Clive Barker - The Hellbound Heart

Then, suddenly, somewhere in this ever more elaborate system of sliding fragments, she saw (or again, seemed to see) movement. Only now did she realize that she'd been holding her breath since this display began, and was beginning to become light-headed. She tried to empty her lungs of the stale air, and take a draught of fresh, but her body would not obey this simple instruction.

Somewhere in her innards a tic of panic began. The hocus-pocus had stopped now, leaving one part of her admiring quite dispassionately the tinkling music that was coming from the wall, the other part fighting the fear that rose in her throat step by step.

Again, she tried to take a breath, but it was as if her body had died, and she was staring out of it, unable now to breathe or blink or swallow.

The spectacle of the unfolding wall had now ceased entirely, and she saw something flicker across the brick, ragged enough to be shadow but too substantial.

It was human, she saw, or had been. But the body had been ripped apart and sewn together again with most of its pieces either missing or twisted and blackened as if in a furnace. There was an eye, gleaming at her, and the ladder of a spine, the vertebrae stripped of muscle, a few unrecognizable fragments of anatomy. That was it. That such a thing might live beggared reason-what little flesh it owned was hopelessly corrupted. Yet live it did. Its eye, despite the rot it was rooted in, scanned her every inch, up and down.

She felt no fear in its presence. This thing was weaker than her by far. It moved a little in its cell, looking for some modicum of comfort. But there was none to be had, not for a creature that wore its frayed nerves on its bleeding sleeve. Every place it might lay its body brought pain: this she knew indisputably. She pitied it. And with pity came release. Her body expelled dead air, and sucked in living. Her

oxygen-starved brain reeled.

Even as she did so it spoke, a hole opening up in the flayed ball of the monster's head and issued a single, weightless word. The word was: "Julia."

2

Kirsty put down her glass, and tried to stand up.

"Where are you going?" Neville asked

"Where do you think?" she replied, consciously trying to prevent the words from slurring.

"Do you need any help?" Rory inquired. The alcohol made his lids lazy, and his grin lazier still.

"I am house-trained," she replied, the riposte greeted with laughter all around. She was pleased with herself; off-the-cuff wit was not her forte. She stumbled to the door.

"It's the last room on the right at the end of the landing," Rory informed her.

"I know," she said, and stepped out into the hall.

She didn't usually enjoy the sensation of drunkenness, but tonight she was reveling in it.

She felt loose-limbed and light-hearted. She might well regret this tomorrow, but tomorrow would have to take care of itself. For tonight, she was flying.

She found her way to the bathroom, and relieved her aching bladder, then splashed some water onto her face. That done, she began her return journey.

She had taken three steps along the landing when she realized that somebody had put out the landing light while she was in the bathroom, and that same somebody was now standing a few yards away from her. She stopped.

"Hello?" she said. Had the cat breeder followed her upstairs, in the hope of proving he wasn't spayed?

"Is that you?" she asked, only dimly aware that this was a singularly fruitless line of inquiry.

There was no reply, and she became a little uneasy.

"Come on," she said, attempting a jocular manner that she hoped masked her anxiety, "who is it?"

"Me," said Julia. Her voice was odd. Throaty, perhaps tearful.

"Are you all right?" Kirsty asked her. She wished she could see Julia's face.

"Yes," came the reply. "Why shouldn't I be?" Within the space of those five words the actress in Julia seized control. The voice cleared, the tone lightened.

"I'm just tired..." she went on. "It sounds like you're having a good time down there."

"Are we keeping you awake?"

"Goodness me, no," the voice gushed, "I was just going to the bathroom." A pause; then: "You go back down. Enjoy yourself."

At this cue Kirsty moved toward her along the landing. At the last possible moment Julia stepped out of the way, avoiding even the slightest physical contact.

"Sleep well," Kirsty said at the top of the stairs.

But there was no reply forthcoming from the shadow on the landing.

3

Julia didn't sleep well. Not that night, nor any night that followed.

What she'd seen in the damp room, what she'd heard and, finally, felt-was enough to keep easy slumbers at bay forever, or so she began to believe.

He was here. Brother Frank was here, in the house-and had been all the time. Locked away from the

world in which she lived and breathed, but close enough to make the frail, pitiful contact he had. The whys and the wherefores of this she had no clue to; the human detritus in the wall had neither the strength nor the time to articulate its condition.

All it said, before the wall began to close on it again, and its wreckage was once more eclipsed by brick and plaster, was "Julia "then, simply: "It's Frank "-and at the very end the word "Blood."

Then it was gone completely, and her legs had given way beneath her. She'd half fallen, half staggered, backward against the opposite wall. By the time she gathered her wits about her once more there was no mysterious light, no wasted figure cocooned in the brick. Reality's hold was absolute once again.

Not quite absolute perhaps. Frank was still here, in the damp room. Of that she had no doubt. Out of sight he might be, but not out of mind. He was trapped somehow between the sphere she occupied and some other place: a place of bells and troubled darkness. Had he died? Was that it? Perished in the empty room the previous summer, and now awaiting exorcism? If so, what had happened to his earthly remains? Only further exchange with Frank himself, or the remnants thereof, would provide an explanation.

Of the means by which she could lend the lost soul strength she had little doubt. He had given her the solution plainly.

"Blood, " he'd said. The syllable had been spoken not as an accusation but as an imperative.

Rory had bled on the floor of the damp room; the splashes had subsequently disappeared. Somehow, Frank's ghost-if that it was-had fed upon his brother's spillage, and gained thereby nourishment enough to reach out from his cell, and make faltering contact. What more might be achieved if the supply were larger?

She thought of Frank's embraces, of his roughness, his hardness, of the insistence he had brought to bear upon her. What would she not give to have such insistence again? Perhaps it was possible. And if it

were-if she could give him the sustenance he needed-would he not be grateful? Would he not be her pet, docile or brutal at her least whim? The thought took sleep away. Took sanity and sorrow with it. She had been in love all this time, she realized, and mourning for him. If it took blood to restore him to her, then blood she would supply, and not think twice of the consequences.

In the days that followed, she found her smile again. Rory took the change of mood as a sign that she was happy in the new house. Her good humor ignited the same in him. He took to the redecoration with renewed gusto.

Soon, he said, he would get to work on the second floor. They would locate the source of dampness in the large room, and turn it into a bedroom fit for his princess. She kissed his cheek when he spoke of this, and she said that she was in no hurry, that the room they had already was more than adequate. Talk

of the bedroom made him stroke her neck, and pull her close, and whisper infantile obscenities in her ear. She did not refuse him, but went upstairs meekly, and let him undress her as he liked to do, unbuttoning her with paint-stained fingers. She pretended the ceremony aroused her, though this was far from the truth.