Hellbound Hearts

by Paul Kane

Gordon pulled up his T-shirt, used it to buffer the stench, and pushed on down a long narrow hall covered with framed movie posters. All horror. All produced by Harden. Besides the posters, everything was white.

  The walls were white. The carpet was white. The closed door in between the last set of posters was so white, that if not for the silver handle, I might not have noticed a door at all.

  Until we reached the end of the hall and the carpet started fading to red; sopping-wet, bloody red.

  The spacious living room was a huge white square, not furnished, nothing on the walls . . . until recently, it seemed. The walls were splattered with blood that still ran and dripped. Chunks of matter, skin and organs ripped to tiny shreds still pried loose from the walls and slapped to the soaked carpet.

  I’d never seen so much blood in my life, not even in one of Harden’s films.

  In the center of the room was a perfect clean spot, like a white crater on a planet of blood. There sat the box we’d come for. It sat on a pad of paper.

  I looked at Gordon. “We should get out of here.”

  Gordon looked nauseous. He was staring at the ceiling, where larger pieces of shredded flesh were coming loose like wet tiles and falling to the sopping carpet with an audible slap. That was the first time I ever saw Gordon afraid . . . and it wouldn’t be the last.

  Despite all this, Gordon was still greedier than smart or frightened. He shook his head and stepped onto the soaked carpet. The sound was loud and wet as he let his foot sink into the gory slush.

  Just watching him walk, hearing the squish of his steps and the sounds of dripping from ceiling to floor, made my stomach lurch and twist. What the hell had happened in here? It looked like a bomb had exploded and the box was ground zero.

  I stood at the edge of the hall, where, even as I waited, blood seeped and spread wider, closing in on me. I watched Gordon take careful steps across the bloody carpet until he reached the clean area, where he immediately picked up the box.

  I watched as Gordon tried to find a way to open it, but he had no luck.

  “What’s on the pad of paper?” I asked, yelling above the rising din of raining gore.

  Gordon paused and bent down. “Looks like someone was trying to figure out how to open it.”

  “Probably Harden?”

  Gordon gestured around the blood-covered walls. “This is probably Harden, too.”

  Gordon tried to pass off his comment as a joke, but even I could see he was nervous.

  He turned and gestured for me to follow him, but I shook my head. “I’m staying right here,” I said, “and I think we should get the fuck out of here.”

  “Are you kidding me? You fucking pussy?” Gordon mocked. “Look at this joint. I’ll bet my last dime that there’s drugs and money, if not both, stashed here somewhere.”

  “Okay,” I snapped back. “Then what are you doing?”

  Gordon started to kneel, placing the gun down beside the ornate box. “I’m going to open this thing and see what’s inside.”

  A shiver ran down my spine as I watched Gordon kneel before the box. I looked around to see what else I could find, but there was blood blocking my path to the stairs across the living room, and to the door leading to what looked like a balcony, and another door to a tiled room I guessed was the kitchen.

  Maybe Gordon hadn’t thought of it, but stepping in that blood meant leaving tracks, and leaving tracks meant leading the cops right back to us. They’d tie us to this entire mess, not just a burglary. Maybe Gordon wasn’t thinking, but for once I was. I’d done a stint in the penitentiary when I was a kid—I had no intention of going through that hell again.

  While Gordon studied the notepad, I looked back down the hall to the door we’d passed by. Maybe that was another way into other areas of the house?

  “I’m going to look around,” I said. “Yell if you need me . . . and hurry.”

  Gordon only half glanced up at me. He was enthralled with the box that I had already lost interest in. Seeing its modest size, I had serious doubts it held any great value.

  The door between posters for Slaughter Me Saturday and Feel the Pain was locked, but that didn’t stop me from opening it. I used a plastic card to shimmy the bolt and popped it right open. On the other side were some stairs leading down.

  I tried the lights, but they weren’t working, which explained why all the security was down—no power.

  I took out my lighter and walked down the steps that led to a small basement room. I laughed out loud when I saw it was a personal torture chamber, with a leather harness swing and a table with straps and handles shaped like a large X. It was Harden’s own sex dungeon.

