Hellbound Hearts (32 page)

When he turned back the screen was steel gray. The words
www.scar-tissue.co.uk
pulsed red in the center. Beneath this, in capitals, the word ENTER. Elliott couldn't remember typing in the website address, but that didn't matter. His trembling fingers squeaked on the plastic mouse. The cursor edged warily toward the inviting word.

Double-click. Done.

The doors parted and a world of wonders opened up to him. Naked flesh, sliced and scratched and bruised. Faces contorted in orgasmic pain. Blood and leather, metal and sweat. Stark light and pitch-black darkness. An escalating series of images, each more extreme than the last.

Elliott wanted to linger over each one, but was simultaneously eager to move on to the next, and the next. His finger clicked feverishly on the mouse. Sweat dripped from his chin onto the keypad as he craned forward over his vast stomach. He licked his lips, the sound preternaturally loud in the fusty room, like the sound of wet
things moving stealthily in the darkness. His erection ached. He ground his fist against it.

The last shot showed a man chained to a wall, spread-eagled, head thrown back, scarred and bloody. Imprinted over the top of this was an address. Before Elliott had even finished reading it, the picture began to corrode, like rusting metal, spots of gray leaking through the image, then joining up, forming larger patches. In a panic, Elliott reached for the blue plastic beaker full of pens to the right of his keyboard. Knocked it over, pens scattering everywhere. He scooped one up, a green CD marker, wrenched off the lid. He tried to write on the back of his hand, but it was too sweaty; the ink spread out along the tiny creases in his skin, like green blood rising from a wound. “Fuck,” he muttered, “fuck, fuck.” The corrosion was moving inward to the center, blotting out the picture of the spread-eagled man, speckling the edges of the address itself. In desperation Elliott wrote on the screen, the pen squeaking on the glass, the address appearing in green scrawled capitals even as the original disappeared in a froth of gray.

Finally he sat back, breathing hoarsely, drenched in sweat, a pulse throbbing behind his eyes. The screen blurred; suddenly he couldn't breathe; he thought he was going to faint. Then the feeling passed and his vision cleared. The screen was steel gray, nothing else there. No words, no pictures. Over the top of it, in green marker pen, was the scrawled address.

Elliott released a long, shuddering breath. Then he gave a snort, the closest he ever came to a laugh, realizing what he could have done. He stabbed his fat fingers at the keyboard, typing in the address again. A search page appeared. Address not found. Suggestions for websites with similar addresses. Cosmetic surgery clinics; Wikipedia; song and book titles.

Scowling, Elliott tried the address again. Same result. He sat for a moment, staring at the screen. Then he thumped across to where the cordless had landed when he'd thrown it, and picked it up. He pressed the green telephone symbol and held the phone to his ear; it was still working. He thumbed in the number of the taxi firm he
always used, and half an hour later was pushing open the car door, struggling from the vehicle.

His driver, a young Asian man who had been nodding his head to Bhangra music throughout the journey, hunched his shoulders to peer dubiously at the black walls rising around them.

“You sure this is the place, mate?”

“If this is the address I asked for, then yes,” Elliott replied peevishly.

“But there's nothing here, though, innit?” said the driver. “It's all just warehouses and factories and that.”

Elliott scowled. “How much do I owe you?”

The driver shrugged. “Eleven eighty.”

Elliott paid him and the cab drove away. Elliott watched its lights bleed red as it turned the corner, and then it was gone, leaving him alone.

He looked around. This was indeed an area of factories and warehouses, most of which seemed abandoned. The walls of the silent buildings towered high on either side of him, black and scabrous. Hundreds of windows, opaque with grime, peered blindly down at him. The road was scattered with broken stone, rotting timber, and rusting machinery that looked as though it had been left out for the garbagemen and never collected. Elliott huffed out a breath that hung like a wraith in the chilly air, and stumped toward a black door that the cabdriver had pointed out to him. The door was ajar. Elliott pushed it and stepped warily into the building.

A black corridor, barely wider or higher than the door itself, stretched ahead into darkness. Elliott allowed himself a moment's doubt, and then he started down it. He could hear nothing but his own stertorous breathing and heavy footsteps. He had the impression that the corridor was sloping downward, but he couldn't be sure. Eventually he came to another black door.

