Hellbound Hearts (10 page)

Not soon enough, the location scout was over, and I held back as the crew headed down the stairs and out the door. I gently placed my hand on Iris's elbow. “Can I give you a ride home?” I asked her.

She blushed, and the scarlet flush that filled her cheeks made my heart—and parts even more private—dance. She smiled sweetly and looked at the floor, like a scene from an old movie, anachronistic but charming, and then said, “I'd like that.”

The rest of the crew climbed their way into the van, giving us the knowing eye as I kept Iris behind with me. Surely they giggled and made ribald conjectures about us all the way back to Bray.

“Wait,” I told her as she started toward my Jaguar. “I want to show you something.”

She looked at me trustingly but questioningly. I put my finger to my lips, conspiratorially, then closed the door, shutting out the world.

I took her hand and led her up the stairs.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Something amazing,” I replied, my body tingling with an erotic thrill that filled me with giddy eagerness unknown since my first phallic insertion.

At the top of the stairs, I paused for a moment before I reached out and opened the door to the uppermost chamber. A wedge of waning sunlight led the way, and I stepped her inside. The room, now bereft of all but the huge mirror, was heating up again.

“It's hot in here,” she said, tiny beads gathering in the fine, virtually invisible fuzz above her glossy upper lip. I wanted to lick it off.

“I noticed that, too. Here, look.”

Through the shadows, I led her to the mirror. The room began to fill with its own glow, feeding on the heat of her menstruation. I could feel the room itself swell with excited anticipation.

I stood her in front of the mirror. “Look how beautiful you are.” And she did. Her face, now sanguine with heat and thrill, was delectable. I eased up behind her and kissed the nape of her neck. Perspiration was emerging everywhere, sheening her body in a glitter of wetness. She closed her eyes and turned her head to me for the kiss, and I did not disappoint her. I nursed on her lips, eased my exploratory tongue into her receptive, sucking mouth, and held her face against my own, my hands holding on to the back of her head.

When finally we pulled apart, we were both breathing hard.

I took the top button of her blouse and opened it, starting it for her. “Let me see you,” I told her.

She was hesitant. “It's . . . it's my time of the month.”

“Do you think that matters a whit to me?” She had no idea it only made me hungrier. “Please.”

I stepped away from her as she slowly unbuttoned her blouse, revealing sweet, barely adolescent breasts that did not require the assistance of a brassiere. She was shy about them, but I pulled her hands away as she tried to cover them. “No. They're lovely. Now the rest.”

“Only if you do.” I smiled and kissed her again, this time more perfunctorily. And then I, too, proceeded to disrobe before her and the mirror. She stared into my eyes and at my gradually revealed body so intently that she did not seem to notice what the mirror now reflected behind her: the hungry, gleaming Stonehenge of torture that surrounded us.

It was so unlike real life, like a cheesy romantic movie, the two of us standing there naked, having kissed only twice. But there we were, sweating, dying for each other, filled with an unquenchable thirst that went out of control in this mad room, this dungeon, this abattoir. I folded my arms around her and, as her eyes closed in ecstasy, backed her away from the mirror and into the center of the torture devices. I saw a tiny rivulet of blood trickle down her bare thigh, and felt the room rear up in hunger.

And then, as she grew slick with welcome, I eagerly entered her.

The heat inside her body was almost unbearably joyous and thrilling . . . for a moment. But as soon as I was fully inside, her vagina closed its mouth and clamped tightly shut, locking me in as tightly as if with teeth.

It hurt.

And then, blessed unconsciousness . . .
again
.

And
again
I woke in this cursed manse, this time suspended above the wooden floor by chains that ended in hooks that had been ripped all the way through my wrists and ankles. Iris, still naked and sweating and rosy of complexion, was likewise crucified. Both of our bodies were drenched in a hot, slick overcoat of our own blood, and the pain was excruciating. Excruciating enough that we were locked together at our nexus by my uncontrollable throbbing erection.

But we were not alone, nor were we in the dark.

Bright lights artfully illuminated us to best effect, as the familiar thrum of a 35mm film camera rolled. I looked up to see that Cunt Face had been joined by two other members of her ilk: stitched, malformed, reformed monstrosities that had once been human but now were merely humanoid—hungry, slavering beasts bound in thick, heavy chains and dense black, bloodstained leather. One watched through the eye of its penis-head, its collar pulled back like a foreskin. The other was a patchwork of fur and flesh, stapled together in seemingly random fashion.

It became immediately apparent to me, and surely to Iris, that we were there to serve a purpose, to feed a need, both literally and figuratively. Made of flesh and blood, living, breathing, bleeding puppets of meat and mind, we were conjoined and displayed for the amusement and edification of the underworld. Our life and death would be eternal, captured in a magic box that would love us as we loved one another: sloppily, hungrily, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It was a different kind of love story; boy meets girl, boy penetrates girl, boy and girl are mounted and displayed and dismantled to entertain us. A meet-cute without the cute.

Technicolor blood dripped onto the hungry wooden floor below,
as the familiar stuttering mechanical sound of film passing through the gate commenced.

And then the machinery came alive: blades began to whirr and move in with an insatiable appetite. Iris and I both screamed in agony, fear, and mutual orgasm as blades began to spin and strip us of our meat. It began to revolve and peel a long strip of our flesh, and we took on the appearance of a barber pole. The cameras rolled, and I lost my grip on consciousness, unable to call out “Cut!”

