“Goodness me, no,” the voice gushed, “I was just going to the bathroom.” A pause; then: “You go back down. Enjoy yourself.”
At this cue Kirsty moved toward her along the landing. At the last possible moment Julia stepped out of the way, avoiding even the slightest physical contact.
“Sleep well,” Kirsty said at the top of the stairs.
But there was no reply forthcoming from the shadow on the landing.
Julia didn’t sleep well. Not that night, nor any night that followed.
What she’d seen in the damp room, what she’d heard and, finally, felt—was enough to keep easy slumbers at bay forever, or so she began to believe.
He was here. Brother Frank was here, in the house—and had been all the time.
Locked away from the world in which she lived and breathed, but close enough to make the frail, pitiful contact he had. The whys and the wherefores of this she had no clue to; the human detritus in the wall had neither the strength nor the time to articulate its condition.
All it said, before the wall began to close on it again, and its wreckage was once more eclipsed by brick and plaster, was “Julia “—then, simply: “It’s Frank “—and at the very end the word “Blood.”
Then it was gone completely, and her legs had given way beneath her. She’d half fallen, half staggered, backward against the opposite wall. By the time she gathered her wits about her once more there was no mysterious light, no wasted figure cocooned in the brick. Reality’s hold was absolute once again.
Not quite absolute perhaps. Frank was still here, in. the damp room. Of that she had no doubt. Out of sight he might be, but not out of mind. He was trapped somehow between the sphere she occupied and some other place: a place of bells and troubled darkness. Had he died? Was that it? Perished in the empty room the previous summer, and now awaiting exorcism? If so, what had happened to his earthly remains? Only further exchange with Frank himself, or the remnants thereof, would provide an explanation.
Of the means by which she could lend the lost soul strength she had little doubt. He had given her the solution plainly.
“Blood,” he’d said. The syllable had been spoken not as an accusation but as an imperative.
Rory had bled on the floor of the damp room; the splashes had subsequently disappeared. Somehow, Frank’s ghost—if that it was—had fed upon his brother’s spillage, and gained thereby nourishment enough to reach out from his cell, and make faltering contact. What more might be achieved if the supply were larger?
She thought of Frank’s embraces, of his roughness, his hardness, of the insistence he had brought to bear upon her. What would she not give to have such insistence again?
Perhaps it was possible. And if it were—if she could give him the sustenance he needed—would he not be grateful? Would he not be her pet, docile or brutal at her least whim?
The thought took sleep away. Took sanity and sorrow with it. She had been in love all this time, she realized, and mourning for him. If it took blood to restore him to her, then blood she would supply, and not think twice of the consequences.
In the days that followed, she found her smile again. Rory took the change of mood as a sign that she was happy in the new house. Her good humor ignited the same in him. He took to the redecoration with renewed gusto.
Soon, he said, he would get to work on the second floor. They would locate the source of dampness in the large room, and turn it into a bedroom fit for his princess. She kissed his cheek when he spoke of this, and she said that she was in no hurry, that the room they had already was more than adequate. Talk of the bedroom made him stroke her neck, and pull her close, and whisper infantile obscenities in -her ear. She did not refuse him, but went upstairs meekly, and let him undress her as he liked to do, unbuttoning her with paint-stained fingers. She pretended the ceremony aroused her, though this was far from the truth.
The only thing that sparked the least appetite in her, as she lay on the creaking bed with his bulk between her legs, was closing her eyes and picturing Frank, as he had been.
More than once his name rose to her lips; each time she bit it back. Finally she opened her eyes to remind herself of the boorish truth. Rory was decorating her face with his kisses. Her cheeks crawled at his touch.
She would not be able to endure this too often, she realized. It was too much of an effort to play the acquiescent wife: her heart would burst.
Thus, lying beneath him while September’s breath brushed her face from the open window, she began to plot the getting of blood.
Sometimes it seemed that eons came and went while he lingered in the wall, eons that some clue would later reveal to have been the passing of hours, or even minutes.
But now things had changed; he had a chance of escape. His spirit soared at the thought. It was a frail chance, he didn’t deceive himself about that. There were several reasons his best efforts might falter.
Julia, for one. He remembered her as a trite, preening woman, whose upbringing had curbed her capacity for passion. He had untamed her, of course, once. He remembered the day, among the thousands of times he had performed that act, with some satisfaction. She had resisted no more than was needful for her vanity, then succumbed with such naked fervor he had almost lost control of himself.
In other circumstances he might have snatched her from under her would-be husband’s nose, but fraternal politics counseled otherwise. In a week or two he would have tired of her, and been left not only with a woman whose body was already an eyesore to him, but also a vengeful brother on his heels. It hadn’t been worth the hassle.
Besides, there’d been new worlds to conquer. He had left the day after to go East: to Hong King and Sri Lanka, to wealth and adventure. He’d had them, too. At least for a while. But everything slipped through his fingers sooner or later, and with time he began to wonder whether it was circumstance that denied him a good hold on his earnings, or whether he simply didn’t care enough to keep what he had. The train of thought, once begun, was a runaway.
