The Hellbound Heart
Clive Barker

Dedication

For Mary

Epigraph

‘I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost

Who died before the god of Love was born.’

JOHN DONNE, ‘Love’s Deitie’

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

IMAJICA

About the Author

Praise

Also by Clive Barker

Copyright

About the Publisher

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 neighbours.

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 more 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 counter-pointed and developed until the initial caprice was all but lost in ornamentation.

At some point in his labours, the bell had begun to ring – a steady sombre tolling. He had not heard it, at least not consciously. But when the puzzle was almost finished – the mirrored innards of the box unknitted – 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 bird-maker’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) which 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 an assortment 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 his unveiling possible? The doorway was even now opening to pleasures no more than a handful of humans had even 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 which 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 rumour 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 blackbirds caught in perpetual tempest. That was all the sense he 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 came with them, like the glow of deep-sea fishes: blue, cold; charmless. It struck Frank that he had never once wondered what they 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 both to and through its skin, hid its private parts, and there was nothing in the dregs of its voice, or in its wilfully disfigured features, that offered the least clue. When it spoke the hooks that transfixed the flaps on its eyes, and were wed, by an intricate system of chains passed through flesh and bone alike, to similar hooks through the lower lips, 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 jewelled 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 splendours 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 amongst the flowers 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 undreamt-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 dreamt about. You can supply the pleasure.’

The thing’s face broke open, its lip curling back in 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 smelt 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 ear-drums 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 tales 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 moustached 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 head.

He felt untold tastes upon his tongue: bitter, sweet, sour, salty; smelt 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 circumstance. He opened his trousers and caressed his cock, more eager to have the seed spilt 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 racking, 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 on to 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 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 it he now saw, but she. The hood it had worn had been discarded, as had the robes. The woman beneath was grey 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 – laid 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

‘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 which had been 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 now – her 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 neighbours 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 van-load, 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 coffee-making 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 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 favourite cup – all were infused with such effortless grace. Seeing it, she understood Rory’s dog-like 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 labours,’ 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 parcelled 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 21st 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 fulfil – 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 was 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 towards 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 ochre 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 lustre was far from maternal.

THREE

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 neighbours, 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 as children had 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 the family. But there had been worse, or so Rory had said. In his wilder moments Frank had talked of 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 towards 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 which comes with desire (and fades with it) Julia had known that today was the day. She’d left Kirsty to her list-making 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 the aggression and the joylessness of rape.

Memory sweetened events, of course, and in the four years (and five months) since that afternoon, she’d replayed the scene often. Now, in remembering it, the bruises were trophies of their passion; her tears proof positive of her feelings for him.

The day following, he’d disappeared. Flitted off to Bangkok or Easter Island, some place where he had no debts to answer. She’d mourned him; couldn’t help it. Nor had her mourning gone unnoticed. Though it was never explicitly discussed, she had often wondered if the subsequent deterioration of her relationship with Rory had not started there: with her thinking of Frank as she made love to his brother.

And now? Now, despite the change of domestic interiors, and the chance of a fresh start together, it seemed that events conspired to remind her again of Frank.

It wasn’t just the gossip of the neighbours that brought him to mind. One day, when she was alone in the house, and unpacking various personal belongings, she came across several wallets of Rory’s photographs. Many were relatively recent pictures of the two of them together in Athens and Malta. But buried amongst the transparent smiles were some pictures she couldn’t remember ever having seen before (had Rory kept them from her?); family portraits that went back decades. A photograph of his parents on their wedding day; the black and white image eroded over the years to a series of greys. Pictures of christenings, in which proud godparents cradled babies smothered in the family lace.

And then, photographs of the brothers together; as toddlers, with wide eyes; as surly schoolchildren, snapped at gymnastic displays and in school pageants. Then, as the shyness of acne-ridden adolescence took over, the number of pictures dwindled – until the frogs emerged, as princes, the other side of puberty.

Seeing Frank in brilliant colour, clowning for the camera, she felt herself blushing. He had been an exhibitionist youth, predictably enough; always dressed à la mode. Rory, by comparison, looked dowdy. It seemed to her that the brothers’ future lives were sketched in these early portraits. Frank the smiling, seductive chameleon; Rory the solid citizen.

