Clive Barker: Age of Desire

McBride ignored Dooley’s request; equipment fascinated him. He stared entranced at the encephalograph and electrocardiograph; at the printout units still disgorging yards of blank paper onto the floor; at the video display monitors and the consoles. The scene brought the Marie Celeste to his mind. This was like some deserted ship of science — still humming some tuneless song to itself as it sailed on, though there was neither captain nor crew left behind to attend upon it.

Beyond the wall of equipment was a window, no more than a yard square. McBride had assumed it let on to the exterior of the building, but now that he looked more closely he realized it did not. A test chamber lay beyond the banked units.

“Dooley…?” he said, glancing around. The man had gone, however, down to meet Carnegie presumably. Content to be left to his exploration, McBride returned his attention to the window. There was no light on inside. Curious, he walked around the back of the banked equipment until he found the chamber door. It was ajar. Without hesitation, he stepped through.

Most of the light through the window was blocked by the instruments on the other side; the interior was dark. It took McBride’s eyes a few seconds to get a true impression of the chaos the chamber contained: the overturned table; the chair of which somebody had made matchwood; the tangle of cables and demolished equipment — cameras, perhaps, to monitor proceedings in the chamber? — clusters of lights which had been similarly smashed. No professional vandal could have made a more through job of breaking up the chamber than had been made.

There was a smell in the air which McBride recognized but, irritatingly, couldn’t place.

He stood still, tantalized by the scent. The sound of sirens rose from down the corridor outside; Carnegie would be here in moments. Suddenly, the smell’s association came to him. It was the same scent that twitched in his nostrils when, after making love to Jessica and — as was his ritual — washing himself, he returned from the bathroom to bedroom. It was the smell of sex. He smiled.

His face was still registering pleasure when a heavy object sliced through the air and met his nose. He felt the cartilage give and a rush of blood came. He took two or three giddy steps backward, thereby avoiding the subsequent slice, but lost his footing in the disarray. He fell awkwardly in a litter of glass shards and looked up to see his assailant, wielding a metal bar, moving toward him. The man’s face resembled one of the monkey’s; the same yellowed teeth, the same rabid eyes. “No!” the man shouted, as he brought his makeshift club down on McBride, who managed to ward off the blow with his arm, snatching at the weapon in so doing.

The attack had taken him unawares but now, with the pain in his smashed nose to add fury to his response, he was more than equal of the aggressor. He plucked the club from the man, sweets from a babe, and leaped, roaring, to his feet. Any precepts he might once have been taught about arrest techniques had fled from his mind. He lay a hail of blows on the man’s head and shoulders, forcing him backward across the chamber. The man cowered beneath the assault and eventually slumped, whimpering, against the wall. Only now, with his antagonist abused to the verge of unconsciousness, did McBride’s furor falter. He stood in the middle of the chamber, gasping for breath, and watched the beaten man slip down the wall. He had made a profound error. The assailant, he now realized, was dressed in a white laboratory coat. He was, as Dooley was irritatingly fond of saying, on the side of the angels.

“Damn,” said McBride, “shit, hell and damn.” The man’s eyes flickered open, and he gazed up at McBride. His grasp on consciousness was evidently tenuous, but a look of recognition crossed his wide-browed, somber face. Or rather, recognition’s absence.

“You’re not him,” he murmured.

“Who?” said McBride, realizing he might yet salvage his reputation from this fiasco if he could squeeze a clue from the witness. “Who did you think I was?” The man opened his mouth, but no words emerged. Eager to hear the testimony, McBride crouched beside him and said: “Who did you think you were attacking?” Again the mouth opened; again no audible words emerged. McBride pressed his suit.

“It’s important,” he said, “just tell me who was here.” The man strove to voice his reply. McBride pressed his ear to the trembling mouth.

“In a pig’s eye,” the man said, then passed out, leaving McBride to curse his father, who’d bequeath him a temper he was afraid he would probably live to regret. But then, what was living for?

Inspector Carnegie was used to boredom. For every rare moment of genuine discovery his professional life had furnished him with, he had endured hour upon hour of waiting for bodies to be photographed and examined, for lawyers to be bargained with and suspects intimidated. He had long ago given up attempting to fight this tide of ennui and, after his fashion, had learned the art of going with the flow. The processes of investigation could not be hurried. The wise man, he had come to appreciate, let the pathologists, the lawyers and all their tribes have their tardy way. All that mattered, in the fullness of time, was that the finger be pointed and that the guilty quake.

Now, with the clock on the laboratory wall reading twelve fifty-three a.m., and even the monkeys hushed in their cages, he sat at one of the benches and waited for Hendrix to finish his calculations. The surgeon consulted his thermometer, then stripped off his gloves like a second skin and threw then down onto the sheet on which the deceased lay. “It’s always difficult,” the doctor said, “fixing time of death. She’s lost less than three degrees. I’d say she’s been dead under two hours.”

“The officers arrived at a quarter to twelve,” Carnegie said, “so she died maybe half an hour before that?”

“Something of that order.”

“Was she put in there?” he asked, indicating the place beneath the bench.

“Oh certainly. There’s no way she hid herself away. Not with those injuries. They’re quite something, aren’t they?”

Carnegie stared at Hendrix. The man had presumably seen hundreds of corpses, in every conceivable condition, but the enthusiasm in his pinched features was unqualified. Carnegie found that mystery more fascinating in its own way than that of the dead woman and her slaughterer. How could anyone possibly enjoy taking the rectal temperature of a corpse? It confounded him. But the pleasure was there, gleaming in the man’s eyes.

“Motive?” Carnegie asked.

“Pretty explicit, isn’t it? Rape. There’s been very thorough molestation; contusions around the vagina; copious semen deposits. Plenty to work with.” “And the wounds on her torso?”

“Ragged. Tears more than cuts.”

“Weapon?”

“Don’t know.” Hendrix made an inverted U of his mouth. “I mean, the flesh has been mauled. If it weren’t for the rape evidence I’d be tempted to suggest an animal.” “Dog, you mean.”

“I was thinking more of a tiger,” Hendrix said.

Carnegie frowned. “Tiger?”

“Joke,” Hendrix replied, “I was making a joke, Carnegie. My Christ, do you have any sense of irony?”

“This isn’t funny,” Carnegie said.

“I’m not laughing,” Hendrix replied with a sour look.

“The man McBride found in the test chamber?” “What about him?”

“Suspect?”

“Not in a thousand years. We’re looking for a maniac, Carnegie. Big, strong. Wild.” “And the wounding? Before or after?”

Hendrix scowled. “I don’t know. Postmortem will give us more. But for what it’s worth, I think our man was in a frenzy. I’d say the wounding and the rape were probably simultaneous.”