Clive Barker
The Hellbound Heart

    
    
    I long to talk with some old lover's ghost
    Who died before the god of Love was born.
    - John Donne, Love's Deitie
    
    
    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 birdmaker's 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 place, 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 be 
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, charmless. It struck Frank that he had never once wondered what they would