Hellbound Hearts

by Paul Kane

  The chains kept its voluptuous, pendulous breasts from hitting the floor, and crisscrossed its leering, dangling phallus in a relentless metallic strangle.

  I was repelled, but unable to look away, fascinated.

  It’s what a filmmaker does, isn’t it? It is my job not to look away, to find fascination in the hideous as well as the everyday. It’s my vocation as well as my avocation to look, and especially not to look askance. I leave it to the great unwashed to look away. In contrast to my mind, my eyes know no fear.

  At least that is what I thought until I saw its face . . .

  Taking another step closer, it stood fully revealed before me, daring me to stare at it without tumbling into madness. And I came close to losing the dare, as well as my breakfast.

  Its head had sparse patches of hair in various tufts that welled out of corrupted, dying flesh. There were scars and stitches wrapped around the face, and the eyes, my God, the eyes, one sea green and the other some kind of muddy shit brown, seemed to roam loosely in mismatched sockets, the lower eyelids open and an angry, wet red. Even the eyeballs had raw, primitive rows of stitches around the retina.

  But worst of all was what passed for its mouth. It occupied most of its face, a long, vertical slash that roughly bisected its visage. If there had been a nose, it was long gone, replaced by this gaping hole that resembled nothing more than, okay, I’ll say it, a huge, loose vagina. Its vertical lips were wet, hungry, horrid. And there was a row of teeth on either side, barely concealed by the labia majora: worn, round nubs, they looked like nothing more than miniature human heads trapped in a forever scream.

  I ran from this beastly creature, needing the door more than I needed my breath. But there was no exit now; the door was hopelessly locked, no matter how madly I beat against it.

  I turned to see that this creature, this beast made of sex and violence, was laughing at me. Its hideous, thumblike nipples curdled into excited prominence, leaking a milk of thrill; its horrific, rotted penis began to rise in a repulsive, desiring salute.

  And, damn me forever, I could not look away.

  I was backed against the door as this bastardization of human life approached me with what could only be described as an amused vertical smile.

  “What have you dreamed?” it asked me again.

  The question, now posed for a third time, unlocked memories of dreams, erotic and ferocious: the dreams that had erupted without my control in my sleep, dreams that drenched me in guilt and sweat and repulsion and desire. My mind, wherever it was hiding, was answering this thing’s question without my control, and the dreams, no, the nightmares, the transgressions of the flesh that I had so carefully locked away from my conscious mind, were set free by this question.

  “I don’t dream!” I answered, but knew this living corruption could tell I was lying. It could see the bodies, the implements, the flesh, the blood, the fluids that soaked my sleep. Again it laughed.

  “You can have all that you dream and more,” it told me, but I wanted no part of it.

  “I don’t dream!” I repeated. “I dream awake! It’s what I do, put dreams on the screen for others.”

  The machines that littered the room stood high around us like a city of sadism, a testament to torture, the antithesis of love. It made sense that a creature like this would be here.

  “It is why you are here,” the monster said to me. “Because you possess . . . imagination.”

  It had been a long time since I had been accused of that.

  “Surely you have needs,” this beast, neither man nor woman but assembled from both, prompted me.

  Yes. I need a studio film, a return to prominence, more gleaming statuettes to fill out the mantel, a home back on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, the place where I was honored and catered to and respected and desired. Where ridiculous sums of money were exchanged for the value of my distinctive services, where my vision stood out among the others, where my style was adopted—no, coopted—by talentless music video directors who masturbated with their RED digital cameras and spattered their issue all over the Internet as they pretended to tell stories without words.

  I still had tales to tell, I wanted to say to this bastardization of human sexuality, and new ways to tell them. This . . . this—ugh!—horror movie was my last hope to return me to creative solvency. If the tale of Lemarchand’s Configuration could be told with enough sex and blood and rock ’n’ roll to reignite interest in a fallow market for tales of cinematic terror, then I might too rise from the dead like one of George Romero’s folk heroes.

