The Hellbound Heart

ELEVEN

1

Rory stood in the hallway and stared at Julia, his Julia, the woman he had once sworn to have and to hold till death did them part. It had not seemed such a difficult promise to keep at the time. He had idolized her for as long as he could remember, dreaming of her by night and spending the days composing love poems of wild ineptitude to her. But things had changed, and he had learned, as he watched them change, that the greatest torments were often the subtlest. There had been times of late when he would have preferred a death by wild horses to the itch of suspicion that had so degraded his joy.

Now, as he looked at her standing at the bottom of the stairs, it was impossible for him to even remember how good things had once been. All was doubt and dirt.

One thing he was glad of: she looked troubled. Maybe that meant there was a confession in the air, indiscretions that she would pour out and that he would forgive her for in a welter of tears and understanding.

"You look sad," he said.

She hesitated, then said: "It's difficult, Rory."

"What is?"

She seemed to want to give up before she began.

"What is?" he pressed.

"I've so much to tell you."

Her hand, he saw, was grasping the banister so tightly the knuckles burned white. "I'm listening," he said. He would love her again, if she'd just be honest with him. "Tell me," he said.

"I think maybe...maybe it would be easier if I showed you..." she told him, and so saying, led him upstairs.

2

The wind that harried the streets was not warm, to judge by the way the pedestrians drew their collars up and their faces down. But Kirsty didn't feel the chill. Was it her invisible companion who kept the cold from her, cloaking her with that fire the Ancients had conjured to burn sinners in? Either that, or she was too frightened to feel anything.

But then that wasn't how she felt; she wasn't frightened. The feeling in her gut was far more ambiguous. She had opened a door-the same door Rory's brother had opened-and now she was walking with demons. And at the end of her travels, she would have her revenge. She would find the thing that had

torn her and tormented her, and make him feel the powerlessness that she had suffered. She would watch him squirm. More, she would enjoy it. Pain had made a sadist of her.

As she made her way along Lodovico Street, she looked round for a sign of the Cenobite, but he was nowhere to be seen. Undaunted, she approached the house. She had no plan in mind: there were too many variables to be juggled. For one, would Julia be there? And if so, how involved in all of this was she? Impossible to believe that she could be an innocent bystander, but perhaps she had acted out of terror of Frank; the next few minutes might furnish the answers. She rang the bell, and waited.

The door was answered by Julia. In her hand, a length of white lace.

"Kirsty," she said, apparently unfazed by her appearance. "It's late..."

"Where's Rory?" were Kirsty's first words. They hadn't been quite what she'd intended, but they came out unbidden.

"He's here," Julia replied calmly, as if seeking to soothe a manic child. "Is there something wrong?"

"I'd like to see him," Kirsty answered.

"Rory?"

"Yes..."

She stepped over the threshold without waiting for an invitation. Julia made no objection, but closed the door behind her.

Only now did Kirsty feel the chill. She stood in the hallway and shivered.

"You look terrible," said Julia plainly.

"I was here this afternoon," she blurted. "I saw what happened, Julia. I saw. "

"What was there to see?" came the reply; her poise was unassailed.

"You know."

"Truly I don't."

"I want to speak to Rory..."

"Of course," came the reply. "But take care with him, will you? He's not feeling very well."

She led Kirsty through to the dining room. Rory was sitting at the table; there was a glass of spirits at his hand, a bottle beside it. Laid across an adjacent chair was Julia's wedding dress. The sight of it prompted recognition of the lace swath in her hand: it was the bride's veil.

Rory looked much the worse for wear. There was dried blood on his face, and at his hairline. The smile he offered was warm, but fatigued.

"What happened...?" she asked him.

"It's all right now, Kirsty," he said. His voice barely aspired to a whisper. "Julia told me everything...and it's all right."

"No," she said, knowing that he couldn't possibly have the whole story.

"You came here this afternoon."

"That's right."

"That was unfortunate."

"You...you asked me..." She glanced at Julia, who was standing at the door, then back at Rory. "I did what I thought you wanted."