Everywhere, in the wreckage around him, he found evidence to support the same bitter thesis: that he had encountered nothing in his life—no person, no state of mind or body—he wanted sufficiently to suffer even passing discomfort for.
A downward spiral began. He spent three months in a wash of depression and self-pity that bordered on the suicidal. But even that solution was denied him by his newfound nihilism. If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn’t it, that there was nothing worth dying for either. He stumbled from one such sterility to the next, until all thoughts were rotted away by whatever opiate his immoralities could earn him.
How had he first heard about Lemarchand’s box? He couldn’t remember. In a bar maybe, or a gutter, from the lips of a fellow derelict. At the time it was merely a rumor—
this dream of a pleasure dome where those who had exhausted the trivial delights of the human condition might discover a fresh definition of joy. And the route to this paradise?
There were several, he was told, charts of the interface between the real and the realer still, made by travelers whose bones had long since gone to dust. One such chart was in the vaults of the Vatican, hidden in code in a theological work unread since the Reformation. Another—in the form of an origami exercise was reported to have been in the possession of the Marquis de Sade, who used it, while imprisoned in the Bastille, to barter with a guard for paper on which to write The 120 Days of Sodom. Yet another was made by a craftsman—a maker of singing birds—called Lemarchand, in the form of a musical box of such elaborate design a man might toy with it half a lifetime and never get inside.
Stories. Stories. Yet since he had come to believe in nothing at all it was not so difficult to put the tyranny of verifiable truth out of his head. And it passed the time, musing drunkenly on such fantasies.
It was in Düsseldorf, where he’d gone smuggling heroin, that he again encountered the story of Lemarchand’s box. His curiosity was piqued once more, but this time h
e followed the story up until he found its source.
The man’s name was Kircher, though he probably laid claim to half a dozen others.
Yes, the German could confirm the existence of the box, and yes, he could see his way to letting Frank have it. The price? Small favors, here and there. Nothing exceptional.
Frank did the favors, washed his hands, and claimed his payment.
There had been instructions from Kircher, on how best to break the seal on Lemarchand’s device, instructions that were part pragmatic, part metaphysical. To solve the puzzle is to travel, he’d said, or something like that. The box, it seemed, was not just the map of the road, but the road itself.
This new addiction quickly cured him of dope and drink. Perhaps there were other ways to bend the world to suit the shape of his dreams.
He came back to the house on Lodovico Street, to the empty house behind whose walls he was now imprisoned, and prepared himself—just as Kircher had detailed—for the challenge of solving Lemarchand’s Configuration. He had never in his life been so abstemious, nor so single-minded. In the days before the onslaught on the box he led a life that would have shamed a saint, focusing all his energies on the ceremonies ahead.
He had been arrogant in his dealing with the Order of the Gash, he saw that now; but there were everywhere— in the world and out of it—forces that encouraged such arrogance because they traded on it. That in itself would not have undone him. No, his real error had been the naive belief that his definition of pleasure significantly overlapped with that of the Cenobites.
As it was, they had brought incalculable suffering. They had overdosed him on sensuality, until his mind teetered on madness, then they’d initiated him into experiences that his nerves still convulsed to recall.
They had called it pleasure, and perhaps they’d meant it. Perhaps not. It was impossible to know with these minds; they were so hopelessly, flawlessly ambiguous. They recognized no principles of reward and punishment by which he could hope to win some respite from their tortures, nor were they touched by any appeal for mercy. He’d tried that, over the weeks and months that separated the solving of the box from today.
There was no compassion to be had on this side of the Schism; there was only the weeping and the laughter. Tears of joy sometimes (for an hour without dread, a breath’s length even), laughter coming just as paradoxically in the face of some new horror, fashioned by the Engineer for the provision of grief.
There was a further sophistication to the torture, devised by a mind that understood exquisitely the nature of suffering. The prisoners were allowed to see into the world they had once occupied. Their resting places—
when they were not enduring pleasure—
looked out onto the very locations where they had once worked the Configuration that had brought them here. In Frank’s case, onto the upper room of number fifty-five, Lodovico Street.
For the best part of a year it had been an unilluminating view: nobody had ever stepped into the house. And then, they’d come: Rory and the lovely Julia. And hope had begun again....
There were ways to escape, he’d heard it whispered; loopholes in the system that might allow a mind supple or cunning enough egress into the room from which it had come. If a prisoner were able to make such an escape, there was no way that the hierophants could follow. They had to be summoned across the Schism. Without such an invitation they were left like dogs on the doorstep, scratching and scratching but unable to get in. Escape therefore, if it could be achieved, brought with it a decree absolute, total dissolution of the mistaken marriage which the prisoner had made. It was a risk worth taking. Indeed it was no risk at all. What punishment could be meted out worse than the thought of pain without hope of release?