  But this creature stood before me, waiting for an answer, its rheumy eyes glinting in the waning light, its vaginal face lifted proudly—or tauntingly—as its slavering lips smacked lightly but wetly in the breeze of its rotted, piscatorial breath.

  “Nothing you could help me with,” I finally answered. God knows why I bothered. Well, if there was a God, he knew. Of course, if there existed demons so monstrous as this foul beast that stood before me, the concept of a Supreme Being no longer seemed so far out of the question.

  It’s difficult to tell if the thing smiled, since its orifice was vertical, but it seemed that that was the expression it took on. Its glistening, moist lips widened somewhat, revealing the nubby little tooth heads. It took a step closer to me, its horrific but stunted erection leading the way. Its penis had two mushroom-shaped heads, and both of them were pointing at me. I didn’t know where to look. When it spoke again, I looked into its face. It drooled when it spoke, a thick, aromatic liquor that ran down its chin and dripped onto its tethered, swollen breasts.

  “I can offer you much.”

  “No,” I countered. “You can’t offer me what I want.”

  “Surely you know the voluptuousness of desire.”

  At one time I had. Now I couldn’t afford it. I just shook my head, wondering how I’d stepped into this dusky, seething cauldron of evil.

  “Surely you desire the touch of flesh against your own, the penetration of one body part into another, the exchange of hot, percolating bodily fluids, the explosion of wet conclusion, only to start it all over again. Surely you recall its power.”

  I stood my ground. I was repelled not only by the creature but also by what it offered.

  “No. I have had all the bodily contact I need. My desire has atrophied along with my creative reach. My needs are more earthbound than that. I need box office more than I need box.”

  “Thanatos sings your name,” the creature told me. Its voice was clogged, choked, gargly. “All your power is derived from your lust; all desire is ignited by arousal. Give in to your physical need and your more . . . grounded desires shall be fulfilled as well.”

  Well, that didn’t make a whit of sense to me, and I told this creature so, wondering why I bothered. It drew even closer to me, reached out long fingers that were more like talons, grabbed me forcefully by the shoulders, and pulled my face to its own. Its damp stench was overwhelming as it planted a greedy, moist kiss along the length of my face, leaving my head shellacked in its ooze. I should have been repulsed, but instead, I felt nature’s heat coursing through my body. I had barely shaken hands with arousal in the last couple of years, but here it was, like an old girlfriend back for an eager onenight toss, and my body responded in kind. I tried to fight off the raising of my manhood’s flag, but the cranial minora had a mind of its own. The otherworldly being devoured me with its hungry patchwork eyes, then it slid its mouth-pussy around my head, sucking on it as if on the head of a six-foot penis.

  I couldn’t breathe . . . but I ejaculated furiously almost immediately after my head was swallowed in hot, wet darkness.

  I woke to the call of the first assistant director, an able old Irishman who’d been working the boards since the Roger Moore Bond days. I was lying on the floor of the empty third-floor room, which was now free of the torture devices, the smell of seafood, and old Cunt Face. Terry Deakins stood over me, assuming another drug casualty by way of Hollywood, doing his best
to keep from judgmentally clucking his tongue. Luckily, my sticky wet crotch was hidden by my coat, though the ooze covering my face must certainly have given him pause. The scent, though diminished, was still unpleasant at the very least.

  “James,” he said to me, “are you all right?”

  Well, if I were all right, surely I would not be a puddle on the floor, my face covered in pussy jam, unconscious under my spurts of ecstasy. I looked up to see the rest of the key crew members on the location-reconnaissance mission fanned behind him, eyes wide in near horror. Most of them were young or old, not much in the in-between. If they were the top of the game, they wouldn’t be working on this piece of shit, no matter how revered the fable. And this one wasn’t.

  The windows were no longer covered in black paint, and the room itself was no longer suffocating in sultry heat. It was cold enough to see breath. Only the huge, decaying dancer’s mirror remained, reflecting our little group innocuously.

  I stammered as I stood: “I came in early and must have gotten locked in. Guess I panicked when I tried to get out and the door wouldn’t give. It was so oppressively hot in here. I suppose I passed out.”