"Yes. I know. I know. I'm only sorry you were dragged into this terrible business."

"You know what your brother's done?" she said. "You know what he summoned?"

"I know enough," Rory replied. "The point is, it's over now."

"What do you mean?"

"Whatever he did to you, I'll make amends-"

"What do you mean, over?"

"He's dead, Kirsty."

("...deliver him alive, and maybe we won't tear your soul apart.')

"Dead?"

"We destroyed him, Julia and I. It wasn't so difficult. He thought he could trust me, you see, thought that blood was thicker than water. Well it isn't. I wouldn't suffer a man like that to live..."

She felt something twitch in her belly. Had the Cenobites got their hooks in her already, snagging the carpet of her bowels?

"You've been so kind, Kirsty. Risking so much, coming back here..."

(There was something at her shoulder. "Give me your souls " it said.)

"I'll go to the authorities, when I feel a little stronger. Try and find a way to make them understand..."

"You killed him?" she said.

"Yes."

"I don't believe it..." she muttered.

"Take her upstairs," Rory said to Julia. "Show her."

"Do you want to see?" Julia inquired.

Kirsty nodded and followed.

It was warmer on the landing than below, and the air greasy and gray, like filthy dishwater. The door to Frank's room was ajar. The thing that lay on the bare boards, in a tangle of torn bandaging, still steamed. His neck was clearly broken, head set askew on his shoulders. He was devoid of skin from head to foot.

Kirsty looked away, nauseated.

"Satisfied?" Julia asked.

Kirsty didn't reply, but left the room and stepped onto the landing. At her shoulder, the air was restless.

("You lost," something said, close by her.

"I know, " she murmured.)

The bell had begun to ring, tolling for her, surely; and a turmoil of wings nearby, a carnival of carrion birds. She hurried down the stairs, praying that she wouldn't be overtaken before she reached the door. If they tore her heart out, let Rory be spared the sight. Let him remember her strong, with laughter on her lips, not pleas.

Behind her, Julia said, "Where are you going?" When there was no reply forthcoming, she went on talking. "Don't say anything to anybody, Kirsty," she insisted. "We can deal with this, Rory and me-"

Her voice had stirred Rory from his drink. He appeared in the hallway. The wounds Frank had inflicted looked more severe than Kirsty had first thought. His face was bruised in a dozen places, and the skin at his neck plowed up. As she came abreast of him, he reached out and took her arm.

"Julia's right," he said. "Leave it to us to report, will you?"

There were so many things she wanted to tell him at that moment, but time left room for none. The bell was getting louder in her head. Someone had looped their entrails around her neck, and was pulling the knot tight.

"It's too late..." she murmured to Rory, and pressed his hand away.

"What do you mean?" he said to her, as she covered the yards to the door. "Don't go, Kirsty. Not yet. Tell me what you mean."

She couldn't help but offer him a backward glance, hoping that he would find in her face all the regrets she felt.

"It's all right," he said sweetly, still hoping to heal her. "Really it is." He opened his arms. "Come to

Daddy, " he said.

The phrase didn't sound right out of Rory's mouth. Some boys never grew to be daddies, however many children they sired.

Kirsty put out a hand to the wall to steady herself.

It wasn't Rory who was speaking to her. It was Frank. Somehow, it was Frank-

She held on to the thought through the mounting din of bells, so loud now that her skull seemed ready to crack open. Rory was still smiling at her, arms extended. He was talking too, but she could no longer hear what he said. The tender flesh of his face shaped the words, but the bells drowned them out. She was thankful for the fact; it made it easier to defy the evidence of her eyes.

"I know who you are..." she said suddenly, not certain of whether her words were audible or not, but unquenchably sure that they were true. Rory's corpse was upstairs, left to lie in Frank's shunned bandaging. The usurped skin was now wed to his brother's body, the marriage sealed with the letting of blood. Yes! That was it.

The coils around her throat were tightening; it could only be moments before they dragged her off. In desperation, she started back along the hallway toward the thing in Rory's face.

"It's you-" she said.

The face smiled at her, undismayed.

