they be remembered.
He felt close to exploding. Surely the world outside his head-the room, and the birds beyond the
door-they, for all their shrieking excesses, could not be as overwhelming as his memories. Better that, he thought, and tried to open his eyes. But they wouldn't unglue. Tears or pus or needle and thread had sealed them up.
He thought of the faces of the Cenobites: the hooks, the chains. Had they worked some similar surgery upon him, locking him up behind his eyes with the parade of his history?
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 bead.
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. Gone. 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 a 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.
TWO
1
"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 nowher beauty came close to frightening him.
"Trust me," he said.
"I do."
"All right then. What say we start moving in on Sunday?"
2
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-"