  The gathered minions looked at one another. Surely they were watching the further decline of Hollywood’s crash and burn, the toppling of another British genius who’d abandoned the mother country until being forced to return to her arms, tail between his legs, to direct a scary movie. There was no pity in their gaze. Perhaps only I minded that the audience for this grotesque piffle was in its teens, years, if not lifetimes, away from their first sexual encounter, their spotted faces agape at the spurting blood that was the closest they’d get to an explosion of bodily fluid that did not rely on their own right fists.

  It was a man’s world here; only the script supervisor, a comely young woman named Iris something-or-other, provided some balance of estrogen to our little army. She reached out to help me to my feet, and I could see at least a trace of pity in her eyes. I could also see the tiny bleat of a pulse in a soft blue vein barely revealed when she brushed the golden cascade of her hair from her eyes.

  I zipped the coat tight over my telltale wet spot before my little, what—experience? Dream? Fantasy?—was revealed, but I was not embarrassed. Instead, I could not keep my eyes and mind off of the increasingly alluring Iris, whose charms kept blooming, reigniting memories of heat and arousal. When she looked briefly at me and found that my eyes were already locked on her, she blushed sweetly and looked away.

  I wanted her in a way I hadn’t wanted in a long, long time.

  Her scent pulled me like a magnet, and it was fortunate that I was draped in a long overcoat that cloaked my carnal desire for her. I could tell with a single intake of breath that she was on her menses. Far from repelling me, it made my own blood boil. I stayed close to her like a nervous puppy as we continued the reconnaissance, making notes on lighting, camera angles, scene placement, and the like, my filmmaker’s sense jumping into its autopilot mode. But this brief creative explosion was overshadowed by the pounding of Iris’s heart when I stood close to her. I wanted our pulses to beat in a passionate, accelerated union.

  Not soon enough, the location scout was over, and I held back as the crew headed down the stairs and out the door. I gently placed my hand on Iris’s elbow. “Can I give you a ride home?” I asked her.

  She blushed, and the scarlet flush that filled her cheeks made my heart—and parts even more private—dance. She smiled sweetly and looked at the floor, like a scene from an old movie, anachronistic but charming, and then said, “I’d like that.”

  The rest of the crew climbed their way into the van, giving us the knowing eye as I kept Iris behind with me. Surely they giggled and made ribald conjectures about us all the way back to Bray.

  “Wait,” I told her as she started toward my Jaguar. “I want to show you something.”

  She looked at me trustingly but questioningly. I put my finger to my lips, conspiratorially, then closed the door, shutting out the world.

  I took her hand and led her up the stairs.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Something amazing,” I replied, my body tingling with an erotic thrill that filled me with giddy eagerness unknown since my first phallic insertion.

  At the top of the stairs, I paused for a moment before I reached out and opened the door to the uppermost chamber. A wedge of waning sunlight led the way, and I stepped her inside. The room, now bereft of all but the huge mirror, was heating up again.

  “It’s hot in here,” she said, tiny beads gathering in the fine, virtually invisible fuzz above her glossy upper lip. I wanted to lick it off.

  “I noticed that, too. Here, look.”

  Through the shadows, I led her to the mirror. The room began to fill with its own glow, feeding on the heat of her menstruation. I could feel the room itself swell with excited anticipation.

  I stood her in front of the mirror. “Look how beautiful you are.” And she did. Her face, now sanguine with heat and thrill, was delectable. I eased up behind her and kissed the nape of her neck. Perspiration was emerging everywhere, sheening her body in a glitter of wetness. She closed her eyes and turned her head to me for the kiss, and I did not disappoint her. I nursed on her lips, eased my exploratory tongue into her receptive, sucking mouth, and held her face against my own, my hands holding on to the back of her head.

  When finally we pulled apart, we were both breathing hard.

  I took the top button of her blouse and opened it, starting it for her. “Let me see you,” I told her.

  She was hesitant. “It’s . . . it’s my time of the month.”