She reached out, and snatched at him. Startled, he took a step backward to avoid her touch, moving with graceful sloth, but somehow still managing to avoid her touch. The bells were intolerable; they were pulping her thoughts, tolling her brain tissue to dust. At the rim of her sanity, she reached again for him, and this time he did not quite avoid her. Her nails raked the flesh of his cheek, and the skin, so recently grafted, slid away like silk. The blood-buttered meat beneath came into horrid view.

Behind her, Julia screamed.

And suddenly the bells weren't in Kirsty's head any longer. They were in the house, in the world.

The hallway lights burned dazzlingly bright, and then-their filaments overloading-went out. There was a short period of total darkness, during which time she heard a whimpering that may or may not have come from her own lips. Then it was as if fireworks were spluttering into life in the walls and floor. The hallway danced. One moment an abattoir (the walls running scarlet); the next, a boudoir (powder blue, canary yellow); the moment following that, a ghost-train tunnel-all speed and sudden fire.

By one flaring light she saw Frank moving toward her, Rory's discarded face hanging from his jaw. She avoided his outstretched arm and ducked through into the front room. The hold on her throat had relaxed, she realized: the Cenobites had apparently seen the error of their ways. Soon they would intervene, surely, and bring an end to this farce of mistaken identities. She would not wait to see Frank claimed as she'd thought of doing; she'd had enough. Instead she'd flee the house by the back door and leave them to it.

Her optimism was short-lived. The fireworks in the hall threw some light ahead of her into the dining room, enough to see that it was already bewitched. There was something moving over the floor, like ash

before wind, and chains cavorting in the air. Innocent she might be, but the forces loose here were indifferent to such trivialities; she sensed that to take another step would invite atrocities.

Her hesitation put her back within Frank's reach, but as he snatched at her the fireworks in the hallway faltered, and she slipped away from him under cover of darkness. The respite was all too brief. New lights were already blooming in the hall-and he was after her afresh, blocking her route to the front door.

Why didn't they claim him, for God's sake? Hadn't she brought them here as she'd promised, and unmasked him?

Frank opened his jacket. In his belt was a bloodied knife-doubtless the flaying edge. He pulled it out, and pointed it at Kirsty.

"From now on," he said, as he stalked her, "I'm Rory." She had no choice but to back away from him, the door (escape, sanity) receding with every step. "Understand me? I'm Rory now. And nobody's ever going to know any better."

Her heel hit the bottom of the stair, and suddenly there were other hands on her, reaching through the banisters and seizing fistfuls of her hair. She twisted her head round and looked up. It was Julia, of course, face slack, all passion consumed. She wrenched Kirsty's head back, exposing her throat as Frank's knife gleamed toward it.

At the last moment Kirsty reached up above her head and snatched hold of Julia's arm, wrenching her from her perch on the third or fourth stair. Losing both her balance and her grip on her victim, Julia let out a shout and fell, her body coming between Kirsty and Frank's thrust. The blade was too close to be averted; it entered Julia's side to the hilt. She moaned, then she reeled away down the hall, the knife buried in her.

Frank scarcely seemed to notice. His eyes were on Kirsty once again, and they shone with horrendous appetite. She had nowhere to go but u¢. The fireworks still exploding, the bells still ringing, she started to mount the stairs.

Her tormentor was not coming in immediate pursuit, she saw. Julia's appeals for help had diverted him to where she lay, halfway between stairs and front door. He drew the knife from her side. She cried out in pain, and, as if to assist her, he went down on his haunches beside her body. She raised her arm to him, looking for tenderness. In response, he cupped his hand beneath her head, and drew her up toward him. As their faces came within inches of each other, Julia seemed to realize that Frank's intentions were far from honorable. She opened her mouth to scream, but he sealed her lips with his and began to feed. She kicked and scratched the air. All in vain.

Tearing her eyes from the sight of this depravity, Kirsty crawled up to the head of the stairs.