She had packed the pictures away at last, and found, when she stood up, that with the blushes had come tears. Not of regret. She had no use for that. It was fury which made her eyes sting. Somehow, between one breath and the next, she’d lost herself.

She knew too, with perfect certainty, when her grip had first faltered. Lying on a bed of wedding lace, while Frank beset her neck with kisses.

3

Once in a while she went up to the room with the sealed blinds.

So far, they’d done little decorating work on the upper floors, preferring to first organize the areas in public gaze. The room had therefore remained untouched. Unentered, indeed, except for these few visits of hers.

She wasn’t sure why she went up; nor how to account for the odd assortment of feelings that beset her while there. But there was something about the dark interior which gave her comfort: it was a womb of sorts; a dead woman’s womb. Sometimes, when Rory was at work, she simply took herself up the stairs and sat in the stillness thinking of nothing; or at least nothing she could put words to.

These sojourns made her feel oddly guilty, and she tried to stay away from the room when Rory was around. But it wasn’t always possible. Sometimes her feet took her there without instructions so to do.

It happened thus that Saturday, the day of the blood.

She had been watching Rory at work on the kitchen door, chiselling several layers of paint around the hinges, when she seemed to hear the room call. Satisfied that he was thoroughly engrossed in his chores, she went upstairs.

It was cooler than usual, and she was glad of it.

She put her hand to the wall, and then transferred her chilled palm to her forehead.

‘No use,’ she murmured to herself, picturing the man at work downstairs. She didn’t love him; no more than he, beneath his infatuation with her face, loved her. He chiselled in a world of his own; she suffered here, far removed from him.

A gust of wind caught the back door below. She heard it slam.

Downstairs, the sound made Rory lose his concentration. The chisel jumped its groove and sliced deeply into the thumb of his left hand. He shouted, as a gush of colour came. The chisel hit the floor.

‘Hell and damnation!’

She heard, but did nothing. Too late, she surfaced through a stupor of melancholy to realize that he was coming upstairs. Fumbling for the key, and an excuse to justify her presence in the room, she stood up, but he was already at the door, crossing the threshold, rushing towards her, his right hand clamped ineptly around his left. Blood was coming in abundance. It welled up between his fingers and dribbled down his arm, dripping from his elbow, adding stain to stain on the bare boards.

‘What have you done?’ she asked him.

‘What does it look like?’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Cut myself.’

His face and neck had gone the colour of window-putty. She’d seen him like this before, he had on occasion passed out at the sight of his own blood.

‘Do something,’ he said queasily.

‘Is it deep?’

‘I don’t know!’ he yelled at her. ‘I don’t want to look.’

He was ridiculous, she thought; but this wasn’t the time to give vent to the contempt she felt. Instead she took his bloody hand in hers and, while he looked away, prised the palm from the cut. It was sizeable, and still bleeding profusely. Deep blood; dark blood.

‘I think we’d better take you off to the hospital,’ she told him.

‘Can you cover it up?’ he asked, his voice devoid of anger now.

‘Sure. I’ll get a clean binding. Come on – ’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his ashen face. ‘If I take a step, I think I’ll pass out.’

‘Stay here then,’ she soothed him. ‘You’ll be fine.’

Finding no bandages in the bathroom cabinet the equal of the staunching, she fetched a few clean handkerchiefs from his drawer and went back into the room. He was leaning against the wall now, his skin glossy with sweat. He had padded in the blood he’d shed; she could taste the tang of it in the air.

Still quietly reassuring him that he wouldn’t die of a two-inch cut, she wound a handkerchief around his hand, bound it on with a second, then escorted him, trembling like a leaf, down the stairs (one by one, like a child) and out to the car.

At the hospital they waited an hour in a queue of the walking wounded before he was finally seen and stitched up. It was difficult for her to know in retrospect what was more comical about the episode: his weakness, or the extravagance of his subsequent gratitude. She told him, when he became too fulsome, that she didn’t want thanks from him, and it was true.

She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.

