Clive Barker: Age of Desire

Carnegie’s normally phlegmatic features registered something close to shock.

“Simultaneous?”

Hendrix shrugged. “Lust’s a funny thing,” he said.

“Hilarious,” came the appalled reply.

As was his wont, Carnegie had his driver deposit him half a mile from his doorstep to allow him a head-clearing walk before home, hot chocolate and slumber. The ritual was observed religiously, even when the Inspector was dog-tired. He used the stroll to wind down before stepping over the threshold. Long experience had taught him that taking his professional concerns into the house assisted neither the investigation nor his domestic life. He had learned the lesson too late to keep his wife from leaving him and his children from estrangement, but he applied the principle still.

Tonight, he walked slowly to allow the distressing scenes the evening had brought to recede somewhat. The route took him past a small cinema which, he had read in the local press, was soon to be demolished. He was not surprised. Though he was no cineaste the fare the flea pit provided had degenerated in recent years. The week’s offering was a case in point: a double bill of horror movies. Lurid and derivative stuff to judge by the poster, with their crude graphics and their unashamed hyperbole. “You May Never Sleep Again!” one of the hook lines read; and beneath it a woman — very much awake — cowered in the shadow of a two-headed man. What trivial images the populists conjured to stir some fear in their audiences. The walking dead; nature grown vast and rampant in a miniature world; blood drinkers, omens, fire walkers, thunderstorms and all the other foolishness the public cowered before. It was all so laughably trite. Among that catalogue of penny dreadfuls there wasn’t one that equaled the banality of human appetite, which horror (or the consequences of same) he saw every week of his working life. Thinking of it, his mind thumbed through a dozen snapshots: the dead by torchlight, face down and thrashed to oblivion; and the living too, meeting his mind’s eye with hunger in theirs — for sex, for narcotics, for others’ pain. Why didn’t they put that on the posters?

As he reached his home a child squealed in the shadows beside his garage; the cry stopped him in his tracks. It came again, and this time he recognized it for what it was. No child at all but a cat, or cats, exchanging love calls in the darkened passageway. He went to the place to shoo them off. Their venereal secretions made the passage stink. He didn’t need to yell; his footfall was sufficient to scare them away. They darted in all directions, not two, but half a dozen of them. A veritable orgy had been underway apparently. He had arrived on the spot too late however. The stench of their seductions was overpowering.

Carnegie looked blankly at the elaborate setup of monitors and video recorders that dominated his office.

“What is Christ’s name is this about?” he wanted to know.

“The video tapes,” said Boyle, his number two, “from the laboratory. I think you ought to have a look at them, sir.”

Though they worked in tandem for seven months, Boyle was not one of Carnegie’s favorite officers; you could practically smell the ambition off his smooth hide. In someone half his age again such greed would be objectionable. In a man of thirty it verged on the objectionable. This present display — the mustering of equipment ready to confront Carnegie when he walked in at eight in the morning — was just Boyle’s style: flashy and redundant.

“Why so many screens?” Carnegie asked acidly. “Do I get it in stereo, too?” “They had three cameras running simultaneously, sir. Covering the experiment from several angles.”

“What experiment?”

Boyle gestured for his superior to sit down. Obsequious to a fault, aren’t you? thought Carnegie; much good it’ll do you.

“Right,” Boyle instructed the technician at the recorders, “roll the tapes.” Carnegie sipped at the cup of hot chocolate he had brought in with him. The beverage was a weakness of his, verging on addition. On the days when the machine supplying it broke down he was an unhappy man indeed. He looked at the three screens. Suddenly, a title.

“Project Blind Boy,” the words read. “Restricted.” “Blind Boy?” said Carnegie. “What, or who, is that?” “It’s obviously a code word of some kind,” Boyle said.

“Blind Boy, Blind Boy.” Carnegie repeated the phrase as if to beat it into submission, but before he could solve the problem the images on the three monitors diverged. They picture the same subject — a bespectacled male in his late twenties sitting in a chair — but each showed the scene from a different angle. One took in the subject full length and in profile; the second was a three-quarter medium-shot, angled from above; the third was a straightforward close-up of the subject’s head and shoulders, shot through the glass of the test chamber and from the front. The three images were in black and white, and none were completely centered or focused. Indeed, as the tapes began to run somebody was still adjusting such technicalities. A backwash of informal chatter ran between the subject and the woman — recognizable even in brief glimpses as the deceased — who was applying electrodes to his forehead. Much of the talk between them was difficult to catch; the acoustics in the chamber frustrated microphone and listener alike.

“The woman’s Doctor Dance,” Boyle offered. “The victim.” “Yes,” said Carnegie, watching the screens intently, “I recognize her. How long does this preparation go on for?”

“Quite a while. Most of it’s unedifying.” “Well, get to the edifying stuff, then.”

“Fast forward,” Boyle said. The technician obliged, and the actors on the three screens became squeaking comedians. “Wait!” said Boyle. “Back up a short way.” Again, the technician did as instructed. “There!” said Boyle. “Stop there. Now run on at normal speed.” The action settled back to its natural pace. “This is where it really begins, sir.” Carnegie had come to the end of his hot chocolate. He put his finger into the soft sludge at the bottom of the cup, delivering the sickly-sweet dregs to his tongue. On the screens Doctor Dance had approached the subject with a syringe, was now swabbing the crook of his elbow, and injecting him. Not for the first time since his visit to the Hume Laboratories did Carnegie wonder precisely what they did at the establishment. Was this kind of procedure de riguer in pharmaceutical research? The implicit secrecy of the experiment — late at night in an otherwise deserted building — suggested not. And there was that imperative on the title card—“Restricted.” What they were watching had clearly never been intended for public viewing.

“Are you comfortable?” a man off camera now inquired. The subject nodded. His glasses had been removed and he looked slightly bemused without them. An unremarkable face, thought Carnegie; the subject — as yet unnamed — was neither Adonis nor Quasimodo. He was receding slightly, and his wispy, dirty-blonde hair touched his shoulders.

“I’m fine, Doctor Welles,” he replied to the off-camera questioner.

“You don’t feel hot at all? Sweaty?”

“Not really,” the guinea pig replied, slightly apologetically. “I feel ordinary.” That you are, Carnegie thought; then to Boyle: “Have you been through the tapes to the end?”

“No, sir,” Boyle replied. “I thought you’d want to see them first. I only ran them as far as the injection.”

“Any word from the hospital on Doctor Welles?” “At the last call he was still comatose.” Carnegie grunted and returned his attention to the screens. Following the burst of action with the injection the tapes now settled into non-activity: the three cameras fixed on their shortsighted subject with beady stares, the torpor occasionally interrupted by an inquire from Welles as to the subject’s condition. It remained the same. After three or four minutes of this eventless study even his occasional blinks began to assume major dramatic significance.