The second floor offered no real hiding place, of course, nor was there any escape route, except to leap from one of the windows. But having seen the cold comfort Frank had just offered his mistress, jumping was clearly the preferable option. The fall might break every bone in her body, but it would at least deprive the monster of further sustenance.

The fireworks were fizzling out, it seemed; the landing was in smoky darkness. She stumbled along it rather than walked, her fingertips moving along the wall.

Downstairs, she heard Frank on the move again. He was finished with Julia.

Now he spoke as he began up the stairs, the same incestuous invitation:

"Come to Daddy. "

It occurred to her that the Cenobites were probably viewing this chase with no little amusement, and would not act until there was only one player left: Frank. She was forfeit to their pleasure.

"Bastards..." she breathed, and hoped they heard.

She had almost reached the end of the landing. Ahead lay the junk room. Did it have a window sizable enough for her to climb through? If so, she would jump, and curse them as she fell-curse them all. God and the Devil and whatever lay between, curse them and as she dropped, hope for nothing but that the concrete be quick with her.

Frank was calling her again, and almost at the top of the stairs. She turned the key in the lock, opened the junk room door, and slipped through.

Yes, there was a window. It was uncurtained, and moonlight fell through it in shafts of indecent beauty, illuminating a chaos of furniture and boxes. She made her way through the confusion to the window. It was wedged open an inch or two to air the room. She put her fingers under the frame, and tried to heave it up far enough for her to climb out, but the sash in the window had rotted, and her arms were not the equal of the task.

She quickly hunted for a makeshift lever, a part of her mind coolly calculating the number of steps it would take her pursuer to cover the length of the landing. Less than twenty, she concluded, as she pulled a sheet off one of the tea chests, only to find a dead man staring up at her from the chest, eyes wild. He was broken in a dozen places, arms smashed and bent back upon themselves, legs tucked up to his chin. As she went to cry out, she heard Frank at the door.

"Where are you?" he inquired.

She clamped her hand over her face to stop the cry of revulsion from coming. As she did so, the door handle turned. She ducked out of sight behind a felled armchair, swallowing her scream.

The door opened. She heard Frank's breath, slightly labored, heard the hollow pad of his feet on the boards. Then the sound of the door being pulled to again. It clicked. Silence.

She waited for a count of thirteen, then peeped out of hiding, half expecting him to still be in the room with her, waiting for her to break cover. But no, he'd gone.

Swallowing the breath her cry had been mounting upon had brought an unwelcome side effect: hiccups. The first of them, so unexpected she had no time to subdue it, sounded gun-crack loud. But there was no returning step from the landing. Frank, it seemed, was already out of earshot. As she returned to the window, skirting the tea-chest coffin, a second hiccup startled her. She silently reprimanded her belly, but in vain. A third and fourth came unbidden while she wrestled once more to lift the window. That too was a fruitless effort; it had no intention of compliance.

Briefly, she contemplated breaking the glass and yelling for help, but rapidly discarded the idea. Frank would be eating out her eyes before the neighbors had even shaken off sleep. Instead she retraced her steps to the door, and opened it a creaking fraction. There was no sign of Frank, so far as her eyes were

able to interpret the shadows. Cautiously, she opened the door a little wider, and stepped onto the landing once again.

The gloom was like a living thing; it smothered her with murky kisses. She advanced three paces without incident, then a fourth. On the fifth (her lucky number) her body took a turn for the suicidal. She hiccuped, her hand too tardy to reach her mouth before the din was out.

This time it did not go unheard.

"There you are," said a shadow, and Frank slipped from the bedroom to block her path. He was faster for his meal-he seemed as wide as the landing-and he stank of meat.

With nothing to lose, she screamed blue murder as he came at her. He was unashamed by her terror. With inches between her flesh and his knife she threw herself sideways and found that the fifth step had brought her abreast of Frank's room. She stumbled through the open door. He was after her in a flash, crowing his delight.