He had been lucky. Some prisoners had departed from the world without leaving sufficient sign of themselves from which, given an adequate collision of circumstances, their bodies might be remade. He had. Almost his last act, bar the shouting, had been to empty his testicles onto the floor. Dead sperm was a meager keepsake of his essential self, but enough. When dear brother Rory (sweet butterfingered Rory) had let his chisel slip, there was something of Frank to profit from the pain. He had found a finger hold for himself, and a glimpse of strength with which he might haul himself to safety. Now it was up to Julia.
Sometimes, suffering in the wall, he thought she would desert him out of fear. Either that or she’d rationalize the vision she’d seen, and decide she’d been dreaming. If so, he was lost. He lacked the energy to repeat the appearance.
But there were signs that gave him cause for hope. The fact that she returned to the room on two or three occasions, for instance, and simply stood in the gloom, watching the wall. She’d even muttered a few words on the second visit, though he’d caught only scraps.
The word “here” was amongst them. And “waiting,” and “soon.” Enough to keep him from despair.
He had another prop to his optimism. She was lost, wasn’t she? He’d seen that in her face, when—before the day Rory had chiseled himself—she and his brother had had occasion to be in the room together. He’d read the looks between the lines, the moments when her guard had slipped, and the sadness and frustration she felt were apparent.
Yes, she was lost. Married to a man she felt no love for, and unable to see a way out.
Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her—oh yes— until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished.
Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa.
And he knew it well enough to call it home.
It turned cold in the third week of September: an Arctic chill brought on a rapacious wind that stripped the trees of leaves in a handful of days.
The cold necessitated a change of costume, and a change of plan. Instead of walking, Julia took the car. Drove down to the city center in the early afternoon and found a bar in which the lunchtime trade was brisk but not clamorous.
The customers came and went: Young Turks from firms of lawyers and accountants, debating their ambitions; parties of wine-imbibers whose only claim to sobriety was their suits; and, more interestingly, a smattering of individuals who sat alone at their tables and simply drank. She garnered a good crop of admiring glances, but they were mostly from the Young Turks. It wasn’t until she’d been in the place an hour, and the wage slaves were returning to their tread-mills, that she caught sight of somebody watching her reflection in the bar mirror. For the next ten minutes his eyes were glued to her. She went on drinking, trying to conceal any sign of agitation. And then, without warning, he stood up and crossed to her table.
“Drinking alone?” he said.
She wanted to run. Her heart was pounding so furiously she was certain he must hear it. But no. He asked her if she wanted another drink; she said she did. Clearly pleased not to have been rebuffed, he went to the bar, ordered doubles, and returned to her side. He was ruddy-featured, and one size larger than his dark blue suit. Only his eyes betrayed any sign of nervousness, resting on her for moments only, then darting away like startled fish.
There would be no serious conversation: that she had already decided. She didn’t want to know much about him. His name, if necessary. His profession and marital status, if he insisted. Beyond that let him be just a body.
As it was there was no danger of a confessional. She’d met more talkative paving stones. He smiled occasionally—a short, nervous smile that showed teeth too even to be real—and offered more drinks. She said no, wanting the chase over with as soon as possible, and instead asked if he had time for a coffee. He said he had.
“The house is only a few minutes from here,” she replied, and they went to her car.
She kept wondering, as she drove—the meat on the seat beside her—why this was so very easy. Was it
that the man was plainly a victim—with his ineffectual eyes and his artificial teeth—born, did he but know it, to make this journey? Yes, perhaps that was it. She was not afraid, because all of this was so perfectly predictable....
As she turned the key in the front door and stepped into the house, she thought she heard a noise in the kitchen. Had Rory returned home early, ill perhaps? She called out.
There was no reply; the house was empty.
Almost.
From the threshold on, she had the thing planned meticulously. She closed the door.
The man in the blue suit stared at his manicured hands, and waited for his cue.
“I get lonely sometimes,” she told him as she brushed past him. It was a line she’d come up with in bed the previous night.
He only nodded by way of response, the expression on his face a mingling of fear and incredulity: he clearly couldn’t quite believe his luck.
“Do you want another drink?” she asked him, “or shall we go straight upstairs?”
He only nodded again.
“Which?”
“I think maybe I’ve drunk enough already.”
“Upstairs then.”
He made an indecisive move in her direction, as though he might have intended a kiss. She wanted no courtship, however.
Skirting his touch, she crossed to the bottom of the stairs.
“I’ll lead,” she said. Meekly, he followed.
At the top of the steps she glanced round at him, and caught him dabbing sweat from his chin with his handkerchief. She waited until he caught up with her, and then led him halfway along the landing to the damp room.
The door had been left ajar.
“Come on in,” she said.
He obeyed. Once inside it took him a few moments to become accustomed to the gloom, and a further time to give voice to his observation: “There’s no bed.”
She closed the door, and switched on the light. She had hung one of Rory’s old jackets on the back of the door. In its pocket she’d left the knife.