The Hellbound Heart

The dark was almost perfect, and she was glad of it. Her eyes rested against the night, their surfaces chilled.

Then, from the far side of the room, she heard a sound.

It was no louder than the din of a cockroach running behind the skirting boards. After seconds, it stopped. She held her breath. It came again. This time there seemed to be some pattern to the sound; a primitive code.

They were laughing like loons downstairs. The noise awoke desperation in her. What would she not do, to be free of such company?

She swallowed, and spoke to the darkness.

‘I hear you,’ she said, not certain of why the words came, or to whom they were addressed.

The cockroach scratches ceased for a moment, and then began again, more urgently. She stepped away from the door and moved towards the noise. It continued, as if summoning her.

It was easy to miscalculate in the dark, and she reached the wall before she’d expected to. Raising her hands, she began to run her palms over the painted plaster. The surface was not uniformly cold. There was a place, she judged it to be halfway between door and window, where the chill became so intense she had to break contact. The cockroach stopped scratching.

There was a moment when she swam, totally disoriented, in darkness and silence. And then something moved in front of her. A trick of her mind’s eye, she assumed, for there was only imagined light to be had here. But the next spectacle showed her the error of that assumption.

The wall was alight; or rather something behind it burned with a cold luminescence which made the solid brick seem insubstantial stuff. More: the wall seemed to be coming apart, segments of it shifting and dislocating like a magician’s prop, oiled panels giving on to hidden boxes whose sides in turn collapsed to reveal some further hiding place. She watched fixedly, not daring even to blink for fear she miss some detail of this extraordinary sleight-of-hand, while pieces of the world came apart in front of her eyes.

Then, suddenly, somewhere in this ever more elaborate system of sliding fragments, she saw (or again, seemed to see) movement. Only now did she realize that she’d been holding her breath since this display began, and was beginning to become lightheaded. She tried to empty her lungs of the stale air, and take a draught of fresh, but her body would not obey this simple instruction.

Somewhere in her innards a tic of panic began. The hocus-pocus had stopped now, leaving one part of her admiring quite dispassionately the tinkling music which was coming from the wall, the other part fighting the fear that rose in her throat step by step.

Again, she tried to take a breath, but it was as if her body had died, and she was staring out of it, unable now to breathe or blink or swallow.

The spectacle of the unfolding wall had now ceased entirely and she saw something flicker across the brick; ragged enough to be shadow but too substantial.

It was human, she saw, or had been. But the body had been ripped apart and sewn together again with most of its pieces either missing or twisted and blackened as if in a furnace. There was an eye, gleaming at her, and the ladder of a spine, the vertebrae stripped of muscle; a few unrecognizable fragments of anatomy. That was it. That such a thing might live beggared reason – what little flesh it owned was hopelessly corrupted. Yet live it did. Its eye, despite the rot it was rooted in, scanned her every inch, up and down.

She felt no fear in its presence. The thing was weaker than her by far. It moved a little in its cell, looking for some modicum of comfort. But there was none to be had; not for a creature that wore its frayed nerves on its bleeding sleeve. Every place it might lay its body brought pain: this she knew indisputably. She pitied it. And with pity came release. Her body expelled dead air, and sucked in living. Her oxygen-starved brain reeled.

Even as she did so it spoke, a hole opening up in the flayed ball of the monster’s head and issuing a single, weightless word.

The word was: ‘Julia.’

2

Kirsty put down her glass, and tried to stand up.

‘Where are you going?’ Neville asked her.

‘Where do you think?’ she replied, consciously trying to prevent the words from slurring.

‘Do you need any help?’ Rory inquired. The alcohol made his lids lazy, and his grin lazier still.

‘I am house-trained,’ she replied, the riposte greeted with laughter all round. She was pleased with herself; off-the-cuff wit was not her forte. She stumbled to the door.

‘It’s the last room on the right at the end of the landing,’ Rory informed her.

‘I know,’ she said, and stepped out into the hall.

She didn’t usually enjoy the sensation of drunkenness, but tonight she was revelling in it. She felt loose-limbed and light-hearted. She might well regret this tomorrow, but tomorrow would have to take care of itself. For tonight, she was flying.

She found her way to the bathroom, and relieved her aching bladder, then splashed some water on to her face. That done, she began her return journey.

She had taken three steps along the landing when she realized that somebody had put out the landing light while she was in the bathroom, and that same somebody was now standing a few yards away from her. She stopped.

‘Hello…?’ she said. Had the cat-breeder followed her upstairs, in the hope of proving he wasn’t spayed?

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