There was a window in this room, she knew; she'd broken it herself, mere hours before. But the darkness was so profound she might have been blindfolded, not even a glimmer of moonlight to feed her sight. Frank was equally lost, it seemed. He called after her in this pitch; the whine of his knife accompanying his call as he slit the air. Back and forth, back and forth. Stepping away from the sound, her foot caught in the tangle of the bandaging on the floor. Next moment she was toppling. It wasn't the boards she fell heavily upon, however, but the greasy bulk of Rory's corpse. It won a howl of horror from her.

"There you are," said Frank. The knife slices were suddenly closer, inches from her head. But she was deaf to them. She had her arms about the body beneath her, and approaching death was nothing beside the pain she felt now, touching him.

"Rory," she moaned, content that his name be on her lips when the cut came.

"That's right," said Frank, "Rory."

Somehow the theft of Rory's name was as unforgivable as stealing his skin; or so her grief told her. A skin was nothing. Pigs had skins; snakes had skins. They were knitted of dead cells, shed and grown and shed again. But a name? That was a spell, which summoned memories. She would not let Frank usurp it.

"Rory's dead," she said. The words stung her, and with the sting, the ghost of a thought

"Hush, baby..." he told her.

-suppose the Cenobites were waiting for Frank to name himself. Hadn't the visitor in the hospital said something about Frank confessing?

"You're not Rory..." she said.

"We know that," came the reply, "but nobody else does..."

"Who are you then?"

"Poor baby. Losing your mind, are you? Good thing too..."

"Who, though?"

"...it's safer that way."

"Who?"

"Hush, baby," he said. He was stooping to her in the darkness, his face within inches of hers.

"Everything's going to be as right as rain."

"Yes?"

"Yes. Frank's here, baby."

"Frank?"

"That's right. I'm Frank."

So saying, he delivered the killing blow, but she heard it coming in the darkness and dodged its benediction. A second later the bell began again, and the bare bulb in the middle of the room flickered into life. By it she saw Frank beside his brother, the knife buried in the dead man's buttock. As he worked it out of the wound he set his eyes on her afresh.

Another chime, and he was up, and would have been at her...but for the voice.

It said his name, lightly, as if calling a child out to play.

"Frank."

His face dropped for the second time that night. A look of puzzlement flitted across it, and on its heels, horror.

Slowly, he turned his head round to look at the speaker. It was the Cenobite, its hooks sparkling. Behind it, Kirsty saw three other figures, their anatomies catalogues of disfigurement.

Frank threw a glance back at Kirsty.

"You did this," he said.

She nodded.

"Get out of here," said one of the newcomers. "This isn't your business now."

"Whore!" Frank screeched at her. "Bitch! Cheating, fucking bitch!"

The hail of rage followed her across the room to the door. As her palm closed around the door handle, she heard him coming after her, and turned to find that he was standing less than a foot from her, the knife a hair's breadth from her body. But there he was fixed, unable to advance another millimeter.

They had their hooks in him, the flesh of his arms and legs, and curled through the meat of his face. Attached to the hooks, chains, which they held taut. There was a soft sound, as his resistance drew the

barbs through his muscle. His mouth was dragged wide, his neck and chest plowed open.

The knife dropped from his fingers. He expelled a last, incoherent curse at her, his body shuddering now as he lost his battle with their claim upon him. Inch by inch he was drawn back toward the middle of the room.

"Go, " said the voice of the Cenobite. She could see them no longer; they were already lost behind the blood-flecked air. Accepting their invitation, she opened the door, while behind her Frank began to scream.

As she stepped onto the landing plaster dust cascaded from the ceiling; the house was growling from basement to eaves. She had to go quickly, she knew, before whatever demons were loose here shook the place apart.

But, though time was short, she could not prevent herself from snatching one look at Frank, to be certain that he would come after her no longer.

He was in extremis, hooked through in a dozen or more places, fresh wounds gouged in him even as she watched. Spread-eagled beneath the solitary bulb, body hauled to the limits of its endurance and beyond, he gave vent to shrieks that would have won pity from her, had she not learned better.

Suddenly, his cries stopped. There was a pause. And then, in one last act of defiance, he cranked up his heavy head and stared at her, meeting her gaze with eyes from which all bafflement and all malice had fled. They glittered as they rested on her, pearls in offal.

