the hell bound heart
by
clive barker


"Barker's the
best thing to happen to horror fiction for many moons ... (he) never
fails to deliver the compelling prose and relentless horror his readers
expect."  -Chicago Tribune

Harper Paperbacks

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that
this book is stolen property.  It was reported as "unsold and
destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher
has received any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction.  The characters, incidents, and dialogues
are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as
real.  Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is
entirely coincidental.

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Copyright 1986 by Clive Barker

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
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10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022.

This book is published by arrangement with the author.  Cover
illustration by Kirk Reinert First Harper Paperbacks printing: November
1991 Printed in the United States of America

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for Mary

/ long to talk with some old lover's ghost Who died before the god of
Love was born.

THE HELLBOUND

HEART

ONE

So intent was Frank upon solving the puzzle of Lemarchand's box that he
didn't hear the great bell begin to ring.  The device had been
constructed by a master craftsman, and the riddle was this--that though
he'd been told the box contained wonders, there simply seemed to be no
way into it, no clue on any of its six black lacquered faces as to the
whereabouts of the pressure points that would disengage one piece of
this three-dimensional jigsaw from another.

Frank had seen similar puzzles--mostly in Hong Kong, products of the
Chinese taste for making metaphysics of hard wood--but to the acuity
and technical genius of the Chinese the Frenchman had brought a
perverse logic that was entirely his own.  If there was a system to the
puzzle, Frank had failed to find it.  Only after several hours of trial
and error did a chance juxtaposition of thumbs, middle and last fingers
bear fruit: an almost imperceptible click, and then--victory!--a
segment of the box slid out from beside its neighbors.

There were two revelations.

The first, that the interior surfaces were brilliantly polished.
Frank's reflection--distorted, fragmented--skated across the lacquer.
The second, that Lemarchand, who had been in his time a maker of
singing birds, had constructed the box so that opening it tripped a
musical mechanism, which began to tinkle a short rondo of sublime
banality.

Encouraged by his success, Frank proceeded to work on the box
feverishly, quickly finding fresh alignments of fluted slot and oiled
peg which in their turn revealed further intricacies.  And with each
solution--each new half twist or pull--a further melodic element was
brought into play--the tune counterpointed

and developed until the initial caprice was all but lost in
ornamentation.

At some point in his labors, the bell had begun to ring--a steady
somber tolling.  He had not heard, at least not consciously.  But when
the puzzle was almost finished--the mirrored innards of the box
unknotted--he became aware that his stomach churned so violently at the
sound of the bell it might have been ringing half a lifetime.

He looked up from his work.  For a few moments he supposed the noise to
be coming from somewhere in the street outside--but he rapidly
dismissed that notion.  It had been almost midnight before he'd begun
to work at the bird maker box; several hours had gone by--hours he
would not have remembered passing but for the evidence of his
watch-since then.  There was no church in the city-however desperate
for adherents--that would ring a summoning bell at such an hour.

No.  The sound was coming from somewhere much more distant, through the
very door (as yet invisible) that Lemarchand's miraculous box had been
constructed to open.  Everything that Kircher, who had sold him the
box, had promised of it was true!  He was on the

_

threshold of a new world, a province infinitely far from the room in
which he sat.

Infinitely far; yet now, suddenly near.

The thought had made his breath quick.  He had anticipated this moment
so keenly, planned with every wit he possessed this rending of the
veil.  In moments they would be here--the ones Kircher had called the
Cenobites, theologians of the Order of the Gash.  Summoned from their
experiments in the higher reaches of pleasure, to bring their ageless
heads into a world of rain and failure.

He had worked ceaselessly in the preceding week to prepare the room for
them.  The bare boards had been meticulously scrubbed and strewn with
petals.  Upon the west wall he had set up a kind of altar to them,
decorated with the kind of placatory offerings Kircher had assured him
would nurture their good offices: bones, bonbons, needles.  A jug of
his urine-the product of seven days' collection--stood on the left of
the altar, should they require some spontaneous gesture of
self-defilement.  On the right, a plate of doves' heads, which Kircher
had also advised him to have on hand.

He had left no part of the invocation ritual unobserved.  No cardinal,
eager for the

fisherman's shoes, could have been more diligent.

But now, as the sound of the bell became louder, drowning out the music
box, he was afraid.

Too late, he murmured to himself, hoping to quell his rising fear.
Lemarchand's device was undone; the final trick had been turned.  There
was no time left for prevarication or regret.  Besides, hadn't he
risked both life and sanity to make this unveiling possible?  The
doorway was even now opening to pleasures no more than a handful of
humans had ever known existed, much less tasted--pleasures which would
redefine the parameters of sensation, which would release him from the
dull round of desire, seduction and disappointment that had dogged him
from late adolescence.  He would be transformed by that knowledge,
wouldn't he?  No man could experience the profundity of such feeling
and remain unchanged.

The bare bulb in the middle of the room dimmed and brightened,
brightened and dimmed again.  It had taken on the rhythm of the bell,
burning its hottest on each chime.  In the troughs between the chimes
the darkness in the room became utter; it was as if the world

he had occupied for twenty-nine years had ceased to exist.  Then the
bell would sound again, and the bulb burn so strongly it might never
have faltered, and for a few precious seconds he was standing in a
familiar pkce, with a door that led out and down and into the street,
and a window through which--had he but the will (or strength) to tear
the blinds back--he might glimpse a rumor of morning.

With each peal the bulb's light was becoming more revelatory.  By it,
he saw the east wall flayed; saw the brick momentarily lose solidity
and blow away; saw, in that same instant, the place beyond the room
from which the bell's din was issuing.  A world of birds was it?  Vast
black birds caught in perpetual tempest?  That was all the sense he
could make of the province from which--even now--the hierophants were
coming--that it was in confusion, and full of brittle, broken things
that rose and fell and filled the dark air with their fright.

And then the wall was solid again, and the bell fell silent.  The bulb
flickered out.  This time it went without a hope of rekindling.

He stood in the darkness, and said nothing.  Even if he could remember
the words of welcome he'd prepared, his tongue would not

have spoken them.  It was playing dead in his mouth.

And then, light.

It came from them: from the quartet of Cenobites who now, with the wall
sealed behind them, occupied the room.  A fitful phosphorescence, like
the glow of deep-sea fishes: blue, cold, charm less  It struck Frank
that he had never once wondered what they would look like.  His
imagination, though fertile when it came to trickery and theft, was
impoverished in other regards.  The skill to picture these eminences
was beyond him, so he had not even tried.

Why then was he so distressed to set eyes upon them?  Was it the scars
that covered every inch of their bodies, the flesh cosmetically
punctured and sliced and infibulated, then dusted down with ash?  Was
it the smell of vanilla they brought with them, the sweetness of which
did little to disguise the stench beneath?  Or was it that as the light
grew, and he scanned them more closely, he saw nothing of joy, or even
humanity, in their maimed faces: only desperation, and an appetite that
made his bowels ache to be voided.

"What city is this?"  one of the four enquired.  Frank had difficulty
guessing the

speaker's gender with any certainty.  Its clothes, some of which were
sewn to and through its skin, hid its private parts, and there was
nothing in the dregs of its voice, or in its willfully disfigured
features that offered the least clue.  When it spoke, the hooks that
transfixed the flaps of its eyes and were wed, by an intricate system
of chains passed through flesh and bone alike, to similar hooks through
the lower lip, were teased by the motion, exposing the glistening meat
beneath.

"I asked you a question," it said.  Frank made no reply.  The name of
this city was the last thing on his mind.

"Do you understand?"  the figure beside the first speaker demanded. Its
voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy-the voice of
an excited girl.  Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an
intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical
axes a jeweled pin driven through to the bone.  Its tongue was
similarly decorated.  "Do you even know who we are?"  it asked.

"Yes."  Frank said at last.  "I know."

Of course he knew; he and Kircher had spent long nights talking of
hints gleaned from the diaries of Bolingbroke and Gilles de Rais.

All that mankind knew of the Order of the Gash, he knew.

And yet... he had expected something different.  Expected some sign of
the numberless splendors they had access to.  He had thought they would
come with women, at least; oiled women, milked women; women shaved and
muscled for the act of love: their lips perfumed, their thighs
trembling to spread, their buttocks weighty, the way he liked them.  He
had expected sighs, and languid bodies spread on the floor underfoot
like a living carpet; had expected virgin whores whose every crevice
was his for the asking and whose skills would press him--upward,
upward--to undreamed-of ecstasies.  The world would be forgotten in
their arms.  He would be exalted by his lust, instead of despised for
it.

But no.  No women, no sighs.  Only these sexless things, with their
corrugated flesh.

Now the third spoke.  Its features were so heavily scarified--the
wounds nurtured until they ballooned--that its eyes were invisible and
its words corrupted by the disfigurement of its mouth.

"What do you want?"  it asked him.

He perused this questioner more confidently than he had the other two.
His fear was

draining away with every second that passed.  Memories of the
terrifying place beyond the wall were already receding.  He was left
with these decrepit deca dents with their stench, their queer
deformity, their self-evident frailty.  The only thing he had to fear
was nausea.

"Kircher told me there would be five of you," Frank said.

"The Engineer will arrive should the moment merit," came the reply.
"Now again, we ask you: What do you want?"

Why should he not answer them straight?  "Pleasure," he replied.
"Kircher said you know about pleasure."

"Oh we do," said the first of them.  "Everything you ever wanted."

"Yes?"

"Of course.  Of course."  It stared at him with its all-too-naked eyes.
"What have you dreamed?"  it said.

The question, put so baldly, confounded him.  How could he hope to
articulate the nature of the phantasms his libido had created?  He was
still searching for words when one of them said:

"This world ... it disappoints you?"

"Pretty much," he replied.

"You're not the first to tire of its trivialities," came the response. 
"There have been others."

"Not many," the gridded face put in.

"True.  A handful at best.  But a few have dared to use Lemarchand's
Configuration.  Men like yourself, hungry for new possibilities, who've
heard that we have skills unknown in your region."

"I'd expected--" Frank began.

"We know what you expected," the Cenobite replied.  "We understand to
its breadth and depth the nature of your frenzy.  It is utterly
familiar to us."

Frank grunted.  "So," he said, "you know what I've dreamed about.  You
can supply the pleasure."

The thing's face broke open, its lips curling back: a baboon's smile.
"Not as you understand it," came the reply.

Frank made to interrupt, but the creature raised a silencing hand.

"There are conditions of the nerve endings," it said, "the like of
which your imagination, however fevered, could not hope to evoke."

"..  . yes?"

"Oh yes.  Oh most certainly.  Your most

treasured depravity is child's play beside the experiences we
offer."

"Will you partake of them?"  said the second Cenobite.  Frank looked at
the scars and the hooks.  Again, his tongue was deficient.

"Will you?"

Outside, somewhere near, the world would soon be waking.  He had
watched it wake from the window of this very room, day after day,
stirring itself to another round of fruitless pursuits, and he'd known,
known, that there was nothing left out there to excite him.  No heat,
only sweat.  No passion, only sudden lust, and just as sudden
indifference.  He had turned his back on such dissatisfaction.  If in
doing so he had to interpret the signs these creatures brought him,
then that was the price of ambition.  He was ready to pay it.

"Show me," he said.

"There's no going back.  You do understand that?"

"Show me."

They needed no further invitation to raise the curtain.  He heard the
door creak as it was opened, and turned to see that the world beyond
the threshold had disappeared, to be replaced by the same panic-filled
darkness from

which the members of the Order had stepped.  He looked back towards
the Cenobites, seeking some explanation for this.  But they'd
disappeared. Their passing had not gone unrecorded however.  They'd
taken the flowers with them, leaving only bare boards, and on the wall
the offerings he had assembled were blackening, as if in the heat of
some fierce but invisible flame.  He smelled the bitterness of their
consumption; it pricked his nostrils so acutely he was certain they
would bleed.

But the smell of burning was only the beginning.  No sooner had he
registered it than half a dozen other scents filled his head.  Perfumes
he had scarcely noticed until now were suddenly overpoweringly strong.
The lingering scent of filched blossoms; the smell of the paint on the
ceiling and the sap in the wood beneath his feet--all filled his head.
He could even smell the darkness outside the door, and in it, the
ordure of a hundred thousand birds.

He put his hand to his mouth and nose, to stop the onslaught from
overcoming him, but the stench of perspiration on his fingers made him
giddy.  He might have been driven to nausea had there not been fresh
sensations flooding his system from each nerve ending and taste bud.

It seemed he could suddenly feel the collision of the dust motes with
his skin.  Every drawn breath chafed his lips; every blink, his eyes.
Bile burned in the back of his throat, and a morsel of yesterday's beef
that had lodged between his teeth sent spasms through his system as it
exuded a droplet of gravy upon his tongue.

His ears were no less sensitive.  His head was filled with a thousand
dins, some of which he himself was father to.  The air that broke
against his eardrums was a hurricane; the flatulence in his bowels was
thunder.  But there were other sounds--innumerable sounds--which
assailed him from somewhere beyond himself.  Voices raised in anger,
whispered professions of love, roars and rattlings, snatches of song,
tears.

Was it the world he was hearing--morning breaking in a thousand homes?
He had no chance to listen closely; the cacophony drove any power of
analysis from his head.

But there was worse.  The eyes!  Oh god in heaven, he had never guessed
that they could be such torment; he, who'd thought there was nothing on
earth left to startle him.  Now he reeled!  Everywhere, sight!

The plain plaster of the ceiling was an

awesome geography of brush strokes.  The weave of his plain shirt an
unbearable elaboration of threads.  In the corner he saw a mite move on
a dead dove's head, and wink its eyes at him, seeing that he saw.  Too
much!  Too much!

Appalled, he shut his eyes.  But there was more inside than out;
memories whose violence shook him to the verge of senselessness.  He
sucked his mother's milk, and choked; felt his sibling's arms around
him (a fight, was it, or a brotherly embrace?  Either way, it
suffocated).  And more; so much more.  A short lifetime of sensations,
all writ in a perfect hand upon his cortex, and breaking him with their
insistence that they be remembered.

He felt close to exploding.  Surely the world outside his head--the
room, and the birds beyond the door--they, for all their shrieking
excesses, could not be as overwhelming as his memories.  Better that,
he thought, and tried to open his eyes.  But they wouldn't unglue.
Tears or pus or needle and thread had sealed them up.

He thought of the faces of the Cenobites: the hooks, the chains.  Had
they worked some similar surgery upon him, locking him up behind his
eyes with the parade of his history?

In fear for his sanity, he began to address them, though he was no
longer certain that they were even within earshot.

"Why?"  he asked.  "Why are you doing this to me?"

The echo of his words roared in his ears, but he scarcely attended to
it.  More sense impressions were swimming up from the past to torment
him.  Childhood still lingered on his tongue (milk and frustration) but
there were adult feelings joining it now.  He was grown!  He was
mustached and mighty, hands heavy, gut large.

Youthful pleasures had possessed the appeal of newness, but as the
years had crept on, and mild sensation lost its potency, stronger and
stronger experiences had been called for.  And here they came again,
more pungent for being laid in the darkness at the back of his head.

He felt untold tastes upon his tongue: bitter, sweet, sour, salty;
smelled spice and shit and his mother's hair; saw cities and skies; saw
speed, saw deeps; broke bread with men now dead and was scalded by the
heat of their spittle on his cheek.

And of course there were women.

Always, amid the flurry and confusion,

memories of women appeared, assaulting him with their scents, their
textures, their tastes.

The proximity of this harem aroused him, despite circumstances.  He
opened his trousers and caressed his cock, more eager to have the seed
spilled and so be freed of these creatures than for the pleasure of
it.

He was dimly aware, as he worked his inches, that he must make a
pitiful sight: a blind man in an empty room, aroused for a dream's
sake.  But the wracking, joyless orgasm failed to even slow the
relentless display.  His knees buckled, and his body collapsed to the
boards where his spunk had fallen.  There was a spasm of pain as he hit
the floor, but the response was washed away before another wave of
memories.

He rolled onto his back, and screamed; screamed and begged for an end
to it, but the sensations only rose higher still, whipped to fresh
heights with every prayer for cessation he offered up.

The pleas became a single sound, words and sense eclipsed by panic.  It
seemed there was no end to this, but madness.  No hope but to be lost
to hope.

As he formulated this last, despairing thought, the torment stopped.

All at once; all of it.  Gone.  Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell.  He
was abruptly bereft of them all.  There were seconds then, when he
doubted his very existence.  Two heartbeats, three, four.

On the fifth beat, he opened his eyes.  The room was empty, the doves
and the piss-pot gone.  The door was closed.

Gingerly, he sat up.  His limbs were tingling; his head, wrist, and
bladder ached.

And then--a movement at the other end of the room drew his attention.

Where, two moments before, there had been an empty space, there was now
a figure.  It was the fourth Cenobite, the one that had never spoken,
nor shown its face.  Not it, he now saw: but she.  The hood it had worn
had been discarded, as had the robes.  The woman beneath was gray yet
gleaming, her lips bloody, her legs parted so that the elaborate
scarification of her pubis was displayed.  She sat on a pile of rotting
human heads, and smiled in welcome.

