Age of Desire

by Clive Barker

  The phone rang. It was Johannson.

  “Still at work?” he said, impressed by Johannson’s dedication to the job. It was well after nine. Perhaps Johannson didn’t have a home worth calling such to go back to either.

  “I heard our man had a busy day,” Johannson said.

  “That’s right. A prostitute in Soho, then got himself stabbed.” “He got through the cordon, I gather?”

  “These things happen,” Carnegie replied, too tired to be testy. “What can I do for you?” “I just thought you’d want to know: the monkeys have started to die.” The words stirred Carnegie from his fatigue-stupor. “How many?” he asked.

  “Three from fourteen so far. But the rest will be dead by dawn, I’d guess.” “What’s killing them? Exhaustion?” Carnegie recalled the desperate saturnalia he’d seen in the cages. What animal — human or otherwise — could keep up such revelry without cracking up?

  “It’s not physical,” Johannson said. “Or at least not in the way you’re implying. We’ll have to wait for the dissection results before we get any detailed explanations—“ ”Your best guess?”

  “For what it’s worth…” Johannson said, “…which is quite a lot: I think they’re going bang.”

  “What?”

  “Cerebral overload of some kind. Their brains are simply giving out. The agent doesn’t disperse you see. It feeds on itself. The more fevered they get, the more of the drug is produced; the more of the drug there is, the more fevered they get. It’s a vicious circle. Hotter and hotter, wilder and wilder. Eventually the system can’t take it, and suddenly I’m up to my armpits in dead monkeys.” The smile came back into the voice again, cold and wry. “Not that the others let that spoil their fun. Necrophilia’s quite the fashion down here.” Carnegie peered at his cooling hot chocolate. It had acquired a thin skin which puckered as he touched the cup. “So it’s just a matter of time?” he said.

  “Before our man goes for bust? Yes, I’d think so.” “All right. Thank you for the update. Keep me posted.” “You want to come down here and view the remains?” “Monkey corpses I can do without, thank you.” Johannson laughed. Carnegie put down the receiver. When he turned back to the window, night had well and truly fallen.

  In the laboratory Johannson crossed to the light switch by the door. In the time he’d been calling Carnegie the last of the daylight had fled. He saw the blow that felled him coming a mere heartbeat before it landed; it caught him across the side of his neck. One of his vertebrae snapped and his legs buckled. He collapsed without reaching the light switch. But by the time he hit the ground the distinction between day and night was academic.

  Welles didn’t bother to check whether his blow had been lethal or not; time was at a premium. He stepped over the body and headed across to the bench where Johannson had been working. There, lying in a circle of lamplight as if for the final act of a simian tragedy, lay a dead monkey. It had clearly perished in a frenzy. Its face was knitted up; mouth wide and spittle-stained; eyes fixed in a final look of alarm. Its fur had been pulled out in tufts in the throes of its copulation. It took Welles half a minute of study to recognize the implications of the corpse, and of the other two he now saw lying on a nearby bench.

  “Love kills,” he murmured to himself philosophically and began his systematic destruction of Blind Boy.

  I’m drying, Jerome thought. I’m dying of terminal joy. The thought amused him. It was the only thought in his head which made sense. Since his encounter with Isaiah and the escape from the police that had followed, he could remember little with any coherence. The hours of hiding and nursing his wounds — of feeling the heat grow again, and of discharging it — had long since merged into one midsummer dream, from which, he knew with pleasurable certainty, only death would wake him. The blaze was devouring him utterly, from the entrails out. If he were to eviscerated now, what would the witnesses find? Only embers and ashes.

  Yet still his one-eyed friend demanded more. Still, as he wove his way back to the laboratories — where else for a man to go when the stitches slipped but back to the first heat? — still the grids gaped at him seductively, and every brick wall offered up a hundred gritty invitations.

  The night was balmy: a night for love songs and romance. In the questionable privacy of a parking lot a few blocks from his destination he saw two people having sex in the back of a car, the doors open to accommodate limbs and draft. Jerome paused to watch the ritual, enthralled as ever by the tangle of bodies and the sound — so loud it was like thunder itself — of twin hearts beating to one escalating rhythm. Watching, his rod grew eager.

