There was no
time left for prevarication or regret. Besides, hadn't he risked both life and
sanity to make this unveiling possible? The doorway was even now opening to
pleasures no more than a handful of humans had ever known existed, much less
tasted-pleasures which would redefine the parameters of sensation, which would
release him from the dull round of desire, seduction and disappointment that
had dogged him from late adolescence. He would be transformed by that
knowledge, wouldn't he? No man could experience the profundity of such feeling
and remain unchanged.
The bare bulb in the middle of the room dimmed and brightened,
brightened and dimmed again. It had taken on the rhythm of the bell, burning
its hottest on each chime. In the troughs between the chimes the darkness in
the room became utter; it was as if the world he had occupied for twenty-nine
years had ceased to exist. Then the bell would sound again, and the bulb burn
so strongly it might never have faltered, and for a few precious seconds he
was standing in a familiar place, with a door that led out and down and into
the street, and a window through which-had he but the will (or strength) to
tear the blinds back-he might glimpse a rumor of morning.
With each peal the bulb's light was becoming more revelatory. By it, he
saw the east wall flayed; saw the brick momentarily lose solidity and blow
away; saw, in that same instant, the place beyond the room from which the
bell's din was issuing. A world of birds was it? Vast black birds caught in
perpetual tempest? That was all the sense be could make of the province from
which-even now-the hierophants were coming-that it was in confusion, and full
of brittle, broken things that rose and fell and filled the dark air with
their fright.
And then the wall was solid again, and the bell fell silent. The bulb
flickered out. This time it went without a hope of rekindling.
He stood in the darkness, and said nothing. Even if he could remember
the words of welcome he'd prepared, his tongue would not have spoken them. It
was playing dead in his mouth.
And then, light.
It came from them: from the quartet of Cenobites who now, with the wall
sealed behind them, occupied the room. A fitful phosphorescence, like the glow
of deep-sea fishes: blue, cold, charmless. It struck Frank that he had never
once wondered what they would look like. His imagination, though fertile when
it came to trickery and theft, was impoverished in other regards. The skill to
picture these eminences was beyond him, so he had not even tried.
Why then was he so distressed to set eyes upon them? Was it the scars
that covered every inch of their bodies, the flesh cosmetically punctured and
sliced and infibulated, then dusted down with ash? Was it the smell of vanilla
they brought with them, the sweetness of which did little to disguise the
stench beneath? Or was it that as the light grew, and he scanned them more
closely, he saw nothing of joy, or even humanity, in their maimed faces: only
desperation, and an appetite that made his bowels ache to be voided.
"What city is this?" one of the four enquired. Frank had difficulty
guessing the speaker's gender with any certainty. Its clothes, some of which
were sewn to and through its skin, hid its private parts, and there was
nothing in the dregs of its voice, or in its willfully disfigured features
that offered the least clue. When it spoke, the hooks that transfixed the
flaps of its eyes and were wed, by an intricate system of chains passed
through flesh and bone alike, to similar hooks through the lower lip, were
teased by the motion, exposing the glistening meat beneath.
"I asked you a question," it said. Frank made no reply. The name of this
city was the last thing on his mind.
"Do you understand?" the figure beside the first speaker demanded. Its
voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy-the voice of an
excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid,
and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jeweled pin driven
through to the bone. Its tongue was similarly decorated. "Do you even know who
we are?" it asked.
"Yes." Frank said at last. "I know."
Of course he knew; he and Kircher had spent long nights talking of hints
gleaned from the diaries of Bolingbroke and Gilles de Rais.
All that mankind knew of the Order of the Gash, he knew.
And yet...he had expected something different. Expected some sign of the
numberless splendors they had access to. He had thought they would come with
women, at least; oiled women, milked women; women shaved and muscled for the
act of love: their lips perfumed, their thighs trembling to spread, their
buttocks weighty, the way he liked them. He had expected sighs, and languid
bodies spread on the floor underfoot like a living carpet; had expected virgin
whores whose every crevice was his for the asking and whose skills would press
him-upward, upward-to undreamed-of ecstasies. The world would be forgotten in
their arms. He would be exalted by his lust, instead of despised for it.
But no. No women, no sighs. Only these sexless things, with their
corrugated flesh.
Now the third spoke. Its features were so heavily scarified-the wounds
nurtured until they ballooned-that its eyes were invisible and its words
corrupted by the disfigurement of its mouth.
"What do you want?" it asked him.
He perused this questioner more confidently than he had the other two.
His fear was draining away with every second that passed. Memories of the
terrifying place beyond the wall were already receding. He was left with these
decrepit decadents, with their stench, their queer deformity, their self-
evident frailty. The only thing he had to fear was nausea.