The collision of sensuality and death appalled him.  Could he have any
doubt that she had personally dispatched these victims?  Their rot was
beneath her nails, and their tongues-twenty or more--lay out in ranks
on her oiled

thighs, as if awaiting entrance.  Nor did he doubt that the brains now
seeping from their ears and nostrils had been driven to insanity before
a blow or a kiss had stopped their hearts.

Kircher had lied to him--either that or he'd been horribly deceived.
There was no pleasure in the air; or at least not as humankind
understood it.

He had made a mistake opening Lemarchand's box.  A very terrible
mistake.

"Oh, so you've finished dreaming," said the Cenobite, perusing him as
he lay panting on the bare boards.  "Good."

She stood up.  The tongues fell to the floor, like a rain of slugs.

"Now we can begin," she said.

TWO

It's not quite what I expected," Julia I commented as they stood in the
hall- JL way.  It was twilight; a cold day in August.  Not the ideal
time to view a house that had been left empty for so long.

"It needs work," Rory said.  "That's all.  It's not been touched since
my grandmother died.  That's the best part of three years.  And I'm
pretty sure she never did anything to it towards the end of her
life."

"And it's yours?"

"Mine and Frank's.  It was willed to us both.  But when was the last
time anybody saw big brother?"

She shrugged, as if she couldn't remember, though she remembered very
well.  A week before the wedding.

"Someone said he spent a few days here last summer.  Rutting away, no
doubt.  Then he was off again.  He's got no interest in property."

"But suppose we move in, and then he comes back, wants what's his?"

"I'll buy him out.  I'll get a loan from the bank and buy him out. He's
always hard up for cash."

She nodded, but looked less than persuaded.

"Don't worry," he said, going to where she was standing and wrapping
his arms around her.  "The place is ours, doll.  We can paint it and
pamper it and make it like heaven."

He scanned her face.  Sometimes--particularly when doubt moved her, as
it did now-her beauty came close to frightening him.

"Trust me," he said.

"I do."

"All right then.  What say we start moving in on Sunday?"

Sunday.

It was still the Lord's Day up this end of the city.  Even if the
owners of these well dressed houses and well-pressed children were no
longer believers, they still observed the sabbath.  A few curtains were
twitched aside when Lewton's van drew up, and the unloading began; some
curious neighbors even sauntered past the house once or twice, on the
pretext of walking the hounds; but nobody spoke to the new arrivals,
much less offered a hand with the furniture.  Sunday was not a day to
break sweat.

Julia looked after the unpacking, while Rory organized the unloading of
the van, with Lewton and Mad Bob providing the extra muscle.  It took
four round-trips to transfer the bulk of the stuff from Alexandra Road,
and at the end of the day there was still a good deal of bric-a-brac
left behind, to be collected at a later point.

About two in the afternoon, Kirsty turned up on the doorstep.  '

"Came to see if I could give you a hand," she said, with a tone of
vague apology in her voice.

"Well, you'd better come in," Julia said.

She went back into the front room, which was a battlefield in which
only chaos was winning, and quietly cursed Rory.  Inviting the lost
soul round to offer her services was his doing, no doubt of it.  She
would be more of a hindrance than a help; her dreamy, perpetually
defeated manner set Julia's teeth on edge.

"What can I do?"  Kirsty asked.  "Rory said--"

"Yes," said Julia.  "I'm sure he did."

"Where is he?  Rory, I mean."

"Gone back for another van load to add to the misery."

"Oh."

Julia softened her expression.  "You know it's very sweet of you," she
said, "to come round like this, but I don't think there's much you can
do just at the moment."

Kirsty flushed slightly.  Dreamy she was, but not stupid.

"I see," she said.  "Are you sure?  Can't I mean, maybe I could make a
cup of coffee for you?"

"Coffee," said Julia.  The thought of it made her realize just how
parched her throat had become.  "Yes," she conceded.  "That's not a bad
idea."

The coffee making was not without its

minor traumas.  No task Kirsty undertook was ever entirely simple. She
stood in the kitchen, boiling water in a pan it had taken a quarter of
an hour to find, thinking that maybe she shouldn't have come after all.
Julia always looked at her so strangely, as if faintly baffled by the
fact that she hadn't been smothered at birth.  No matter.  Rory had
asked her to come, hadn't he?  And that was invitation enough.  She
would not have turned down the chance of his smile for a hundred
Julias.

The van arrived twenty-five minutes later, minutes in which the women
had twice attempted, and twice failed, to get a conversation simmering.
They had little in common.  Julia the sweet, the beautiful, the winner
of glances and kisses, and Kirsty the girl with the pale handshake,
whose eyes were only ever as bright as Julia's before or after tears.
She had long ago decided that life was unfair.  But why, when she'd
accepted that bitter truth, did circumstance insist on rubbing her face
in it?

She surreptitiously watched Julia as she worked, and it seemed to
Kirsty that the woman was incapable of ugliness.  Every gesture --a
stray hair brushed from the eyes with the back of the hand, dust blown
from a favorite cup--all were infused with such effortless

grace.  Seeing it, she understood Rory's doglike adulation, and
understanding it, despaired afresh.

He came in, at last, squinting and sweaty.  The afternoon sun was
fierce.  He grinned at her, parading the ragged line of his front teeth
that she had first found so irresistible,

"I'm glad you could come," he said.

"Happy to help--" she replied, but he had already looked away, at
Julia.

"How's it going?"

"I'm losing my mind," she told him.

"Well, now you can rest from your labors," he said.  "We brought the
bed this trip."  He gave her a conspiratorial wink, but she didn't
respond.

"Can I help with unloading?"  Kirsty offered.

"Lewton and M.B. are doing it," came Rory's reply.  "Oh."

"But I'd give an arm and a leg for a cup of tea."

"We haven't found the tea," Julia told him.

"Oh.  Maybe a coffee, then?"

"Right," said Kirsty.  "And for the other two?"

"They'd kill for a cup."

Kirsty went back to the kitchen, filled the small pan to near brimming,
and set it back on the stove.  From the hallway she heard Rory
supervising the next unloading.

It was the bed, the bridal bed.  Though she tried very hard to keep the
thought of his embracing Julia out of her mind, she could not.  As she
stared into the water, and it simmered and steamed and finally boiled,
the same painful images of their pleasure came back and back.

While the trio were away, gathering the fourth and final load of the
day, Julia lost her temper with the unpacking.  It was a disaster, she
said; everything had been parceled up and put into the tea chests in
the wrong order.  She was having to disinter perfectly useless items to
get access to the bare necessities.

Kirsty kept her silence, and her place in the kitchen, washing the
soiled cups.

Cursing louder, Julia left the chaos and went out for a cigarette on
the front step.  She leaned against the open door, and breathed the
pollen-gilded air.  Already, though it was only

the twenty-first of August, the afternoon was tinged with a smoky
scent that heralded autumn.

She had lost track of how fast the day had gone, for as she stood there
a bell began to ring for Evensong: the run of chimes rising and falling
in lazy waves.  The sound was reassuring.  It made her think of her
childhood, though not--that she could remember--of any particular day
or place.  Simply of being young, of mystery.

It was four years since she'd last stepped into a church: the day of
her marriage to Rory, in fact.  The thought of that day--or rather, of
the promise it had failed to fulfill--soured the moment.  She left the
step, the chimes in full flight, and turned back into the house.  After
the touch of the sun on her upturned face, the interior seemed gloomy.
Suddenly she tired to the point of tears.

They would have to assemble the bed before they could put their heads
down to sleep tonight, and they had yet to decide which room they would
use as the master bedroom.  She would do that now, she elected, and so
avoid having to return to the front room, and to ever-mournful
Kirsty.

The bell was still pealing when she opened

the door of the front room on the second floor.  It was the largest of
the three upper rooms--a natural choice--but the sun had not got in
today (or any other day this summer) because the blinds were drawn
across the window.  The room was consequently chillier than anywhere
else in the house; the air stagnant.  She crossed the stained
floorboards to the window, intending to remove the blind.

At the sill, a strange thing.  The blind had been securely nailed to
the window frame, effectively cutting out the least intrusion of life
from the sunlit street beyond.  She tried to pull the material free,
but failed.  The workman, whoever he'd been, had done a thorough job.

No matter; she'd have Rory take a claw hammer to the nails when he got
back.  She turned from the window, and as she did so she was suddenly
and forcibly aware that the bell was still summoning the faithful. Were
they not coming tonight?  Was the hook not sufficiently baited with
promises of paradise?  The thought was only half alive; it withered in
moments.  But the bell rolled on, reverberating around the room.  Her
limbs, already aching with fatigue, seemed dragged down further by each
peal.  Her head throbbed intolerably.

The room was hateful, she'd decided; it

was stale, and its benighted walls clammy.  Despite its size, she
would not let Rory persuade her into using it as the master bedroom.
Let it rot.

She started toward the door, but as she came within a yard of it, the
corners of the room seemed to creak, and the door slammed.  Her nerves
jangled.  It was all she could do to prevent herself from sobbing.

Instead she simply said, "Go to hell," and snatched at the handle.  It
turned easily (why should it not?  yet she was relieved) and the door
swung open.  From the hall below, a splash of warmth and ocher light.

She closed the door behind her and, with a queer satisfaction the root
of which she couldn't or wouldn't fathom turned the key in the lock.

As she did so, the bell stopped.

"But it's the biggest of the rooms .. ."  "I don't like it, Rory.  It's
damp.  We can use the back room."

"If we can get the bloody bed through the door."

"Of course we can.  You know we can."  "Seems a waste of a good room,"
he protested, knowing full well that this was a fait accompli.

"Mother knows best," she told him, and smiled at him with eyes whose
luster was far from maternal.

THREE

The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they
may be cured of their excesses.  Spring, if it lingers more than a week
beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of
perpetual promise.  Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for
something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of
gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its
fruitfulness.

Even winter--the hardest season, the most impkcable--dreams, as
February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away.
Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save
it from itself.

So August gave way to September and there were few complaints.

With work, the house on Lodovico Street began to look more hospitable.
There were even visits from neighbors, who--after sizing up the
couple--spoke freely of how happy they were to have number fifty-five
occupied again.  Only one of them made any mention of Frank, referring
in passing to the odd fellow who'd lived in the house for a few weeks
the previous summer.  There was a moment of embarrassment when Rory
revealed the tenant to have been his brother, but it was soon glossed
over by Julia, whose power to charm knew no bounds.

Rory had seldom made mention of Frank during the years of his marriage
to Julia, though he and his brother were only eighteen months apart in
age, and had, as children, been

inseparable.  This Julia had learned on an occasion of drunken
reminiscing--a month or two before the wedding--when Rory had spoken at
length about Frank.  It had been melancholy talk.  The brothers' paths
had diverged considerably once they'd passed through adolescence, and
Rory regretted it.  Regretted still more the pain Frank's wild
life-style had brought to their parents.  It seemed that when Frank
appeared, once in a blue moon, from whichever corner of the globe he
was presently laying waste, he only brought grief.  His tales of
adventures in the shallows of criminality, his talk of whores and petty
theft, all appalled their parents.  But there had been worse, or so
Rory had said.  In his wilder moments Frank had talked of a life lived
in delirium, of an appetite for experience that conceded no moral
imperative.

Was it the tone of Rory's telling, a mixture of revulsion and envy,
that had so piqued Julia's curiosity?  Whatever the reason, she had
been quickly seized by an unquenchable curiosity concerning this
madman.

Then, barely a fortnight before the wedding, the black sheep had
appeared in the flesh.  Things had gone well for him of late.  He was
wearing gold rings on his fingers, and his skin was tight and tanned.
There was little outward

sign of the monster Rory had described.  Brother Frank was smooth as a
polished stone.  She had succumbed to his charm within hours.

A strange time ensued.  As the days crept toward the date of the
wedding she found herself thinking less and less of her husband-to-be,
and more and more of his brother.  They were not wholly dissimilar; a
certain lilt in their voices, and their easy manner, marked them as
siblings.  But to Rory's qualities Frank brought something his brother
would never have: a beautiful desperation.

Perhaps what had happened next had been inevitable; and no matter how
hard she'd fought her instincts, she would only have postponed the
consummation of their feelings for each other.  At least that was how
she tried to excuse herself later.  But when all the self-recrimination
was done with, she still treasured the memory of their first--and
last--encounter.

Kirsty had been at the house, hadn't she?, on some matrimonial
business, when Frank had arrived.  But by that telepathy that comes
with desire (and fades with it) Julia had known that today was the day.
She'd left Kirsty to her list making or suchlike, and taken Frank
upstairs on the pretext of showing him the wedding dress.  That was
how she remembered it-that he'd asked to see the dress--and she'd put
the veil on, laughing to think of herself in white, and then he'd been
at her shoulder, lifting the veil, and she'd laughed on, laughed and
laughed, as though to test the strength of his purpose.  He had not
been cooled by her mirth however; nor had he wasted time with the
niceties of a seduction.  The smooth exterior gave way to cruder stuff
almost immediately.  Their coupling had had in every regard but the
matter of her acquiescence, all the aggression and the joylessness of
rape.

Memory sweetened events of course, and in the four years (and five
months) since that afternoon, she'd replayed the scene often.  Now, in
remembering it, the bruises were trophies of their passion, her tears
proof positive of her feelings for him.

The day following, he'd disappeared.  Flitted off to Bangkok or Easter
Island, some place where he had no debts to answer.  She'd mourned him,
couldn't help it.  Nor had her mourning gone unnoticed.  Though it was
never explicitly discussed, she had often wondered if the subsequent
deterioration of her relationship with Rory had not started there:

with her thinking of Frank as she made love to his brother.

And now?  Now, despite the change of domestic interiors, and the chance
of a fresh start together, it seemed that events conspired to remind
her again of Frank.

It wasn't just the gossip of the neighbors that brought him to mind.
One day, when she was alone in the house and unpacking various personal
belongings, she came across several wallets of Rory's photographs. Many
were relatively recent: pictures of the two of them together in Athens
and Malta.  But buried amongst the transparent smiles were some
pictures she couldn't remember ever having seen before (had Rory kept
them from her?); family portraits that went back decades.  A photograph
of his parents on their wedding day, the black and white image eroded
over the years to a series of grays.  Pictures of christenings, in
which proud godparents cradled babies smothered in the family lace.

And then, photographs of the brothers together; as toddlers, with wide
eyes; as surly schoolchildren, snapped at gymnastic displays and in
school pageants.  Then, as the shyness of acne-ridden adolescence took
over, the number

of pictures dwindled--until the frogs emerged, as princes, the other
side of puberty.

Seeing Frank in brilliant color, clowning for the camera, she felt
herself blushing.  He had been an exhibitionist youth, predictably
enough, always dressed a la mode.  Rory, by comparison, looked dowdy.
It seemed to her that the brothers' future lives were sketched in these
early portraits.  Frank the smiling, seductive chameleon; Rory the
solid citizen.

She had packed the pictures away at last, and found, when she stood up,
that with the blushes had come tears.  Not of regret.  She had no use
for that.  It was jury that made her eyes sting.  Somehow, between one
breath and the next, she'd lost herself.

She knew too, with perfect certainty, when her grip had first faltered.
Lying on a bed of wedding lace, while Frank beset her neck with
kisses.

Once in a while she went up to the room with the sealed blinds.

So far, they'd done little decorating work on the upper floors,
preferring to first organize

the areas in public gaze.  The room had therefore remained untouched.
Unentered, indeed, except for these few visits of hers.

She wasn't sure why she went up, nor how to account for the odd
assortment of feelings that beset her while there.  But there was
something about the dark interior that gave her comfort; it was a womb
of sorts, a dead woman's womb.  Sometimes, when Rory was at work, she
simply took herself up the stairs and sat in the stillness, thinking of
nothing; or at least nothing she could put words to.

These sojourns made her feel oddly guilty, and she tried to stay away
from the room when Rory was around.  But it wasn't always possible.
Sometimes her feet took her there without instruction to do so.

It happened thus that Saturday, the day of the blood.

She had been watching Rory at work on the kitchen door, chiseling
several layers of paint from around the hinges, when she seemed to hear
the room call.  Satisfied that he was thoroughly engrossed in his
chores, she went upstairs.

It was cooler than usual, and she was glad of it.  She put her hand to
the wall, and then transferred her chilled palm to her forehead.

"No use," she murmured to herself, picturing the man at work
downstairs.  She didn't love him; no more than he, beneath his
infatuation with her face, loved her.  He chiseled in a world of his
own; she suffered here, far removed from him.

A gust of wind caught the back door below.  She heard it slam.

Downstairs, the sound made Rory lose his concentration.  The chisel
jumped its groove and sliced deeply into the thumb of his left hand. He
shouted, as a gush of color came.  The chisel hit the floor.

"Hell and damnation!"

She heard, but did nothing.  Too late, she surfaced through a stupor of
melancholy to realize that he was coming upstairs.  Fumbling for the
key, and an excuse to justify her presence in the room, she stood up,
but he was already at the door, crossing the threshold, rushing toward
her, his right hand clamped ineptly around his left.  Blood was coming
in abundance.  It welled up between his fingers and dribbled down his
arm, dripping from his elbow, adding stain to stain on the bare
boards.

