In fear for his sanity, he began to address them, though he was no longer certain that they were even within earshot.
“Why?” he asked. “Why are you doing this to me?”
The echo of his words roared in his ears, but he scarcely attended to it. More sense impressions were swimming up from the past to torment him. Childhood still lingered on his tongue (milk and frustration) but there were adult feelings joining it now. He was grown! He was mustached and mighty, hands heavy, gut large.
Youthful pleasures had possessed the appeal of newness, but as the years had crept on, and mild sensation lost its potency, stronger and stronger experiences had been called for. And here they came again, more pungent for being laid in the darkness at the back of his head.
He felt untold tastes upon his tongue: bitter, sweet, sour, salty; smelled spice and shit and his mother’s hair; saw cities and skies; saw speed, saw deeps; broke bread with men now dead and was scalded by the heat of their spittle on his cheek.
And of course there were women.
Always, amid the flurry and confusion, memories of women appeared, assaulting him with their scents, their textures, their tastes.
The proximity of this harem aroused him, despite circumstances. He opened his trousers and caressed his cock, more eager to have the seed spilled and so be freed of these creatures than for the pleasure of it.
He was dimly aware, as he worked his inches, that he must make a pitiful sight: a blind man in an empty room, aroused for a dream’s sake. But the wracking, joyless orgasm failed to even slow the relentless display. His knees buckled, and his body collapsed to the boards where his spunk had fallen. There was a spasm of pain as he hit the floor, but the response was washed away before another wave of memories.
He rolled onto his back, and screamed; screamed and begged for an end to it, but the sensations only rose higher still, whipped to fresh heights with every prayer for cessation he offered up.
The pleas became a single sound, words and sense eclipsed by panic. It seemed there was no end to this, but madness. No hope but to be lost to hope.
As he formulated this last, despairing thought, the torment stopped.
All at once; all of it. Cone. Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. He was abruptly bereft of them all. There were seconds then, when he doubted his very existence. Two heartbeats, three, four.
On the fifth beat, he opened his eyes. The room was empty, the doves and the piss-pot gone. The door was closed.
Gingerly, he sat up. His limbs were tingling; his head, wrist, and bladder ached.
And then—a movement at the other end of the room drew his attention.
Where, two moments before, there had been an empty space, there was now a figure. It was the fourth Cenobite, the one that had never spoken, nor shown its face. Not it he now saw: but she. The hood it had worn had been discarded, as had the robes. The woman beneath was gray yet gleaming, her lips bloody, her legs parted so that the elaborate scarification of her pubis was displayed.
She sat on a pile of rotting human heads, and smiled in welcome.
The collision of sensuality and death appalled him. Could he have any doubt that she had personally dispatched these victims? Their rot was beneath her nails, and their tongues—twenty or more—lay out in ranks on her oiled thighs, as if awaiting entrance. Nor did he doubt that the brains now seeping from their ears and nostrils had been driven to insanity before a blow or a kiss had stopped their hearts.
Kircher had lied to him—either that or he’d been horribly deceived. There was no pleasure in the air; or at least not as humankind understood it.
He had made a mistake opening Lemarchand’s box. A very terrible mistake.
“Oh, so you’ve finished dreaming,” said the Cenobite, perusing him as he lay panting on the bare boards. “Good.”
She stood up. The tongues fell to the floor, like a rain of slugs.
“Now we can begin,” she said.
“It’s not quite what I expected,” Julia commented as they stood in the hallway. It was twilight; a cold day in August. Not the ideal time to view a house that had been left empty for so long.
“It needs work,” Rory said. “That’s all.
It’s not been touched since my grandmother died. That’s the best part of three years. And I’m pretty sure she never did anything to it towards the end of her life.”
“And it’s yours?”
“Mine and Frank’s. It was willed to us both. But when was the last time anybody saw big brother?”
She shrugged, as if she couldn’t remember, though she remembered very well. A week before the wedding.
“Someone said he spent a few days here last summer. Rutting away, no doubt. Then he was off again. He’s got no interest in property.”
“But suppose we move in, and then he comes back, wants what’s his?”
“I’ll buy him out. I’ll get a loan from the bank and buy him out. He’s always hard up for cash.”
She nodded, but looked less than persuaded.
“Don’t worry,” he said, going to where she was standing and wrapping his arms around her. “The place is ours, doll. We can paint it and pamper it and make it like heaven.”
He scanned her face. Sometimes—particularly when doubt moved her, as it did now—
her beauty came close to frightening him.
“Trust me,” he said.
“I do.”
“All right then. What say we start moving in on Sunday?”
Sunday.
It was still the Lord’s Day up this end of the city. Even if the owners of these well-dressed houses and well-pressed children were no longer believers, they still observed the sabbath. A few curtains were twitched aside when Lewton’s van drew up, and the unloading began; some curious neighbors even sauntered past the house once or twice, on the pretext of walking the hounds; but nobody spoke to the new arrivals, much less offered a hand with the furniture. Sunday was not a day to break sweat.
