The Hellbound Heart: A Novel

by Clive Barker

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 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.

With each peal the bulb’s light was becoming more revelatory.

A world of birds was it? Vast black birds 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.

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.

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

The thing’s face broke open, its lips curling back: a baboon’s smile. “Not as you understand it,” came the reply.

“There are conditions of the nerve endings,” it said, “the like of which your imagination, however fevered, could not hope to evoke.”

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.

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.

Sometimes—particularly when doubt moved her, as it did now— her beauty came close to frightening him.

Seeing it, she understood Rory’s doglike adulation, and understanding it, despaired afresh.

He grinned at her, parading the ragged line of his front teeth that she had first found so irresistible.

Evensong: the run of chimes rising and falling in lazy waves. The sound was reassuring.

After the touch of the sun on her upturned face, the interior seemed gloomy. Suddenly she tired to the point of tears.

Instead she simply said, “Go to hell,” and snatched at the handle. It turned easily (why should it not? yet she was relieved)

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.

But by that telepathy that comes with desire (and fades with it)

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.

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.

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

Gray moons hung beneath his eyes. He hadn’t slept well, so he’d said. A cut finger, and he had nightmares of mortality.

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.

Beyond the reach of the light, the room bowed to darkness.

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.

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 hocus-pocus had stopped now, leaving one part of her admiring quite dispassionately the tinkling music that 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.

They had overdosed him on sensuality, until his mind teetered on madness, then they’d initiated him into experiences that his nerves still convulsed to recall. They had called it pleasure, and perhaps they’d meant it. Perhaps not. It was impossible to know with these minds; they were so hopelessly, flawlessly ambiguous.

Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of.

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

The cold necessitated a change of costume, and a change of plan.

Only his eyes betrayed any sign of nervousness, resting on her for moments only, then darting away like startled fish.