“Husband?” she said.
V
KIRSTY WENT TO THE cabinet. On the bottom shelf she found a hammer. The irony was not lost on her. As she gripped the handle, she spoke:
“There’s a hammer here,” she said. “Funny. I knew a woman who killed people with a hammer once. Years ago. It was the death of her.”
Kirsty’s grip upon the hammer’s grainy, wooden handle tightened as a sudden realization came over her. The paintings. Their colors. The ineffable meanings hidden within. She saw with a terrible clarity just how stupid she had been. The golden hues and abstracted patterns had been carved into her psyche long ago and remained embedded in her soul, forever part of her. So deeply, in fact, that she had taken them for granted. But it was the image of the house that gave it away. The six gold and black pillars—between them a doorway leading to an inferno that blacked out the heavens; the house was a work of loving tribute to the infernal device. It was a shrine to the Lament Configuration. A current of shudders passed through Kirsty’s body. This house and everything in it was an agent of the Wastes.
No sooner had Kirsty made her realization than she heard the pistol’s hammer click into place. Kirsty hung her head and cursed herself under her breath.
“Don’t move,” Walter said. “He’ll be along shortly.”
“Why?” Kirsty said without turning around.
“He wants to talk with you. Share his plans.”
“No,” Kirsty said. “Not that. Why have you done this to yourself? You’ve damned yourself. I’ll never understand why people do it.”
“Life is complicated, Mademoiselle. Maybe decisions do not come so easy for some as they do for others, such as yourself. So it becomes necessary to, I believe they say, hedge the bets.”
“You’re afraid you’ll end up in Hell, so you make a deal with the Devil? That makes no sense.”
“It is not for you to understand. It is not your path. You are there, and I am—”
Before he could finish his sentence, Kirsty twisted her body and hurled the hammer toward the man with the gun. His eyes widened and he pulled the trigger. Kirsty braced herself, heard first the click of the hammer striking the chamber. But instead of the report of a bullet being fired, she only heard a heavy thudding sound, like a wet cabbage hitting a brick wall. And then Walter was on the ground. She’d hit her mark.
“That’s for bringing a gun to a hammer fight,” Kirsty said.
Kirsty stood quickly, backing away from the man. But Walter remained still as she moved through the darkness of the room. Cautiously she went to his side. The glint of moonlight caught her eye and told her all she needed to know. There was blood, and it was streaming from Walter’s head in freshets, spreading across the floor. She stepped over it and crouched down by his side. He wasn’t breathing, partly because the hammer had struck him directly between the eyes, driving his nose into his brain, and partly because the man had likely died before he even hit the ground.
She grabbed the gun from his hand, pointed it at his bleeding body, and pulled the trigger just to be safe. The gun misfired for the second time. Kirsty examined the weapon in her hands and noticed just how old the piece of equipment truly was. It looked like something that had been used in the American Revolutionary War. The gun, and likely too its ammunition, were relics from a more prosperous time for The Devil’s Island. Kirsty dropped the gun to the floor, picked up the blood-soaked hammer, and went outside. The darkness was intimidating. Though there were a few stars out tonight, they shed little light on the lawn and none whatsoever on the jungle beyond.
VI
KIRSTY SET FOOT ON the damp earth of the jungle, expecting the next portion of her journey to be far from uneventful. As the foliage thickened, the rain began in short bursts, and though the view before her was dark and more than a little disquieting, she was able to appreciate that the jungle did possess its own kind of eerie beauty. Stoic trees reached higher than her eyes could see, the animals that found their homes here sang their strange jungle songs, and on occasion showed themselves to the interloper who dared trespass through their domain. Catching fleeting glimpses of their bodies disappearing behind branches, trunks, and leaves, Kirsty was reminded of the Runner on Lodovico Street weaving between the withered trunks, and wondered if he wasn’t here, now, watching her stumble her way blindly to her death.