"What have you done?"  she asked him.

"What does it look like?"  he said through gritted teeth.  "Cut
myself."

His face and neck had gone the color of window putty.  She'd seen him
like this before; he had on occasion passed out at the sight of his own
blood.

"Do something," he said queasily.

"Is it deep?"

"I don't know!"  he yelled at her.  "I don't want to look."

He was ridiculous, she thought, but this wasn't the time to give vent
to the contempt she felt.  Instead she took his bloody hand in hers
and, while he looked away, prized the palm from the cut.  It was
sizable, and still bleeding profusely.  Deep blood, dark blood.

"I think we'd better take you off to the hospital," she told him.

"Can you cover it up?"  he asked, his voice devoid of anger now.

"Sure.  I'll get a clean binding.  Come on--"

"No," he said, shaking his ashen face.  "If I take a step, I think I'll
pass out."

"Stay here then," she soothed him.  "You'll be fine."

Finding no bandages in the bathroom cabinet the equal of the
staunching, she fetched a few clean handkerchiefs from his drawer and
went back into the room.  He was

leaning against the wall now, his skin glossy with sweat.  He had
padded in the blood he'd shed; she could taste the tang of it in the
air.

Still quietly reassuring him that he wouldn't die of a two-inch cut,
she wound a handkerchief around his hand, bound it on with a second,
then escorted him, trembling like a leaf, down the stairs (one by one,
like a child) and out to the car.

At the hospital they waited an hour in a queue of the walking wounded
before he was finally seen, and stitched up.  It was difficult for her
to know in retrospect what was more comical about the episode: his
weakness, or the extravagance of his subsequent gratitude.  She told
him, when he became fulsome, that she didn't want thanks from him, and
it was true.

She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his
absence.

"Did you clean up the floor in the damp room?"  she asked him the
following day.  They'd called it the damp room since that first Sunday,
though there was not a sign of rot from ceiling to skirting board.

Rory looked up from his magazine.  Gray moons hung beneath his eyes.
He hadn't slept well, so he'd said.  A cut finger, and he had
nightmares of mortality.  She, on the other hand, had slept like a
babe.

"What did you say?"  he asked her.

"The floor--" she said again.  "There was blood on the floor.  You
cleaned it up."

He shook his head.  "No," he said simply and returned to the
magazine.

"Well I didn't," she said.

He offered her an indulgent smile.  "You're such a perfect hausfrau,"
he said.  "You don't even know when you're doing it."

The subject was closed there.  He was content, apparently, to believe
that she was quietly losing her sanity.

She, on the other hand, had the strangest sense that she was about to
find it again.

FOUR

irsty hated parties.  The smiles to be j\ pasted on over the panic, the
glances JL A. to be interpreted, and worst, the conversation.  She had
nothing to say of the least interest to the world, of this she had long
been convinced.  She'd watched too many eyes glaze over to believe
otherwise, seen every device known to man for wheedling oneself out of
the company of the dull, from "Will you excuse me, I believe I see my
accountant," to passing out dead drunk at her feet.

But Rory had insisted she come to the housewarming.  Just a few close
friends, he'd promised.  She'd said yes, knowing all too well what
scenario would ensue from refusal.  Moping at home in a stew of
self-recrimination, cursing her cowardice, and thinking of Rory's sweet
face.

The gathering wasn't such a torment as it turned out.  There were only
nine guests in toto, all of whom she knew vaguely, which made it
easier.  They didn't expect her to illuminate the room, only to nod and
laugh where appropriate.  And Rory--his hand still bound up--was at his
most winning, full of guileless bonhomie.  She even wondered if
Neville--one of Rory's work colleagues--wasn't making eyes at her
behind his spectacles, a suspicion that was confirmed in the middle of
the evening when he maneuvered himself to her side and inquired whether
she had any interest in cat breeding.  She told him she hadn't, but was
always interested in new experiences.  He seemed delighted, and on this
fragile pretext proceeded to ply her with liqueurs for the rest of the
night.  By eleven-thirty she was a whoozy but happy

wreck, prompted by the most casual remark to ever more painful fits of
giggling.

A little after midnight, Julia declared that she was tired, and wanted
to go to bed.  The statement was taken as a general cue for dispersal,
but Rory would have none of it.  He was up and refilling glasses before
anyone had a chance to protest.  Kirsty was certain she caught a look
of displeasure cross Julia's face, then it passed, and the brow was
unsullied once again.  She said her good-nights, was complimented
profusely on her skill with calf's liver, and went to bed.

The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessly happy, weren't they?  To
Kirsty this had always seemed self-evident.  Tonight, however, the
alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn't blinded her.  Perhaps to be
flawless was another kind of sadness.

But her spinning head had an inept hold on such ruminations, and the
next minute Rory was up, and telling a joke about a gorilla and a
Jesuit that had her choking on her drink before he'd even got to the
votive candles.

Upstairs, Julia heard a fresh bout of laughter.  She was indeed tired,
as she'd claimed, but it wasn't the cooking that had exhausted her.  It
was the effort of suppressing her contempt

for the damn fools who were gathered in the lounge below.  She'd
called them friends once, these half-wits, with their poor jokes and
their poorer pretensions.  She had played along with them for several
hours; it was enough.  Now she needed some cool place, some darkness.

As soon as she opened the door of the damp room she knew things were
not quite as they had been.  The light from the shadeless bulb on the
landing illuminated the boards where Rory's blood had fallen, now so
clean they might have been scrubbed.  Beyond the reach of the light,
the room bowed to darkness.  She stepped in, and closed the door.  The
lock clicked into place at her back.

The dark was almost perfect, and she was glad of it.  Her eyes rested
against the night, their surfaces chilled.

Then, from the far side of the room, she heard a sound.

It was no louder than the din of a cockroach running behind the
skirting boards.  After seconds, it stopped.  She held her breath.  It
came again.  This time there seemed to be some pattern to the sound; a
primitive code.

They were laughing like loons downstairs.  The noise awoke desperation
in her.  What would she not do, to be free of such company?

She swallowed, and spoke to the darkness.

"I hear you," she said, not certain of why the words came, or to whom
they were addressed.

The cockroach scratches ceased for a moment, and then began again, more
urgently.  She stepped away from the door and moved toward the noise.
It continued, as if summoning her.

It was easy to miscalculate in the dark, and she reached the wall
before she'd expected to.  Raising her hands, she began to run her
palms over the painted plaster.  The surface was not uniformly cold.
There was a place, she judged it to be halfway between door and window,
where the chill became so intense she had to break contact.  The
cockroach stopped scratching.

There was a moment when she swam, totally disoriented, in darkness and
silence.  And then, something moved in front of her.  A trick of her
mind's eye, she assumed, for there was only imagined light to be had
here.  But the next spectacle showed her the error of that
assumption.

The wall was alight, or rather something behind it burned with a cold
luminescence that made the solid brick seem insubstantial stuff.

More; the wall seemed to be coming apart, segments of it shifting and
dislocating like a magician's prop, oiled panels giving on to hidden
boxes whose sides in turn collapsed to reveal some further hiding
place.  She watched fixedly, not daring to even blink for fear she miss
some detail of this extraordinary sleight of-hand, while pieces of the
world came apart in front of her eyes.

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."

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

"Where are you going?"  Neville asked her.

"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 knding.

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.

The only thing that sparked the least appetite in her, as she lay on
the creaking bed

with his bulk between her legs, was closing her eyes and picturing
Frank, as he had been.

More than once his name rose to her lips; each time she bit it back.
Finally she opened her eyes to remind herself of the boorish truth.
Rory was decorating her face with his kisses.  Her cheeks crawled at
his touch.

She would not be able to endure this too often, she realized.  It was
too much of an effort to play the acquiescent wife: her heart would
burst.

Thus, lying beneath him while September's breath brushed her face from
the open window, she began to plot the getting of blood.

FIVE

Sometimes it seemed that eons came and went while he lingered in the
wall, eons that some clue would later reveal to have been the passing
of hours, or even minutes.

But now things had changed; he had a chance of escape.  His spirit
soared at the thought.  It was a frail chance, he didn't deceive
himself about that.  There were several reasons his best efforts might
falter.  Julia, for one.  He remembered her as a trite, preening
woman,

whose upbringing had curbed her capacity for passion.  He had untamed
her, of course, once.  He remembered the day, among the thousands of
times he had performed that act, with some satisfaction.  She had
resisted no more than was needful for her vanity, then succumbed with
such naked fervor he had almost lost control of himself.

In other circumstances he might have snatched her from under her
would-be husband's nose, but fraternal politics counseled otherwise. In
a week or two he would have tired of her, and been left not only with a
woman whose body was already an eyesore to him, but also a vengeful
brother on his heels.  It hadn't been worth the hassle.

Besides, there'd been new worlds to conquer.  He had left the day after
to go East: to Hong King and Sri Lanka, to wealth and adventure.  He'd
had them, too.  At least for a while.  But everything slipped through
his fingers sooner or later, and with time he began to wonder whether
it was circumstance that denied him a good hold on his earnings, or
whether he simply didn't care enough to keep what he had.  The train of
thought, once begun, was a runaway.  Everywhere, in the wreckage around
him, he found evidence to

support the same bitter thesis: that he had encountered nothing in his
life--no person, no state of mind or body--he wanted sufficiently to
suffer even passing discomfort for.

A downward spiral began.  He spent three months in a wash of depression
and self-pity that bordered on the suicidal.  But even that solution
was denied him by his newfound nihilism.  If nothing was worth living
for it followed, didn't it, that there was nothing worth dying for
either.  He stumbled from one such sterility to the next, until all
thoughts were rotted away by whatever opiate his immoralities could
earn him.

How had he first heard about Lemarchand's box?  He couldn't remember.
In a bar maybe, or a gutter, from the lips of a fellow derelict.  At
the time it was merely a rumor-this dream of a pleasure dome where
those who had exhausted the trivial delights of the human condition
might discover a fresh definition of joy.  And the route to this
paradise?  There were several, he was told, charts of the interface
between the real and the realer still, made by travelers whose bones
had long since gone to dust.  One such chart was in the vaults of the
Vatican, hidden in code in a theological work unread since the
Reformation.  Another--in

the form of an origami exercise, was reported to have been in the
possession of the Marquis de Sade, who used it, while imprisoned in the
Bastille, to barter with a guard for paper on which to write The 120
Days of Sodom.  Yet another was made by a craftsman--a maker of singing
birds--called Lemarchand, in the form of a musical box of such
elaborate design a man might toy with it half a lifetime and never get
inside.

Stories.  Stories.  Yet since he had come to believe in nothing at all
it was not so difficult to put the tyranny of verifiable truth out of
his head.  And it passed the time, musing drunkenly on such
fantasies.

It was in Dusseldorf, where he'd gone smuggling heroin, that he again
encountered the story of Lemarchand's box.  His curiosity was piqued
once more, but this time he followed the story up until he found its
source.  The man's name was Kircher, though he probably laid claim to
half a dozen others.  Yes, the German could confirm the existence of
the box, and yes, he could see his way to letting Frank have it.  The
price?  Small favors, here and there.  Nothing exceptional.  Frank did
the favors, washed his hands, and claimed his payment.

There had been instructions from Kircher, on how best to break the
seal on Le marc hand device, instructions that were part pragmatic,
part metaphysical.  To solve the puzzle is to travel, he'd said, or
something like that.  The box, it seemed, was not just the map of the
road, but the road itself.

This new addiction quickly cured him of dope and drink.  Perhaps there
were other ways to bend the world to suit the shape of his dreams.

He came back to the house on Lodovico Street, to the empty house behind
whose walls he was now imprisoned, and prepared himself --just as
Kircher had detailed--for the challenge of solving Lemarchand's
Configuration.  He had never in his life been so abstemious, nor so
single-minded.  In the days before the onslaught on the box he led a
life that would have shamed a saint, focusing all his energies on the
ceremonies ahead.

He had been arrogant in his dealing with the Order of the Gash, he saw
that now; but there were everywhere--in the world and out of it--forces
that encouraged such arrogance because they traded on it.  That in
itself would not have undone him.  No, his real error had been the
naive belief that his definition of pleasure significantly overlapped
with that of the Cenobites.

As it was, they had brought incalculable suffering.  They had overdosed
him on sensuality, until his mind teetered on madness, then they'd
initiated him into experiences that his nerves still convulsed to
recall.  They had called it pleasure, and perhaps they'd meant it.
Perhaps not.  It was impossible to know with these minds; they were so
hopelessly, flawlessly ambiguous.  They recognized no principles of
reward and punishment by which he could hope to win some respite from
their tortures, nor were they touched by any appeal for mercy.  He'd
tried that, over the weeks and months that separated the solving of the
box from today.

There was no compassion to be had on this side of the Schism; there was
only the weeping and the laughter.  Tears of joy sometimes (for an hour
without dread, a breath's length even), laughter coming just as
paradoxically in the face of some new horror, fashioned by the Engineer
for the provision of grief.

There was a further sophistication to the torture, devised by a mind
that understood exquisitely the nature of suffering.  The prisoners
were allowed to see into the world they had

once occupied.  Their resting places--when they were not enduring
pleasure--looked out onto the very locations where they had once worked
the Configuration that had brought them here.  In Frank's case, onto
the upper room of number fifty-five, Lodovico Street.

For the best part of a year it had been an un illuminating view: nobody
had ever stepped into the house.  And then, they'd come: Rory and the
lovely Julia.  And hope had begun again..  ..

There were ways to escape, he'd heard it whispered; loopholes in the
system that might allow a mind supple or cunning enough egress into the
room from which it had come.  If a prisoner were able to make such an
escape, there was no way that the hierophants could follow.  They had
to be summoned across the Schism.  Without such an invitation they were
left like dogs on the doorstep, scratching and scratching but unable to
get in.  Escape therefore, if it could be achieved, brought with it a
decree absolute, total dissolution of the mistaken marriage which the
prisoner had made.  It was a risk worth taking.  Indeed it was no risk
at all.  What punishment could be meted out worse than the thought of
pain without hope of release?

He had been lucky.  Some prisoners had departed from the world without
leaving sufficient sign of themselves from which, given an adequate
collision of circumstances, their bodies might be remade.  He had.
Almost his last act, bar the shouting, had been to empty his testicles
onto the floor.  Dead sperm was a meager keepsake of his essential
self, but enough.  When dear brother Rory (sweet butterfingered Rory)
had let his chisel slip, there was something of Frank to profit from
the pain.  He had found a finger hold for himself, and a glimpse of
strength with which he might haul himself to safety.  Now it was up to
Julia.

Sometimes, suffering in the wall, he thought she would desert him out
of fear.  Either that or she'd rationalize the vision she'd seen, and
decide she'd been dreaming.  If so, he was lost.  He lacked the energy
to repeat the appearance.

But there were signs that gave him cause for hope.  The fact that she
returned to the room on two or three occasions, for instance, and
simply stood in the gloom, watching the wall.  She'd even muttered a
few words on the second visit, though he'd caught only scraps.  The
word "here" was amongst them.  And

"waiting," and "soon."  Enough to keep him from despair.

He had another prop to his optimism.  She was lost, wasn't she?  He'd
seen that in her face, when--before the day Rory had chiseled
himself-she and his brother had had occasion to be in the room
together.  He'd read the looks between the lines, the moments when her
guard had slipped, and the sadness and frustration she felt were
apparent.

Yes, she was lost.  Married to a man she felt no love for, and unable
to see a way out.

Well, here he was.  They could save each other, the way the poets
promised lovers should.  He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all
she had dreamed of.  And if she would only free him he would service
her--oh yes-until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all
thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak
perished.

Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa.  And he knew it well enough to
call it home.

SIX

It turned cold in the third week of September: an Arctic chill brought
on a rapacious wind that stripped the trees of leaves in a handful of
days.

The cold necessitated a change of costume, and a change of plan.
Instead of walking, Julia took the car.  Drove down to the city center
in the early afternoon and found a bar in which the lunchtime trade was
brisk but not clamorous.

\

The customers came and went: Young Turks from firms of lawyers and
accountants, debating their ambitions; parties of wine-imbibers whose
only claim to sobriety was their suits; and, more interestingly, a
smattering of individuals who sat alone at their tables and simply
drank.  She garnered a good crop of admiring glances, but they were
mostly from the Young Turks.  It wasn't until she'd been in the place
an hour, and the wage slaves were returning to their treadmills, that
she caught sight of somebody watching her reflection in the bar mirror.
For the next ten minutes his eyes were glued to her.  She went on
drinking, trying to conceal any sign of agitation.  And then, without
warning, he stood up and crossed to her table.

"Drinking alone?"  he said.

She wanted to run.  Her heart was pounding so furiously she was certain
he must hear it.  But no.  He asked her if she wanted another drink;
she said she did.  Clearly pleased not to have been rebuffed, he went
to the bar, ordered doubles, and returned to her side.  He was
ruddy-featured, and one size larger than his dark blue suit.  Only his
eyes betrayed any sign of nervousness, resting on her for moments only,
then darting away like startled fish.

There would be no serious conversation: that she had already decided.
She didn't want to know much about him.  His name, if necessary.  His
profession and marital status, if he insisted.  Beyond that let him be
just a body.