This one was locked. Elliott's fleshy fist hovered in the air in front of him, and then he knocked. Almost immediately the door sighed open. Elliott stepped into blackness. The door closed behind him. There was a smell, an abattoir reek of hot blood mingled with
the heady, salty tang of sex. Elliott's cock reacted to it, filling with blood. A voice beside his ear purred, “How far do you want to go?”

Elliott tried not to flinch. “All the way,” he said.

The throaty chuckle of the unseen speaker seemed to echo around him. “Are you quite certain of that?”

Sweat dribbled into Elliott's eye, stinging, making him blink. “Yes,” he said hoarsely.

“Well, then,” said the voice, and a light came on.

It was a stark white spotlight beam, lancing down from somewhere above. Illuminated by the spotlight was a woman, naked but for a black hood and a multitude of bodily piercings. She was shaved and oiled; tattoos of battling serpents swarmed over her breasts and stomach and twined around her heavily muscled thighs. In each hand she held a secateurlike blade.

“Step into the light,” instructed the voice behind him.

Elliott stumbled forward, as though led by his straining cock. He was wheezing and sweating, his heart pounding with terror and lust. As soon as the light touched him, the hooded woman stepped forward, her hands moving with lightning speed. She cut off his clothes, deliberately slicing and nicking the flesh beneath as she did so. Elliott cried out as blood welled from the neat, symmetrical wounds on his arms and shoulders and back, on his belly and thighs and buttocks.

Bleeding and gasping, Elliott's journey into darkness began. When he was naked, the hooded woman looped a chain around his neck and strode away, yanking him behind her. Elliott had to half run to keep up, and had no breath left to scream when the woman led him barefoot across a carpet of upstanding razor blades. As the slivers of metal shredded the soles of his feet, tears poured from his eyes as freely as the blood that formed a slick trail behind him.

He had never known such agony. It was already too much. He wanted it to stop—and yet a part of him craved to go further. His cock was still pointing the way, still engorged and aching. Almost fainting with pain, he stumbled behind the woman until he felt the chain slacken around his neck, whereupon he stumbled and fell to
his knees. Instantly the woman strode forward and kicked him hard in the belly. As Elliott opened his mouth to whoop in air, the woman grabbed his hair and thrust her shaven vulva into his face. Instinctively Elliott stuck out his tongue and began to lap at her—and then white-hot pain exploded into his mouth and ripped through his head.

The woman had stepped back, taking half his tongue with her. Elliott heard the gristly ripping sound as the sluglike flesh parted. He tasted metal as blood flooded his mouth and spilled down his chin.

Vagina dentata. The woman plucked the clots of bloody tongue from the serrated metal teeth that lined the inside of her cunt and flicked them disdainfully away.

Elliott's head was spinning. The woman yanked on the chain, tightening it. Elliott wanted to plead for respite, for time to recover, or perhaps reconsider, but his mutilated tongue was a mass of throbbing, useless rubber in his mouth, and the cold steel around his throat was crushing his windpipe, giving him no option but to rise to his feet and stumble onward.

He passed through a series of rooms, in each of which he was forced to experience agony upon agony, humiliation upon humiliation. As he slipped to ever greater depths, he felt the essence of himself diminishing, retreating further and further into the increasingly tormented prison of his lacerated flesh. The pain was excruciating, unendurable—and yet somehow he endured. After a while his ordeal became a blur, like a series of terrible, half-remembered nightmares, a parade of photographlike images. He was fellated by the woman with the pincushion tongue; he was forced to fuck a girl who wore a girdle of metal spikes which pierced his flesh each time he thrust forward; he was strapped down while a thin, heated blade was inserted into his anus.

