The Hellbound Heart
Clive Barker
ONE
So intent was Frank upon solving the puzzle of Lemarchand's box that he didn't hear the
great bell begin to ring. The device had been constructed by a master craftsman, and the riddle was
this-that though he'd been told the box contained wonders, there simply seemed to be no way into
it, no clue on any of its six black lacquered faces as to the whereabouts of the pressure points that
would disengage one piece of this three-dimensional jigsaw from another.
Frank had seen similar puzzles-mostly in Hong Kong, products of the Chinese taste for
making metaphysics of hard wood-but to the acuity and technical genius of the Chinese the
Frenchman had brought a perverse logic that was entirely his own. If there was a system to the
puzzle, Frank had failed to find it. Only after several hours of trial and error did a chance
juxtaposition of thumbs, middle and last fingers bear fruit: an almost imperceptible click, and thenvictory!-a segment of the box slid out from beside its neighbors.
There were two revelations.
The first, that the interior surfaces were brilliantly polished. Frank's reflection-distorted,
fragmented-skated across the lacquer. The second, that Lemarchand, who had been in his time a
maker of singing birds, had constructed the box so that opening it tripped a musical mechanism,
which began to tinkle a short rondo of sublime banality.
Encouraged by his success, Frank proceeded to work on the box feverishly, quickly finding
fresh alignments of fluted slot and oiled peg which in their turn revealed further intricacies. And
with each solution-each new half twist or pull-a further melodic element was brought into play-the
tune counterpointed and developed until the initial caprice was all but lost in ornamentation.
At some point in his labors, the bell had begun to ring-a steady somber tolling. He had not
heard, at least not consciously. But when the puzzle was almost finished-the mirrored innards of the
box unknotted-he became aware that his stomach churned so violently at the sound of the bell it
might have been ringing half a lifetime.
He looked up from his work. For a few moments he supposed the noise to be coming from
somewhere in the street outside-but he rapidly dismissed that notion. It had been almost midnight
before he'd begun to work at the birdmaker's box; several hours had gone by-hours he would not
have remembered passing but for the evidence of his watch-since then. There was no church in the
city-however desperate for adherents-that would ring a summoning bell at such an hour.
No. The sound was coming from somewhere much more distant, through the very door (as
yet invisible) that Lemarchand's miraculous box had been constructed to open. Everything that
Kircher, who had sold him the box, had promised of it was true! He was on the threshold of a new
world, a province infinitely far from the room in which he sat.
Infinitely far; yet now, suddenly near.
The thought had made his breath quick. He had anticipated this moment so keenly, planned
with every wit he possessed this rending of the veil. In moments they would be here-the ones
Kircher had called the Cenobites, theologians of the Order of the Gash. Summoned from their
experiments in the higher reaches of pleasure, to bring their ageless heads into a world of rain and
failure.
He had worked ceaselessly in the preceding week to prepare the room for them. The bare
boards had been meticulously scrubbed and strewn with petals. Upon the west wall he had set up a
kind of altar to them, decorated with the kind of placatory offerings Kircher had assured him would
nurture their good offices: bones, bonbons, needles. A jug of his urine-the product of seven days'
collection-stood on the left of the altar, should they require some spontaneous gesture of selfdefilement. On the right, a plate of doves' heads, which Kircher had also advised him to have on
hand.
He had left no part of the invocation ritual unobserved. No cardinal, eager for the
fisherman's shoes, could have been more diligent.
But now, as the sound of the bell became louder, drowning out the music box, he was
afraid.
Too late, he murmured to himself, hoping to quell his rising fear. Lemarchand's device was
undone; the final trick had been turned. There was no time left for prevarication or regret. Besides,
hadn't he risked both life and sanity to make this unveiling possible? The doorway was even now
opening to pleasures no more than a handful of humans had ever known existed, much less tastedpleasures which would redefine the parameters of sensation, which would release him from the dull
round of desire, seduction and disappointment that 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 rumor 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 black birds
caught in perpetual tempest? That was all the sense be 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, like the glow of deep-sea fishes: blue, cold,
charmless. It struck Frank that he had never once wondered what they would 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 to and through its skin, hid its
private parts, and there was nothing in the dregs of its voice, or in its willfully disfigured features
that offered the least clue. When it spoke, the hooks that transfixed the flaps of its eyes and were
wed, by an intricate system of chains passed through flesh and bone alike, to similar hooks through
the lower lip, were teased by the motio