As it was there was no danger of a confessional.  She'd met more
talkative paving stones.  He smiled occasionally--a short, nervous
smile that showed teeth too even to be real--and offered more drinks. 
She said no, wanting the chase over with as soon as possible, and
instead asked if he had time for a coffee.  He said he had.

"The house is only a few minutes from here," she replied, and they went
to her car.  She kept wondering, as she drove--the meat on the seat
beside her--why this was so very easy.  Was it that the man was plainly
a victim --with his ineffectual eyes and his artificial teeth--born,
did he but know it, to make this journey?  Yes, perhaps that was it.
She was not afraid, because all of this was so perfectly predictable.
.

As she turned the key in the front door and stepped into the house, she
thought she heard a noise in the kitchen.  Had Rory returned home
early, ill perhaps?  She called out.

There was no reply; the house was empty.  Almost.

From the threshold on, she had the thing planned meticulously.  She
closed the door.  The man in the blue suit stared at his manicured
hands, and waited for his cue.

"I get lonely sometimes," she told him as she brushed past him.  It was
a line she'd come up with in bed the previous night.

He only nodded by way of response, the expression on his face a
mingling of fear and incredulity: he clearly couldn't quite believe his
luck.

"Do you want another drink?"  she asked him, "or shall we go straight
upstairs?"

He only nodded again.

"Which?"

"I think maybe I've drunk enough already."

"Upstairs then."

He made an indecisive move in her direction, as though he might have
intended a kiss.  She wanted no courtship, however.  Skirting his
touch, she crossed to the bottom of the stairs.

"I'll lead," she said.  Meekly, he followed.

At the top of the steps she glanced round at him, and caught him
dabbing sweat from his chin with his handkerchief.  She waited until
he

caught up with her, and then led him halfway along the landing to the
damp room.

The door had been left ajar.

"Come on in," she said.

He obeyed.  Once inside it took him a few moments to become accustomed
to the gloom, and a further time to give voice to his observation:
"There's no bed."

She closed the door, and switched on the light.  She had hung one of
Rory's old jackets on the back of the door.  In its pocket she'd left
the knife.

He said again: "No bed."

"What's wrong with the floor?"  she replied.

"The floor?"

"Take off your jacket.  You're warm."

"I am," he agreed, but did nothing, so she moved across to him, and
began to slip the knot of his tie.  He was trembling, poor lamb.  Poor,
bleat less lamb.  While she removed the tie, he began to shrug off his
jacket.

Was Frank watching this?  she wondered.  Her eyes strayed momentarily
to the wall.  Yes, she thought; he's there.  He sees.  He knows.  He
licks his lips and grows impatient.

The lamb spoke.  "Why don't you ..."  he

began, "why don't you maybe ... do the same?"

"Would you like to see me naked?"  she teased.  The words made his eyes
gleam.

"Yes," he said thickly.  "Yes.  I'd like that."

"Very much?"

"Very much."

He was unbuttoning his shirt.

"Maybe you will," she said.

He gave her that dwarf smile again.

"Is it a game?"  he ventured.

"If you want it to be," she said, and helped him out of his shirt.  His
body was pale and waxy, like a fungus.  His upper chest was heavy, his
belly too.  She put her hands to his face.  He kissed her fingertips.

"You're beautiful," he said, spitting the words out as though they'd
been vexing him for hours.

"Am I?"

"You know you are.  Lovely.  Loveliest woman I ever set eyes on."

"That's gallant of you," she said, and turned back to the door.  Behind
her she heard his belt buckle clink, and the sound of cloth slipping
over skin as he dropped his trousers.

So far and no farther, she thought.  She

had no wish to see him babe-naked.  It was enough to have him like
this She reached into the jacket pocket.

"Oh dear," the lamb suddenly said.

She let the knife lie.  "What is it?"  she asked, turning to look at
him.  If the ring on his finger hadn't already given his status away,
she would have known him to be a married man by the underpants he wore:
baggy and over washed, an unflattering garment bought by a wife who had
long since ceased to think of her husband in sexual terms.

"I think I need to empty my bladder," he said.  "Too many whiskies."

She shrugged a small shrug, and turned back to the door.

"Won't be a moment," he said at her back.  But her hand was in the
jacket pocket before the words were out, and as he stepped towards the
door, she turned on him, slaughtering knife in hand.

His pace was too quick to see the blade until the very last moment, and
even then it was bemusement that crossed his face, not fear.  It was a
short-lived look.  The knife was in him a moment after, slicing his
belly with the ease of a blade in overripe cheese.  She opened one cut,
and then another.

As the blood started, she was certain the room flickered, the bricks
and mortar trembling to see the spurts that flew from him.

She had a breath's length to admire the phenomena, no more, before the
lamb let out a wheezing curse, and--instead of moving out of the
knife's range as she had anticipated-took a step toward her and knocked
the weapon from her hand.  It spun across the floorboards and collided
with the skirting.  Then he was upon her.

He put his hand into her hair and took a fistful.  It seemed his
intention was not violence but escape, for he relinquished his hold as
soon as he'd pulled away from the door.  She fell against the wall,
looking up to see him wrestling with the door handle, his free hand
clamped to his cuts.

She was quick now.  Across to where the knife lay, up, and back toward
him in one fluid motiorL He had got the door open by inches, but not
far enough.  She brought the knife down in the middle of his pockmarked
back.  He yelled, and released the door handle.  She was already
drawing the knife out, and plunging into him a second time, and now a
third and a fourth.  Indeed she lost count of the wounds she made, her
attack lent venom by his

refusal to lie down and die.  He stumbled around the room, grieving
and complaining, blood following blood onto his buttocks and legs.
Finally, after an age of this farcical stuff, he keeled over and hit
the floor.

This time she was certain her senses did not deceive her.  The room, or
the spirit in it, responded with soft sighs of anticipation.

Somewhere, a bell was ringing .. .

Almost as an afterthought, she registered that the lamb had stopped
breathing.  She crossed the blood-spangled floor to where he lay, and
said:

"Enough?"

Then she went to wash her face.

As she moved down the landing she heard the room groan--there was no
other word for it.  She stopped in her tracks, almost tempted to go
back.  But the blood was drying on her hands, and its stickiness
revolted her.

In the bathroom she stripped off her flower-patterned blouse, and
rinsed first her hands, then her speckled arms, and finally her neck.
The dowsing both chilled and braced her.  It felt good.  That done, she
washed the knife, rinsed the sink and returned along the landing
without bothering to dry herself or to dress.

She had no need for either.  The room was like a furnace, as the dead
man's energies pulsed from his body.  They didn't get far.  Already the
blood on the floor was crawling away toward the wall where Frank was,
the beads seeming to boil and evaporate as they came within range of
the skirting boards.  She watched, entranced.  But there was more.
Something was happening to the corpse.  It was being drained of every
nutritious element, the body convulsing as its innards were sucked out,
gases moaning in its bowels and throat, the skin dessicating in front
of her startled eyes.  At one point the plastic teeth dropped back into
the gullet, the gums withered around them.

And in mere moments, it was done.  Anything the body might have
usefully offered by way of nourishment had been taken; the husk that
remained would not have sustained a family of fleas.  She was
impressed.

Suddenly, the bulb began to flicker.  She looked to the wall, expecting
it to tremble and spit her lover from hiding.  But no.  The bulb went
out.  There was only the dim light that crept through the age-beaten
blind.

"Where are you?"  she said.

The walls remained mute.

"Where are you?"

Still nothing.  The room was cooling.  Her breasts had grown
gooseflesh.  She peered down at the luminous watch on the lamb's
shriveled arm.  It ticked away, indifferent to the apocalypse that had
overtaken its owner.  It read 4:41.  Rory would be back anytime after
5:15, depending on how dense the traffic was.  She had work to do
before then.

Bundling up the blue suit and the rest of his clothes, she put them in
several plastic bags, and then went in search of a larger bag for the
remains.  She had expected Frank to be here to help her with this
labor, but as he hadn't shown she had no choice but to do it herself.
When she came back to the room, the deterioration of the lamb was still
continuing, though now much slowed.  Perhaps Frank was still finding
nutriments to squeeze from the corpse, but she doubted it.  More likely
the pauperized body, sucked clean of marrow and every vital fluid, was
no longer strong enough to support itself.  When she had parceled it up
in the bag, it was the weight of a small child, no more.  Sealing the
bag up, she was about to take it down to the car when she heard the
front door open.

The sound un dammed all the panic she'd so assiduously kept from
herself.  She began to shake.  Tears pricked her sinuses.

"Not now ..."  she told herself, but the feelings would simply not be
suppressed any longer.

In the hallway below, Rory said: "Sweetheart?"

Sweetheart!  She could have laughed, but for the terror.  She was here
if he wanted to find her--his sweetheart, his honey bun--with her
breasts new-washed, and a dead man in her arms.

"Where are you?"

She hesitated before replying, not certain that her larynx was the
equal of the deception.

He called a third time, his voice changing timbre as he walked through
into the kitchen.  It would take him a moment only to discover that she
wasn't at the cooker stirring sauce; then he would come back and head
up the stairs.  She had ten seconds, fifteen at most.

Attempting to keep her tread as light as possible, for fear he heard
her movements overhead, she carried the bundle to the spare room at the
end of the landing.  Too small to be used as a bedroom (except perhaps
for a child), they had used it as a dump.  Half-emptied tea chests,
pieces of furniture they had not found a place for, all manner of
rubbish.  Here she kid the body to rest awhile, behind an upended
armchair.  Then she locked the door behind her, just as Rory called
from the bottom of the stairs.  He was coming up.

"Julia?  Julia, sweetheart.  Are you there?"

She slipped into the bathroom, and consulted the mirror.  It showed her
a flushed portrait.  She picked up the blouse she'd left hanging over
the side of the bath and put it on.  It smelled stale, and there was
undoubtedly blood spattered between the flowers, but she had nothing
else to wear.

He was coming along the landing; she heard his elephantine tread.

"Julia?"

This time, she answered--making no attempt to disguise the tremulous
quality of her voice.  The mirror had confirmed what she feared: that
there was no way she could pass herself off as undistressed.  She was
obliged to make a virtue of the liability.

"Are you all right?"  he asked her.  He was outside the door.

"No," she said.  "I'm feeling sick."

"Oh, darling .. ."

"I'll be fine in a minute."

He tried the handle, but she'd bolted the door.

"Can you leave me alone for a little while?"

"Do you want a doctor?"

"No," she told him.  "No.  Really.  But I wouldn't mind a brandy--"

"Brandy .. ."

"I'll be down in two ticks."

"Whatever madam wants," he quipped.  She counted his steps as he
trudged to the stairs, then descended.  Once she'd calculated that he
was out of earshot, she slid back the bolt and stepped onto the
landing.

The late afternoon light was failing quickly; the landing was a murky
tunnel.

Downstairs, she heard the clink of gkss on glass.  She moved as quickly
as she dared to Frank's room.

There was no sound from the gloomed interior.  The walls no longer
trembled, nor did distant bells toll.  She pushed the door open; it
creaked slightly.

She had not entirely tidied up after her labors.  There was dust on the
floor, human dust, and fragments of dried flesh.  She went down on her
haunches and collected them up diligently.  Rory had been right.  What
a perfect hausfrau she made.

As she stood up again, something shifted

in the ever-denser shadows of the room.  She looked in the direction
of the movement, but before her eyes could make sense of the form in
the corner, a voice said: "Don't look at me."

It was a tired voice--the voice of somebody used up by events; but it
was concrete.  The syllables were carried on the same air that she
breathed.

"Frank," she said.

"Yes .. ."  came the broken voice, "it's

>

me.

From downstairs, Rory called up to her.  "Are you feeling better?"

She went to the door.

"Much better," she responded.  At her back the hidden thing said:
"Don't let him near me," the words coming fast and fierce.

"It's all right," she whispered to him.  Then, to Rory: "I'll be with
you in a minute.  Put on some music.  Something soothing."

Rory replied that he would, and retired to the lounge.

"I'm only half-made," Frank's voice said.  "I don't want you to see me
... don't want anybody to see me ... not like this .. ."  The words
were halting once more, and wretched.  "I have to have more blood,
Julia."

"More?"

"And soon."

"How much more?"  she asked the shadows.  This time she caught a better
glimpse of what lay in wait there.  No wonder he wanted no one to
look.

"Just more," he said.  Though the volume was barely above a whisper,
there was an urgency in the voice that made her afraid.

"I have to go ..."  she said, hearing music from below.

This time the darkness made no reply.  At the door, she turned back.

"I'm glad you came," she said.  As she closed the door, she heard a
sound not unlike laughter behind her, nor unlike sobs.

 Kirsty Is that you?"  "Yes?  Who is this?"  "It's Rory .. ."  The
line was watery, as though the deluge outside had seeped down the
phone. Still, she was happy to hear from him.  He called up so seldom,
and when he did it was usually on behalf of both himself and Julia. 
Not this time however.  This time Julia was the subject under
discussion.

-- 82 EVEN

"There's something wrong with her, Kirsty," he said.  "I don't know
what."

"Ill, you mean?"

"Maybe.  She's just so strange with me.  And she looks terrible."

"Have you said anything to her?"

"She says she's fine.  But she isn't.  I wondered if maybe she'd spoken
with you."

"I haven't set eyes on her since your housewarming."

"That's another thing.  She doesn't even want to leave the house.
That's not like her."

"Do you want me to ... to have a word with her?"

"Would you?"

"I don't know if it'll do any good, but I'll try."

"Don't say anything about me talking to you."

"Of course not.  I'll call in at the house tomorrow--"

("Tomorrow.  It has to be tomorrow."

"Yes ...I know."

"I'm afraid III lose my grip, Julia.  Start slipping back ")

"I'll give you a call from the office on Thursday.  You can tell me
what you make of her."

("Slipping back?"

"They'll know I've gone by now."

"Who will?"

"The Gash.  The bastards that took me..."

"They're waiting for you?"

"first beyond the watt.  ")

Rory told her how grateful he was, and she in turn told him that it was
the least a friend could do.  Then he put down the phone, leaving her
listening to the rain on the empty line.

Now they were both Julia's creatures, looking after her welfare,
fretting for her if she had bad dreams.

No matter, it was a kind of togetherness.

The man with the white tie had not bided his time.  Almost as soon as
he set eyes on Julia he came across to her.  She decided, even as he
approached, that he was not suitable.  Too big; too confident.  After
the way the first one had fought, she was determined to choose with
care.  So, when White Tie asked what she was drinking, she told him to
leave her be.

He was apparently used to rejections, and

took it in his stride, withdrawing to the bar.  She returned to her
drink.

It was raining heavily today--had been raining now for seventy-two
hours, on and off--and there were fewer customers than there had been
the week before.  One or two drowned rats headed in from the street,
but none looked her way for more than a few moments.  And time was
moving on.  It was already past two.  She wasn't going to risk getting
caught again by Rory's return.  She emptied her glass, and decided that
this was not Frank's lucky day.  Then she stepped out of the bar into
the downpour, put up her umbrella, and headed back to the car.  As she
went she heard footsteps behind her, and then White Tie was at her side
and saying: "My hotel's nearby."

"Oh ..."  she said and kept on walking.  But he wasn't going to be
shrugged off so easily.

"I'm only here for two days," he said.

Don't tempt me, she thought.

"Just looking for some companionship" he went on.  "I haven't spoken to
a soul."

"Is that right?"

He took hold of her wrist.  A grip so tight she almost cried out.  That
was when she knew she was going to have to kill him.  He seemed to see
the desire in her eyes.

"My hotel?"  he said.  "I don't much like hotels.  They're so
impersonal."

"Have you got a better idea?"  he said to her.  She had, of course.

He hung his dripping raincoat on the hall stand, and she offered him a
drink, which he welcomed.  His name was Patrick, and he was from
Newcastle.

"Down on business.  Can't seem to get much done."

"Why's that?"

He shrugged.  "I'm probably a bad salesman.  Simple as that."

"What do you sell?"  she asked him.

"What do you care?"  he replied, razor quick.

She grinned.  She would have to get him upstairs quickly, before she
started to enjoy his company.

"Why don't we dispense with the small talk?"  she said.  It was a stale
line, but it was the first thing that came to her tongue.  He swallowed
the last of his drink in one gulp, and went where she led.

This time she had not left the door ajar.  It was locked, which plainly
intrigued him.

"After you," he said, when the door swung open.

She went first.  He followed.  This time, she had decided, there would
be no stripping.  If some nourishment was soaked up by his clothes then
so be it; she was not going to give him a chance to realize that they
weren't alone in the room.

"Going to fuck on the floor, are we?"  he asked casually.

"Any objections?"

"Not if it suits you," he said and clamped his mouth over hers, his
tongue frisking her teeth for cavities.  There was some passion in him,
she mused; she could feel him hard against her already.  But she had
work to do here: blood to spill and a mouth to feed.

She broke his kiss, and tried to slip from his arms.  The knife was
back in the jacket on the door.  While it was out of reach she had
little power to resist him.

"What's the problem?"  he said.

"No problem .. ."  she murmured.  "There's no hurry either.  We've got
all the time in the world."  She touched the front of his trousers, to
reassure him.  Like a stroked dog, he closed his eyes.

