Hellbound Hearts

by Paul Kane

  He grew aware of something tickling the back of his scalp like fear. He turned to face the main road and saw a figure watching him from the tram stop platform. He was bathed in the acid white of floodlights, a tall, thin man in a long, gray coat and a dark, woolen hat. The man stared at Gravier, unabashed. His hands were deep in his coat pockets, writhing, as if he were wrestling to keep something from exposing itself. Gravier stepped toward him. “Could I have a minute with you, sir?” he called out.

  The man did not move. The woolen hat was pulled down almost to the point where it blinded him. The closer Gravier got, the more he did not want to approach. It was as if he were being repulsed. When he was standing in front of the other man, whom he could now see was closer to six foot four, he noticed that the hat was not dark; it was a pale cement color, but it was covered with stains.

  “Could I have a minute of your time, please?” Gravier asked again, having to give more spine to his voice than he was used to.

  “You could. You could have more.”

  Christ. A smell hit him, of all the things that made him want to puke. Wet dogs, tooth decay, weeks’ old piss in the doorways of dilapidated buildings. It was all he could do not to gag in front of the man, not that he’d notice. His eyes were shivering in their sockets.

  “Are you all right?” Gravier asked.

  “All right,” the man replied. His voice was accentless. It was like water.

  Gravier found himself struggling to even remember what he’d said. He glanced back at the bins and their overscore of painted wit. “We’re currently investigating a murder, sir,” he said, trying to summon some iron. “I wondered if you knew anything about what happened here, January twenty-seventh.”

  “Lonely man?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The lonely can take extreme measures to, ah, stop being lonely anymore.”

  “What have you got in your pockets?”

  “My hands.”

  “Come on, mate. Empty them. It’s too cold for this. You can smart-mouth me all you like down the station if that’s what you’d prefer.”

  The man took his hands from his pockets and opened them, a conciliatory gesture. They were huge. The nails were like scimitars on his fingers, backlit: ten pearlescent crescents, packed with filth. Gravier felt dread shift inside him, like something concrete. This man was dangerous. “I have nothing in my pockets.”

  Gravier suddenly did not feel like frisking him for the truth. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  The man was sweating. It was maybe minus one or two degrees Celsius, yet here came tears of perspiration from the collar of his hat. More worried than he’s letting on, Gravier thought. The man bore the expression of someone digging lightly for a recently forgotten item of information, and then: “Henry Johns.”

  “Henry?”

  “Henry, yes.”

  “Do you have any ID on you, Mr. Johns?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Address?”

  “I’m not from this place.”

  “Why are you in Manchester, then?”

  “Business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “I represent a client in the entertainment industry.”

  “What, so you’re an agent?”

  “You could say that.”

  “And who is your client?”

  Johns handed Gravier a card. Gravier took it. He couldn’t remember where it might have come from; he was sure Johns’s hands had been empty ever since he removed them from his pockets. The card was a translucent tablet with a claw-mark effect cut out of the top-right-hand corner. A name, in eggshell white, was just legible if you tilted the card away from the plane of vision. Lady Ice. No phone number. No address.

  “Great card,” Gravier said. “I bet she does a roaring trade.”

  “You’ll find her when you need her the most. They all do.”

  Gravier was tired and cold. He wanted coffee. He gave Johns a card of his own. “Give me a call if you have anything interesting to say,” he said. “A girl of nineteen was killed and then dumped here. Not good. Not good.” He was turning to go, feeling bad about the whole thing, warning signs going off all over his head. Nick him. Nick him now.

  “She’s sweet,” Johns said. “She could be yours, if you want her. She wants you.”

  Gravier stared at him. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Girl of your dreams, Detective Inspector.”

  Gravier ignored him and hurried away. He climbed into his car and turned up the heater, his hands shaking. The sweat drizzling out of the wool of Johns’s cap was what had been staining it. Sort of dark. Sort of bloody. He closed his eyes to the impossibility of it and released the handbrake. He drove up Shude Hill, retracing the steps he had taken, until he was level with the tram platform. He saw Johns moving away down Balloon Street toward Victoria train station. Gravier watched him remove his woolen hat. He took it off tenderly. He peeled it away from the exposed lobes of his brain.

  Back at the nick in time for breakfast. Sausage sandwich and a tangerine. Hot, sweet tea. You get it down you, somehow. A head full of black ice and white bone. Soaking, cold trouser cuffs. You should have arrested him. On suspicion of . . . anything you say . . . But too scared. Too old. It was in him, all of a sudden, this need to get out. You put the hours in, you became the job and happiness, fulfillment never came, and you ended up realizing it was because you had hated the job all along. What he’d seen, he hadn’t seen. Put it down to a lack of blood sugar. Put it down to nervous exhaustion.

  Gravier here. Ah, Simmonds. Nice of you to make the effort. Give us the griff, then. What’s that you say? I found a Chinese proverb, did I? Well, well. He is an educated boy, isn’t he? What about the others? Any luck? Yes? You found some? Excellent. We’ll make a policeman of you yet. Well yes, you have to follow your hunch, don’t you? As Quasimodo said while walking backward one day. E-mail them over, soon as you can. And, Simmonds? Thank you.

  Whalley Range. Emma Tees. A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. Denton. Gillian Jarvis. The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches. Simmonds had called him with the authors. Kafka he’d heard of. The beetle man, wasn’t he? But E. E. Cummings? He didn’t so much sound like a poet as a porn mag for mice.