Christopher Golden & Mike Mignola Illustrations by Mike Mignola

On that particular October morning—a lovely fall day, a Wednesday—the autumn light fell across the rooftops of Oxford with a hint of gold sufficient to transform the view from mundane to wondrous. Colin Radford, a young man of serious scholarship, found himself so taken by the panorama visible from the classroom window that he had difficulty following the threads of Professor Sidgwick's lecture on Suetonius. This was especially troubling when Colin considered that the biographies that comprised the Roman historian's
De Vita Caesarum
had been amongst the most compelling reading that the young man had encountered in his time at Oxford, second only to the comedic plays of Aristophanes.

Colin Radford adored university—all the thinking, the constant discourse over questions of philosophy, scholarship, and theology. At times he felt as though he had been waiting all his life to escape dreary Norwich, with its forbidding cathedral and the chill wind that swept across the Channel all the way from the Russian steppes. He had found in Oxford a truer home, where men put their minds to work upon the mechanisms of intellect. There were kindred spirits here, competitive though they might be.

So for Colin to allow his mind to wander required a vista of unparalleled beauty. And yet on certain mornings, Oxford glistened in such a way as to have earned the lyrical nickname that romantics had bestowed upon it.

The City of Dreaming Spires, they called it.

Had he known on that morning that he would never see it again, Colin would have been filled with such grief as to make him weep. And yet there was so much more grief to come.

A mods student named Chisholm hurried into the room the moment the lecture concluded, earning a disapproving glare from Professor Sidgwick, even as he handed a folded sheet of cream parchment to the bespectacled old man. Colin watched Sidgwick dismiss the lad with a sniff and then glance at the note, which could only have come from the headmaster's office. Somehow, even before it happened, he knew what would come next. Sidgwick lifted his gaze, glanced around the room, and they locked eyes.

“Mr. Radford, come here, if you please.”

Colin felt a strange heat prickle his face. He did not fear Sidgwick the way he knew some others did, though if he thought the professor had caught him drifting during the lecture, he might have done well to be afraid of his wrath. Yet the look on the old man's face, the way he stroked his pointed beard, and the almost militaristic manner in which he held that crisp letter still half raised in his right hand, made the young scholar cringe.

“Yes, sir,” Colin said, and as the other students departed, he made for the lectern.

Sidgwick looked at him over the tops of his spectacles. “You're from Norwich, lad? I'd never have thought it.”

The significance of this—whether it contained compliment or insult—escaped Colin, so he did not reply.

“Instructions from the headmaster,” Sidgwick said, proffering the note in his right hand, fingers bent as if in a claw, half crushing the parchment. “You're to return home at once. You've a train leaving in less than two hours, so you'd best be on your way.”

Poison twisted in Colin's gut. Expelled? How could it be? He'd done nothing.

“But, sir—” he began.

Sidgwick must have read the reaction in his face, for the old man instantly waved a hand in the air as though to erase such thoughts.

“It's not expulsion, boy. You've been summoned.”

Reluctantly—as if by not doing so he might avert his fate—Colin took the note.

“But why?” he asked as he unfolded it and began to read.

Sidgwick did not wait for him to discover it on his own. “It appears,” the professor said, “that your father has disappeared.”

The Radford ancestral home rested on a hill in the city of Norwich, on the eastern coast of England. The seventeenth-century manse neither perched nor loomed upon its hill, and though there were many trees on the sprawling grounds, neither could it rightly be said to nestle there. Even to say the old house “stood” on that slope, with its distant view of the blue-gray waters of the English Channel, would have been a kindness. No, Colin had always thought of the house as resting there. After more than two hundred years providing hearth and shelter for the Radford family, its halls echoing with the shouts and laughter of Radford children.

Now, as the carriage that had awaited him at the train station climbed the long drive up to the front door, Colin stared at the house and considered another interpretation for his insistence upon the lazy imagery that accompanied the house's personification in his mind. Absent his father's inhabitance, the house seemed a body without its soul, a still husk of a thing, awaiting burial. Whether his own arrival might breathe some new life into the stones and beams of the place he quite doubted, as he had no intention of remaining forever, or even for very long, once his father's whereabouts had been ascertained.

For all the golden, autumnal beauty he had cherished in Oxford,
here in Norwich there was only gray. The sky, the stones, the prematurely bare trees, the pallor of its citizens, and the windchopped water of the Channel, all gray.

The carriage came to a halt, and it was not until he had climbed down and retrieved his single case that he realized he had taken for granted the comfort afforded him by the familiar clip-clop of horses' hooves on the road and the rattle of the conveyance itself. Without it, here on the hill, the only sound remaining was the wind, which, when it gusted through the hollows and eaves of the old house, moaned with the grief of a forlorn spirit or a heartbroken widow.

Fortunately, Colin Radford did not believe in ghosts. Prior to university, he had lived all of his life in this house and he knew it as a lonely place, but not haunted.

Still, he hesitated as the carriage driver snapped his reins and the carriage began to roll away. The sound that had been a comfort receded; soon not even its promise would remain and the wind would rule. Better to be inside. The timbers and stones still moaned, but sorrowful as they were—gray sounds in a gray house in a gray city—they were familiar sounds.

As he started toward the door, it swung inward. Colin looked up, expecting Filgate or one of the other servants, but the silhouette that greeted him—stepping forward, bent and defeated—belonged to the nearest thing the estate did have to a ghost: his grandmother, Abigail.

“Took your time about it, didn't you?” she said.

Trouble on the rails had delayed his arrival in London until after the last train had left for Norwich for the day, so he had been forced to spend the night in the capital and board the rescheduled train this morning. But the old woman's disapproving tone and baleful gaze discouraged any explanation. Let her think what she wished.