4

‘Did you clean up the floor in the damp room?’ she asked him the following day. They’d called it the damp room since that first Sunday, though there was not a sign of rot from ceiling to skirting board.

Rory looked up from his magazine. Grey moons hung beneath his eyes. He hadn’t slept well, so he’d said. A cut finger, and he had nightmares of mortality. She, on the other hand, had slept like a babe.

‘What did you say?’ he asked her.

‘The floor,’ she said again. ‘There was blood on the floor. You cleaned it up.’

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said simply, and returned to the magazine.

‘Well I didn’t,’ she said.

He offered her an indulgent smile. ‘You’re such a perfect hausfrau,’ he said. ‘You don’t even know when you’re doing it.’

The subject was closed there. He was content, apparently, to believe that she was quietly losing her sanity.

She, on the other hand, had the strangest sense that she was about to find it again.

FOUR

Kirsty hated parties. The smiles to be pasted on over the panic; the glances to be interpreted; and worst, the conversation. She had nothing to say of the least interest to the world, of this she had long been convinced. She’d watched too many eyes glaze over to believe otherwise; seen every device known to man for wheedling oneself out of the company of the dull, from: ‘Will you excuse me, I believe I see my accountant’, to passing out dead drunk at her feet.

But Rory had insisted she come to the house-warming. Just a few close friends, he’d promised. She’d said yes, knowing all too well what scenario would ensue from her refusal. Moping at home in a stew of self-recrimination, cursing her cowardice and thinking of Rory’s sweet face.

The gathering wasn’t such a torment, as it turned out. There were only nine guests in toto, all of whom she knew vaguely, which made it easier. They didn’t expect her to illuminate the room; only to nod and laugh where appropriate. And Rory – his hand still bound up – was at his most winning, full of guileless bonhomie. She even wondered if Neville – one of Rory’s work colleagues – wasn’t making eyes at her behind his spectacles, a suspicion which was confirmed in the middle of the evening when he manoeuvred himself to her side and enquired whether she had any interest in cat-breeding. She told him she hadn’t, but was always interested in new experiences. He seemed delighted, and on this fragile pretext proceeded to ply her with liqueurs for the rest of the night. By eleven-thirty she was a whoozy but happy wreck, prompted by the most casual remark to ever more painful fits of giggling.

A little after midnight, Julia declared that she was tired, and wanted to go to bed. The statement was taken as a general cue for dispersal, but Rory would have none of it. He was up and re-filling glasses before anyone had a chance to protest. Kirsty was certain she caught a look of displeasure cross Julia’s face, then it passed, and the brow was unsullied once again. She said her goodnights, was complimented profusely on her skill with calf’s liver, and went to bed.

The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessly happy, weren’t they? To Kirsty this had always seemed self-evident. Tonight, however, the alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn’t blinded her. Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.

But her spinning head had an inept hold on such ruminations, and the next minute Rory was up, and telling a joke about a gorilla and a Jesuit which had her choking on her drink before he’d even got to the votive candles.

Upstairs, Julia heard a fresh bout of laughter. She was indeed tired, as she’d claimed, but it wasn’t the cooking that had exhausted her. It was the effort of suppressing her contempt for the damn fools who were gathered in the lounge below. She’d called them friends once, these halfwits, with their poor jokes and their poorer pretensions. She had played along with them for several hours; it was enough. Now she needed some cool place; some darkness.

As soon as she opened the door of the damp room she knew things were not quite as they had been. The light from the shadeless bulb on the landing illuminated the boards where Rory’s blood had fallen, now so clean they might have been scrubbed. Beyond the reach of the light, the room bowed to darkness. She stepped in, and closed the door. The lock clicked into place at her back.

The dark was almost perfect, and she was glad of it. Her eyes rested against the night, their surfaces chilled.

Then, from the far side of the room, she heard a sound.

It was no louder than the din of a cockroach running behind the skirting boards. After seconds, it stopped. She held her breath. It came again. This time there seemed to be some pattern to the sound; a primitive code.

They were laughing like loons downstairs. The noise awoke desperation in her. What would she not do, to be free of such company?