  The female saw him first and alerted her partner to the wreck of a human being who was watching them with such childish delight. The male looked around from his gropings to stare.

  Do I burn, Jerome wondered? Does my hair flame? At the last, does the illusion gain substance?

  To judge by the look on their faces, the answer was surely no. They were not in awe of him, merely angered and revolted.

  “I’m on fire,” he told them.

  The male got to his feet and spat at Jerome. He almost expected the spittle to turn to steam as it approached him but instead it landed on his face and upper chest as a cooling shower.

  “Go to hell,” the woman said. “Leave us alone.” Jerome shook his head. The male warned him that another step would oblige him to break Jerome’s head. It disturbed our man not a jig; no words, no blows, could silence the imperative of the rod.

  Their hearts, he realized, as he moved toward them, no longer beat in tandem.

  Carnegie consulted the map, five years out of date now, on his office wall to pinpoint the location of the attack that had just been reported. Neither of the victims had come to serious harm, apparently. The arrival of a carload of revelers had dissuaded Jerome (it was unquestioningly Jerome) from lingering. Now the area was being flooded with officers, half a dozen of them armed. In a matter of minutes every street in the vicinity of the attack would be cordoned off. Unlike Soho, which had been crowded, the area would furnish the fugitive with few hiding places.

  Carnegie pinpointed the location of the attack and realized that it was within a few blocks of the laboratories. No accident, surely. The man was heading back to the scene of his crime.

  Wounded, and undoubtedly on the verge of collapse — the lovers had described a man who looked more dead than alive — Jerome would probably by picked up before he reached home. But there was always the risk of his slipping though the net and getting to the laboratories. Johannson was working there, alone. The guard on the building was, in these straitened times, necessarily small.

  Carnegie picked up the phone and dialed through to Johannson. The phone rang at the other end but nobody picked it up. The man’s gone home, Carnegie thought, happy to be relieved of his concern. It’s ten-fifty at night and he’s earned his rest. Just as he was about to put the receiver down, however, it was picked up at the other end.

  “Johannson?”

  Nobody replied.

  “Johannson? This is Carnegie.” And still, no reply. “Answer me, damn it. Who is this?”

  In the laboratories the receiver was forsaken. It was not replaced on the cradle but left to lie on the bench. Down the buzzing line, Carnegie could clearly hear the monkeys, their voices shrill.

  “Johannson?” Carnegie demanded. “Are you there? Johannson?” But the apes screamed on.

  Welles had built two bonfires of the Blind Boy material in the sinks and then set them alight. They flared up enthusiastically. Smoke, heat and ashes filled the large room, thickening the air. When the fires were fairly raging he threw all the tapes he could lay hands upon into the conflagration, and added all of Johannson’s notes for good measure. Several of the tapes had already gone from the files, he noted. But all they could show any thief was some teasing scenes of transformation. The heart of the secret remained his. With the procedures and formulae now destroyed, it only remained to wash the small amounts of remaining agent
down the drain and kill and incinerate the animals.

  He prepared a series of lethal hypodermics, going about the business with uncharacteristic orderliness. This systematic destruction gratified him. He felt no regret at the way things had turned out. From that first moment of panic, when he’d helplessly watched the Blind Boy serum work its awesome effects upon Jerome, to this final elimination of all that had gone before had been, he now saw, one steady process of wiping clean. With these fires he brought an end to the pretense of scientific inquiry. After this he was indisputably the Apostle of Desire, its John in the Wilderness. The thought blinded him to any other. Careless of the monkeys’ scratchings he hauled them one by one from their cages to deliver the killing dose. He had dispatched three, and was opening the cage of the fourth, when a figure appeared in the doorway of the laboratory. Through the smoky air it was impossible to see who. The surviving monkeys seemed to recognize him, however. They left off their couplings and set up a din of welcome.

  Welles stood still and waited for the newcomer to make his move.

