Kirsty had done as her father had asked. But she’d found no truth. Though her father had told Kirsty his wife was pale and sickly, she was anything but. Kirsty found Julia looking flushed, sweaty, and agitated. She looked, Kirsty thought, like a woman who was entertaining male company: a suspicion that had been further supported by a stranger’s coat hanging within sight of the doorstep where Kirsty stood. Julia had been in no mood for niceties.
Kirsty remembered with particular clarity what had happened as she’d retreated from Julia and the place she called home; how very strongly she’d had the sense of being scrutinized, and how she’d looked back and known somehow that it wasn’t Julia who was watching her from one of the upper windows, but her secret lover, whoever he was.
Only later would she discover the vile truth: that the lover Julia was entertaining in the house that afternoon had been her own uncle, Larry’s brother, Frank Cotton, a man whose exploits—as an explorer of all things extreme and forbidden—were believed to have ended his life. In a sense, this was true. In pursuit of experiences beyond anything his flesh had ever known, Larry’s brother had purchased from a felon in Morocco—a man called Kircher who had been responsible for the blinding of a two-month-old baby and the murder of the infant’s mother—a box, legendary in unholy circles, known as the Lament Configuration.
Then he set about opening it, and he quickly learned the error of his choices. The place of erotic atrocities he’d hoped to discover instead opened a doorway into the Wastes of Hell, and he, thanks to the box, had become the prisoner of its overlords, the Order of the Gash, a sadistic sect of demons known as Cenobites.
Kirsty only discovered all of this later, when she’d accidentally summoned the creatures up with her own fingers. There were four of these creatures, their bodies slashed and sutured beyond recognition, the wounds decorated and displayed as though they were things of beauty.
Kirsty would have become their prey as Frank had, if she hadn’t solved the mystery of Frank Cotton’s life after death. Frank had escaped his captors with the aid of Julia, who had nourished him with the life-blood of the few hopeful lovers she’d seduced to Lodovico Street through the promise of a little lunchtime adultery. In the end, Frank and Julia took Larry’s life, and then his skin, in an attempt to hide Frank in perpetuity from his tormentors. But like a clever innocent in a nursery tale, Kirsty had tricked Frank into offering up the most crucial scrap of information in the invisible presence of those tormentors: his own name. It didn’t matter whose face he’d stolen to conceal himself. He was Frank Cotton.
‘“Hush now,” he’d said to her, brandishing his switchblade. “Everything’s alright. Frank’s here. Your dear old uncle Frank.”
He would have taken her life a moment later, but his attention had been distracted by the sound of a tolling bell. She had known its origin the instant it began to sound. She could smell the bitter air of the Infernal place from which it had emanated. They came swiftly. And when they did, they took him. The whole affair was a gruesome, violent conflict that had left her with nightmares of the house on Lodovico Street for as long as she could remember.
There was no logic to what she decided to do next. But then she knew from harsh experience that the world she had escaped from contained not a grain of logic. So it made sense, in such a world, to go back to Lodovico Street, and sniff the old place out.
III
A WEEK LATER, KIRSTY found herself standing in a neighborhood she hardly recognized. At first she thought she’d miscounted the houses, or that what had once been the Cotton residence had been so extensively renovated that she’d failed to spot it. But she walked back and forth along the street again and again, studying the houses and paving stones beneath her feet, looking for some tiny sign she found familiar. But there was nothing. The house had literally vanished without a trace; its very existence, or any evidence thereof, erased in every way. There could only be one explanation: some force, angelic or infernal, had scratched out the place where the threshold to Hell had stood. The moment she accepted this—not as a possibility, but as gospel—her eyes recalculated Lodovico Street, and she saw the evidence of where the house had been torn away. The street had been crudely refitted so that the paving stones almost matched. The crack in the earth where the house had been uprooted and carried away would have been undetectable had she not implemented the more metaphysical calculations.
She didn’t linger to study the signs, however. Who knew what kinds of eyes still watched over the spot, and might have called down forces to interrogate her on the matter of her curiosity? Careful to conceal her awareness, she went on her way. But as she walked on, she found that her awakening to the illusions on Lodovico Street had changed the world beyond it; or rather, because her eyes had changed, she now saw her surroundings as they truly were. She chose, for reasons of safety, to walk to her hotel by way of the busiest streets. It was a little after four, and the first escapees from the St. Francis Elementary School padded the number of pedestrians along her route, their raucous laughter and shrill shrieks a welcome reminder of a safer world.
Her changed eyes saw the same wing she’d seen where the Cotton house had stood. Everywhere she looked, she now saw cracked flagstones poorly fitted back together, the bricks in walls mismatched where the schoolchildren wove about one another as they ran, squealing with ignorant delight.