"You're a strange one," he said.

"Don't look," she told him.

"Huh?"

"Keep your eyes closed."

He frowned, but obeyed.  She took a step backward toward the door, and
half turned to fumble in the depths of the pocket, glancing back to see
that he was still blind.

He was, and unzipping himself.  As her hand clasped the knife, the
shadows growled.

He heard the noise.  His eyes sprang open.

"What was that?"  he said, reeling round and peering into the
darkness.

"It was nothing," she insisted, as she pulled the knife from its hiding
place.  He was moving away from her, across the room.

"There's somebody--"

"Don't"

"--here."

The last syllable faltered on his lips, as he glimpsed a fretful motion
in the corner beside the window.

"What..  in God's .. .?"  he began.  As he pointed into the darkness
she was at him, and slicing his neck open with a butcher's efficiency.
Blood jumped immediately, a fat spurt that hit the wall with a wet
thud.  She heard Frank's pleasure, and then the dying man's complaint,
long and low.  His hand went up to

his neck to stem the pulse, but she was at him again, slicing his
pleading hand, his face.  He staggered, he sobbed.  Finally, he
collapsed, twitching.

She stepped away from him to avoid the flailing legs.  In the corner of
the room she saw Frank rocking to and fro.

"Good woman .. ."  he said.

Was it her imagination, or was his voice already stronger than it had
been, more like the voice she'd heard in her head a thousand times
these plundered years?

The door bell rang.  She froze.

"Oh Jesus," her mouth said.

"It's all right .. ."  the shadow replied.  "He's as good as dead."

She looked at the man in the white tie and saw that Frank was right.
The twitching had all but ceased.

"He's big," said Frank.  "And healthy."

He was moving into her sight, too greedy for sustenance to prohibit her
stare; she saw him plainly now for the first time.  He was a travesty.
Not just of humanity, of life.  She looked away.

The door bell was ringing again, and for longer.

"Go and answer it," Frank told her.

She made no reply.

"Go on," he told her, turning his foul head in her direction, his eyes
keen and bright in the surrounding corruption.

The bell rang a third time.

"Your caller is very insistent," he said, trying persuasion where
demands had failed.  "I really think you should answer the door."

She backed away from him, and he turned his attentions back to the body
on the floor.

Again, the bell.

It was better to answer it perhaps (she was already out of the room,
trying not to hear the sounds Frank was making), better to open the
door to the day.  It would be a man selling insurance, most likely, or
a Jehovah's Witness, with news of salvation.  Yes, she wouldn't mind
hearing that.  The bell rang again.  "Coming," she said, hurrying now
for fear he leave.  She had welcome on her face when she opened the
door.  It died immediately.

"Kirsty."

"I was just about to give up on you."

"I was ... I was asleep."

"Oh."

Kirsty looked at the apparition that had opened the door to her.  From
Rory's description she'd expected a washed-out creature.

What she saw was quite the reverse.  Julia's face was flushed: strands
of sweat-darkened hair glued to her brow.  She did not look like a
woman who had just risen from sleep.  A bed, perhaps, but not sleep.

"I just called by"--Kirsty said--"for a chat."

Julia made a half shrug.

"Well, it's not convenient just at the moment," she said.

"I see."

"Maybe we could speak later in the week?"

Kirsty's gaze drifted past Julia to the coat stand in the hall.  A
man's gabardine hung from one of the pegs, still damp.

"Is Rory in?"  she ventured.

"No," Julia said.  "Of course not.  He's at work."  Her face hardened.
"Is that what you came round for?"  she said.  "To see Rory?"

"No, I--"

"You don't have to ask my permission, you know.  He's a grown man.  You
two can do what the fuck you like."

Kirsty didn't try to debate the point.  The volte-face left her
dizzied.

"Go home," Julia said.  "I don't want to talk to you."

She slammed the door.

Kirsty stood on the step for half a minute, shaking.  She had little
doubt of what was going on.  The dripping raincoat, Julia's
agitation-her flushed face, her sudden anger.  She had a lover in the
house.  Poor Rory had misread all the signs.

She deserted the doorstep and started down the path to the street.  A
crowd of thoughts jostled for her attention.  At last, one came clear
of the pack: How would she tell Rory?  His heart would break, she had
no doubt of that.  And she, the luckless tale-teller, she would be
tainted with the news, wouldn't she?  She felt tears close.

They didn't come, however; another sensation, more insistent, overtook
as she stepped onto the pavement from the path.

She was being watched.  She could feel the look at the back of her
head.  Was it Julia?  Somehow, she thought not.  The lover then.  Yes,
the lover!

Safely out of the shadow of the house, she succumbed to the urge to
turn and look.

In the damp room, Frank stared through the hole he had made in the
blind.  The visitor --whose face he vaguely recognized--was staring up
at the house, at his very window,

indeed.  Confident that she could see nothing of him, he stared back.
He had certainly set his eyes on more voluptuous creatures, but
something about her lack of glamour engaged him.  Such women were in
his experience often more entertaining company than beauties like
Julia. They could be flattered or bullied into acts the beauties would
never countenance and be grateful for the attention.  Perhaps she would
come back, this woman.  He hoped she would.

Kirsty scanned the facade of the house, but it was blank; the windows
were either empty or curtained.  Yet the feeling of being watched
persisted; indeed it was so strong she turned away in embarrassment.

The rain started again as she walked along Lodovico Street, and she
welcomed it.  It cooled her blushes, and gave cover to tears that would
be postponed no longer.

Julia had gone back upstairs trembling, and found White Tie at the
door.  Or rather, his head.  This time, either out of an excess of
greed or malice, Frank had dismembered the

corpse.  Pieces of bones and dried meat lay scattered about the
room.

There was no sign of the gourmet himself.

She turned back toward the door, and he was there, blocking her path.
Mere minutes had passed since she'd seen him bending to drain energy
from the dead man.  In that brief time he had changed out of all
recognition.  Where there had been withered cartilage, there was not
ripening muscle; the map of his arteries and veins was being drawn
anew: they pulsed with stolen life.  There was even a sprouting of
hair, somewhat premature perhaps given his absence of skin, on the raw
ball of his head.

None of this sweetened his appearance a jot.  Indeed in many ways it
worsened it.  Previously there had been scarcely anything recognizable
about him, but now there were scraps of humanity everywhere, throwing
into yet greater relief the catastrophic nature of his wounding.

There was worse to come.  He spoke, and when he spoke it was with a
voice that was indisputably Frank's.  The broken syllables had gone.

"I feel pain," he said.

His browless, half-lidded eyes were watching her every response.  She
tried to conceal the queasiness she felt, but knew the disguise
inadequate.

"My nerves are working again," he was telling her, "and they hurt."

"What can I do about it?"  she asked him.

"Maybe .. . maybe some bandages."

"Bandages?"

"Help me bind myself together."

"If that's what you want."

"But I need more than that, Julia.  I need another body."

"Another?"  she said.  Was there no end to this?

"What's to lose?"  he replied, moving closer to her.  At his sudden
proximity she became very anxious.  Reading the fear in her face, he
stopped his advance.  "I'll be whole soon ..."  he promised her, "and
when I am .. ."

"I'd better clear up," she said, averting her gaze from him.

"When I am, sweet Julia ..."

"Rory will be home soon."

"Rory!"  He spat the name out.  "My darling brother!  How in God's name
did you come to marry such a dullard

She felt a spasm of anger toward Frank.  "I

_as loved him," she said.  And then, after a moment's pondering,
corrected herself.  "I thought I loved him."

His laugh only made his dreadful nakedness more apparent.  "How can you
have believed that?"  he said.  "He's a slug.  Always was.  Always will
be.  Never had any sense of adventure."

"Unlike you."

"Unlike me."

She looked down at the floor; a dead man's hand lay between them.  For
an instant she was almost overwhelmed by self-revulsion.  All that she
had done, and dreamed of doing, in the last.  few days rose up in front
of her: a parade of seductions that had ended in death-all for this
death that she had hoped so fervently would end in seduction.  She was
as damned as he, she thought; no fouler ambition could nest in his head
than presently cooed and fluttered in hers.

Well ... it was done.

"Heal me," he whispered to her.  The harshness had gone from his voice.
He spoke like a lover.  "Heal me ... please."

"I will," she said.  "I promise you I will."

"And then we'll be together."

She frowned.

"What about Rory?"

"We're brothers, under the skin," Frank said.  "I'll make him see the
wisdom of this, the miracle of it.  You don't belong to him Julia.  Not
anymore."

"No," she said.  It was true.

"We belong to each other.  That's what you want isn't it?"

"It's what I want."

"You know I think if I'd had you I wouldn't have despaired," he said to
her.  "Wouldn't have given away my body and soul so cheaply."

"Cheaply?"

"For pleasure.  For mere sensuality.  In you ."  here he moved toward
her again.  This time his words held her; she didn't retreat.  "In you
I might have discovered some reason to live."

"I'm here," she said.  Without thinking, she reached across and touched
him.  The body was hot, and damp.  His pulse seemed to be everywhere.
In every tender bud of nerve, in each burgeoning sinew.  The contact
excited her.  It was as if, until this moment, she had never quite
believed him to be real.  Now it was incontestable.  She had made this
man, or remade him, used her wit and her cunning to

give him substance.  The thrill she felt, touching this too vulnerable
body, was the thrill of ownership.

"This is the most dangerous time," he told her.  "Before now, I could
hide myself.  I was practically nothing at all.  But not anymore."

"No.  I've thought of that."

"We must be done with it quickly.  I must be strong and whole, at
whatever cost.  You agree?"

"Of course."

"After that there'll be an end to the waiting, Julia."

The pulse in him seemed to quicken at the thought.

Then he was kneeling in front of her.  His unfinished hands were at her
hips, then his mouth.

Forsaking the dregs of her distaste, she put her hand upon his head,
and felt the hair-silken, like a baby's--and the shell of his skull
beneath.  He had learned nothing of delicacy since last he'd held her.
But despair had taught her the fine art of squeezing blood from stones;
with time she would have love from this hateful thing, or know the
reason why.

EIGHT

There was thunder that night.  A storm without rain, which made the air
smell of steel.

Kirsty had never slept well.  Even as a child, though her mother had
known lullabies enough to pacify nations, the girl had never found
slumber easy.  It wasn't that she had bad dreams; or at least none that
lingered until morning.  It was that sleep itself--the act of closing
the eyes and relinquishing control of

her consciousness--was something she was temperamentally unsuited
to.

Tonight, with the thunder so loud and the lightning so bright, she was
happy.  She had an excuse to forsake her tangled bed, and drink tea,
and watch the spectacle from her window.

It gave her time to think, as well--time to turn over the problem that
had vexed her since leaving the house on Lodovico Street.  But she was
still no nearer an answer.

One particular doubt nagged.  Suppose she was wrong about what she'd
seen?  Suppose she'd misconstrued the evidence, and Julia had a
perfectly good explanation?  She would lose Rory at a stroke.

And yet, how could she remain silent?  She couldn't bear to think of
the woman laughing behind his back, exploiting his gentility, his
naivete.  The thought made her blood boil.

The only other option was to wait and watch, to see if she could gain
some incontrovertible evidence.  If her worst suppositions were then
confirmed, she would have no choice but to tell Rory all she'd seen.

Yes.  That was the answer.  Wait and watch, watch and wait.

The thunder rolled around for long hours, denying her sleep until
nearly four.  When, finally, she did sleep, it was the slumber of a
watcher and waiter. Light, and full of sighs.

The storm made a ghost train of the house.  Julia sat downstairs, and
counted the beats between the flash and the fury that came on its
heels.  She had never liked thunder.  She, a murderess; she, a con
sorter with the living dead.  It was another paradox to add to the
thousand she'd found at work in herself of late.  She thought more than
once of going upstairs, and taking some comfort with the prodigy, but
knew that it would be unwise.  Rory might return at any moment from his
office party.  He would be drunk, on past experience, and full of
unwelcome fondness.

The storm crept closer.  She put on the television, to block out the
din, which it scarcely did.

At eleven.  Rory came home, wreathed in smiles.  He had good news.  In
the middle of the party his supervisor had taken him aside, commended
him for his excellent work, and spoken of great things for the future.
Julia listened to his retelling of the exchange, hoping that his

inebriation would blind him to her indifference.  At last, his news
told, he threw off his jacket and sat down on the sofa beside her.

"Poor you," he said.  "You don't like the thunder."

"I'm fine," she said.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes.  Fine."

He leaned across to her and nuzzled her ear.

"You're sweaty," she said matter-offactiy.  He didn't cease his
overtures, however, unwilling to lower his baton now that he'd begun.

"Please, Rory--" she said.  "I don't want this."

"Why not?  What did I do?"  "Nothing," she said, pretending some
interest in the television.  "You're fine."

"Oh, is that right?"  he said.  "You're fine.  I'm fine.  Everybody's
fucking fine."

She stared at the flickering screen.  The late evening news had just
begun, the usual cup of sorrows full to brimming.  Rory talked on,
drowning out the newscaster's voice with his diatribe.  She didn't much
mind.  What did the world have to tell her?  Little enough.  Whereas
she, she had news for the world that it would

reel to hear.  About the condition of the damned; about love lost, and
then found; about what despair and desire have in common.

"Please, Julia"--Rory was saying--"just speak to me."

The pleas demanded her attention.  He looked, she thought, like the boy
in the photographs --his body hirsute and bloated, his clothes those of
an adult--but still, in essence, a boy, with his bewildered gaze and
sulky mouth.  She remembered Frank's question: "How could you ever have
married such a dullard?"  Thinking of it, a sour smile creased her
lips.  He looked at her, his puzzlement deepening.

"What's so funny, damn you?"

"Nothing."

He shook his head, dull anger replacing the sulk.  A peal of thunder
followed the lightning with barely a beat intervening.  As it came,
there was a noise from the floor above.  She turned her attention back
to the television, to divert Rory's interest.  But it was a vain
attempt; he'd heard the sound.

"What the fuck was that?"

"Thunder."

He stood up.  "No," he said.  "Something else."  He was already at the
door.

A dozen options raced through her head, none of them practical.  He
wrestled drunkenly with the door handle.

"Maybe I left a window open," she said and got up.  "I'll go and
see."

"I can do it," he replied.  "I'm not totally inept."

"Nobody said--" she began, but he wasn't listening.  As he stepped out
into the hallway the lightning came with the thunder: loud and bright.
As she went in pursuit of him another flash came fast upon the first,
accompanied by a bowel-rocking crash.  Rory was already halfway up the
stairs.

"It was nothing!"  she shouted after him.  He made no reply but climbed
on to the top of the stairs.  She followed.

"Don't .. ."  she said to him, in a lull between one peal and the next.
He heard her this time.  Or rather, chose to listen.  When she reached
the top of the stairs he was waiting.

"Something wrong?"  he said.

She hid her trepidation behind a shrug.  "You're being silly," she
replied softly.

"Am I?"

"It was just the thunder."

His face, lit from the hall below, suddenly

softened.  "Why do you treat me like shit?"  he asked her.

"You're just tired," she told him.

"Why though?"  he persisted, childlike.  "What have I ever done to
you?"

"It's all right," she said.  "Really, Rory.  Everything's all right."
The same hypnotic banalities, over and over.

Again, the thunder.  And beneath the din, another sound.  She cursed
Frank's indiscretion.

Rory turned, and looked along the darkened landing.

"Hear that?"  he said.

"No."

His limbs dogged by drink, he moved away from her.  She watched him
recede into shadow.  Lightning, spilling through the open bedroom door,
flash--lit him; then darkness again.  He was walking toward the damp
room.  Toward Frank.

"Wait..."  she said, and went after him.

He didn't halt, but covered the few yards to the door.  As she reached
him, his hand was closing on the handle.

Inspired by panic, she reached out and touched his cheek.  "I'm afraid
.. ."  she said.

He looked round at her woozily.

"What of?"  he asked her.

She moved her hand to his lips, letting him taste the fear on her
fingers.

"The storm," she said.

She could see the wetness of his eyes in the gloom, little more.  Was
he swallowing the hook, or spitting it out?

Then: "Poor baby," he said.

Swallowed, she elated, and reaching down she put her hand over his and
drew it from the door.  If Frank so much as breathed now, all was
lost.

"Poor baby," he said again and wrapped an embrace around her.  His
balance was not too good; he was a lead weight in her arms.

"Come on," she said, coaxing him away from the door.  He went with her
for a couple of stumbling paces, and then lost his equilibrium.  She
let go of him, and reached out to the wall for support.  The lightning
came again, and by it she saw that his eyes had found her, and
glittered.

"I love you," he said, stepping across the hallway to where she stood.
He pressed against her, so heavily there was no resisting.  His head
went to the crook of her neck, muttering sweet talk into her skin.  Now
he was kissing her.  She wanted to throw him off.  More, she wanted
to

take him by his clammy hand and show him the death-defying monster he
had been so close to stumbling across.

But Frank wasn't ready for that confrontation, not yet.  All she could
do was endure Rory's caresses and hope that exhaustion claimed him
quickly.

"Why don't we go downstairs?"  she suggested.