  “Do you think that matters a whit to me?” She had no idea it only made me hungrier. “Please.”

  I stepped away from her as she slowly unbuttoned her blouse, revealing sweet, barely adolescent breasts that did not require the assistance of a brassiere. She was shy about them, but I pulled her hands away as she tried to cover them. “No. They’re lovely. Now the rest.”

  “Only if you do.” I smiled and kissed her again, this time more perfunctorily. And then I, too, proceeded to disrobe before her and the mirror. She stared into my eyes and at my gradually revealed body so intently that she did not seem to notice what the mirror now reflected behind her: the hungry, gleaming Stonehenge of torture that surrounded us.

  It was so unlike real life, like a cheesy romantic movie, the two of us standing there naked, having kissed only twice. But there we were, sweating, dying for each other, filled with an unquenchable thirst that went out of control in this mad room, this dungeon, this abattoir. I folded my arms around her and, as her eyes closed in ecstasy, backed her away from the mirror and into the center of the torture devices. I saw a tiny rivulet of blood trickle down her bare thigh, and felt the room rear up in hunger.

  And then, as she grew slick with welcome, I eagerly entered her.

  The heat inside her body was almost unbearably joyous and thrilling . . . for a moment. But as soon as I was fully inside, her vagina closed its mouth and clamped tightly shut, locking me in as tightly as if with teeth.

  It hurt.

  And then, blessed unconsciousness . . . again.

  And again I woke in this cursed manse, this time suspended above the wooden floor by chains that ended in hooks that had been ripped all the way through my wrists and ankles. Iris, still naked and sweating and rosy of complexion, was likewise crucified. Both of our bodies were drenched in a hot, slick overcoat of our own blood, and the pain was excruciating. Excruciating enough that we were locked together at our nexus by my uncontrollable throbbing erection.

  But we were not alone, nor were we in the dark.

  Bright lights artfully illuminated us to best effect, as the familiar thrum of a 35mm film camera rolled. I looked up to see that Cunt Face had been joined by two other members of her ilk: stitched, malformed, reformed monstrosities that had once been human but now were merely humanoid—hungry, slavering beasts bound in thick, heavy chains and den
se black, bloodstained leather. One watched through the eye of its penis-head, its collar pulled back like a foreskin. The other was a patchwork of fur and flesh, stapled together in seemingly random fashion.

  It became immediately apparent to me, and surely to Iris, that we were there to serve a purpose, to feed a need, both literally and figuratively. Made of flesh and blood, living, breathing, bleeding puppets of meat and mind, we were conjoined and displayed for the amusement and edification of the underworld. Our life and death would be eternal, captured in a magic box that would love us as we loved one another: sloppily, hungrily, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It was a different kind of love story; boy meets girl, boy penetrates girl, boy and girl are mounted and displayed and dismantled to entertain us. A meet-cute without the cute.

  Technicolor blood dripped onto the hungry wooden floor below, as the familiar stuttering mechanical sound of film passing through the gate commenced.

  And then the machinery came alive: blades began to whirr and move in with an insatiable appetite. Iris and I both screamed in agony, fear, and mutual orgasm as blades began to spin and strip us of our meat. It began to revolve and peel a long strip of our flesh, and we took on the appearance of a barber pole. The cameras rolled, and I lost my grip on consciousness, unable to call out “Cut!”

  Mechanisms

  Christopher Golden & Mike Mignola Illustrations by Mike Mignola

  On that particular October morning—a lovely fall day, a Wednesday—the autumn light fell across the rooftops of Oxford with a hint of gold sufficient to transform the view from mundane to wondrous. Colin Radford, a young man of serious scholarship, found himself so taken by the panorama visible from the classroom window that he had difficulty following the threads of Professor Sidgwick’s lecture on Suetonius. This was especially troubling when Colin considered that the biographies that comprised the Roman historian’s De Vita Caesarum had been amongst the most compelling reading that the young man had encountered in his time at Oxford, second only to the comedic plays of Aristophanes.