"Kircher told me there would be five of you," Frank said.
"The Engineer will arrive should the moment merit," came the reply. "Now
again, we ask you: What do you want."
Why should he not answer them straight? "Pleasure," he replied. "Kircher
said you know about pleasure."
"Oh we do," said the first of them. "Everything you ever wanted."
"Yes?"
"Of course. Of course." It stared at him with its all-too-naked eyes.
"What have you dreamed?" it said.
The question, put so baldly, confounded him. How could he hope to
articulate the nature of the phantasms his libido had created? He was still
searching for words when one of them said:
"This world...it disappoints you?"
"Pretty much," he replied.
"You're not the first to tire of its trivialities," came the response.
"There have been others."
"Not many," the gridded face put in.
"True. A handful at best. But a few have dared to use Lemarchand's
Configuration. Men like yourself, hungry for new possibilities, who've heard
that we have skills unknown in your region."
"I'd expected-" Frank began.
"We know what you expected," the Cenobite replied. "We understand to its
breadth and depth the nature of your frenzy. It is utterly familiar to us."
Frank grunted. "So," he said, "you know what I've dreamed about. You can
supply the pleasure."
The thing's face broke open, its lips curling back: a baboon's smile.
"Not as you understand it," came the reply.
Frank made to interrupt, but the creature raised a silencing hand.
"There are conditions of the nerve endings," it said, "the like of which
your imagination, however fevered, could not hope to evoke."
"...yes."
"Oh yes. Oh most certainly. Your most treasured depravity is child's
play beside the experiences we offer."
"Will you partake of them?" said the second Cenobite.
Frank looked at the scars and the hooks. Again, his tongue was
deficient.
"Will you?"
Outside, somewhere near, the world would soon be waking. He had watched
it wake from the window of this very room, day after day, stirring itself to
another round of fruitless pursuits, and he'd known, known, that there was
nothing left out there to excite him. No heat, only sweat. No passion, only
sudden lust, and just as sudden indifference. He had turned his back on such
dissatisfaction. If in doing so he had to interpret the signs these creatures
brought him, then that was the price of ambition. He was ready to pay it.
"Show me," he said.
"There's no going back. You do understand that?"
"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.
TWO
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.
3
While the trio were away, gathering the fourth and final load of the
day, Julia lost her temper with the unpacking. It was a disaster, she said;
everything had been parceled up and put into the tea chests in the wrong
order. She was having to disinter perfectly useless items to get access to the
bare necessities.
Kirsty kept her silence, and her place in the kitchen, washing the
soiled cups.
Cursing louder, Julia left the chaos and went out for a cigarette on the
front step. She leaned against the open door, and breathed the pollen-gilded
air. Already, though it was only the twenty-first of August, the afternoon was
tinged with a smoky scent that heralded autumn.
She had lost track of how fast the day had gone, for as she stood there
a bell began to ring for Evensong: the run of chimes rising and falling in
lazy waves. The sound was reassuring. It made her think of her childhood,
though not-that she could remember-of any particular day or place. Simply of
being young, of mystery.
It was four years since she'd last stepped into a church: the day of her
marriage to Rory, in fact. The thought of that day-or rather, of the promise
it had failed to fulfill-soured the moment. She left the step, the chimes in
full flight, and turned back into the house. After the touch of the sun on her
upturned face, the interior seemed gloomy. Suddenly she tired to the point of
tears.
They would have to assemble the bed before they could put their heads
down to sleep tonight, and they had yet to decide which room they would use as
the master bedroom. She would do that now, she elected, and so avoid having to
return to the front room, and to ever-mournful Kirsty.
The bell was still pealing when she opened the door of the front room on
the second floor. It was the largest of the three upper rooms-a natural
choice-but the sun had not got in today (or any other day this summer) because
the blinds were drawn across the window. The room was consequently chillier
than anywhere else in the house; the air stagnant. She crossed the stained
floorboards to the window, intending to remove the blind.
At the sill, a strange thing. The blind had been securely nailed to the
window frame, effectively cutting out the least intrusion of life from the
sunlit street beyond. She tried to pull the material free, but failed. The
workman, whoever he'd been, had done a thorough job.
No matter; she'd have Rory take a claw hammer to the nails when he got
back. She turned from the window, and as she did so she was suddenly and
forcibly aware that the bell was still summoning the faithful. Were they not
coming tonight? Was the hook not sufficiently baited with promises of
paradise? The thought was only half alive; it withered in moments. But the
bell rolled on, reverberating around the room. Her limbs, already aching with
fatigue, seemed dragged down further by each peal. Her head throbbed
intolerably.
The room was hateful, she'd decided; it was stale, and its benighted
walls clammy. Despite its size, she would not let Rory persuade her into using
it as the master bedroom. Let it rot.