She swallowed, and spoke to the darkness.

‘I hear you,’ she said, not certain of why the words came, or to whom they were addressed.

The cockroach scratches ceased for a moment, and then began again, more urgently. She stepped away from the door and moved towards the noise. It continued, as if summoning her.

It was easy to miscalculate in the dark, and she reached the wall before she’d expected to. Raising her hands, she began to run her palms over the painted plaster. The surface was not uniformly cold. There was a place, she judged it to be halfway between door and window, where the chill became so intense she had to break contact. The cockroach stopped scratching.

There was a moment when she swam, totally disoriented, in darkness and silence. And then something moved in front of her. A trick of her mind’s eye, she assumed, for there was only imagined light to be had here. But the next spectacle showed her the error of that assumption.

The wall was alight; or rather something behind it burned with a cold luminescence which made the solid brick seem insubstantial stuff. More: the wall seemed to be coming apart, segments of it shifting and dislocating like a magician’s prop, oiled panels giving on to hidden boxes whose sides in turn collapsed to reveal some further hiding place. She watched fixedly, not daring even to blink for fear she miss some detail of this extraordinary sleight-of-hand, while pieces of the world came apart in front of her eyes.

Then, suddenly, somewhere in this ever more elaborate system of sliding fragments, she saw (or again, seemed to see) movement. Only now did she realize that she’d been holding her breath since this display began, and was beginning to become lightheaded. She tried to empty her lungs of the stale air, and take a draught of fresh, but her body would not obey this simple instruction.

Somewhere in her innards a tic of panic began. The hocus-pocus had stopped now, leaving one part of her admiring quite dispassionately the tinkling music which was coming from the wall, the other part fighting the fear that rose in her throat step by step.

Again, she tried to take a breath, but it was as if her body had died, and she was staring out of it, unable now to breathe or blink or swallow.

The spectacle of the unfolding wall had now ceased entirely and she saw something flicker across the brick; ragged enough to be shadow but too substantial.

It was human, she saw, or had been. But the body had been ripped apart and sewn together again with most of its pieces either missing or twisted and blackened as if in a furnace. There was an eye, gleaming at her, and the ladder of a spine, the vertebrae stripped of muscle; a few unrecognizable fragments of anatomy. That was it. That such a thing might live beggared reason – what little flesh it owned was hopelessly corrupted. Yet live it did. Its eye, despite the rot it was rooted in, scanned her every inch, up and down.

She felt no fear in its presence. The thing was weaker than her by far. It moved a little in its cell, looking for some modicum of comfort. But there was none to be had; not for a creature that wore its frayed nerves on its bleeding sleeve. Every place it might lay its body brought pain: this she knew indisputably. She pitied it. And with pity came release. Her body expelled dead air, and sucked in living. Her oxygen-starved brain reeled.

Even as she did so it spoke, a hole opening up in the flayed ball of the monster’s head and issuing a single, weightless word.

The word was: ‘Julia.’

2

Kirsty put down her glass, and tried to stand up.

‘Where are you going?’ Neville asked her.

‘Where do you think?’ she replied, consciously trying to prevent the words from slurring.

‘Do you need any help?’ Rory inquired. The alcohol made his lids lazy, and his grin lazier still.

‘I am house-trained,’ she replied, the riposte greeted with laughter all round. She was pleased with herself; off-the-cuff wit was not her forte. She stumbled to the door.

‘It’s the last room on the right at the end of the landing,’ Rory informed her.

‘I know,’ she said, and stepped out into the hall.

She didn’t usually enjoy the sensation of drunkenness, but tonight she was revelling in it. She felt loose-limbed and light-hearted. She might well regret this tomorrow, but tomorrow would have to take care of itself. For tonight, she was flying.

She found her way to the bathroom, and relieved her aching bladder, then splashed some water on to her face. That done, she began her return journey.

She had taken three steps along the landing when she realized that somebody had put out the landing light while she was in the bathroom, and that same somebody was now standing a few yards away from her. She stopped.

‘Hello…?’ she said. Had the cat-breeder followed her upstairs, in the hope of proving he wasn’t spayed?

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