  The walls were lined with whips and straps and various other toys you could find at any sex shop in West Hollywood, but farther along the wall, the toys turned from kinky to downright bizarre. There were whips with metal balls on them, and others with spikes. There was what looked like a vest and panties made of razor wire and a mask made entirely of barbed wire. All of the weaponlike toys looked like they had dried blood on them.

  On the farthest wall there was a medieval shield with two crossed swords behind it. It looked like something from a B-movie version of Camelot, and as I stepped closer I could see it hung awkwardly from the wall.

  There was something behind it.

  I put out the lighter and waited a moment for my eyes to adjust, then lifted the surprisingly light shield off the wall. Behind it was a wall safe, and the reason the shield had hung awkwardly was because it had been left open.

  Hoping for stacks of cash, I pulled it open to find instead stacks of pornography; graphic shit, violent, not what I would have called sexy at all. There were pictures of women tied up and being fucked, and others of men bound and having their balls tortured. Not my cup of tea at all.

  Then, behind the stacks, I saw the drugs. There were bags of white powder and bottles of pills. Not cash, but just as good. I took the bags and bottles one by one and filled my pockets to capacity. I was taking one last look inside when I heard Gordon scream upstairs and felt the entire house rumble.

  Thinking it was an earthquake I ran for the stairs, but by the time I reached the top, the rumbling had stopped, and when I peered toward the bloody living room, I saw that Gordon was no longer alone.

  Four figures stood around Gordon, who held the box, now oddly reconfigured, in one shaking hand; his gun in the other.

  My pockets loaded with thousands of dollars in drugs, I almost ran, thinking the leather-clad figures were police. As I looked closer, though, I saw they were anything but cops.

  I wasn’t even sure they were human.

  One stood in front of Gordon, one behind, and the last two flanked him. All wore what looked like black leather, but no two looked the same. The lead figure, facing Gordon, appeared to have the leather sewn into his skin up the sides of his arms and torso.

  Exposed areas of deathly blue-white flesh were covered with gashes that were held open by wires. The leader’s head was a maze of slashes and slices and wires that held them open, forming an intricate maze of designs, cutting into the figure’s face.

  If these figures were male or female, I could not tell. Except for the leader facing Gordon, their chests and crotch regions were so severely mutilated that I simply could not even begin to guess.

  But the leader, he was male, or had been at one time. I glanced down in horror, feeling my breath cut off and mouth go dry. What I’d first thought was a vagina was instead the figure’s penis, cut down the middle in at least six slices, pulled and pinned around his belly and legs like a seeping bloody flower of flesh.

  I took a step forward, trying to see what was happening, and the pills in my pockets rattled so loud that all of the figures—even Gordon—turned and looked at me.

  Gordon cried out. “Ed, help me, man!”

  The leader tilted his head and stared at me with large, black eyes. “Would the witness care to change places with his accomplice?” he said, his voice sexless, b
oth high-pitched and low, like two voices speaking simultaneously.

  It seemed to know who I was, or what I was to Gordon at least, but I sensed some doubt in the inhuman tones. My presence was unexpected, that much was clear.

  The leader, with the head and face of gashes and wire-maze mesh, looked at me and the expression was like nothing I had seen before. It was almost a smile, but a smile of pain; pleasure and pain intertwined, love and hate crushed together in a vise.

  I couldn’t help myself. I smiled back at the inhuman creature as if we knew each other’s game.

  “No,” I said, “I won’t.”

  The leader nodded.

  I’d played my hand and it was understood.

  Gordon looked at me with disbelief and raised the gun, “You fucking bastard!”

  He fired the weapon, but the leader with the flowered penis and understanding, loving eyes raised his hand and blocked the muzzle, taking the bullet through his own palm.

  As the shot tore through his hand, the leader bent his head back and opened his mouth in pure ecstasy, an orgasm of pain.