  “I’m dying,” said Jerome.

  Welles had not expected this. Of all the people he had anticipated here, Jerome was the last.

  “Did you hear me?” the man wanted to know.

  Welles nodded. “We’re all dying, Jerome. Life is a slow disease, no more nor less. But such a light, eh? in the going.”

  “You knew this would happen,” Jerome said. “You knew the fire would eat me away.” “No,” came the sober reply. “No, I didn’t. Really.” Jerome walked out of the door frame and into the murky light. He was a wasted shambles, a patchwork man, blood on his body, fire in his eyes. But Welles knew better than to trust the apparent vulnerability of this scarecrow. The agent in his system had made him capable of superhuman acts. He had seen Dance torn open with a few nonchalant strokes. Tact was required. Though clearly close to death, Jerome was still formidable.

  “I didn’t intend this, Jerome,” Welles said, attempting to tame the tremor in his voice. “I wish, in a way, I could claim that I had. But I wasn’t that farsighted. It’s taken me time and pain to see the future plainly.”

  The burning man watched him, gaze intent.

  “Such fires, Jerome, waiting to be lit.”

  “I know…” Jerome replied. “Believe me…I know.” “You and I, we are the end of the world.” The wretched monster pondered this for a while, and then nodded slowly. Welles softly exhaled a sigh of relief. The deathbed diplomacy was working. But he had little time to waste with talk. If Jerome was here, could the authorities be far behind?

  “I have urgent work to do, my friend,” he said calmly. “Would you think me uncivil if I continued with it?”

  Without waiting for a reply he unlatched another cage and hauled the condemned monkey out, expertly turning its body around to facilitate the injection. The animal convulsed in his arms for a few moments, then died. Welles disengaged its wizened fingers from his shirt and tossed the corpse and the discharged hypodermic on to the bench, turning with an executioner’s economy to claim his next victim.

  “Why?” Jerome asked, staring at the animal’s open eyes.

  “Act of mercy,” Welles replied, picking up another primed hypodermic. “You can see how they’re suffering.” He reached to unlatch the next cage.

  “Don’t,” Jerome said.

  “No time for sentiment,” Welles replied. “I beg you, an end to that.” Sentiment, Jerome thought, muddily remembering the songs on the radio that had first rewoken the fire in him. Didn’t Welles understand that the processes of heart and head and groin were indivisible? That sentiment, however trite, might lead to undiscovered regions? He wanted to tell the doctor that, to explain all that he had seen and all that he had loved in these desperate hours. But somewhere between mind and tongue the explanations absconded. All he could say, to state the empathy he felt for all the suffering world, was: “Don’t,” as Welles unlocked the next cage. The doctor ignored him and reached into the wire-mesh cell. It contained three animals. He took hold of the nearest and drew it, protesting, from its companions’ embraces.

  Without doubt it knew what fate awaited it; a flurry of screeches signaled its terror.

  Jerome couldn’t stomach this casual disposal. He moved, the wound in his side a torment, to prevent the killing. Welles, distracted by Jerome’s advance, lost hold of the wriggling charge. The monkey scampered away across the bench-tops. As he went to recapture it the prisoners in the cage behind him took their chance and slipped out.

  “Damn you,” Welles yelled at Jerome, “don’t you see we’ve no time? Don’t you understand?”

  Jerome understood everything, and yet nothing. The fever he and the animals shared he understood; its purpose, to transform the world, he understood too. But why should it end like this — that joy, that vision — why should it all come down to a sordid room filled with smoke and pain, to frailty, to despair? That he did not comprehend. Nor, he now realized, did Welles, who had been the architect of these contradictions.

  As the doctor made a snatch for one of the escaping monkeys, Jerome crossed swiftly to the remaining cages and unhatched them all. The animals leaped to their freedom. Welles had succeeded with his recapture, however, and had the protesting monkey in his grip, about to deliver the panacea. Jerome made toward him.

  “Let it be,” he yelled.

