The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker.
Title: The Hellbound Heart.
Author: Clive Barker.
Genre: Fiction, literature, novella, horror, sexuality.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1986.
Summary: Frank Cotton's insatiable appetite for the dark pleasures of pain led him to the puzzle of Lemarchand's box, and from there, to a death only a sick-minded soul could invent. But his brother's love-crazed wife, Julia, has discovered a way to bring Frank back-though the price will be bloody and terrible . . . and there will certainly be hell to pay.
My rating: 8.5/10.
My review: Clive Barker combines extreme gore and extreme eroticism to combine a strikingly poignant and horribly disturbing narrative, and I love him for it. I don't know of a single other author who is able to deliver repulsion and arousal simultaneously, in equal measure.
♥ "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's 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."
♥ 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 on 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's 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?
...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 tastes upon his tongue: butter, 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 they were women.
Always, amid the flurry and confusion, memories of women appeared, assaulting him with their scents, their textures, their tastes.
♥ 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.
♥ 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.
♥ 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 pf 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 implacable-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.
♥ But to Rory's qualities Frank brought something his brother would never have: a beautiful desperation.
♥ 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.
♥ 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 fury 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.
♥ She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.
♥ 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.
♥ 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.
♥ The dark was almost perfect, and she was glad of it. Her eyes rested against the night, their surfaces chilled.
♥ 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.
♥ If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn't it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.
♥ He had been arrogant in his dealing with the Order of the Gash, he sew 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.
♥ 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.
♥ 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 honeybun-with her breasts new-washed, and a dead man in her arms.
♥ 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 dew 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.
♥ "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 as 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.
♥ 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 skill 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 should would have love from this hateful thing, or know the reason why.
♥ 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.
...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 consorter with the living dead. It was another paradox to add to the thousand she'd found at work in herself of late.
♥ 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.
♥ Frank shook his head. "There's no such thing as almost," he said, still staring out of the window.
♥ 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 wen on as ever, gray on gray.
♥ "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.
♥ "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.
♥ 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.
♥ The gloom was like a living thing; it smothered her with murky kisses.
♥ "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.
♥ 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 there: 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.