  What happened next was a blur. I watched as weapons appeared in the hands of the humanoid figures surrounding Gordon; an array of blades and razors and hooks. They hacked into Gordon all at once, tearing away his flesh as easily as his clothing. The figure behind him slashed down his spine, sending him reeling in agony.

  The screams brought odd titters of laughter from the deathly, mutilated shapes, like children giggling at something naughty.

  Gordon wailed as he was taken apart layer by layer. Flesh gave way to muscle. Muscle gave way to bone, and while he still stood, they hacked into his organs before they could fall to the floor.

  Only the leader paused in the slaughter, to pick up the puzzle box Gordon had dropped. He held it in his hands as he faced me, and I watched as it reconfigured into a box shape right in the palms of his hands.

  Then he looked at me one last time. “Are you sure you would not like to play?”

  I shook my head and backed away, and the leader began cackling. Behind him his brethren demolished the last of Gordon, even though his head, lanced on a hook but still intact, managed to scream in pain.

  I turned and ran, feeling the house rumble and the electricity suddenly coming back on. I didn’t yet fully realize what had happened and just scrambled for the door, but as I reached it, I turned back and saw the leader standing alone with the box.

  Gordon was gone. Only his blood remained.

  The leader had stopped laughing, but the smile of pain lingered.

  I didn’t get it until the lights flickered on and the alarm system that had been silenced came back to life with a slowly winding screech.

  I looked one last time at the leader, who seemed to be fading into the light, and the smile was gone. Instead he looked at me with a sort of pity, like I was the fool who had played a game I didn’t understand and thought I’d won.

  I didn’t even try running. I walked out of Harden’s mansion with my hands raised in the air as police cars screamed through the gates and up the horseshoe driveway.

  Behind me was unimaginable carnage, a safe with my prints all over it, and I had a pocketful of stolen drugs.

  The leader was a clever one. I had to give him that. Even with a searing anger welling inside, knowing I’d been fooled, knowing I’d played his game despite imagining I’d played by my rules, I had to give the mutilated man his credit.

  I’d be blamed for all the crimes, and the death of Gordon—second biggest scumbag in the world, and the only person I had personally sent to Hell, condemning myself as well.

  I thought about what had happened as the cops surrounded me, pointing guns and yelling the things cops yell. I had never touched the box, and I certainly wasn’t the one who’d opened it, but I now understood.

  I thought I was so smart, and I had played right into the leader’s hands. It wasn’t just the handling of the box that allowed them access to my life; it was my interaction with him. I had entered their world, with their rules, before I even knew what was happening.

  I’d played his game, thinking I wasn’t, and I lost regardless.

  Now I knew why the leader laughed as he had. I’d thought it was a communion of souls facing off, but the leader had simply played me as Gordon had the box, and both of us had lost our souls—one in Hell and the other on Earth.

  Well played.

  The Dark Materials Project

  Sarah Langan

  A lot of thoughts crossed Absalom’s mind when he discovered that his pregnant wife had left him. As he confronted his Mr. Coffee machine, bewildered by its myriad buttons, he wondered: Was it his halitosis? Was she a spy for ExxonMobil? He’d known her less than a year, and back then she’d had a man (or woman) on the side, so was the child even his? He looked at the refrigerator, where the kid’s sonogram was taped like an edible fetus, then around the empty kitchen. His wife was nowhere in sight.

  He found her note on the passenger seat of their blue Saab. A tribute to the obvious:

  I’m sorry. It’s getting too dangerous.

  All My Love,

  Mireille

  On the radio, some NPR dipshit reported on Stanford University’s renegade black hole. The EPA had evacuated the entire campus and would soon do the same with all of Southern California. It was spreading too fast to contain. A nuke was the only way to hasten its collapse, but so far nobody wanted to suggest it.

  As warmth poured through the vents that cold winter morning, he blew on his hands to get his fingers moving again, then set Mireille’s note ablaze with the car’s cigarette lighter. It didn’t crackle as it burned. Instead, it singed. His parents, his little brother, his college professors, his contemporaries, even his protégés—they’d all betrayed him. Stolen his work, lost faith, mocked his ambitions, taken jobs in other countries just to get away from him. Why had he expected that Mireille would be any different, just because he’d paid for her?