Julia looked after the unpacking, while Rory organized the unloading of the van, with Lewton and Mad Bob providing the extra muscle. It took four round-trips to transfer the bulk of the stuff from Alexandra Road, and at the end of the day there was still a good deal of bric-a-brac left behind, to be collected at a later point.
About two in the afternoon, Kirsty turned up on the doorstep.
“Came to see if I could give you a hand,”
she said, with a tone of vague apology in her voice.
“Well, you’d better come in,” Julia said.
She went back into the front room, which was a battlefield in which only chaos was winning, and quietly cursed Rory. Inviting the lost soul round to offer her services was his doing, no doubt of it. She would be more of a hindrance than a help; her dreamy, perpetually defeated manner set Julia’s teeth on edge.
“What can I do?” Kirsty asked. “Rory said—”
“Yes,” said Julia. “I’m sure he did.”
“Where is he? Rory, I mean.”
“Gone back for another vanload, to add to the misery.”
“Oh.”
Julia softened her expression. “You know it’s very sweet of you,” she said, “to come round like this, but I don’t think there’s much you can do just at the moment.”
Kirsty flushed slightly. Dreamy she was, but not stupid.
“I see,” she said. “Are you sure? Can’t …I mean, maybe I could make a cup of coffee for you?”
“Coffee,” said Julia. The thought of it made her realize just how parched her throat had become. “Yes,” she conceded. “That’s not a bad idea.”
The coffee making was not without its minor traumas. No task Kirsty undertook was ever entirely simple. She stood in the kitchen, boiling water in a pan it had taken a quarter of an hour to find, thinking that maybe she shouldn’t have come after all.
Julia always looked at her so strangely, as if faintly baffled by the fact that she hadn’t been smothered at birth. No matter. Rory had asked her to co
me, hadn’t he? And that was invitation enough. She would not have turned down the chance of his smile for a hundred Julias.
The van arrived twenty-five minutes later, minutes in which the women had twice attempted, and twice failed, to get a conversation simmering. They had little in common.
Julia the sweet, the beautiful, the winner of glances and kisses, and Kirsty the girl with the pale handshake, whose eyes were only ever as bright as Julia’s before or after tears.
She had long ago decided that life was unfair. But why, when she’d accepted that bitter truth, did circumstance insist on rubbing her face in it?
She surreptitiously watched Julia as she worked, and it seemed to Kirsty that the woman was incapable of ugliness. Every gesture—a stray hair brushed from the eyes with the back of the hand, dust blown from a favorite cup—all were infused with such effortless grace. Seeing it, she understood Rory’s doglike adulation, and understanding it, despaired afresh.
He came in, at last, squinting and sweaty.
The afternoon sun was fierce. He grinned at her, parading the ragged line of his front teeth that she had first found so irresistible.
“I’m glad you could come,” he said.
“Happy to help—” she replied, but he had already looked away, at Julia.
“How’s it going?”
“I’m losing my mind,” she told him.
“Well, now you can rest from your labors,” he said. “We brought the bed this trip.”
He gave her a conspiratorial wink, but she didn’t respond.
“Can I help with unloading?” Kirsty offered.
“Lewton and M.B. are doing it,” came Rory’s reply.
“Oh.”
“But I’d give an arm and a leg for a cup of tea.”
“We haven’t found the tea,” Julia told him.
“Oh. Maybe a coffee, then?”
“Right,” said Kirsty. “And for the other two?”
“They’d kill for a cup.”
Kirsty went back to the kitchen, filled the small pan to near brimming, and set it back on the stove. From the hallway she heard Rory supervising the next unloading.
It was the bed, the bridal bed. Though she tried very hard to keep the thought of his embracing Julia out of her mind, she could not.
As she stared into the water, and it simmered and steamed and finally boiled, the same painful images of their pleasure came back and back.
While the trios were away, gathering the fourth and final load of the day, Julia lost her temper with the unpacking. It was a disaster, she said; everything had been parceled up and put into the tea chests in the wrong order. She was having to disinter perfectly useless items to get access to the bare necessities.
Kirsty kept her silence, and her place in the kitchen, washing the soiled cups.
Cursing louder, Julia left the chaos and went out for a cigarette on the front step. She leaned against the open door, and breathed the pollen-gilded air. Already, though it was only the twenty-first of August, the afternoon was tinged with a smoky scent that heralded autumn.
She had lost track of how fast the day had gone, for as she stood there a bell began to ring for Evensong: the run of chimes rising and falling in lazy waves. The sound was reassuring. It made her think of her child-hood, though not—that she could remember—of any particular day or place. Simply of being young, of mystery.
It was four years since she’d last stepped into a church: the day of her marriage to Rory, in fact. The thought of that day—or rather, of the promise it had failed to fulfill—soured the moment. She left the step, the chimes in full flight, and turned back into the house. After the touch of the sun on her upturned face, the interior seemed gloomy.
Suddenly she tired to the point of tears.
They would have to assemble the bed before they could put their heads down to sleep tonight, and they had yet to decide which room they would use as the master bedroom. She would do that now, she elected, and so avoid having to return to the front room, and to ever-mournful Kirsty.
