The Hellbound Heart: A Great Fall or Halloween Read

by Clive Barker

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!

Childhood still lingered on his tongue (milk and frustration) but there were adult feelings joining it now. He was grown! He was mustached and mighty, hands heavy, gut large.

He was dimly aware, as he worked his inches,

Why say that

She stood up. The tongues fell to the floor, like a rain of slugs.

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

Julia always looked at her so strangely, as if faintly baffled by the fact that she hadn’t been smothered at birth.

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 favorite cup—all were infused with such effortless grace.

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.

A strange time ensued. As the days crept toward the date of the wedding she found herself thinking less and less of her husband-to-be, and more and more of his brother.

Yuck

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 grays.

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

These people are so awful lol

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.

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.

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

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

As it was there was no danger of a confessional. She’d met more talkative paving stones.

It was as if, until this moment, she had never quite believed him to be real. Now it was incontestable. She had made this man, or remade him, used her wit and her cunning to give him substance.

It wasn’t that she had bad dreams; or at least none that lingered until morning. It was that sleep itself—the act of closing the eyes and relinquishing control of her consciousness—was something she was temperamentally unsuited to.

When, finally, she did sleep, it was the slumber of a watcher and waiter. Light, and full of sighs.

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

“This isn’t happening,” she told herself aloud, but the beast only laughed. “I used to tell myself that,” he said. “Day in, day out. Used to try and dream the agonies away. But you can’t. Take it from me. You can’t. They have to be endured.”

She knew he was telling the truth, the kind of unsavory 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.

He spoke of both dancing and death with equal nonchalance, as though one carried as little significance as the other. It calmed her, hearing him talk that way.

“No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering.”

“He wanted pleasure, until we gave it to him. Then he squirmed.”

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.

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.

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.

“It’s all right,” he said sweetly, still hoping to heal her. “Really it is.” He opened his arms. “Come to Daddy,” he said.

holy fuckkkk

under cover of darkness.

strokes

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.

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.

Then he came unsewn.