He muttered something into her neck and didn't move.  His left hand was
on her breast, the other cksped around her waist.  She let him work his
fingers beneath her blouse.  To resist at this juncture would only
inflame him afresh.

"I need you," he said, raising his mouth to her ear.  Once, half a
lifetime ago, her heart had seemed to skip at such a profession.  Now
she knew better.  Her heart was no acrobat; there was no tingle in the
coils of her abdomen.  Only the steady workings of her body.  Breath
drawn, blood circulated, food pulped and purged.  Thinking of her
anatomy thus, untainted by romanticism--as a collection of natural
imperatives housed in muscle and bone--she found it easier to let him
strip her blouse and put his face to her breasts.  Her nerve endings
dutifully responded to his tongue, but again, it was

merely an anatomy lesson.  She stood back in the dome of her skull,
and was unmoved.

He was unbuttoning himself now; she caught sight of the boastful plum
as he stroked it against her thigh.  Now he opened her legs, and pulled
her underwear down just far enough to give him access.  She made no
objection, nor even a sound, as he made his entrance.

His own din began almost immediately, feeble claims to love and lust
hopelessly tangled together.  She half listened, and let him work at
his play, his face buried in her hair.

Closing her eyes, she tried to picture better times, but the lightning
spoiled her dreaming.  As sound followed light, she opened her eyes
again to see that the door of the damp room had been opened two or
three inches.  In the narrow gap between door and frame she could just
make out a glistening figure, watching them.

She could not see Frank's eyes, but she felt them sharpened beyond
pricking by envy and rage.  Nor did she look away, but stared on at the
shadow while Rory's moans increased.  And at the end one moment became
another, and she was lying on the bed with her wedding dress crushed
beneath her, while a black and

scarlet beast crept up between her legs to give her a sample of its
love.

"Poor baby," was the last thing Rory said as sleep overcame him.  He
lay on the bed still dressed; she made no attempt to strip him.  When
his snores were even, she left him to it, and went back to the room.

Frank was standing beside the window, watching the storm move to the
southeast.  He had torn the blind away.  Lamplight washed the walls.

"He heard you," she said.  "I had to see the storm," he replied simply.
"I needed it."

"He almost found you, damn it."

Frank shook his head.  "There's no such thing as almost," he said,
still staring out of the window.  Then, after a pause: "I want to be
out there.  I want to have it all again."

"I know."

"No you don't," he told her.  "You've no conception of the hunger I've
got on me."

"Tomorrow then," she said.  "I'll get another body tomorrow."

"Yes.  You do that.  And I want some other stuff.  A radio, for one.  I
want to know what's

going on out there.  And food: proper food.  Fresh bread--"

"Whatever you need."

"--and ginger.  The preserved kind, you know?  In syrup."

"I know."

He glanced round at her briefly, but he wasn't seeing her.  There was
too much world to be reacquainted with tonight.

"I didn't realize it was autumn," he said, and went back to watching
the storm.

-no NINE

The first thing Kirsty noticed when she came round the corner of
Lodovico Street the following day was that the blind had gone from the
upper front window.  Sheets of newspaper had been taped against the
gkss in its place.

She found herself a vantage point in the shelter of a holly hedge, from
which she hoped she could watch the house but remain unseen.  Then she
settled down for her vigil.

It was not quickly rewarded.  Two hours and more went by before she
saw Julia leave the house, another hour and a quarter before she
returned, by which time Kirsty's feet were numb with cold.

Julia had not returned alone.  The man she was with was not known to
Kirsty, nor indeed did he look to be a likely member of Julia's circle.
From a distance he appeared to be in middle age, stocky, balding. When
he followed Julia into the house he gave a nervous backward glance, as
if fearful of voyeurs.  She waited in her hiding place for a further
quarter of an hour, not certain of what to do next.  Did she linger
here until the man emerged, and challenge him?  Or did she go to the
house and try to talk her way inside?  Neither option was particularly
attractive.  She decided not to decide.  Instead she would get closer
to the house, and see what inspiration the moment brought.

The answer was, very little.  As she made her way up the path her feet
itched to turn and carry her away.  Indeed she was within an ace of
doing just that when she heard a shout from within.

The man's name was Sykes, Stanley Sykes.  Nor was that all he'd told
Julia on the way back

from the bar.  She knew his wife's name (Maddie) and occupation
(assistant chiropodist); she'd had pictures of the children (Rebecca
and Ethan) provided for her to coo over.  The man seemed to be defying
her to continue the seduction.  She merely smiled, and told him he was
a lucky man.

But once in the house, things had begun to go awry.  Halfway up the
stairs friend Sykes had suddenly announced that what they were doing
was wrong--that God saw them, and knew their hearts, and found them
wanting.  She had done her best to calm him, but he was not to be won
back from the Lord.  Instead, he lost his temper and flailed out at
her.  He might have done worse, in his righteous wrath, but for the
voice that had called him from the landing.  He'd stopped hitting her
instantly and become so pale it was as if he believed God himself was
doing the calling.  Then Frank had appeared at the top of the stairs,
in all his glory.  Sykes had loosed a cry, and tried to run.  But Julia
was quick.  She had her hand on him long enough for Frank to descend
the few stairs and make a permanent arrest.

She had not realized, until she heard the creak and snap of bone as
Frank took hold of his prey, how strong he had become of late:

stronger surely than a natural man.  At Frank's touch Sykes had
shouted again.  To silence him, Frank wrenched off his jaw.

The second shout that Kirsty had heard had ended abruptly, but she read
enough panic in the din to have her at the door and on the verge of
knocking.

Only then did she think better of it.  Instead, she slipped down the
side of the house, doubting with every step the wisdom of this, but
equally certain that a frontal assault would get her nowhere.  The gate
that offered access to the back garden was lacking a bolt.  She slipped
through, her ears alive to every sound, especially that of her own
feet.  From the house, nothing.  Not so much as a moan.

Leaving the gate open in case she should need a quick retreat, she
hurried to the back door.  It was unlocked.  This time, she let doubt
slow her step.  Maybe she should go and call Rory, bring him to the
house.  But by that time whatever was happening inside would be over,
and she knew damn well that unless Julia was caught red-handed she
would slide from under any accusation.  No, this was the only way.  She
stepped inside.

The house remained completely quiet.  There was not even a footfall to
help her locate

the actors she'd come to view.  She moved to the kitchen door, and
from there through to the dining room.  Her stomach twitched; her
throat was suddenly so dry she could barely swallow.

From dining room to lounge, and thence into the hallway.  Still
nothing, no whisper or sigh.  Julia and her companion could only be
upstairs, which suggested that she had been wrong, thinking she heard
fear in the shouts.  Perhaps it was pleasure that she'd heard.  An
orgasmic whoop, instead of the terror she'd taken it for.  It was an
easy mistake to make.

The front door was on her right, mere yards away.  She could still slip
out and away, the coward in her tempted, and no one be any the wiser.
But a fierce curiosity had seized her, a desire to know (to see] the
mysteries the house held, and be done with them.  As she climbed the
stairs the curiosity mounted to a kind of exhilaration.

She reached the top, and began to make her way along the landing.  The
thought occurred now that the birds had flown, that while she had been
creeping through from the back of the house they had left via the
front.

The first door on the left was the bedroom: if they were mating
anywhere, Julia and

her paramour, it would surely be here.  But no.  The door stood ajar;
she peered in.  The bedspread was uncreased.

Then, a misshapen cry.  So near, so loud, her heart missed its
rhythm.

She ducked out of the bedroom, to see a figure lurch from one of the
rooms farther along the landing.  It took her a moment to recognize the
fretful man who had arrived with Julia--and only then by his clothes.
The rest was changed, horribly changed.  A wasting disease had seized
him in the minutes since she'd seen him on the step, shriveling his
flesh on the bone.

Seeing Kirsty, he threw himself toward her, seeking what fragile
protection she could offer.  He had got no more than a pace from the
door however, when a form spilled into sight behind him.  It too seemed
diseased, its body bandaged from head to foot--the bindings stained by
issues of blood and pus.  There was nothing in its speed, however, or
the ferocity of its subsequent attack, that suggested sickness.  Quite
the reverse.  It reached for the fleeing man and took hold of him by
the neck.  Kirsty let out a cry, as the captor drew its prey back into
its embrace.

The victim made what little complaint his

dislocated face was capable of.  Then the antagonist tightened its
embrace.  The body trembled and twitched; its legs buckled.  Blood
spurted from eyes and nose and mouth.  Spots of it filled the air like
hot hail, breaking against her brow.  The sensation snapped her from
her inertia.  This was no time to wait and watch.  She ran.

The monster made no pursuit.  She reached the top of the stairs without
being overtaken.  But as her foot descended, it addressed her.

Its voice was .. . familiar.

"There you are," it said.

It spoke with melting tones, as if it knew her.  She stopped.

"Kirsty," it said.  "Wait a while."

Her head told her to run.  Her gut defied the wisdom, however.  It
wanted to remember whose voice this was, speaking from the binding. 
She could still make good her escape, she reasoned; she had an
eight-yard start.  She looked round at the figure.  The body in its
arms had curled up, fe tally legs against chest.  The beast dropped
it.

"You killed him .. ."  she said.

The thing nodded.  It had no apologies to make, apparently, to either
victim or witness.

"We'll mourn him later," it told her and took a step toward her.

"Where's Julia?"  Kirsty demanded.

"Don't you fret.  All's well..  ."  the voice said.  She was so close
to remembering who it was.

As she puzzled it took another step, one hand upon the wall, as if its
balance was still uncertain.

"I saw you," it went on.  "And I think you saw me.  At the window ..
."

Her mystification increased.  Had this thing been in the house that
long?  If so, surely Rory must And then she knew the voice.

"Yes.  You do remember.  I can see you remember .. ."

It was Rory's voice, or rather, a close approximation of it.  More
guttural, more self regarding, but the resemblance was uncanny enough
to keep her rooted to the spot while the beast shambled within
snatching distance of her.

At the last she recanted her fascination, and turned to Bee, but the
cause was already lost.  She heard its step a pace behind her, then
felt its fingers at her neck.  A cry came to her lips, but it was
barely mounted before the thing

had its corrugated palm across her face, canceling both the shout and
the breath it came upon.

It plucked her up, and took her back the way she'd come.  In vain she
struggled against its hold; the small wounds her fingers made upon its
body--tearing at the bandages and digging into the rawness
beneath--left it entirely unmoved, it seemed.  For a horrid moment her
heels snagged the corpse on the floor.  Then she was being hauled into
the room from which the living and the dead had emerged.  It smelled of
soured milk and fresh meat.  When she was flung down the boards beneath
her were wet and warm.

Her belly wanted to turn inside out.  She didn't fight the instinct,
but retched up all that her stomach held.  In the confusion of present
discomfort and anticipated terror she was not certain of what happened
next.  Did she glimpse somebody else (Julia) on the landing as the door
was slammed, or was it shadow?  One way or another it was too late for
appeals.  She was alone with the nightmare.

Wiping the bile from her mouth she got to her feet.  Daylight pierced
the newspaper at the window here and there, dappling the room

like sunlight through branches.  And through this pastoral, the thing
came sniffing her.

"Come to Daddy," it said.

In her twenty-six years she had never heard an easier invitation to
refuse.

"Don't touch me," she told it.

It cocked its head a little, as if charmed by this show of propriety.
Then it closed in on her, all pus and laughter, and--God help
her--desire.

She backed a few desperate inches into the corner, until there was
nowhere else for her to go.

"Don't you remember me?"  it said.

She shook her head.

"Frank," came the reply.  "This is brother Frank ..."

She had met Frank only once, at Alexandra Road.  He'd come visiting one
afternoon, just before the wedding, more she couldn't recall.  Except
that she'd hated him on sight.

"Leave me alone," she said as it reached for her.  There was a vile
finesse in the way his stained fingers touched her breast.

"Don't," she shrieked, "or so help me--"

"What?"  said Rory's voice.  "What will you do?"

Nothing, was the answer of course.  She

was helpless, as only she had ever been in dreams, those dreams of
pursuit and assault that her psyche had always staged on a ghetto
street in some eternal night.  Never--not even in her most witless
fantasies--had she anticipated that the arena would be a room she had
walked past a dozen times, in a house where she had been happy, while
outside the day went on as ever, gray on gray.

In a futile gesture of disgust, she pushed the investigating hand
away.

"Don't be cruel," the thing said, and his fingers found her skin again,
as unshooable as October wasps.  "What's to be frightened of?"

"Outside .. ."  she began, thinking of the horror on the landing.

"A man has to eat," Frank replied.  "Surely you can forgive me that?"

Why did she even feel his touch, she wondered?  Why didn't her nerves
share her disgust and die beneath his caress?

"This isn't happening," she told herself aloud, but the t>east only
laughed.

"I used to tell myself that," he said.  "Day in, day out.  Used to try
and dream the agonies away.  But you can't.  Take it from me.  You
can't.  They have to be endured."

She knew he was telling the truth, the

kind of unsavory truth that only monsters were at liberty to tell.  He
had no need to flatter or cajole; he had no philosophy to debate, or
sermon to deliver.  His awful nakedness was a kind of sophistication.
Past the lies of faith, and into purer realms.

She knew too that she would not endure.  That when her pleadings
faltered, and Frank claimed her for whatever vileness he had in mind,
she would loose such a scream that she would shatter.

Her very sanity was at stake here; she had no choice but to fight back,
and quickly.

Before Frank had a chance to press his suit any harder, her hands went
up to his face, fingers gouging at his eye holes and mouth.  The flesh
beneath the bandage had the consistency of jelly; it came away in
globs, and with it, a wet heat.

The beast shouted out, his grip on her relaxing.  Seizing the moment,
she threw herself out from under him, the momentum carrying her against
the wall with enough force to badly jpnd her.

Again, Frank roared.  She didn't waste time enjoying his discomfort,
but slid along the wall--not trusting her legs sufficiently to move
into open territory--toward the door.  As she

advanced, her feet sent an unlidded jar of preserved ginger rolling
across the room, spilling syrup and fruit alike.

Frank turned toward her, the bandaging about his face hanging in
scarlet loops where she'd torn it away.  In several places the bone was
exposed.  Even now, he ran his hands over the wounds, roars of horror
coming as he sought to measure the degree of his maiming.  Had she
blinded him?  She wasn't sure.  Even if she had it was only a matter of
time before he located her in this small room, and when he did his rage
would know no bounds.  She had to reach the door before he reoriented
himself.

Faint hope!  She hadn't a moment to take a step before he dropped his
hands from his face and scanned the room.  He saw her, no doubt of
that.  A beat later, he was bearing down upon her with renewed
violence.

At her feet lay a litter of domestic items.  The heaviest item amongst
them was a plain box.  She reached down and picked it up.  As she stood
upright, he was upon her.  She loosed a cry of defiance and swung the
box-bearing fist at his head.  It connected heavily; bone splintered.
The beast tottered backward, and she launched herself toward the door,
but before she reached it the shadow swamped her once

more, and she was flung backward across the room.  It came in a raging
pursuit.

This time he had no intention beyond the murderous.  His lashes were
intended to kill; that they did not was testament less to her speed
than to the imprecision of his fury.  Nevertheless, one out of every
three blows caught her.  Gashes opened in her face and upper chest; it
was all she could do to prevent herself from fainting.

As she sank beneath his assault, again she remembered the weapon she'd
found.  The box was still in her hand.  She raised it to deliver
another blow, but as Frank's eyes came to rest on the box his assault
abruptly ceased.

There was a panting respite, in which Kirsty had a chance to wonder if
death might not be easier than further flight.  Then Frank raised his
arm toward her, unfurled his fist and said: "Give it to me."

He wanted his keepsake, it seemed.  But she had no intention of
relinquishing her only weapon.

"No," she said.

He made the demand a second time, and there was a distinct anxiety in
his tone.  It seemed the box was too precious for him to risk taking it
by force.

"One last time," he said to her.  "Then I'll kill you.  Give me the
box."

She weighed the chances.  What had she left to lose?

"Say please," she said.

He regarded her quizzically, a soft growl in his throat.  Then, polite
as a calculating child, he said, "Please."

The word was her cue.  She threw the box at the window with all the
strength her trembling arm possessed.  It sailed past Frank's head,
shattering the glass, and disappeared from sight.

"No!"  he shrieked, and was at the window in a heartbeat.  "No!  No!
No!"

She raced to the door, her legs threatening to fail her with every
step.  Then she was out onto the landing.  The stairs almost defeated
her, but she clung to the bannister like a geriatric, and made it to
the hallway without falling.

Above, there was further din.  He was calling after her again.  But
this time she would not be caught.  She fled along the hallway to the
front door, and flung it open.

The day had brightened since she'd first entered the house--a defiant
burst of sunlight before evening fell.  Squinting against the glare she
started down the pathway.  There was glass

underfoot, and amongst the shards, her weapon.  She picked it up, a
souvenir of her defiance, and ran.  As she reached the street proper,
words began to come--a hopeless babble, fragments of things seen and
felt.  But Lodovico Street was deserted, so she began to run, and kept
running until she had put a good distance between her and the bandaged
beast.  Eventually, wandering on some street she didn't recognize,
somebody asked her if she needed help.  The little kindness defeated
her, for the effort of making some coherent reply to the inquiry was
too much, and her exhausted mind lost its hold on the light.