In response, the chains were drawn an inch tighter, but the Cenobites gained no further cry from him. Instead he put his tongue out at Kirsty, and flicked it back and forth across his teeth in a gesture of unrepentant lewdness.

Then he came unsewn.

His limbs separated from his torso, and his head from his shoulders, in a welter of bone shards and heat. She threw the door closed, as something thudded against it from the other side. His head, she guessed.

Then she was staggering downstairs, with wolves howling in the walls, and the bells in turmoil, and everywhere-thickening the air like smoke-the ghosts of wounded birds, sewn wing tip to wing tip, and lost to flight.

She reached the bottom of the stairs, and began along the hallway to the front door, but as she came within spitting distance of freedom she heard somebody call her name.

It was Julia. There was blood on the hall floor, marking a trail from the spot where Frank had abandoned her, through into the dining room.

"Kirsty..." she called again. It was a pitiable sound, and despite the wing-choked air, she could not help but go in pursuit of it, stepping through into the dining room.

The furniture was smoldering charcoal; the ash that she'd glimpsed was a foul-smelling carpet. And there, in the middle of this domestic wasteland, sat a bride.

By some extraordinary act of will, Julia had managed to put her wedding dress on, and secure her veil

upon her head. Now she sat in the dirt, the dress besmirched. But she looked radiant nevertheless, more beautiful, indeed, for the fact of the ruin that surrounded her.

"Help me," she said, and only now did Kirsty realize that the voice she heard was not coming from beneath the lush veil, but from the bride's lap.

And now the copious folds of the dress were parting, and there was Julia's head-set on a pillow of scarlet silk and framed with a fall of auburn hair. Bereft of lungs, how could it speak? It spoke nevertheless-

"Kirsty..." it said, it begged-and sighed, and rolled back and forth in the bride's lap as if it hoped to unlodge its reason.

Kirsty might have aided it-might have snatched the head up and dashed out its brains-but that the bride's veil had started to twitch, and was rising now, as if plucked at by invisible fingers. Beneath it, a light flickered and grew brighter, and brighter yet, and with the light, a voice.

"I am the Engineer, " it sighed. No more than that.

Then the fluted folds rose higher, and the head beneath gained the brilliance of a minor sun.

She did not wait for the blaze to blind her. Instead she backed out into the hallway-the birds almost solid now, the wolves insane-and flung herself at the front door even as the hallway ceiling began to give way.

The night came to meet her-a clean darkness. She breathed it in greedy gulps as she departed the house at a run. It was her second such departure. God help her, her sanity that there ever be a third.

At the corner of Lodovico Street, she looked back. The house had not capitulated to the forces unleashed within. It stood now as quiet as a grave. No, quieter.

As she turned away somebody collided with her. She yelped with surprise, but the huddled pedestrian was already hurrying away into the anxious murk that preceded morning. As the figure hovered on the outskirts of solidity, it glanced back, and its head flared in the gloom, a cone of white fire. It was the Engineer. She had no time to look away; it was gone again in one instant, leaving its glamour in her eye.

Only then did she realize the purpose of the collision. Lemarchand's box had been passed back to her, and sat in her hand.

Its surfaces had been immaculately resealed, and polished to a high gloss. Though she did not examine it, she was certain there would be no clue to its solution left. The next discoverer would voyage its faces without a chart. And until such time, was she elected its keeper? Apparently so.

She turned it over in her hand. For the frailest of moments she seemed to see ghosts in the lacquer. Julia's face, and that of Frank. She turned it over again, looking to see if Rory was held here: but no. Wherever he was, it wasn't here. There were other puzzles, perhaps, that if solved gave access to the place where he lodged. A crossword maybe, whose solution would lift the latch of the paradise garden, or a jigsaw in the completion of which lay access to Wonderland.

She would wait and watch, as she had always watched and waited, hoping that such a puzzle would one day come to her. But if it failed to show itself she would not grieve too deeply, for fear that the mending of broken hearts be a puzzle neither wit nor time had the skill to solve.