LITMIR.BIZ

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and disappointment which had dogged him from late adolescence. He would be transformed by that knowledge, wouldn’t he? No man could experience the profundity of such feeling and remain unchanged.

      The bare bulb in the middle of the room dimmed and brightened; brightened and dimmed again. It had taken on the rhythm of the bell, burning its hottest on each chime. In the troughs between the chimes the darkness in the room became utter; it was as if the world he had occupied for twenty-nine years had ceased to exist. Then the bell would sound again, and the bulb burn so strongly it might never have faltered, and for a few precious seconds he was standing in a familiar place, with a door that led out and down and into the street, and a window through which – had he but the will (or strength) to tear the blinds back – he might glimpse a rumour of morning.

      With each peal the bulb’s light was becoming more revelatory. By it, he saw the east wall flayed; saw the brick momentarily lose solidity and blow away; saw, in that same instant, the place beyond the room from which the bell’s din was issuing. A world of birds, was it? Vast blackbirds caught in perpetual tempest. That was all the sense he could make of the province from which – even now – the hierophants were coming: that it was in confusion, and full of brittle, broken things that rose and fell and filled the dark air with their fright.

      And then the wall was solid again, and the bell fell silent. The bulb flickered out. This time it went without a hope of rekindling.

      He stood in the darkness, and said nothing. Even if he could remember the words of welcome he’d prepared, his tongue would not have spoken them. It was playing dead in his mouth.

      And then, light.

      It came from them: from the quartet of Cenobites who now, with the wall sealed behind them, occupied the room. A fitful phosphorescence came with them, like the glow of deep-sea fishes: blue, cold; charmless. It struck Frank that he had never once wondered what they look like. His imagination, though fertile when it came to trickery and theft, was impoverished in other regards: the skill to picture these eminences was beyond him, so he had not even tried.

      Why then was he so distressed to set eyes upon them? Was it the scars that covered every inch of their bodies; the flesh cosmetically punctured and sliced and infibulated, then dusted down with ash? Was it the smell of vanilla they brought with them, the sweetness of which did little to disguise the stench beneath? Or was it that as the light grew, and he scanned them more closely, he saw nothing of joy, or even humanity, in their maimed faces: only desperation, and an appetite that made his bowels ache to be voided.

      ‘What city is this?’ one of the four enquired. Frank had difficulty guessing the speaker’s gender with any certainty. Its clothes, some of which were sewn both to and through its skin, hid its private parts, and there was nothing in the dregs of its voice, or in its wilfully disfigured features, that offered the least clue. When it spoke the hooks that transfixed the flaps on its eyes, and were wed, by an intricate system of chains passed through flesh and bone alike, to similar hooks through the lower lips, were teased by the motion, exposing the glistening meat beneath.

      ‘I asked you a question,’ it said. Frank made no reply. The name of this city was the last thing on his mind.

      ‘Do you understand?’ the figure beside the first speaker demanded. Its voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy – the voice of an excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jewelled pin driven through to the bone. Its tongue was similarly decorated. ‘Do you even know who we are?’ it asked.

      ‘Yes,’ Frank said at last. ‘I know.’

      Of course he knew; he and Kircher had spent long nights talking of hints gleaned from the diaries of Bolingbroke and Gilles de Rais. All that mankind knew of the Order of the Gash, he knew.

      And yet…he had expected something different. Expected some sign of the numberless splendours they had access to. He had thought they would come with women, at least; oiled women, milked women; women shaved and muscled for the act of love: their lips perfumed, their thighs trembling to spread, their buttocks weighty, the way he liked them. He had expected sighs, and languid bodies spread amongst the flowers underfoot like a living carpet; had expected virgin whores whose every crevice was his for the asking and whose skills would press him – upward, upward – to undreamt-of ecstasies. The world would be forgotten in their arms. He would be exalted by his lust, instead of despised for it.

      But no. No women, no sighs. Only these sexless things, with their corrugated flesh.

      Now the third spoke. Its features were so heavily scarified – the wounds nurtured until they ballooned – that its eyes were invisible and its words corrupted by the disfigurement of its mouth.

      ‘What do you want?’ it asked him.

      He perused this questioner more confidently than he had the other two. His fear was draining away with every second that passed. Memories of the terrifying place beyond the wall were already receding. He was left with these decrepit decadents; with their stench, their queer deformity, their self-evident frailty. The only thing he had to fear was nausea.

      ‘Kircher told me there would be five of you,’ Frank said.

      ‘The Engineer will arrive should the moment merit,’ came the reply. ‘Now again, we ask you: what do you want?’

      Why should he not answer them straight? ‘Pleasure,’ he replied. ‘Kircher said you know about pleasure.’

      ‘Oh we do,’ said the first of them. ‘Everything you ever wanted.’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘Of course. Of course.’ It stared at him with its all-too-naked eyes. ‘What have you dreamed?’ it said.

      The question, put so baldly, confounded him. How could he hope to articulate the nature of the phantasms his libido had created?

      He was still searching for words when one of them said: ‘This world…it disappoints you?’

      ‘Pretty much,’ he replied.

      ‘You’re not the first to tire of its trivialities,’ came the response. ‘There have been others.’

      ‘Not many,’ the gridded face put in.

      ‘True. A handful at best. But a few have dared to use Lemarchand’s Configuration. Men like yourself, hungry for new possibilities, who’ve heard that we have skills unknown in your region.’

      ‘I’d expected – ’ Frank began.

      ‘We know what you expected,’ the Cenobite replied. ‘We understand to its breadth and depth the nature of your frenzy. It is utterly familiar to us.’

      Frank grunted. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you know what I’ve dreamt about. You can supply the pleasure.’

      The thing’s face broke open, its lip curling back in a baboon’s smile. ‘Not as you understand it,’ came the reply.

      Frank made to interrupt, but the creature raised a silencing hand.

      ‘There are conditions of the nerve-endings,’ it said, ‘the like of which your imagination, however fevered, could not hope to evoke.’

      ‘…yes?’

      ‘Oh yes. Oh most certainly. Your most treasured depravity is child’s play beside the experiences we offer.’

      ‘Will you partake of them?’ said the second Cenobite.

      Frank looked at the scars and the hooks. Again, his tongue was deficient.

      ‘Will you?’

      Outside, somewhere near, the world would soon be waking. He had watched it wake from the window of this very room, day after day, stirring itself to another round of fruitless pursuits, and he’d known, known, that there was nothing left out there to excite him. No heat, only sweat. No passion; only sudden lust, and just as sudden indifference. He had turned

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