She was three blocks from the corner of the street where she turned off to make her way back to her room when the first drops of rain began to fall. The kids stopped racing each other and instead sped off down the street to outrun the storm. Kirsty picked up her pace, and lowered her head. The rain—chilled by the gusts of wind driving it—was blown against her face. She squinted against the needle jabs of ice water and when she next looked up there had been another substantial emptying of the pavements, as adults cut short whatever business they might have had in these last cold hours of the afternoon, and were hurrying away to the shelter of the Underground or the occasional cab that had not yet been claimed.
Kirsty reached the corner of the street and glanced back. To Kirsty’s recollection, it had been one of the few streets in the neighborhood that had genuine charm. Many years before days at the Cotton house, some far-sighted city official had planted trees along both sides of this street, and they had prospered in the decades since. But while Kirsty was busy trying to outrun her past, someone had taken a chainsaw and had cut the branches back with such brutality that the work resembled amputation rather than pruning.
Kirsty was feeling too vulnerable on this late afternoon to bear the sight of these butchered trees, so she turned her back on the street. But as she did so she heard the sound of somebody running nearby on the rain-soaked sidewalk. She tried to get a fix on the runner, and caught sight of a slim, dark, bald figure on the left-hand side of the street, racing in and out of the trees carrying a darkness towards her as he came. He was chanting, she heard, the meaning of his call at first inexplicable, rendered only more complex by its own echo, which doubled back on itself. But when she held her breath a moment and listened more carefully the simple obscenity which found her ears was all too easily understood:
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
She could not yet see his face as he briefly emerged from the desiccated trees, but she quickly became accustomed to the rhythm with which he was appearing and disappearing, and was able to predict the moment of his next appearance. The only certain thing about him was the clarity with which he repeated the word:
“FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”
With each utterance a very fine thread of lightning leapt up out of his mouth, spreading out, and igniting his bony torso as it escaped his lips.
“FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” he yelled.
The speed with which he was weaving his way towards her, and the volume of his shout, made it very difficult for her to resist fleeing before his approach, but at the end of the street directly beneath the last of the sycamores, she halted and stood
her ground. The Runner was instantly intimidated by this and he stopped in his tracks. The lightning that had been so incandescent when he’d been running at her lost its brilliance. There was one last illumination that showed his face. Kirsty seemed then to see the sadness there that had not been visible before. Then, the last of the light died away and he simply stood there, the rain slapping on the pavement around him.
She watched him for a moment, and then turned and walked away. She had no fear of him now. No doubt he was some form of demonic entity, and no doubt his origins lay somewhere with that far greater evil that had appeared in Lodovico Street. The fact that he was fiend, she knew, more or less guaranteed her safety once she turned the corner. Demons were territorial. More than likely the Runner had been given the sycamores to watch over as they rotted in their living roots. This was what she told herself as she pressed on. She did not look back, but turned the corner of the street and left the Runner and his sycamores to their mutual decay.
IV
BY THE TIME KIRSTY reached her room, the light shower had become a deluge, numbing her face and hands. Her fingers were so chilled that she twice dropped her key before successfully getting it into the lock and turned. Once inside, she got herself dry and warm as quickly as possible. She turned on the heating, and grabbed a towel from the bathroom to dry off her hair, sloughing off her sodden shoes as she did so and padding on bare feet across the cold tiles. As she went to pick up the towel, some spasm in her cortex brought the vision of the Runner back into her mind’s eye. She saw him there looking melancholy as the rain pelted him, the last frail fragment of lightning illuminating his face. She realized then that she needed a drink. She went to the mini-fridge and took out the bottle of brandy. Her grandmother (God bless her pragmatic, Puritan soul) had remarked on several occasions that brandy was useful in every emergency, especially death.
She could find no glasses, but she didn’t care. She unscrewed the cap and offered up a little toast before she put the bottle to her lips:
“Grandma, if you’re up there, keep an eye on me, will you? I’ve got problems.”
No question, she was in trouble. Whatever she hoped to learn at Lodovico Street, whatever she may have gained by way of visions, none of it was worth the price of attentions she was beginning to fear she’d just drawn in her direction.
Things were in motion, like water being drained at a great rate out of a tub—only a huge tub, a tub maybe the size of the world—and she felt like a scrap of a bit of a remnant of nothing—being carried down, round and round, down and down, into the place where the rest of the world was going. And wherever that place was, she knew it wasn’t good.
The ever-irritated wind gusted against the window again. She thought of the Runner. Was he still out there, she wondered, trying to find some small measure of shelter beneath those trees, which his bosses had surely had their hands in destroying, leaving him naked and cold?
The image that had appeared in her head in turn flowed on into another image, one which she had first encountered in a history lesson in high school. It was the obligatory grainy scratched footage from a concentration camp, taken not by its liberators but by some minor monster who had considered the spectacle of dying Jews worthy of home movies. The casual way in which this scene had been filmed had made a powerful impression upon Kirsty at the age of fourteen. She had been haunted by the image for weeks after the lesson and had found herself asking the inevitable question: what would I have done? Would she have simply set her jaw and defied the icy rain to erode her hope, knowing that she would be shown no mercy by heaven or earth, or would she have perished—dropped into the dirty snow, giving up all hope of a brighter time while the black smoke billowed from the cremation chimney above the camp?