  Welles pressed the hypodermic into the monkey’s body, but before he could depress the plunger Jerome had pulled at his wrist. The hypodermic spat its poison into the air and then fell to the ground. The monkey, wresting itself free, followed.

  Jerome pulled Welles close. “I told you to let it be,” he said.

  Welles’s response was to drive his fist into Jerome’s wounded flank. Tears of pain spurted from his eyes, but he didn’t release the doctor. The stimulus, unpleasant as it was, could not dissuade him from holding that beating heart close. He wished, embracing Welles like a prodigal, that he could ignite himself, that the dream of burning flesh he had endured would now become a reality, consuming maker and made in one cleansing flame. But his flesh was only flesh; his bone, bone. What miracles he had seen had been a private revelation, and now there was no time to communicate their glories or their horrors. What he had seen would die with him, to be rediscovered (perhaps) by some future self, only to be forgotten and discovered again. Like the story of love the radio had told; the same joy lost and found, found and lost. He stared at Welles with new comprehension dawning, hearing still the terrified beat of the man’s heart. The doctor was wrong. If he left the man to live, he would come to know his error. They were not presagers of the millennium. They had both been dreaming.

  “Don’t kill me,” Welles pleaded. “I don’t want to die.” More fool you, Jerome thought, and let the man go.

  Welles’s bafflement was plain. He couldn’t believe that his appeal for life had been answered. Anticipating a blow with every step he took he backed away from Jerome, who simply turned his back on the doctor and walked away.

  From downstairs there came a shout, and then may shouts. Police, Welles guessed. They had presumably found the body of the officer who’d been on guard at the door. In moments only they would be coming up the stairs. There was no time now for finishing the tasks he’d come here to perform. He had to be away before they arrived.

  On the floor below Carnegie watched the armed officers disappear up the stairs. There was a faint smell of burning in the air. He feared the worst.

  I am the man who comes in after the act, he thought to himself. I am perpetually upon the scene when the best of the action is over. Used as he was to waiting, patient as a loyal dog, this time he could not hold his anxieties in check while the others went ahead. Disregarding the voices advising him to wait, he began up the stairs.

  The laboratory on the top floor was empty but for the monkeys and Johannson’s corpse.

  The toxicologist lay on his face where he had fallen, neck broken. The emergency exit, which let on to the fire e
scape, was open; smoky air was being sucked out through it. As Carnegie stepped away from Johannson’s body officers were already on the fire escape calling to their colleagues below to seek out the fugitive.

  “Sir?”

  Carnegie looked across at the mustachioed individual who had approached him.

  “What is it?”

  The officer pointed to the other end of the laboratory, to the test chamber. There was somebody at the window. Carnegie recognized the features, even though they were much changed. It was Jerome. At first he thought the man was watching him, but a short perusal scotched that idea. Jerome was staring, tears on his face, at his own reflection in the smeared glass. Even as Carnegie watched, the face retreated with the gloom of the chamber.

  Other officers had noticed the man too. They were moving down the length of the laboratory, taking up positions behind the benches where they had a good line on the door, weapons at the ready. Carnegie had been present in such situations before; they had their own, terrible momentum, Unless he intervened, there would be blood.

  “No,” he said, “hold your fire.”

  He pressed the protesting officer aside and began to walk down the laboratory, making no attempt to conceal his advance. He walked past sinks in which the remains of Blind Boy guttered, past the bench under which, a short while ago, they’d found the dead Dance. A monkey, its head bowed, dragged itself across his path, apparently deaf to his proximity. He let it find a hole to die in, then moved on to the chamber door. It was ajar. He reached for the handle. Behind him the laboratory had fallen completely silent; all eyes were on him. He pulled the door open. Fingers tightened on triggers. There was no attack however. Carnegie stepped inside.

  Jerome was standing against the opposite wall. If he saw Carnegie enter, or heard him, he made no sign of it. A dead monkey lay at his feet, one hand still grasping the hem of his trousers. Another whimpered in the corner, holding its head in its hands.

  “Jerome?”

  Was it Carnegie’s imagination, or could he smell strawberries?