TEN

She woke in a blizzard, or such was her first impression.  Above her, a
perfect whiteness, snow on snow.  She was tucked up in snow, pillowed
in snow.  The blankness was sickening.  It seemed to fill up her throat
and eyes.

She raised her hands in front of her face; they smelled of an
unfamiliar soap, whose perfume was harsh.  Now she began to focus:
the

walls, the pristine sheets, the medication beside the bed.  A
hospital.

She called out for help.  Hours or minutes later, she wasn't sure
which, it came, in the form of a nurse who simply said, "You're awake,"
and went to fetch her superiors.

She told them nothing when they came.  She had decided in the time
between the nurse's disappearance and reappearance with the doctors
that this was not a story she was ready to tell.  Tomorrow (mAybe) she
might find the words to convince the seen.  But today?  If she tried
would stroke her brow and tell her  nonsense, condescend to her

:m of what she'd to explain, they 1 her to hush her and try to persuade
her she was hallucinating.  If she pressed the point, they'd probably
sedate her, which would make matters worse.  yVhat she needed was time
to think.

All of this she'd worked out before they arrived, so that when they
asked her what had happened she had her lies ready  It was all a fog,
she told them; she could barely remember her own name.  It will come
back in time, they reassured her, and she replied meekly that she
supposed it would.  Sleep now, they said, and she told them she'd be
happy to do just that, and yawned.  They withdrew then.

"Oh, yes ..."  said one of them as he was about to go.  "I forgot ..
."

He brought Frank's box from his pocket.

"You were holding on to this," he said, "when you were found.  We had
the Devil's own job getting it out of your hand.  Does it mean anything
to you?"  She said it didn't.

"The police have looked at it.  There was blood on it, you see.  Maybe
yours.  Maybe not."

He approached the bed.

"Do you want it?"  he asked her.  Then added, "It has been cleaned."

"Yes," she replied.  "Yes, please."

"It may jog your memory," he told her, and put it down on the bedside
table.

"What are we going to do?"  Julia demanded for the hundredth time.  The
man in the corner said nothing; nor was there any interpretable sign on
his ruin of a face.  "What did you want with her anyway?"  she asked
him.  "You've spoiled everything."

"Spoiled?"  said the monster.  "You don't know the meaning of
spoiled."

She swallowed her anger.  His brooding unnerved her.

"We have to leave, Frank," she said, softening her tone.

He threw a look across at her, white-hot ice.

"They'll come looking," she said.  "She'll tell them everything."

"Maybe .. "

"Don't you care?"  she demanded.

The bandaged lump shrugged.  "Yes," he said.  "Of course.  But we can't
leave, sweetheart."  Sweetheart The word mocked them both, a breath of
sentiment in a room that had known only pain.  "I can't face the world
like this."  He gestured to his face.  "Can I?"  he said, staring up at
her.  "Look at me."  She looked.  "Can I?"

"No."

"No."  He went back to perusing the floor.  "I need a skin, Julia."

"A skin?"

"Then, maybe ... maybe we can go dancing together.  Isn't that what you
want?"

He spoke of both dancing and death with equal nonchalance, as though
one carried as little significance as the other.  It calmed her,
hearing him talk that way.

"How?"  she said at last.  Meaning, how can a skin be stolen, but
also, how will our sanity survive?

"There are ways," said the flayed face, and blew her a kiss.

Had it not been for the white walls she might never have picked up the
box.  Had there been a picture to look at--a vase of sunflowers, or a
view of pyramids--anything to break the monotony of the room, she would
have been content to stare at it, and think.  But the blankness was too
much; it gave her no handhold on sanity.  So she reached across to the
table beside the bed and picked up the box.

It was heavier than she remembered.  She had to sit up in bed to
examine it.  There was little enough to see.  No lid that she could
find.  No keyhole.  No hinges.  If she turned it over once she turned
it half a hundred times, finding no clue to how it might be opened.  It
was not solid, she was certain of that.  So logic demanded that there
be a way into it.  But where?

She tapped it, shook it, pulled and pressed it, all without result.  It
was not until she rolled

over in bed and examined it in the full glare of the lamp that she
discovered some clue as to how the box was constructed.  There were
infinitesimal cracks in the sides of the box, where one piece of the
puzzle abutted the next.  They would have been invisible, but that a
residue of blood remained in them, tracing the complex relation of the
parts.

Systematically, she began to feel her way over the sides, testing her
hypothesis by pushing and pulling once more.  The cracks offered her a
general geography of the toy; without them she might have wandered the
six sides forever.  But the options were significantly reduced by the
clues she'd found; there were only so many ways the box could be made
to come apart.

After a time, her patience was rewarded.  A click, and suddenly one of
the compartments was sliding out from beside its lacquered neighbors.
Within, there was beauty.  Polished surfaces which scintillated like
the finest mother-of-pearl, colored shadows seeming to move in the
gloss.

And there was music too; a simple tune emerged from the box, played on
a mechanism that she could not yet see.  Enchanted, she delved further.
Though one piece had been

removed, the rest did not come readily.  Each segment presented a
fresh challenge to fingers and mind, the victories rewarded with a
further filigree added to the tune.

She was coaxing the fourth section out by an elaborate series of turns
and counter turns, when she heard the bell.  She stopped working, and
looked up.

Something was wrong.  Either her weary eyes were playing tricks or the
blizzard-white walls had moved subtly out of true.  She put down the
box, and slipped out of bed to go to the window.  The bell still rang,
a solemn tolling.  She drew back the curtain a few inches.  It was
night, and windy.  Leaves migrated across the hospital lawn; moths
congregated in the lamplight.  Unlikely as it seemed, the sound of the
bell wasn't coming from outside.  It was behind her.  She let the
curtain drop and turned back into the room.

As she did so, the bulb in the bedside light guttered like a living
flame.  Instinctively, she reached for the pieces of the box: they and
these strange events were intertwined somehow.  As her hand found the
fragments, the light blew out.

She was not left in darkness however; nor was she alone.  There was a
soft phosphorescence at the end of the bed, and in its folds, a figure.
The condition of its flesh beggared her imagination--the hooks, the
scars. Yet its voice, when it spoke, was not that of a creature in
pain.

"It's called the Lemarchand Configuration," it said, pointing at the
box.  She looked down; the pieces were no longer in her hand, but
floating inches above her palm.  Miraculously, the box was reassembling
itself without visible aid, the pieces sliding back together as the
whole construction turned over and over.  As it did so she caught fresh
glimpses of the polished interior, and seemed to see ghosts'
faces--twisted as if by grief or bad glass--howling back at her.  Then
all but one of the segments was sealed up, and the visitor was claiming
her attention afresh.

"The box is a means to break the surface of the real," it said.  "A
kind of invocation by which we Cenobites can be notified--"

"Who?"  she said.

"You did it in ignorance," the visitor said.  "Am I right?"

"Yes."

"It's happened before," came the reply.  "But there's no help for it.
No way to seal the Schism, until we take what's ours .. ."

"This is a mistake," she said.

"Don't try to fight.  It's quite beyond your control.  You have to
accompany me."

She shook her head.  She'd had enough of bullying nightmares to last
her a lifetime.

"I won't go with you," she said.  "Damn you, I won't--"

As she spoke, the door opened.  A nurse she didn't recognize--a member
of the night shift presumably--was standing there.

"Did you call out?"  she asked.

Kirsty looked at the Cenobite, then back at the nurse.  They stood no
more than a yard apart.

"She doesn't see me," it told her.  "Nor hear me.  I belong to you,
Kirsty.  And you to me."

"No," she said.

"Are you sure?"  said the nurse.  "I thought 1 heard--"

Kirsty shook her head.  It was lunacy, all lunacy.

"You should be in bed," the nurse chided.  "You'll catch your death."

The Cenobite tittered.

"I'll be back in five minutes," said the nurse.  "Please go back to
sleep."

And she was gone again.

"We'd better go," it said.  "Leave them to their patchwork, eh?  Such
depressing places."

"You can't do this," she insisted.

It moved toward her nevertheless.  A row of tiny bells, depending from
the scraggy flesh of its neck, tinkled as it approached.  The stink it
gave off made her want to heave.

"Wait," she said.

"No tears, please.  It's a waste of good suffering."

"The box," she said in desperation.  "Don't you want to know where I
got the box?"

"Not particularly."

"Frank Cotton," she said.  "Does the name mean anything to you?  Frank
Cotton."

The Cenobite smiled.

"Oh yes.  We know Frank."

"He solved the box too, am I right?"

"He wanted pleasure, until we gave it to him.  Then he squirmed."

"If I took you to him .. ."

"He's alive then?"

"Very much alive."

"And you're proposing what?  That I take him back instead of you?"

"Yes.  Yes.  Why not?  Yes.  "

The Cenobite moved away from her.  The room sighed.

"I'm tempted," it said.  Then: "But perhaps you're cheating me. Perhaps
this is a lie, to buy you time."

"I know where he is, for God's sake," she said.  "He did this to me!"
She presented her slashed arms for its perusal.

"If you're lying"--it said--"if you're trying to squirm your way out of
this--"

"I'm not."

"Deliver him alive to us then .. ."

She wanted to weep with relief.

"..  . make him confess himself.  And maybe we won't tear your soul
apart."

ELEVEN

^\ Wory stood in the hallway and stared at Julia, his Julia, the woman
he had once sworn to have and to hold till death did them part.  It had
not seemed such a difficult promise to keep at the time.  He had
idolized her for as long as he could remember, dreaming of her by night
and spending the days composing love poems of wild ineptitude to her.
But things had changed, and he had learned, as he watched them change,
that the greatest torments were often the subtlest.  There had been
times of late when he would have preferred a death by wild horses to
the itch of suspicion that had so degraded his joy.

Now, as he looked at her standing at the bottom of the stairs, it was
impossible for him to even remember how good things had once been.  All
was doubt and dirt.

One thing he was glad of: she looked troubled.  Maybe that meant there
was a confession in the air, indiscretions that she would pour out and
that he would forgive her for in a welter of tears and understanding.

"You look sad," he said.

She hesitated, then said: "It's difficult, Rory."

"What is?"

She seemed to want to give up before she began.

"What is?"  he pressed.

"I've so much to tell you."

Her hand, he saw, was grasping the banister so tightly the knuckles
burned white.  "I'm listening," he said.  He would love her again, if
she'd just be honest with him.  "Tell me," he said.

"I think maybe .. . maybe it would be

easier if I showed you ..."  she told him, and so saying, led him
upstairs.

The wind that harried the streets was not warm, to judge by the way the
pedestrians drew their collars up and their faces down.  But Kirsty
didn't feel the chill.  Was it her invisible companion who kept the
cold from her, cloaking her with that fire the Ancients had conjured to
burn sinners in?  Either that, or she was too frightened to feel
anything.

But then that wasn't how she felt; she wasn 't frightened.  The feeling
in her gut was far more ambiguous.  She had opened a door-the same door
Rory's brother had opened-and now she was walking with demons.  And at
the end of her travels, she would have her revenge.  She would find the
thing that had torn her and tormented her, and make him feel the
powerlessness that she had suffered.  She would watch him squirm. More,
she would enjoy it.  Pain had made a sadist of her.

As she made her way along Lodovico Street, she looked round for a sign
of the Cenobite, but he was nowhere to be seen.  Un-daunted, she
approached the house.  She had no plan in mind: there were too many
variables to be juggled.  For one, would Julia be there?  And if so,
how involved in all of this was she?  Impossible to believe that she
could be an innocent bystander, but perhaps she had acted out of terror
of Frank; the next few minutes might furnish the answers.  She rang the
bell, and waited.

The door was answered by Julia.  In her hand, a length of white kce.

"Kirsty," she said, apparently unfazed by her appearance.  "It's late
.. ."

"Where's Rory?"  were Kirsty's first words.  They hadn't been quite
what she'd intended, but they came out unbidden.

"He's here," Julia replied calmly, as if seeking to soothe a manic
child.  "Is there something wrong?"

"I'd like to see him," Kirsty answered.

"Rory?"

"Yes .. ."

She stepped over the threshold without waiting for an invitation. Julia
made no objection, but closed the door behind her.

Only now did Kirsty feel the chill.  She stood in the hallway and
shivered.

"You look terrible," said Julia plainly.

"I was here this afternoon," she blurted.  "I saw what happened,
Julia. I saw."

"What was there to see?"  came the reply; her poise was unassailed.

"You know."

"Truly I don't."

"I want to speak to Rory .. ."

"Of course," came the reply.  "But take care with him, will you?  He's
not feeling very well."

She led Kirsty through to the dining room.  Rory was sitting at the
table; there was a glass of spirits at his hand, a bottle beside it.
Laid across an adjacent chair was Julia's wedding dress.  The sight of
it prompted recognition of the lace swath in her hand: it was the
bride's veil.

Rory looked much the worse for wear.  There was dried blood on his
face, and at his hairline.  The smile he offered was warm, but
fatigued.

"What happened .. . ?"  she asked him.

"It's all right now, Kirsty," he said.  His voice barely aspired to a
whisper.  "Julia told me everything .. . and it's all right."

"No," she said, knowing that he couldn't possibly have the whole
story.

"You came here this afternoon."

"That's right."

"That was unfortunate."

"You ... you asked me ..."  She glanced at Julia, who was standing at
the door, then back at Rory.  "I did what I thought you wanted."

"Yes.  I know.  I know.  I'm only sorry you were dragged into this
terrible business."

"You know what your brother's done?"  she said.  "You know what he
summoned?"

"I know enough," Rory replied.  "The point is, it's over now."

"What do you mean?"

"Whatever he did to you, I'll make amends--"

"What do you mean, over?"

"He's dead, Kirsty."

("..  . deliver him alive, and maybe we won't tear your soul apart ")

"Dead?"

"We destroyed him, Julia and I. It wasn't so difficult.  He thought he
could trust me, you see, thought that blood was thicker than water.
Well it isn't.  I wouldn't suffer a man like that to live .. ."

She felt something twitch in her belly.  Had the Cenobites got their
hooks in her already, snagging the carpet of her bowels?

"You've been so kind, Kirsty.  Risking so much, coming back here
..."

(There was something at her shoulder.  "Give me your soul," it said.)

"I'll go to the authorities, when I feel a little stronger.  Try and
find a way to make them understand .. ."

"You killed him?"  she said.

"Yes."

"I don't believe it .. ."  she muttered.

"Take her upstairs," Rory said to Julia.  "Show her."

"Do you want to see?"  Julia inquired.

Kirsty nodded and followed.

It was warmer on the landing than below, and the air greasy and gray,
like filthy dishwater.  The door to Frank's room was ajar.  The thing
that lay on the bare boards, in a tangle of torn bandaging, still
steamed.  His neck was clearly broken, head set askew on his shoulders.
He was devoid of skin from head to foot.

Kirsty looked away, nauseated.

"Satisfied?"  Julia asked.

Kirsty didn't reply, but left the room and stepped onto the landing. At
her shoulder, the air was restless.

("You lost," something said, close by her.

"/ know," she murmured.)

The bell had begun to ring, tolling for her, surely; and a turmoil of
wings nearby, a carnival of carrion birds.  She hurried down the
stairs, praying that she wouldn't be overtaken before she reached the
door.  If they tore her heart out, let Rory be spared the sight.  Let
him remember her strong, with laughter on her lips, not pleas.

Behind her, Julia said, "Where are you going?"  When there was no reply
forthcoming, she went on talking.  "Don't say anything to anybody,
Kirsty," she insisted.  "We can deal with this, Rory and me--"

Her voice had stirred Rory from his drink.  He appeared in the hallway.
The wounds Frank had inflicted looked more severe than Kirsty had first
thought.  His face was bruised in a dozen places, and the skin at his
neck plowed p. As she came abreast of him, he reached out and took her
arm.

"Julia's right," he said.  "Leave it to us to report, will you?"

There were so many things she wanted to tell him at that moment, but
time left room for none.  The bell was getting louder in her head.
Someone had looped their entrails around her neck, and was pulling the
knot tight.

"It's too late ..."  she murmured to Rory, and pressed his hand
away.

"What do you mean?"  he said to her, as she covered the yards to the
door.  "Don't go, Kirsty.  Not yet.  Tell me what you mean."

She couldn't help but offer him a backward glance, hoping that he would
find in her face all the regrets she felt.

"It's all right," he said sweetly, still hoping to heal her.  "Really
it is."  He opened his arms.  "Come to Daddy," he said.

The phrase didn't sound right out of Rory's mouth.  Some boys never
grew to be daddies, however many children they sired.

Kirsty put out a hand to the wall to steady herself.

It wasn't Rory who was speaking to her.  It was Frank.  Somehow, it was
Frank She held on to the thought through the mounting din of bells, so
loud now that her skull seemed ready to crack open.  Rory was still
smiling at her, arms extended.  He was talking too, but she could no
longer hear what he said.  The tender flesh of his face shaped the
words, but the bells drowned them out.  She was thankful for the fact;
it made it easier to defy the evidence of her eyes.  "I know who you
are .. ."  she said slid

denly, not certain of whether her words were audible or not, but
unquenchably sure that they were true.  Rory's corpse was upstairs,
left to lie in Frank's shunned bandaging.  The usurped skin was now wed
to his brother's body, the marriage sealed with the letting of blood.
Yes!  That was it.