Kirsty shook the thought from her mind and maintained her course, searching for any sign of Madame Rembert. Would the old woman be waiting for her with a weapon as Walter had been, or would she be surprised to see her alive, mistaken in the certainty that her errand boy had done her bidding and done it well? Kirsty certainly hoped to catch the old woman off guard. She wanted to see the look of surprise on the old cow’s face. But rather than dwell on what lay ahead and let the fear of its unknown possibilities get the better of her, Kirsty kept her thoughts in the present: on the jungle, the slender path before her, and the soft earth beneath her feet.
It became harder and harder to focus, however, once she found a piece of Madame Rembert’s clothing: a shoe, sticking out of the ground, its toe buried in the dirt as though the old woman had trod in quicksand and, in her haste, stepped out of the shoe and kept her pace, never once looking back for fear of some Fiend close at her back. As Kirsty journeyed on, she came across more and more articles of Madame Rembert’s clothing: another shoe, her stockings, and then a shawl, blowing across the threshold of the jungle like an orphaned ghost seeking its new haunt.
She was passing beyond the jungle now. Dawn was hours in front of her, the last bit of sunlight hours behind. She was deep in the middle of her night, and knew that her journey had only just begun. As she walked on, curiosity and caution gave way to uncertainty and dread. The further she traveled, the darker the night seemed to grow. Forms in front of her blurred, their lines of definition defying Kirsty’s eyes. Did she see another piece of clothing, or was that a plant? Overhead, was that a bird seeking a fresh carcass, or the last of the jungle’s canopy waving her farewell?
She had prepared herself for a hard journey after putting down the man in the hotel. It was then that the rules of the game had changed, or rather, that she was again reminded of the game’s distaste for predictability, and that the only rule was that the game ended when it had no more use for you. And yet, armed with this information, Kirsty was still unprepared for what came next. No matter how hard she tried to prepare for the worst, what came always surprised her.
The jungle opened up, and delivered Kirsty to the entrance of that infamous structure of stone and mortar: the hand-made Hell of the French government—the place of shame with the tiny cells where countless prisoners were housed, tortured, and eventually died all alone only to have their bodies thrown into a mass grave, and covered over by dirt and by time, their lives forgotten by history, their stories lost to the ages.
The prison of The Devil’s Island was as terrible to Kirsty’s eyes as anything she’d seen in the Wastes, and as she walked towards it, the earth beneath her feet grew noticeably damp, until she found herself struggling to keep her balance in an ever-thickening black mud. She walked on until she came upon Madame Rembert.
Kirsty halted suddenly. Madame Rembert stared up at her, the woman’s eyes and mouth open wide in a silent shriek of terror. The woman’s body, however, was nowhere to be seen. What lay in the mud was a sheaf of flesh—the skin of her face, from her forehead to her withered breasts—seemingly torn from her body in the midst of a despairing cry, or perhaps, Kirsty thought, martyred ecstasy. Whatever her state of mind at the time of her death (and dead she must be, for only now that Kirsty looked closer did she see that it wasn’t water which made moist this earth, but the lifeblood of the old woman, surely spilled in its entirety), any questions to which Madame Rembert held the answers had been taken with her. Kirsty hoped the old woman had found her husband at last, and that reunited, their suffering was greater now than their love had been the last time they saw one another alive.
Kirsty
moved ahead, entering the prison. As she did so, the clouds glided across the thin sliver of moon that hung in the sky, blotting out the last remaining fragment of light in the night sky. It astonished her that, after so many journeys into the heart of darkness, trying for thirty years to run from The Cold Man and his legacy in her life, she only ever seemed to find herself moving inexorably closer to him with every step.
