Clive Barker: Age of Desire

Without warning a spasm of pain traveled down his spine from cortex to testicles and back again, convulsing him. His hands lost grip of the brick and he finished his agonizing climax on the air as he fell across the pavement. For several seconds he lay where he had collapsed, while the echoes of the initial spasm bounced back and forth along his spine, diminishing with each return. He could taste blood at the back of his throat. He wasn’t certain if he’d bitten his lip or tongue, but he thought not. Above his head the birds circled on, rising lazily on a spiral of warm air. He watched the fire in the clouds gutter out.

He got to his feet and looked down at the coinage of semen he’d spent on the pavement.

For a fragile instant he caught again a whiff of the vison he’d just had; imagined a marriage of his seed with the paving stone. What sublime children the would might boast, he thought, if he could only mate with brick or tree. He would gladly suffer the agonies of conception if such miracles were possible. But the paving stone was unmoved by his seed’s entreaties. The vison, like the fire above him, cooled and hid its glories.

He put his bloodied member away and leaned against the wall, turning the strange events of his recent life over and over. Something fundamental was changing in him, of that he had no doubt. The rapture that had possessed him (and would, no doubt, possess him again) was like nothing he had hitherto experienced. And whatever they had injected into his system, it showed no signs of being discharged naturally; far from it. He could feel the heat in him still, as he had leaving the laboratories, but this time the roar of its presence was louder than ever.

It was a new kind of life he was living, and the thought, through frightening, exulted him.

Not once did it occur to his spinning, eroticized brain that this new kind of life should, in time, demand a new kind of death.

Carnegie had been warned by his superiors that results were expected. He was now passing the verbal beating he’d received to those under him. It was a line of humiliation in which the greater was encouraged to kick the lesser man, and that man, in turn, his lesser.

Carnegie had sometimes wondered what the man at the end of the line took his ire out on; his dog presumably.

“This miscreant is still loose, gentlemen, despite his photograph in many of this morning’s newspapers and an operating method which is, to say the least, insolent. We will catch him, of course, but let’s get the bastard before we have another murder on our hands—“ The phone rang. Boyle’s replacement, Migeon, picked it up, while Carnegie concluded his pep talk to the assembled officers.

“I want him in the next twenty-four hors, gentlemen. That’s the time scale I’ve been given, and that’s what we’ve got. Twenty-four hours.” Migeon interrupted. “Sir? It’s Johannson. He says he’s got something for you. It’s urgent.”

“Right.” Carnegie claimed the receiver. “Carnegie.” The voice at the other end was soft to the point of inaudibility. “Carnegie,” Johannson said, “we’ve been right through the laboratory, dug up every piece of information we could find on Dance and Welles’s tests—“

”And?”

“We’ve also analyzed traces of the agent from the hypo they used on the suspect. I think we’ve found the boy, Carnegie.”

“What boy?” Carnegie wanted to know. He found Johannson’s obfuscation irritating.

“The Blind Boy, Carnegie.”

“And?”

For some inexplicable reason Carnegie was certain the man smiled down the phone line before replying: “I think perhaps you’d better come down and see for yourself. Sometime around noon suit you?”

Johannson could have been one of history’s greatest poisoners. He had all the requisite qualifications. A tidy mind (poisoners were, in Carnegie’s experience, domestic paragons), a patient nature (poison could take time) and, most importantly, an encyclopedic knowledge of toxicology. Watching him at work, which Carnegie had done on two previous cases, was to see a subtle man at his subtle craft, and the spectacle made Carnegie’s blood run cold.

Johannson had installed himself in the laboratory on the top floor, where Doctor Dance had been murdered, rather than use police facilities for the investigation, because, as he explained to Carnegie, much of the equipment the Hume organization boasted was simply not available elsewhere. His dominion over the place, accompanied by his two assistants, had, however, transformed the laboratory from the clutter left by the experimenters to a dream of order. Only the monkeys remained a constant. Try as he might Johannson could not control their behavior.

“We didn’t have difficulty finding the drug used on your man,” Johannson said, “we simply cross-checked traces remaining in the hypodermic with materials found in the room. In fact, they seem to have been manufacturing this stuff, or variations on the theme, for some time.

The people here claim they know nothing about it, of course. I’m inclined to believe them.

What the good doctors were doing here was, I’m sure, in the nature of a personal experiment.” “What sort of experiment?”

Johannson took off his spectacles and set about cleaning them with the tongue of his red tie. “At first, we thought they were developing some kind of hallucinogen,” he said. “In some regards the agent used on your man resembles a narcotic. In fact — methods apart — I think they made some very exciting discoveries. Developments which take us into entirely new territory.” “It’s not a drug then?”

“Oh, yes, of course it’s a drug,” Johannson said, replacing the spectacles, “but one created for a very specific purpose. See for yourself.” Johannson led the way across the laboratory to the row of monkeys’ cages. Instead of being confined separately, the toxicologist had seen fit to open the interconnecting doors between one cage and the next, allowing the animals free access to gather in groups. The consequence was absolutely plain — the animals were engaged in an elaborate series of sexual acts.

Why, Carnegie wondered, did monkeys perpetually perform obscenities? It was the same torrid display whenever he’d taken his offspring, as children, to Regent’s Park Zoo; the ape enclosure elicited one embarrassing question upon another. He stopped taking the children after a while.

He simply found it too mortifying.

“Believe me,” Johannson smirked, “this is mild by comparison with much of the behavior we’ve seen from them since we gave them a shot of the agent. From that point on they neglected all normal behavior patterns. They bypassed the arousal signals, the courtship rituals. They no longer show any interest in food. They don’t sleep. They have become sexual obsessives. All other stimuli are forgotten. Unless the agent is naturally discharged, I suspect they are going to screw themselves to death.”

Carnegie looked along the rest of the cages. The same pornographic scenes were being played out in each one. Mass rape, homosexual liaisons, fervent and ecstatic masturbation.

“It’s no wonder the doctors made a secret project of their discovery,” Johannson went on.

“They were on to something that could have made them a fortune. As aphrodisiac that actually works.

“An aphrodisiac?”

“Most are useless, of course. Rhinoceros horn, live eels in cream sauce: symbolic stuff.

They’re designed to arouse by association.” Carnegie remembered the hunger in Jerome’s eyes. It was echoed here in the monkeys’.

Hunger, and the desperation that hunger brings.

“And the ointments too, all useless. Cantharis vesticatora—“ ”What’s that?”

“You know the stuff as Spanish fly, perhaps? It’s a paste made from a beetle. Again, useless. At best these things are irritants. But this…” He picked up a vial of colorless fluid.