The coils around her throat were tightening; it could only be moments
before they dragged her off.  In desperation, she started back along
the hallway toward the thing in Rory's face.

"It's you--" she said.

The face smiled at her, undismayed.

She reached out, and snatched at him.  Startled, he took a step
backward to avoid her touch, moving with graceful sloth, but somehow
still managing to avoid her touch.  The bells were intolerable; they
were pulping her thoughts, tolling her brain tissue to dust.  At the
rim of her sanity, she reached again for him, and this time he did not
quite avoid her.  Her nails raked the flesh of his cheek, and the skin,
so recently grafted, slid away like silk.  The blood-buttered meat
beneath came into horrid view.

Behind her, Julia screamed.

And suddenly the bells weren't in Kirsty's

head any longer.  They were in the house, in the world.

The hallway lights burned dazzlingly bright, and then--their filaments
overloading-went out.  There was a short period of total darkness,
during which time she heard a whimpering that may or may not have come
from her own lips.  Then it was as if fireworks were spluttering into
life in the walls and floor.  The hallway danced.  One moment an
abattoir (the walls running scarlet); the next, a boudoir (powder blue,
canary yellow); the moment following that, a ghost-train tunnel--all
speed and sudden fire.

By one flaring light she saw Frank moving toward her, Rory's discarded
face hanging from his jaw.  She avoided his outstretched arm and ducked
through into the front room.  The hold on her throat had relaxed, she
realized: the Cenobites had apparently seen the error of their ways.
Soon they would intervene, surely, and bring an end to this farce of
mistaken identities.  She would not wait to see Frank claimed as she'd
thought of doing; she'd had enough.  Instead she'd flee the house by
the back door and leave them to it.

Her optimism was short-lived.  The fireworks in the hall threw some
light ahead of her

into the dining room, enough to see that it was already bewitched.
There was something moving over the floor, like ash before wind, and
chains cavorting in the air.  Innocent she might be, but the forces
loose here were indifferent to such trivialities; she sensed that to
take another step would invite atrocities.

Her hesitation put her back within Frank's reach, but as he snatched at
her the fireworks in the hallway faltered, and she slipped away from
him under cover of darkness.  The respite was all too brief.  New
lights were already blooming in the hall--and he was after her afresh,
blocking her route to the front door.

Why didn't they claim him, for God's sake?  Hadn't she brought them
here as she'd promised, and unmasked him?

Frank opened his jacket.  In his belt was a bloodied knife--doubtless
the flaying edge.  He pulled it out, and pointed it at Kirsty.

"From now on," he said, as he stalked her, "I'm Rory."  She had no
choice but to back away from him, the door (escape, sanity) receding
with every step.  "Understand me?  I'm Rory now.  And nobody's ever
going to know any better."

Her heel hit the bottom of the stair, and suddenly there were other
hands on her, reaching through the banisters and seizing fistfuls of
her hair.  She twisted her head round and looked up.  It was Julia, of
course, face slack, all passion consumed.  She wrenched Kirsty's head
back, exposing her throat as Frank's knife gleamed toward it.

At the last moment Kirsty reached up above her head and snatched hold
of Julia's arm, wrenching her from her perch on the third or fourth
stair.  Losing both her balance and her grip on her victim, Julia let
out a shout and fell, her body coming between Kirsty and Frank's
thrust.  The blade was too close to be averted; it entered Julia's side
to the hilt.  She moaned, then she reeled away down the hall, the knife
buried in her.

Frank scarcely seemed to notice.  His eyes were on Kirsty once again,
and they shone with horrendous appetite.  She had nowhere to go but up.
The fireworks still exploding, the bells still ringing, she started to
mount the stairs.

Her tormentor was not coming in immediate pursuit, she saw.  Julia's
appeals for help had diverted him to where she lay, halfway between
stairs and front door.  He drew the knife from her side.  She cried out
in pain, and, as if to assist her, he went down on his haunches beside
her body.  She raised her arm to

him, looking for tenderness.  In response, he cupped his hand beneath
her head, and drew her up toward him.  As their faces came within
inches of each other, Julia seemed to realize that Frank's intentions
were far from honorable.  She opened her mouth to scream, but he sealed
her lips with his and began to feed.  She kicked and scratched the air.
All in vain.

Tearing her eyes from the sight of this depravity, Kirsty crawled up to
the head of the stairs.

The second floor offered no real hiding place, of course, nor was there
any escape route, except to leap from one of the windows.  But having
seen the cold comfort Frank had just offered his mistress, jumping was
clearly the preferable option.  The fall might break every bone in her
body, but it would at least deprive the monster of further
sustenance.

The fireworks were fizzling out, it seemed; the landing was in smoky
darkness.  She stumbled along it rather than walked, her fingertips
moving along the wall.

Downstairs, she heard Frank on the move again.  He was finished with
Julia.

Now he spoke as he began up the stairs, the same incestuous
invitation:

"Come to Daddy."

It occurred to her that the Cenobites were probably viewing this chase
with no little amusement, and would not act until there was only one
player left: Frank.  She was forfeit to their pleasure.

"Bastards .. ."  she breathed, and hoped they heard.

She had almost reached the end of the landing.  Ahead lay the junk
room.  Did it have a window sizable enough for her to climb through? If
so, she would jump, and curse them as she fell--curse them all.  God
and the Devil and whatever lay between, curse them and as she dropped,
hope for nothing but that the concrete be quick with her.

Frank was calling her again, and almost at the top of the stairs.  She
turned the key in the lock, opened the junk room door, and slipped
through.

Yes, there was a window.  It was uncurtained, and moonlight fell
through it in shafts of indecent beauty, illuminating a chaos of
furniture and boxes.  She made her way through the confusion to the
window.  It was wedged open an inch or two to air the room.  She put
her fingers under the frame, and tried to heave it up far enough for
her to climb out, but the

sash in the window had rotted, and her arms were not the equal of the
task.

She quickly hunted for a makeshift lever, a part of her mind coolly
calculating the number of steps it would take her pursuer to cover the
length of the landing.  Less than twenty, she concluded, as she pulled
a sheet off one of the tea chests, only to find a dead man staring up
at her from the chest, eyes wild.  He was broken in a dozen places,
arms smashed and bent back upon themselves, legs tucked up to his chin.
As she went to cry out, she heard Frank at the door.

"Where are you?"  he inquired.

She clamped her hand over her face to stop the cry of revulsion from
coming.  As she did so, the door handle turned.  She ducked out of
sight behind a felled armchair, swallowing her scream.

The door opened.  She heard Frank's breath, slightly labored, heard the
hollow pad of his feet on the boards.  Then the sound of the door being
pulled to again.  It clicked.  Silence.

She waited for a count of thirteen, then peeped out of hiding, half
expecting him to still be in the room with her, waiting for her to
break cover.  But no, he'd gone.

Swallowing the breath her cry had been

mounting upon had brought an unwelcome side effect: hiccups.  The
first of them, so unexpected she had no time to subdue it, sounded
gun-crack loud.  But there was no returning step from the landing.
Frank, it seemed, was already out of earshot.  As she returned to the
window, skirting the tea-chest coffin, a second hiccup startled her.
She silently reprimanded her belly, but in vain.  A third and fourth
came ' unbidden while she wrestled once more to lift the window.  That
too was a fruitless effort; it had no intention of compliance.

Briefly, she contemplated breaking the j. glass and yelling for help,
but rapidly discarded

1 the idea.  Frank would be eating out her eyes f before the neighbors
had even shaken off sleep.

I Instead she retraced her steps to the door, and opened it a creaking
fraction.  There was no sign of Frank, so far as her eyes were able to
interpret the shadows.  Cautiously, she opened the door a little wider,
and stepped onto the landing once again.

The gloom was like a living thing; it smothered her with murky kisses.
She advanced three paces without incident, then a fourth.  On the fifth
(her lucky number) her body took a turn for the suicidal.  She
hiccuped,

her hand too tardy to reach her mouth before the din was out.

This time it did not go unheard.

"There you are," said a shadow, and Frank slipped from the bedroom to
block her path.  He was vaster for his meal--he seemed as wide as the
landing--and he stank of meat.

With nothing to lose, she screamed blue murder as he came at her.  He
was unashamed by her terror.  With inches between her flesh and his
knife she threw herself sideways and found that the fifth step had
brought her abreast of Frank's room.  She stumbled through the open
door.  He was after her in a flash, crowing his delight.

There was a window in this room, she knew; she'd broken it herself,
mere hours before.  But the darkness was so profound she might have
been blindfolded, not even a glimmer of moonlight to feed her sight.
Frank was equally lost, it seemed.  He called after her in this pitch;
the whine of his knife accompanying his call as he slit the air.  Back
and forth, back and forth.  Stepping away from the sound, her foot
caught in the tangle of the bandaging on the floor.  Next moment she
was toppling.  It wasn't the boards she fell heavily upon, how-ever,
but the greasy bulk of Rory's corpse.  It won a howl of horror from
her.

"There you are," said Frank.  The knife slices were suddenly closer,
inches from her head.  But she was deaf to them.  She had her arms
about the body beneath her, and approaching death was nothing beside
the pain she felt now, touching him.

"Rory," she moaned, content that his name be on her lips when the cut
came.

"That's right," said Frank, "Rory."

Somehow the theft of Rory's name was as unforgivable as stealing his
skin; or so her grief told her.  A skin was nothing.  Pigs had skins;
snakes had skins.  They were knitted of dead cells, shed and grown and
shed again.  But a name?  That was a spell, which summoned memories.
She would not let Frank usurp it.

"Rory's dead," she said.  The words stung her, and with the sting, the
ghost of a thought' Hush baby .. ."  he told her.

--suppose the Cenobites were waiting for Frank to name himself.  Hadn't
the visitor in the hospital said something about Frank confessing!"

"You're not Rory .. ."  she said.

"We know that," came the reply, "but nobody else does ..."

"Who are you then?"

"Poor baby.  Losing your mind, are you?  Good thing too .. ."

"Who, though?"

"..  . it's safer that way."

"Who?"

"Hush, baby," he said.  He was stooping to her in the darkness, his
face within inches of hers.  "Everything's going to be as right as
rain

"Yes?"

"Yes.  Frank's here, baby."

"Frank?"

"That's right.  I'm Frank."

So saying, he delivered the killing blow, but she heard it coming in
the darkness and dodged its benediction.  A second later the bell began
again, and the bare bulb in the middle of the room flickered into life.
By it she saw Frank beside his brother, the knife buried in the dead
man's buttock.  As he worked it out of the wound he set his eyes on her
afresh.

Another chime, and he was up, and would have been at her .. . but for
the voice.

It said his name, lightly, as if calling a child out to play.

"Frank."

His face dropped for the second time that night.  A look of puzzlementx
flitted across it, and on its heels, horror.  VA

Slowly, he turned his head round to look at the speaker.  It was the
Cenobite, its hooks sparkling.  Behind it, Kirsty saw three other
figures, their anatomies catalogues of disfigurement.

Frank threw a gknce back at Kirsty.

"You did this," he said.

She nodded.

"Get out of here," said one of the newcomers.  "This isn't your
business now."

"Whore!"  Frank screeched at her.  "Bitch!  Cheating, fucking bitch!"

The hail of rage followed her across the room to the door.  As her palm
closed around the door handle, she heard him coming after her, and
turned to find that he was standing less than a foot from her, the
knife a hair's breadth from her body.  But there he was fixed, unable
to advance another millimeter.

They had their hooks in him, the flesh of his arms and legs, and curled
through the meat of his face.  Attached to the hooks, chains, which
they held taut.  There was a soft sound, as his resistance drew the
barbs through his

muscle.  His mouth was dragged wide, his neck and chest plowed open.

The knife dropped from his fingers.  He expelled a last, incoherent
curse at her, his body shuddering now as he lost his battle with their
claim upon him.  Inch by inch he was drawn back toward the middle of
the room.

"Go, " said the voice of the Cenobite.  She could see them no longer;
they were already lost behind the blood-flecked air.  Accepting their
invitation, she opened the door, while behind her Frank began to
scream.

As she stepped onto the landing plaster dust cascaded from the ceiling;
the house was growling from basement to eaves.  She had to go quickly,
she knew, before whatever demons were loose here shook the place
apart.

But, though time was short, she could not prevent herself from
snatching one look at Frank, to be certain that he would come after her
no longer.

He was in extremis, hooked through in a dozen or more places, fresh
wounds gouged in him even as she watched.  Spread-eagled beneath the
solitary bulb, body hauled to the limits of its endurance and beyond,
he gave vent to shrieks that would have won pity from her, had she not
learned better.

Suddenly, his cries stopped.  There was a pause.  And then, in one
last act of defiance, he cranked up his heavy head and stared at her,
meeting her gaze with eyes from which all bafflement and all malice had
fled.  They glittered as they rested on her, pearls in offal.

In response, the chains were drawn an inch tighter, but the Cenobites
gained no further cry from him.  Instead he put his tongue out at
Kirsty, and flicked it back and forth across his teeth in a gesture of
unrepentant lewdness.

Then he came un sewn

His limbs separated from his torso, and his head from his shoulders, in
a welter of bone shards and heat.  She threw the door closed, as
something thudded against it from the other side.  His head, she
guessed.

Then she was staggering downstairs, with wolves howling in the walls,
and the bells in turmoil, and everywhere--thickening the air like
smoke--the ghosts of wounded birds, sewn wing tip to wing tip, and lost
to flight.

She reached the bottom of the stairs, and began along the hallway to
the front door, but as she came within spitting distance of freedom she
heard somebody call her name.

It was Julia.  There was blood on the hall

floor, marking a trail from the spot where Frank had abandoned her,
through into the dining room.

"Kirsty .. ."  she called again.  It was a pitiable sound, and despite
the wing-choked air, she could not help but go in pursuit of it,
stepping through into the dining room.

The furniture was smoldering charcoal; the ash that she'd glimpsed was
a foul-smelling carpet.  And there, in the middle of this domestic
wasteland, sat a bride.

By some extraordinary act of will, Julia had managed to put her wedding
dress on, and secure her veil upon her head.  Now she sat in the dirt,
the dress besmirched.  But she looked radiant nevertheless, more
beautiful, indeed, for the fact of the ruin that surrounded her.

"Help me," she said, and only now did Kirsty realize that the voice she
heard was not coming from beneath the lush veil, but from the bride's
lap.

And now the copious folds of the dress were parting, and there was
Julia's head--set on a pillow of scarlet silk and framed with a fall of
auburn hair.  Bereft of lungs, how could it speak?  It spoke
nevertheless'Kirsty .. ."  it said, it begged--and

sighed, and rolled back and forth in the bride's lap as if it hoped to
un lodge its reason.

Kirsty might have aided it--might have snatched the head up and dashed
out its brains--but that the bride's veil had started to twitch, and
was rising now, as if plucked at by invisible fingers.  Beneath it, a
light flickered and grew brighter, and brighter yet, and with the
light, a voice.

"/ am the Engineer," it sighed.  No more than that.

Then the fluted folds rose higher, and the head beneath gained the
brilliance of a minor sun.

She did not wait for the blaze to blind her.  Instead she backed out
into the hallway--the birds almost solid now, the wolves insane--and
flung herself at the front door even as the hallway ceiling began to
give way.

The night came to meet her--a clean darkness.  She breathed it in
greedy gulps as she departed the house at a run.  It was her second
such departure.  God help her, her sanity that there ever be a third.

At the corner of Lodovico Street, she looked back.  The house had not
capitulated to the forces unleashed within.  It stood now as quiet as a
grave.  No, quieter.

As she turned away somebody collided with her.  She yelped with
surprise, but the huddled pedestrian was already hurrying away into the
anxious murk that preceded morning.  As the figure hovered on the
outskirts of solidity, it glanced back, and its head flared in the
gloom, a cone of white fire.  It was the Engineer.  She had no time to
look away; it was gone again in one instant, leaving its glamour in her
eye.

Only then did she realize the purpose of the collision.  Lemarchand's
box had been passed back to her, and sat in her hand.

Its surfaces had been immaculately resealed, and polished to a high
gloss.  Though she did not examine it, she was certain there would be
no clue to its solution left.  The next discoverer would voyage its
faces without a chart.  And until such time, was she elected its
keeper?  Apparently so.

She turned it over in her hand.  For the frailest of moments she seemed
to see ghosts in the lacquer.  Julia's face, and that of Frank.  She
turned it over again, looking to see if Rory was held here: but no.
Wherever he was, it wasn't here.  There were other puzzles, perhaps,
that if solved gave access to the place where he lodged.  A crossword
maybe, whose solution

would lift the latch of the paradise garden, or a jigsaw in the
completion of which lay access to Wonderland.

She would wait and watch, as she had always watched and waited, hoping
that such a puzzle would one day come to her.  But if it failed to show
itself she would not grieve too deeply, for fear that the mending of
broken hearts be a puzzle neither wit nor time had the skill to
solve.



