The Hellbound Heart: A Great Fall or Halloween Read

by Clive Barker

But now, as the sound of the bell became louder, drowning out the music box, he was afraid.

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.

But there was no reply forthcoming from the shadow on the landing.

She had been in love all this time, she realized, and mourning for him. If it took blood to restore him to her, then blood she would supply, and not think twice of the consequences.

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

Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.

He took hold of her wrist. A grip so tight she almost cried out. That was when she knew she was going to have to kill him.

She had never liked thunder. She, a murderess; she, a consorter with the living dead. It was another paradox to add to the thousand she’d found at work in herself of late.

“Come to Daddy,” it said. In her twenty-six years she had never heard an easier invitation to refuse.

Had it not been for the white walls she might never have picked up the box. Had there been a picture to look at a vase of sunflowers, or a view of pyramids—anything to break the monotony of the room, she would have been content to stare at it, and think. But the blankness was too much; it gave her no handhold on sanity.

She tapped it, shook it, pulled and pressed it, all without result.

Did she try bopping it?

The gloom was like a living thing; it smothered her with murky kisses.

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.

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.