Hellbound Hearts (18 page)

“He didn't have any money, did he?” Jake said flatly. “He was hungry.”

“No, he's doing great. He's in a show.” She was lying to him.

He studied her. And then she smiled faintly. “That's great. But you agreed not to invite him over. He upsets you.”

He touched her cheek. She laid her hand over his but she couldn't actually feel his skin on hers. Then he headed for his home office, which they had actually planned to be a nursery.
That
hadn't
happened, either, and Dr. Everson said maybe that was really why she felt so teetery all the time.

After he shut the door, she burst into tears. She ran into their bedroom and flopped into Danai's nest. Damn him to hell and back again. Damn them both. Why did Danai have to make her admit how lonely and
nothing
she was? He
was
a snake and she
was
going to stop seeing him. And as for his stupid box—

She grabbed it up. It was warm to her touch. Startled, she gazed down at the etched sides, at the metallic runes and sigils, which seemed to be
moving
.

Lindsay thought she saw a little section that extended from the top of the box, like a lever. Her palm seemed to melt around the sharp corners; she hissed, sensing a cut being made; feeling pain, but at a distance.
Feeling
.

I don't feel anymore
, she thought.
Not really
. Sex? She faked all of it, timing her gasps and her writhing so that Jake would be pleased and finish sooner. Sex was beige, like her bedspread.

She ran her fingers along the top, the side, of the cube. A droplet of blood ran into a channel, and she saw the steps she must take to open it. Saw how she had closed the box of her life around herself:

If I hadn't moved in with Jake, I would dream of dying from pneumonia. But I did move in. And so . . . who wants to die of anything? That's so crazy. Danai can talk like that because his mind won't fixate on it like mine. Mine is scrambled.

Danai's free to be as silly and irresponsible as he wants. Oh, how I wish . . .

She jerked, seeing that she had pressed a circle on one of the sides. The top of the box rose up, star-shaped, and began to rotate counterclockwise.

A bell tolled, low and deep, and the room filled with light. No, the light slanted, glowing stripes of blue light, cyanotic. The stripes became rectangles—doors, widows. Her hands shook as she whirled in a circle.

Am I really seeing this?

“Jake,” she whispered, wrapping her hands around the puzzle
box; the bell tolling as if from deep inside her rib cage,
Bring out your dead
.

The blue-white color stretched and bloomed. Shapes began to form—human figures, outlined with purplish black auras. She heard the clanking of chain and snap-crack of a whip.

Then a man stepped out of the icy blue light. His skin was dead white and his eyes were two wounds; his eyelids and lips were wrenched back by hooks. He wore a black robe, like some kind of monk, as the light swirled around him like mist.

She had gone crazy, really and finally. Psychotic break. Dr. Everson had threatened her with it. Jake had fretted about it. Danai told her to embrace it, learn from it, and move back out of it. He hadn't understood. He had never understood.

The man focused on her, moving toward her. He didn't smile, just kept coming. She backed away, her calves grazing her solid bed frame.

“You're not here,” she whispered.

“Oh, but I am. What is your pleasure?” he asked her. His voice was icy hot, like frost and lava. His mutilated eyes were red-and-black circles. What had happened to his lips? And there were chains in his skull, inside the bones . . .

Two more figures materialized in the blue. One was a bald woman in a stiff black gown with a wide, belled skirt, the bodice cupping her breasts. The ends of needles gleamed on either side of her swollen nipples. Black leather fabric crisscrossed her torso, revealing flesh sliced open with myriad cuts from beneath her sharp chin to her sex, which was shaved. Hooks pierced her stark flesh and folded it back in intricate folds, like origami, the underside a scintillating crimson.

The third was a creature that was nothing but an open sideways mouth on stiltlike legs, chittering and gibbering through clacking fangs. It was six feet tall and as it skittered toward her, mucus dribbled over the rows of sharp white teeth. Mucus and blood.

Lindsay trembled as the coppery odor of blood slid over her face. She was swaying, reeling. Unbelievably, the blare of the TV
permeated the room. Jake had turned on the football game. Jake was close by.

“What is your pleasure?” said the man again. His voice was a caress across her cheek . . . and then a slap.

And then a kiss.

She jerked and backed away.

“This isn't happening. This isn't real.”

“You summoned us,” said the man. He raised a hand and pointed to the box gripped in her hand. Blood was running down her forearm and dripping off her elbow. “We came. Now you belong to us.”

Then a fourth figure appeared in the room, a man wearing a half mask of black leather that appeared to be sewn to his face. The black leather mask molded features hard and leonine, with sensual, pierced lips curved in a smile. His black hair was pulled so hard into a ponytail that oozing cracks had formed along his scalp line. His nipples were pierced. Large multifaceted stones, like rubies, dangled from them. Ornate scars ran beneath his navel to his penis, which had been sliced open; two silver spheres dangled from the bifurcated head; and when he walked toward Lindsay, they chimed in unison—the tolling bell she had heard. Was
still
hearing.

“I didn't summon you,” she croaked. Her lips were numb; she wasn't sure how she could manage to speak.

“We're here. You'll be coming,” said the first man, with the jeweled head.

The naked man in the mask laughed and came toward her. He was erect. His smile was hellish.