VII
THE BIG HOUSE WAS an illusion, which became truer the deeper Kirsty ventured. The two roofs above ground were facades: frames of weather-warped timber and weather-tattered canvas. But below ground, a real world lay waiting to be discovered. No, not world; worlds. On the first floor Kirsty found a maze of interconnected chambers, with something scrawled on every wall, seemingly by the same madman. At first, Kirsty thought it gibberish, but the closer she looked, the more the pattern began to emerge. Yes, there were calculations here, such as a man of science might have recognized. But the solutions were offered in far less conventional forms. In a recipe for jam, there were insights into the way an unborn soul might be taught to choose its own parents. In an analysis of pastel blue and its power to hypnotise, were found the encoded means of taking the life of any living being, and repurposing its life essence into another body.
On the floor below these chambers of science and madness was a furnace. But even further below, in the sub-basement, Kirsty found the end, and perhaps the beginning as well to both the flames and the fevers.
At the end of a long, dark, damp and ancient concrete hallway was a doorway. The second Kirsty saw it, she knew it led to the Other Place.
Kirsty saw all of this, her mouth sealed shut in a grimace of resolve as she passed through the halls, as she made her way down into the lower chambers, and ultimately approached the two massive doors carved from stone. And reaching the end of one journey, but the beginning of another, she saw then that the doors were connected to an ancient system of weights and counterweights that caused them to open and close when pressed upon. As she moved in to more closely examine the device, unseen birds filled the passage between this world and the one she was knocking on, their panicked chirps echoing off the stone walls.
Just like the invisible birds that flew overhead, she could not see what lay on the other side with any clarity, but she could hear the sounds coming from Hell with horrible lucidity. There were screams, and sobbings, and prayers being offered to unholy things. The sounds made her stomach turn. Despite this, she reached for the lever to open the door. She was already past the point of no return. A man she’d never met had discovered her whereabouts and convinced her to forsake the safety of her hiding place for the epicenter of Hell’s double doors. Kirsty wrapped her hand around the lever, realizing this would could prove to be the greatest journey of her life, but would likely be her very undoing.
“Do you know what the word autopsy means?” asked a voice from within the darkness.
Kirsty wrenched her hand back from the lever as though it had burned her, and while skin pulled itself taut, gooseflesh spreading from head to toe, and back again. The voice came from somewhere behind her. The voice. She hadn’t been in the presence of its owner in thirty years, and yet she still heard it almost every night in her dreams. But this was no dream. It was him. It was The Cold Man.
VIII
HER FEET REFUSED TO move. Trembling, but not daring to turn around, she found she couldn’t bring herself to answer the question the voice had posed. The fear in her was insurmountable. Had she been able to speak, however, she was uncertain she’d even be able to attempt to answer his question when so many of her own questions began to fight for first position; After three decades of running, why would any sane person turn and run into the fire? Could The Cold Man be killed? What were the odds this was all some terrible dream?
“For most people it’s a death word,” the voice said, invading her thoughts—stopping them in their tracks. “Mutilated corpses. Darkness. Incisions. But when the blinders of fear are stripped away, only one thing remains: seeing. It’s time to open the door. That which lays on the other side has been waiting for you.”
In front of her, the two doors seemed to beg for The Cold Man’s request to be heeded. She wanted to scream. Instead, again she reached for the lever, hand shaking. This time, she pulled it. With incremental movement, the doors slid open, but nothing revealed itself from that crack between worlds. Blackness, thick as the wall Madame Rembert had pointed to, was all that Kirsty could see at first.
When there was enough room to squeeze through into the next world, however, Kirsty did so, moving past the chaotic racket of unseen birds and into the Wastes that marked the dividing line of this infernal nowhere. With one foot on earth, and one in Hell, the Wastes opened before her.
How often she’d thought of this place, since the moment when she first encountered the term in a book about the topography of Hell. It had been, as she remembered, a somewhat condescending book, mocking the fact that those who spoke of infernal regions constantly contradicted each other and themselves. Kirsty would have gained some satisfaction from taking the smug ones by their collars and showing them what she saw now.