She started toward the door, but as she came within a yard of it, the
corners of the room seemed to creak, and the door slammed. Her nerves jangled.
It was all she could do to prevent herself from sobbing.
Instead she simply said, "Go to hell," and snatched at the handle. It
turned easily (why should it not? yet she was relieved) and the door swung
open. From the hall below, a splash of warmth and ocher light.
She closed the door behind her and, with a queer satisfaction the root
of which she couldn't or wouldn't fathom turned the key in the lock.
As she did so, the bell stopped.
4
"But it's the biggest of the rooms..."
"I don't like it, Rory. It's damp. We can use the back room."
"If we can get the bloody bed through the door."
"Of course we can. You know we can."
"Seems a waste of a good room," he protested, knowing full well that
this was a fait accompli.
"Mother knows best," she told him, and smiled at him with eyes whose
luster was far from maternal.
THREE
1
The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they
may be cured of their excesses.
Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger
for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon
begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns
will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its
fruitfulness.
Even winter-the hardest season, the most implacable-dreams, as February
creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires
with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.
So August gave way to September and there were few complaints.
2
With work, the house on Lodovico Street began to look more hospitable.
There were even visits from neighbors, who-after sizing up the couple-spoke
freely of how happy they were to have number fifty-five occupied again. Only
one of them made any mention of Frank, referring in passing to the odd fellow
who'd lived in the house for a few weeks the previous summer. There was a
moment of embarrassment when Rory revealed the tenant to have been his
brother, but it was soon glossed over by Julia, whose power to charm knew no
bounds.
Rory had seldom made mention of Frank during the years of his marriage
to Julia, though he and his brother were only eighteen months apart in age,
and had, as children, been inseparable. This Julia had learned on an occasion
of drunken reminiscing-a month or two before the wedding-when Rory had spoken
at length about Frank. It had been melancholy talk. The brothers' paths had
diverged considerably once they'd passed through adolescence, and Rory
regretted it. Regretted still more the pain Frank's wild life-style had
brought to their parents. It seemed that when Frank appeared, once in a blue
moon, from whichever corner of the globe he was presently laying waste, he
only brought grief. His tales of adventures in the shallows of criminality,
his talk of whores and petty theft, all appalled their parents. But there had
been worse, or so Rory had said. In his wilder moments Frank had talked of a
life lived in delirium, of an appetite for experience that conceded no moral
imperative.
Was it the tone of Rory's telling, a mixture of revulsion and envy, that
had so piqued Julia's curiosity? Whatever the reason, she had been quickly
seized by an unquenchable curiosity concerning this madman.
Then, barely a fortnight before the wedding, the black sheep had
appeared in the flesh. Things had gone well for him of late. He was wearing
gold rings on his fingers, and his skin was tight and tanned. There was little
outward sign of the monster Rory had described. Brother Frank was smooth as a
polished stone. She had succumbed to his charm within hours.
A strange time ensued. As the days crept toward the date of the wedding
she found herself thinking less and less of her husband-to-be, and more and
more of his brother. They were not wholly dissimilar; a certain lilt in their
voices, and their easy manner, marked them as siblings. But to Rory's
qualities Frank brought something his brother would never have: a beautiful
desperation.
Perhaps what had happened next had been inevitable; and no matter how
hard she'd fought her instincts, she would only have postponed the
consummation of their feelings for each other. At least that was how she tried
to excuse herself later. But when all the self-recrimination was done with,
she still treasured the memory of their first-and last-encounter.
Kirsty had been at the house, hadn't she?, on some matrimonial business,
when Frank had arrived. But by that telepathy that comes with desire (and
fades with it) Julia had known that today was the day. She'd left Kirsty to
her listmaking or suchlike, and taken Frank upstairs on the pretext of showing
him the wedding dress. That was how she remembered it-that he'd asked to see
the dress-and she'd put the veil on, laughing to think of herself in white,
and then he'd been at her shoulder, lifting the veil, and she'd laughed on,
laughed and laughed, as though to test the strength of his purpose. He had not
been cooled by her mirth however; nor had he wasted time with the niceties of
a seduction. The smooth exterior gave way to cruder stuff almost immediately.
Their coupling had had in every regard but the matter of her acquiescence, all
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TheHellboundHeartbyCliveBarkerCopyright1986Ilongtotalkwithsomeoldlover'sghostWhodiedbeforethegodofLovewasborn.-JohnDonne,Love'sDeitieONESointentwasFrankuponsolvingthepuzzleofLemarchand'sboxthathedidn'thearthegreatbellbegintoring.Thedevicehadbeenconstructedbyamastercraftsman,andtheriddlewasthis-thatt...

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