Finally, burned and cut, pierced and pummeled, bitten and bruised, he was dragged into a candlelit room. The floor was dominated by an intricate series of esoteric symbols enclosed within a circular frame, which was constructed of hundreds of rusty, upstanding nails. Elliott was laid atop the circle and strapped down, the
nails piercing his back. He whimpered as a series of women rode his now flaccid and bloodied cock, bearing down on him with their weight, driving the nails in deeper. Eventually he was released and hauled to his feet, only to be strapped, spread-eagled, to a wall. He hung there, legs buckling, for what seemed like hours, the images on the website that had led him to this place reeling endlessly through his shattered mind. He recalled the final image, the hanging man, and hoped it was an indication that his endless night would soon be over. But what would come next? Death? Freedom? Either of those alternatives would be a blessed release.

When they finally took him down, Elliott was more dead than alive. His arms were purple and swollen where the bones and muscles, placed under too much strain, had dislocated and snapped. He crumpled onto his face, now praying for death to take him.

The women—his attendants and tormentors—refused to allow him that luxury, however. They hauled and shoved at his corpulent bulk, like abattoir workers manipulating the carcass of a bull. When they had heaved him onto his back, the hooded woman grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked his head up. Elliott stared blearily at the section of wall to which he had been strapped, and saw that blood from his punctured back had created a messy but accurate impression of the circular construction on the floor. What appeared to be a red smoky light was rising from the bloodied symbols, coagulating in the air in front of the wall. Elliott thought he must be hallucinating when the light seemed suddenly to harden and thicken, to form the shape of a figure.

Then there was a crack and a rush of cold air that smelled of sour milk. A flare of light made Elliott flinch, and when his vision cleared he found himself looking into the dispassionate eyes of a monster.

She—for Elliott had no doubt that the creature was female—was fully eight feet tall and had skin the color of ivory. She was naked, and endowed with six pendulous breasts, at each of which suckled a shapeless sac of thickly-veined flesh. She was heavily pregnant, but even as Elliott watched, her cunt gaped open and
another “baby” was born, splatting to the floor in a muck of blood and black slime. The creature mewled piteously from a puckered aperture, but its mother ignored it. Indeed, her belly began to swell again almost immediately as another of the hideous infants gestated inside her.

The creature regarded Elliott, her expression serene, but her eyes utterly without pity. When she spoke, her voice was both gentle and terrifying.

“So,” she said, “you succumbed to temptation. I knew that you would.”

Elliott's lips parted. “Who . . .” he tried to say through the mangled mess of his tongue.

“I am the Matriarch,” murmured the creature. “I collect children. And tonight, Elliott, I am here to collect you.”

“But I'm not . . . not . . .” Elliott thought more than said.

“Not a child? Oh, but you are. Everyone is someone's child. Even you. Poor, lonely Elliott. And here are your parents to prove it.”

For the first time, Elliott saw that the Matriarch was holding two thin chains in her right hand. Attached to the chains, cowering in the shadows at her heels, were creatures that were little more than mangled scraps of flesh. One was simply a few randomly linked body parts—a sliver of brain, an eye, a withered limb, a thin sac of skin containing a feebly beating heart—but the other was complete enough to identify as something that had once been human.

This second creature stared at Elliott with a combination of sorrow, rage, and regret, which seemed somehow familiar. Then he gasped. Of course. The woman in the library.

“I see you recognize them,” the Matriarch said. “They visited you today. It was part of our pact. They were there to offer you temptation.”

“I don't . . .” Elliott tried to say.

“Understand? Of course not. But I'm afraid that won't save you. I've already been more than generous. I've given you forty years of life.” She smiled sweetly. A mother's smile. “I'm just sentimental at
heart. When your parents summoned me, your mother pleaded so prettily for your life that I simply couldn't refuse her. And so I offered her a deal. I would grant you forty years of life if, at the end of it, she and your father would return to this realm to place temptation in your path. If you resisted, you would become free of my influence forever, but if not . . .” A tinkling laugh. “Your suffering, combined with their knowledge that they have become the architects of your destruction, will be so sweet, Elliott.
Sssooooo
sweet.”

Squatting, she gave birth to another mewling infant. Almost instantly, her belly began to swell once again.

She came forward, dragging what was left of Elliott's parents behind her, the suckling creatures clinging to her swinging breasts. Elliott tried to scramble away as she leaned over, lowering her face toward his, but his wrecked body was a mass of unresponsive agony. She opened her mouth and he smelled the rancid sweetness of sour milk and motherly love.