Clive Barker: Age of Desire

The burning man propelled himself down the steps of the Hume Laboratories as the police car — summoned, he presumed, by the alarm either Welles or Dance had set off upstairs — appeared at the gate and swung up the driveway. As he ran from he door the car screeched up to the steps and discharged its human cargo. He waited in the shadows, too exhausted by terror to run any farther, certain they would see him. But they disappeared through the swing doors without so much as a glance toward his torment. Am I on fire at all? he wondered. Was this horrifying spectacle — his flesh baptized with s polished flame that seared but failed to consume — simply a hallucination, for his eyes and his eyes only? If so, perhaps all that he had suffered up in the laboratory had also been delirium. Perhaps he had not truly committed the crimes he had fled from, the heat in his flesh licking him into ecstasies.

He looked down his body. His exposed skin still crawled with livid dots of fire, but one by one they were being extinguished. He was going out, he realized, like a neglected bonfire.

The sensations that had suffused him — so intense and so demanding that they had been as like pain as pleasure — were finally deserting his nerve endings, leaving a numbness for which he was grateful. His body, now appearing from beneath the veil of fire, was in a sorry condition. His skin was a panic-map of scratches, his clothes torn to shreds, his hands sticky with coagulating blood; blood, he knew, that was not his own. There was no avoiding the bitter truth. He had done all he had imagined doing. Even now the officers would be staring down at his atrocious handiwork.

He crept away from his niche beside the door and down the driveway, keeping a lookout for the return of the two policemen. Neither reappeared. The street beyond the gate was deserted. He started to run. He had managed only a few paces when the alarm was abruptly cut off. For several seconds his ears rang in sympathy with the silenced bell. Then, eerily, he began to hear the sound of heat — the surreptitious murmuring of embers — distant enough that he didn’t panic, yet close as his heartbeat.

He limped on to put as much distance as he could between him and his felonies before they were discovered. But however fast he ran, the heat went with him, safe in some backwater of his gut, threatening with every desperate step he took to ignite him afresh.

It took Dooley several seconds to identify the cacophony he was hearing from the upper floor now that McBride had hushed the alarm bell. It was the high-pitched chattering of monkeys, and it came from one of the many rooms down the corridor to his right.

“Virgil,” he called down the stairwell. “Get up here.” Not waiting for his partner to join him, Dooley headed off toward the source of the din.

Halfway along the corridor the smell of static and new carpeting gave way to a more pungent combination: urine, disinfectant and rotting fruit. Dooley slowed his advance. He didn’t like the smell any more than he liked the hysteria in the babble of monkey voices. But McBride was slow in answering his call, and after a short hesitation, Dooley’s curiosity got the better of his disquiet. Hand on truncheon, he approached the open door and stepped in. His appearance sparked off another wave of frenzy from the animals, a dozen or so rhesus monkeys. They threw themselves around in their cages, somersaulting, screeching and berating the wire mesh. Their excitement was infectious. Dooley could feel the sweat begin to squeeze from his pores.

“Is there anybody here?” he called out.

The only reply came from the prisoners: more hysteria, more cage rattling. He stared across the room at them. They stared back, their teeth bared in fear or welcome; Dooley didn’t know which, nor did he wish to test their intentions. He kept well clear of the bench on which the cages were lined up as he began a perfunctory search of the laboratory.

“I wondered what the hell the smell was,” McBride said, appearing at the door.

“Just animals,” Dooley replied.

“Don’t they ever wash? Filthy buggers.”

“Anything downstairs?”

“Nope,” McBride said, crossing to the cages. The monkeys met his advance with more gymnastics. “Just the alarm.”

“Nothing up here either,” Dooley said. He was about to add, “Don’t do that,” to prevent his partner putting his finger to the mesh, but before the words were out one of the animals seized the proffered digit and bit it. McBride wrested his finger free and threw a blow back against the mesh in retaliation. Squealing its anger, the occupant flung its scrawny body about in a lunatic fandango that threatened to pitch cage and monkey alike onto the floor.

“You’ll need a tetanus shot for that,” Dooley commented.

“Shit!” said McBride, “what’s wrong with the little bastard anyhow?” “Maybe they don’t like strangers.”

“They’re out of their tiny minds.” McBride sucked ruminatively on his finger, than spat.

“I mean, look at them.”

Dooley didn’t answer.

“I said, look…” McBride repeated.

Very quietly, Dooley said: “Over here.”

“What is it?”

“Just come over here.”

McBride drew his gaze from the row of cages and across the cluttered work surfaces to where Dooley was staring at the ground, the look on his face one of fascinated revulsion.

McBride neglected his finger sucking and threaded his way among the benches and stools to where his partner stood.

“Under there,” Dooley muttered.

On the scuffed floor at Dooley’s feet was a woman’s beige shoe; beneath the bench was the shoe’s owner. To judge by her cramped position she had either been secreted there by the miscreant or dragged herself out of sight and died in hiding.

“Is she dead?” McBride asked.

“Look at her, for Christ’s sake,” Dooley replied, “she’s been torn open.” “We’ve got to check for vital signs,” McBride reminded him. Dooley made no more to comply, so McBride squatted down in front of the victim and checked for a pulse at her ravaged neck. There was none. Her skin was still warm beneath his fingers however. A gloss of salvia on her cheek had not yet dried.

Dooley, calling in his report, looked down at the deceased. The worst of her wounds, on the upper torso, were masked by McBride’s crouching body. All he could see was a fall of auburn hair and her legs, one foot shoeless, protruding from her hiding place. They were beautiful legs. He might have whistled after such legs once upon a time.

“She’s a doctor or technician,” McBride said. “She’s wearing a lab coat.” Or she had been. In fact the coat had been ripped open, as had the layers of clothing beneath, and then, as if to complete the exhibition, the skin and muscle beneath that. McBride peered into her chest.

The sternum had been snapped and the heart teased from its seat, as if her killer had wanted to take it as a keepsake and been interrupted in the act. He perused her without squeamishness; he had always prided himself on his strong stomach.

“Are you satisfied she’s dead?”

“Never saw deader.”

“Carnegie’s coming down,” Dooley said, crossing to one of the sinks. Careless of fingerprints, he turned on the tap and splashed a handful of cold water onto his face. When he looked up from his ablutions McBride had left off his t?te-?-t?te with the corpse and was walking down the laboratory toward a bank of machinery.

“What do they do here, for Christ’s sake?” he remarked. “Look at all this stuff.” “Some kind of research facility,” Dooley said.

“What do they research?”

“How the hell do I know?” Dooley snapped. The ceaseless chatterings of the monkeys and the proximity of the dead woman made him want to desert the place. “Let’s leave it be, huh?”