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 bead.
    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 a 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
    
    1