Her sight seemed both wider and higher than it had ever been before, as though the bone of her skull had surrendered to the ambition of her new vision, and retreated. Though her sight was not the only sense that had new appetite; her ears not only heard with new clarity, but when the wind here blew against her face she could have named the origin of every note that grazed her skin. It was the smell of the Wastes, however, that moved her most deeply. She had read just days before that it was in humanity’s sense of smell where the greatest repository of associations and memories lay.
It was from the smell alone that Kirsty guessed this place had earned it name. But even without the smell, the Wastes lived up to its name. Greasy mud was all she could see for a hundred feet in front of her. Beyond that, the vista seemed to stretch out for miles with nary a topographical distinction to break up the monotonous view. This piece of Hell was impressive in its banality. There was nothing worthy of mockery here. It seemed a place perfectly suited as a punishment. It was in the middle distance, however, that Kirsty saw why The Cold Man had brought her here. There, she caught sight of a teeming mass of bodies gathered around a large and ancient-looking stone well; it was the only variation in her entire field of vision.
“Do you see?” The Cold Man said. “This is what they do to pay their respects to the great Absence which is God. Above or Below, it makes no difference. God is a well with no water to which pilgrims who are already damned come to drink. This is the void gazing at the void. This is the place where I realized I am nothing, nor ever was, and as a result, I decided to finally expose the charade.”
Kirsty perceived the significance of The Cold Man’s delivery, but the message was lost on her. She dared a backward glance in his direction and felt her blood freeze in her veins at the sight of him. The Cold Man stood there, exactly as she remembered him. His skin was white as porcelain, his shorn head carved with lines that crisscrossed his face and head. Where the lines met, thick, rusted nails had been driven deep into scalp and bone. If these wounds had ever caused him to bleed, that day had long since passed. The exposed flesh beneath the surface was grey like old meat. The most striking things of all, though, were the demon’s eyes. They were two portals that transported her to that place on Lodovico Street and reduced her to her basest, feral fears. The two orbs in his noble skull were black as the night, with a silvery glint, and contained only the sentiment of decay.
She said nothing.
“I am gathering many magics,” he said. “All I have need of now are my disciples. Your presence is requested. I have cast my first witness. A detective. You will be my second. You will witness my great working from your throne on earth, and the detective shall witness my ascension below.”
IX
“WHY?” WAS THE ONLY word that escaped her mouth.
“Most who cross my path are not fortunate e
nough to escape with breath in their body. You and the detective have this rare honor in common.”
She looked at him curiously. Her throat was dry. She wanted to ask him more questions. She wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. She wanted to scream the name “Pinhead” at him. Before she could do any of these things, he spoke again. Instead, she said nothing.
The Cold Man looked at her curiously. “Are you afraid? Where is the bravery, the anger? The rebellious spirit from the girl on Lodovico Street?”
“I can’t help you.” A tear rolled down her cheek.
“You will. I have left nothing to chance. Should I fail, there is another who will rise in my place. I have spread my seed that my legacy may live on. She is in your world, moving amongst the living, even as we speak.”
Kirsty looked at him with eyes wide. He was a father? How could God have allowed it?
“Look at the lost souls,” he said. “This is it. The End of All Things.”
Kirsty maintained her gaze, staring at The Cold Man. At his eyes. Those eyes. The eyes of the creature that ruined her life.
“Look!” he snapped.
Kirsty flinched at The Cold Man’s outburst. She did as she was told, and looked round slowly. The Cold Man was right. The many tens of thousands of pilgrims were assembled around a hole, which she deemed in her mind the Well of the Wastes. A hole. A great big hole. As she watched, a column of young mothers carrying their babes naked in their arms walked purposefully towards the hole, like devout Catholics coming to an altar to give thanks. Their feet did not falter, even for an instant. They kept walking, until there was no more ground. Clutching their infants, they went over the edge, one after the other.
“My God,” she said.
“‘Jesus wept’ is more appropriate, is it not?” he said.
Hellraiser- The Toll Page 4