  He looked up at their old colonial as he pulled from the driveway, and imagined that she was trapped inside the master bedroom while a voracious fire burned. Would she scream? Or would she maintain an infuriatingly stiff upper lip as the flames licked her cheeks? He hoped to find out.

  The Servitus Labs were a three-block radius of sprawl surrounded by barbwire and armed guards. Six years ago, its CEO recruited Absalom to manage the Dark Materials Project, and every day since then, the saboteurs had gotten bolder. Eco-terrorists, anti-eugenicists, university competition, random crazies who needed a cause—they all flocked to Winchester, Massachusetts, sandwich boards and spray paint in hands like they’d discovered the new Roswell. They wanted either to halt the project or to have a piece of it. Sometimes both, so long as it gave them a few seconds of fame.

  Winchester was prettier than most suburbs, full of colonial mansions, kids’ parks, and independently owned boutiques selling high-priced crap like antique Underwood typewriters that didn’t type and sterling silver jewelry crafted by hippies with rich parents. The town was far enough away from Boston to keep the operation secure, but close enough to lure the top scientists. You could raise a family here, which, until recently, had been part of his plan.

  At the first checkpoint, he rolled down the window so the infrared laser could scan his retina. Upon recognition, the gate lifted, and George and Juan waved him through with the butts of their semiautomatics. He’d always gotten the impression that neither of them liked him. But that was fine. They were rent-a-cops, and he was on track for a second Nobel Prize.

  “It’s a mess,” Dan Stephens announced as the second Absalom walked through the third security door. A missing wife, and no morning coffee. He had to agree: it was a mess.

  “The chimps. The dogs. Even the fucking rabbits,” Dan said. He was a lanky guy who wore cheap Men’s Wearhouse suits to work every day, even though he could afford better. A geek, like everybody else here.

  “More mania?” Absalom asked. They were standing in the hallway. Ionized,
filtered air hissed through the vents. It smelled sweet.

  “Two of the chimps bashed their heads against their cages last night. They killed themselves.” Dan pinched the skin between his eyes and took a couple of gasping breaths. “Animals don’t commit suicide. They were scared of something!” Dan’s eyes got misty. He was unmarried, and called the chimps his babies.

  This entire Winchester Complex, which Absalom managed, was devoted to the discovery and study of Shadow DNA; dark matter. Blue eyes, wide smile, agility of synapses: all were determined by run-of-the mill chromosomes. Humans have twenty-three pairs; chimps, twenty-four; fruit flies, four; E. coli, one. Shadow DNA were more sophisticated. Personality, sense of humor, moral compass, human soul—these variables existed outside the parameters of the double helix. There was a reason that, until now, no geneticist had accurately predicted their expression, even after the entire human genome was decoded: they were determined by Shadow DNA.

  A decade ago, Absalom was the only scientist in the world who’d anticipated that the dark matter attending all mass also existed in the human genome. What he hadn’t guessed, and the reason it had taken so long to find the stuff, was that only mammals possessed it. The rest—bacteria, fruit flies, lizards, even sharks—none were complex enough to warrant the extra genetic material.

  Shadow DNA’s commercial potential was huge. Parents could special order the best and brightest children. Medicines could be targeted against mutated Shadow genes, so that humorless duds suddenly became prom kings. In another generation, this society could clone itself, and no one would ever have to die.

  In college, while every other wannabe MD had gotten laid by promising his money-hungry girlfriend a white picket fence, Absalom had sat in his dorm room, gazing at a poster of the double helix while jerking off, convinced that something so perfect proved God. He’d worked his whole life. Forty-two years old, and his back was crooked from leaning over a desk eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. But now he headed the most important project in history, and raked in millions. He’d been able to buy a Porsche, a summer house on the Cape, present Mireille with a fucking ruby tiara and tell her she was his queen the night they got hitched. Five years ago, Time magazine had called him the smartest man in the world.