Somehow people got through these terrors. Somehow they convinced themselves that all they needed was the tiniest of hopes, the smallest of cracks through which to escape into a better world that was waiting for them tomorrow. Was she amongst them? Was there a better tomorrow to be had? She didn’t know.
It was time to find some answers. There weren’t, unfortunately, a lot of places to look or people to ask. One of the few might be Lansing. She grabbed herself another brandy from the mini-fridge and finished changing out of her damp clothes into some dry ones. Then she again called the number in Minnesota. This time somebody picked up the phone. It was a man’s voice.
“Joe Lansing’s office,” said the voice. “How may I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Dr. Lansing if he’s available,” Kirsty said.
“Depends who wants to talk to him,” the man replied.
“My name’s Kirsty, I received a letter a little while ago.”
“Okay. I’ll pass the word along. What do you need?”
“I think you know what I need.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have time for this. Right now I have some people in my office and they need to talk to me.”
There was something about the tone of the man’s voice that made Kirsty uneasy. Not for herself, but for the man who was four thousand miles away. It was her unease that kept her from pressing the questions any further. All she said was:
“Things are rather urgent where I am. In fact they’re a little dangerous. I’ve got about an hour’s worth of packing to do and then I’m leaving. If you wouldn’t mind telling Dr. Lansing that, I would be very grateful.”
“Why don’t you just call me back when you’re done?” he said. And without waiting for her to reply, he hung up.
V
KIRSTY HAD MOVED TOO many times to be challenged by the organizational routine. It was a job that needed to be done, and it needed to be done fast—in this case, as was so often true, very fast—so that she could be ready to depart as soon as she made her follow up call to Lansing. She fortified her maneuvers with another brandy and then got about the all-too-familiar task of fitting the important things in her life into one medium-sized suitcase and one smaller bag with a number of compartments for papers and clothes.
She had a much-used large leather wallet which had served for many years as a receptacle for everything that she absolutely needed to get herself out of one country and into another, out of danger and into whatever approximation of safety the world would ever offer her; that was the first item into one of the compartments of the smaller bag. It was followed by a selection of less necessary, but still useful items, including several pieces of forged paperwork, allowing her in and out of countries as a national.
Had anybody assessed the contents of these various pouches they would probably have assumed Kirsty was in the espionage business. In a sense, she was. The enemy was spiritual, not national, but the dangers were as real and as sudden as anything she might have encountered had her enemies been things of guns and steel, rather than hell and damnation.
Kirsty had first heard hell’s bell tolling in the attic room at the top of the house on Lodovico Street. It had signaled the approach of the greatest source of evil she hoped she would ever meet—the demon with the bitter breath; the creature she could only think of as The Cold Man—perhaps the most notorious member of the Order of the Gash. Though she had never seen the bell, nor the steeple in which that bell hung, nor what unholy force caused it to ring, she had seen the mechanism which sent a message to that steeple from this world. It was a box, a golden box, reputedly fashioned by a French maker of automatons by the name of Philip Lemarchand.
She thought of Frank, whose desire to know more, taste more, own more of the world’s supply of experience than was his right to possess, had brought one of the boxes Lemarchand had fashioned into the house on Lodovico Street. Kirsty had held it in her hand. It had been heavy, she remembered. Her hand still knew its weight as though the flesh of her palm would always be haunted by the holding of it.
And the creature it eventually summoned went by many names. To those foolish or suicidal enough to indulge in insult, he was called Pinhead. Kirsty had thought it was an idiot name the first time she’d hea
rd it, and had not changed her opinion since. She didn’t doubt that those who had first used the name had done so believing it would somehow take away from his power. But no. The Pinhead was a poisonous flower by any name.
Besides, like most of the entities that haunted the Wastes, the Cenobite owned more than one name. Many demons had half a dozen or more. Pinhead had been given his name from the ranks of nails that were driven in a symmetrical pattern over his entire head, from the line of his jaw up over his dour and weary face to the spot at the base of his naked skull where a hook kept the flesh taut. She was certain he went by other names. She’d never know them, but it mattered little. To her, he was The Cold Man.
She realized she should have been talking to Lansing by now.
The Cold Man…
She looked at the clock beside the bed. She had to call.
The Cold Man…
This was all about him. It had always been about him. She was his unfinished business, she knew. An irritant left over from his manipulations of Frank Cotton. More than likely if he had any intentions regarding her, they were to kill her. Isn’t that what you did with unfinished business? You got rid of it. Shredded it. Threw it in the fire. Smothered it.
Hellraiser- The Toll Page 2
