Clive Barker - Age of Desire

Isaiah had killed before. He knew the wordless vocabulary of the act, and he could see the invitation in his victim’s eyes. Happy to oblige, he came to meet it, knife at the ready. As the last possible moment Jerome recanted, and instead of presenting himself for slitting, threw a blow at the giant. Isaiah ducked to avoid it and his feet slid in the mush. The knife fled from his hand and fell among the debris of baskets and fruit. Jerome turned away as the hunter — the advantage lost— stooped to locate the knife. But his prey was gone before his ham-fisted grip had found it; lost again in the crowd-filled streets. He had no opportunity to pocket the knife before the uniform stepped out of the crowd and joined him in the hot passageway.

“What’s the story?” the policeman demanded, looking down at the knife. Isaiah followed his gaze. The bloodied blade was black with flies.

In his office Inspector Carnegie sipped at his hot chocolate, his third in the past hour, and watched the processes of dusk. He had always wanted to be a detective, right from his earliest rememberings. And, in those rememberings, this had always been a charged and magical hour.

Night descending on the city; myriad evils putting on their glad rags and coming out to play. A time for vigilance, for a new moral stringency.

But as a child he had failed to imagine the fatigue that twilight invariably brought. He was tired to his bones, and if he snatched any sleep in the next few hours he knew it would be here, in his chair, with his feet up on the desk amid a clutter of plastic cups.

The phone rang. It was Johannson.

“Still at work?” he said, impressed by Johannson’s dedication to the job. It was well after nine. Perhaps Johannson didn’t have a home worth calling such to go back to either.

“I heard our man had a busy day,” Johannson said.

“That’s right. A prostitute in Soho, then got himself stabbed.” “He got through the cordon, I gather?”

“These things happen,” Carnegie replied, too tired to be testy. “What can I do for you?” “I just thought you’d want to know: the monkeys have started to die.” The words stirred Carnegie from his fatigue-stupor. “How many?” he asked.

“Three from fourteen so far. But the rest will be dead by dawn, I’d guess.” “What’s killing them? Exhaustion?” Carnegie recalled the desperate saturnalia he’d seen in the cages. What animal — human or otherwise — could keep up such revelry without cracking up?

“It’s not physical,” Johannson said. “Or at least not in the way you’re implying. We’ll have to wait for the dissection results before we get any detailed explanations—“ ”Your best guess?”

“For what it’s worth…” Johannson said, “…which is quite a lot: I think they’re going bang.”

“What?”

“Cerebral overload of some kind. Their brains are simply giving out. The agent doesn’t disperse you see. It feeds on itself. The more fevered they get, the more of the drug is produced; the more of the drug there is, the more fevered they get. It’s a vicious circle. Hotter and hotter, wilder and wilder. Eventually the system can’t take it, and suddenly I’m up to my armpits in dead monkeys.” The smile came back into the voice again, cold and wry. “Not that the others let that spoil their fun. Necrophilia’s quite the fashion down here.” Carnegie peered at his cooling hot chocolate. It had acquired a thin skin which puckered as he touched the cup. “So it’s just a matter of time?” he said.

“Before our man goes for bust? Yes, I’d think so.” “All right. Thank you for the update. Keep me posted.” “You want to come down here and view the remains?” “Monkey corpses I can do without, thank you.” Johannson laughed. Carnegie put down the receiver. When he turned back to the window, night had well and truly fallen.

In the laboratory Johannson crossed to the light switch by the door. In the time he’d been calling Carnegie the last of the daylight had fled. He saw the blow that felled him coming a mere heartbeat before it landed; it caught him across the side of his neck. One of his vertebrae snapped and his legs buckled. He collapsed without reaching the light switch. But by the time he hit the ground the distinction between day and night was academic.

Welles didn’t bother to check whether his blow had been lethal or not; time was at a premium. He stepped over the body and headed across to the bench where Johannson had been working. There, lying in a circle of lamplight as if for the final act of a simian tragedy, lay a dead monkey. It had clearly perished in a frenzy. Its face was knitted up; mouth wide and spittle-stained; eyes fixed in a final look of alarm. Its fur had been pulled out in tufts in the throes of its copulation. It took Welles half a minute of study to recognize the implications of the corpse, and of the other two he now saw lying on a nearby bench.

“Love kills,” he murmured to himself philosophically and began his systematic destruction of Blind Boy.

I’m drying, Jerome thought. I’m dying of terminal joy. The thought amused him. It was the only thought in his head which made sense. Since his encounter with Isaiah and the escape from the police that had followed, he could remember little with any coherence. The hours of hiding and nursing his wounds — of feeling the heat grow again, and of discharging it — had long since merged into one midsummer dream, from which, he knew with pleasurable certainty, only death would wake him. The blaze was devouring him utterly, from the entrails out. If he were to eviscerated now, what would the witnesses find? Only embers and ashes.

Yet still his one-eyed friend demanded more. Still, as he wove his way back to the laboratories — where else for a man to go when the stitches slipped but back to the first heat? — still the grids gaped at him seductively, and every brick wall offered up a hundred gritty invitations.

The night was balmy: a night for love songs and romance. In the questionable privacy of a parking lot a few blocks from his destination he saw two people having sex in the back of a car, the doors open to accommodate limbs and draft. Jerome paused to watch the ritual, enthralled as ever by the tangle of bodies and the sound — so loud it was like thunder itself — of twin hearts beating to one escalating rhythm. Watching, his rod grew eager.

The female saw him first and alerted her partner to the wreck of a human being who was watching them with such childish delight. The male looked around from his gropings to stare.

Do I burn, Jerome wondered? Does my hair flame? At the last, does the illusion gain substance?

To judge by the look on their faces, the answer was surely no. They were not in awe of him, merely angered and revolted.

“I’m on fire,” he told them.

The male got to his feet and spat at Jerome. He almost expected the spittle to turn to steam as it approached him but instead it landed on his face and upper chest as a cooling shower.

“Go to hell,” the woman said. “Leave us alone.” Jerome shook his head. The male warned him that another step would oblige him to break Jerome’s head. It disturbed our man not a jig; no words, no blows, could silence the imperative of the rod.

Their hearts, he realized, as he moved toward them, no longer beat in tandem.

Carnegie consulted the map, five years out of date now, on his office wall to pinpoint the location of the attack that had just been reported. Neither of the victims had come to serious harm, apparently. The arrival of a carload of revelers had dissuaded Jerome (it was unquestioningly Jerome) from lingering. Now the area was being flooded with officers, half a dozen of them armed. In a matter of minutes every street in the vicinity of the attack would be cordoned off. Unlike Soho, which had been crowded, the area would furnish the fugitive with few hiding places.