“You'll be coming,” he echoed, and she fell into his voice, low and seductive and like nothing she had ever heard in her life. It held her up as something slid along the curves of her body and she
felt
—

“No, there's been a mistake. Jake!” she cried, as the crowd on his TV burst into cheers and applause.

“No mistake,” said the man in the mask. “Let us begin.”

A hook shot across the room and ripped out the darkest, bluest vein in the back of her hand. Another caught her cheek, and yanked.

“I'm sorry,” the police detective told Jake. Her name was Maile Baker.

“Thank you,” Jake murmured in as neutral a voice as possible. He stood in the detective's windowless, airless office, reeling.
Cold case
. His Lindsay.

Detective Baker indicated the plain cardboard box on her desk. “These are her things. You're free to take them. You must know how frustrated we are,” she said. “It's been a year.”

Almost to the day. His chest was tight. “Yes, thank you.”

He took the subway home, the box in his lap. When he got home, he examined each object: some postcards and letters, her laptop computer . . . and the puzzle box, which Dan had given her the night of her disappearance. About a month later, Dan had disappeared, too. . . into insanity. He had always had a fragile hold on reality, that one. Which was why Dr. Everson and Jake had ordered Lindsay to steer clear of him.

“She's in the box,” Danai had gibbered. To him, to the police. “Open the box, Jake in the Box, open the box.”

No one could get the box open, and the police investigated other leads. Now she was a cold case.

Thunder rolled across the ceiling. Jake sat in his bedroom, once
their
bedroom, and held the box up to the artificial light from a lamp beside the bed. The box felt warm in his hand. And—

“Ouch,” he said, as a static charge shot through him.

And . . .
there
. He saw how to open the box as clearly as if someone was standing beside him and pointing to the indentation in the center panel of wood. His lips parted. How had no one noticed it before?

He touched the panel, and the box
zzz
'ed with electricity. A soft blue glow emanated from it.

He pushed on the panel, and it rose straight up.

A tolling bell rang inside his hollow chest, inside his hollow heart.

He was the Ravisher, and he was Lindsay's Cenobite. He had penetrated her and taken her and tortured her and skinned her; he had raped her and violated her and the pain was unbearable. He slid a knife under each cell of her body and pulled it back, hooking it in place; he pierced her labia and her urethra and he sounded her with lightning bolts and knives, talons, teeth, fingernails, and the screams of his other victims. He tormented her and dissected her.

Every second of every hour for centuries of time.

Hell had other clocks; the Engineer had made all of them, and they ticked too slowly to endure; clanged the alarm too fast for human hearts to catch up. The Ravisher brought Lindsay to life each time she died in sheer agony,
from
sheer agony; she was spreadeagled so tightly and so often that her body would explode into pieces by sheer force of habit.

The pain . . .

The pain . . .

“You're not there yet,” he would hiss at her, and strike her, and slice her. She thought she would become numb to it; she moaned and writhed, trying to fake the worst she could imagine, so he would stop; because while he tore her apart, he fucked her apart. He had sex with every wound, incision, and fragment. He pushed and he came, all over her and often. All she felt was agony. Endless.

She panted, moaned; then, after more centuries of new and inventive torments, she fell silent.

“Yes,” he whispered into her soul.

More centuries.

And more.

Then:

She stood in the center of a labyrinth. The cold gray walls spread outward, like her arms and legs, pinioned to the torture bed of the Ravisher. She saw the road she had traveled, Jake and Danai's road that she had
not
traveled, and the roads of other possibilities. Spurred into heightened self-awareness by her pain, she crawled
down the passages, then staggered, then walked. Blood gushed down the corridors and striated the walls; she knew she was inside her own body, and then inside her own mind, pushing hard to be born.

Inside her own soul, tearing it apart herself. With his help. Her tormentor, her beloved. To let her out.

To let
her
out.

“Yes,” she whispered to the Ravisher, floating, rising to her heaven. He was her angel; he had pushed her through to the side of pleasure. Endorphins of the body and the soul, to the essential core of death. “I know who I am now. You did this for me.”

“It was you who did it,” he told her, as they flew through black skies together, on the wings of delight. “Your pain spoke to you. Without pain, there is no growing.

“And I have given you more pain than anyone can imagine.”

Turn it this way and that way and this way
, said the voice in Jake's mind. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled, and he listened to the voice as the room turned blue; as tears streamed down his face and
someone
moved the cube in his hands while the panels opened.

The bell tolled.

“I will come for you,” he whispered, half mad.

“I know who I am now,” Lindsay told the Ravisher, as he stretched her and racked her. As he forced her and brutalized her. “I know exactly who I am.”

“That is good,” he said, smiling broadly, as she fainted again.

When she woke, she expected to see his masked face above her. Instead she saw Jake's. A little rounder, a little older, and his eyes huge with horror.

“Oh my God, Lindsay,” he whispered, reaching out to her, drawing back his hands. His face was white, and tears were streaming down his cheeks. “My darling, my poor darling.”

She stared at him, then down at herself. Large leather straps held her in place as she was spread-eagled on two wooden beams
over a fiery pit. White-hot irons pierced her sex, and she smelled her own cooking flesh.