The bell was still pealing when she opened the door of the front room on the second floor. It was the largest of the three upper rooms—a natural choice—but the sun had not got in today (or any other day this summer) because the blinds were drawn across the window. The room was consequently chillier than anywhere else in the house; the air stagnant. She crossed the stained floorboards to the window, intending to remove the blind.
At the sill, a strange thing. The blind had been securely nailed to the window frame, effectively cutting out the least intrusion of life from the sunlit street beyond. She tried to pull the material free, but failed. The workman, whoever he’d been, had done a thorough job.
No matter; she’d have Rory take a claw hammer to the nails when he got back. She turned from the window, and as she did so she was suddenly and forcibly aware that the bell was still summoning the faithful. Were they not coming tonight? Was the hook not sufficiently baited with promises of paradise? The thought was only half alive; it withered in moments. But the bell rolled on, reverberating around the room. Her limbs, already aching with fatigue, seemed dragged down further by each peal. Her head throbbed intolerably.
The room was hateful, she’d decided; it was stale, and its benighted walls clammy.
Despite its size, she would not let Rory persuade her into using it as the master bedroom. Let it rot.
She started toward the door, but as she came within a yard of it, the corners of the room seemed to creak, and the door slammed. Her nerves jangled. It was all she could do to prevent herself from sobbing.
Instead she simply said, “Go to hell,” and snatched at the handle. It turned easily (why should it not? yet she was relieved) and the door swung open. From the hall below, a splash of warmth and ocher light.
She closed the door behind her and, with a queer satisfaction the root of which she couldn’t or wouldn’t fathom turned the key in the lock.
As she did so, the bell stopped.
“But it’s the biggest of the rooms . . .”
“I don’t like it, Rory. It’s damp. We can use the back room.”
“If we can get the bloody bed through the door.”
“Of course we can. You know we can.”
“Seems a waste of a good room,” he protested, knowing full well that this was a fait accompli.
“Mother knows best,” she told him, and smiled at him with eyes whose luster was far from maternal.
The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.
Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise.
Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mel-lowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness.
Even winter—the hardest season, the most implacable—dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself. So August gave way to September and there were few complaints.
With work, the house on Lodovico Street began to look more hospitable. There were even visits from neighbors, who—after sizing up the couple—spoke freely of how happy they were to have number fifty-five occupied again. Only one of them made any mention of Frank, referring in passing to the odd fellow who’d lived in the house for a few weeks the previous summer. There was a moment of embarrassment when Rory revealed the tenant to have been his brother, but it was soon glossed over by Julia, whose power to charm knew no bounds.
Rory had seldom made mention of Frank during the years of his marriage to Julia, though he and his brother were only eighteen months apart in age, and had, as children, been inseparable. This Julia had learned on an occasion of drunken reminiscing—a month or two before the wedding—when Rory had spoken at length about Frank. It had been melancholy talk. The brothers’ path
s had diverged considerably once they’d passed through adolescence, and Rory regretted it. Regretted still more the pain Frank’s wild life-style had brought to their parents. It seemed that when Frank appeared, once in a blue moon, from whichever corner of the globe he was presently laying waste, he only brought grief. His tales of adventures in the shallows of criminality, his talk of whores and petty theft, all appalled their parents. But there had been worse, or so Rory had said. In his wilder moments Frank had talked of a life lived in delirium, of an appetite for experience that conceded no moral imperative.
Was it the tone of Rory’s telling, a mixture of revulsion and envy, that had so piqued Julia’s curiosity? Whatever the reason, she had been quickly seized by an unquenchable curiosity concerning this madman.
Then, barely a fortnight before the wedding, the black sheep had appeared in the flesh. Things had gone well for him of late.
He was wearing gold rings on his fingers, and his skin was tight and tanned. There was little outward sign of the monster Rory had described. Brother Frank was smooth as a polished stone. She had succumbed to his charm within hours.
A strange time ensued. As the days crept toward the date of the wedding she found herself thinking less and less of her husband-to-be, and more and more of his brother.
They were not wholly dissimilar; a certain lilt in their voices, and their easy manner, marked them as siblings. But to Rory’s qualities Frank brought something his brother would never have: a beautiful desperation.
Perhaps what had happened next had been inevitable; and no matter how hard she’d fought her instincts, she would only have postponed the consummation of their feelings for each other. At least that was how she tried to excuse herself later. But when all the self-recrimination was done with, she still treasured the memory of their first—and last—encounter.
Kirsty had been at the house, hadn’t she?, on some matrimonial business, when Frank had arrived. But by that telepathy that comes with desire (and fades with it) Julia had known that today was the day. She’d left Kirsty to her list making or suchlike, and taken Frank upstairs on the pretext of showing him the wedding dress. That was how she remembered it— that he’d asked to see the dress—and she’d put the veil on, laughing to think of herself in white, and then he’d been at, her shoulder, lifting the veil, and she’d laughed on, laughed and laughed, as though to test, the strength of his purpose. He had not been cooled by her mirth however; nor had he wasted time with the niceties of a seduction. The smooth exterior gave way to cruder stuff almost immediately. Their coupling had had in every regard but the matter of her acquiescence, all the aggression and the joylessness of rape.