The Hellbound Heart: Open the doorway to ultimate pleasure…

by Clive Barker

‘I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost Who died before the god of Love was born.’ JOHN DONNE, ‘Love’s Deitie’

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.

The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.

Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.

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

If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn’t it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.

But despair had taught her the fine art of squeezing blood from stones; with time she would have love from this hateful thing, or know the reason why.

She knew he was telling the truth; the kind of unsavoury truth that only monsters were at liberty to tell. He had no need to flatter or cajole; he had no philosophy to debate, or sermon to deliver. His awful nakedness was a kind of sophistication. Past the lies of faith, and into purer realms.

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.