  Patterns in frost. The bodies so cold the blood had frozen to black plaques on their flesh. A confectionery crackle as they were peeled clear of pavements and roads. Gravier lay in bed, feeling the temperature drop. His skin felt old and papery, hanging from his body as if unattached. Get up too quickly and it might simply flutter away from his bones. He thought of the girl on her bike, bent over the handlebars, thumbing at the spring-loaded clapper of the bell. He tried to remember what it had been like to be young. The absence of responsibility, the irrelevance of effect. You didn’t think ahead as a child. It was all seat-of-the-pants from one day to the next. He yearned for a little of that freedom now. He seemed to spend every waking minute inside his mind, the pulses of his thought processes pushing at the membranes that coated his brain. There was never any feeling of physical release. He was locked in; he was his own prison. And then he thought of the bars of a cell. He thought of ribs. A body opened and closed, like a police case, or a door to somewhere new. The killer had not taken a thing.

  He stabbed his finger at the keys of his mobile phone.

  “Simmonds. Get over to pathology. Get Mercer out of bed. Our friend, he might not be harvesting. But what if he’s leaving stuff behind instead?”

  Dead end. Sometimes the thoughts you believe might just blow your options wide open are the ones that close us down for good. Gravier accepted the pint from Simmonds and for a moment didn’t know what he should do with it. Everything felt as though it should be kicked, punched, smashed; damaged in some way. It was not a good feeling. He was not having a good day. He swallowed half the pint in three savage mouthfuls. Nobody behind the bar or sitting at it would meet his eye. Danger radiated fro
m him.

  What’s that, Simmonds? Sir, if you’d just take it easy? Don’t you dare try the arm around the shoulder with me, Simmonds, or I’ll punch you so hard you’ll find you’re suddenly rimming yourself off. Yes, I know the pathologist’s report said there was no internal damage, nothing to write home about in any of the postmortems, but the pathologist isn’t fucking Superman. Brian Mercer? Man’s a sot. And half blind. If he wasn’t wearing those Coke-bottle glasses of his, he’d take his scalpel to a turkey’s twat and think it was a pensioner’s mouth. Now fuck away off with you. Leave me alone.

  Another night’s torture for the brogues. Slapping through the wet, wondering why he never put on a thicker pair of socks, or invested in some of those Gore-Tex boots the younger generation clomp around in. Freezing wind wound itself around his neck and shoulders, reaching deep into his body. Some days he woke up with the core of his limbs giving him gyp, and could imagine his moldering bones turned damp with the cold. He used to walk through miles of rain when he was courting and never felt the needling of it. He was happy then. The only thing pressing down on his shoulders were the five-inch-thick firecheck doors he had to lug around the warehouse where he used to work summer holidays. Seventeen. Full of cum and muscle. Not a care. When did it all turn bad? When you got a job that held a mirror up to the world and showed it to be some foxed, blighted shithole, that’s when.

  How long till the next one? And there would be a next one. There always was, even if the killer was one of those twisted individuals desperate to be stopped. He sensed himself walking faster, as if an increase in speed might hurry a conclusion his way. His fingers worried at the stylized business card in his coat pocket. If he stroked the surface, he could just feel the raised pimples of the typeface outlining her name: Lady Ice. No address. No phone number.

  Why was he moving in this direction?

  Here was a part of town he didn’t know so well. He remembered a few callouts here, many years ago. But not a place he lingered. Somewhere he couldn’t give a name to now, no matter how hard he delved for one. He frowned and checked road names, but none impinged on his memory. He felt a weird slanting in perception, as if he’d had a dizzy spell and felt the world shift away for a second. He put out a hand to steady himself and burned his fingers on the frozen door knocker of a large building, which reminded Gravier of the neoclassical buildings in the town center—the libraries and banks—bought by brewery chains and transformed into spit-and-sawdust pubs selling alcopops and indigestible hunks of beef.

  The door opened as he pushed to lever himself upright. He heard a female voice, strident, calling from farther along a dark hallway. “Get in. Shut out that unwanted.”

  He thought she meant the weather, but once the door was closed behind him, he felt sure she wanted the chill in, and him out. He couldn’t understand why he’d even crossed the threshold, but there was something in her voice that brooked no argument. “Hello?” he called. “I’m a police officer. You should watch that door. I think the lock’s faulty.”

  “Come in. Take off your coat. And wipe your feet. I don’t want muddy prints all over my pile.”

  Gravier’s heart was loud in the corridor. He took his hand off the latch and moved deeper into the house. Stairs vanished into a dark upper floor. A room to his left was a series of sagging browns: tired curtains, caved-in armchair, a rug, and a sleeping caramel cat. A kitchen containing a dining table covered with a protective plastic sheet. Dripping tap. A view through a back window of nothing but night’s oily swirl of streetlamps and bad weather. He imagined himself closing the door on a filthy night like this and entering a kitchen filled with warm smells of good food and a woman who lit up to see him home.

  A door under the stairs was open. He caught a whiff of patchouli oil and nubuck. Music was playing. Soft light curled against the bottom steps like smoke. Shadows swam languidly through it.

  Gravier gritted his teeth and rapped on the door. “Could you come up here, madam? I need to have a word.”

  A light chuckle that might have come in response to his demand. He heard a loud crack. He’d heard noises like that in shooting ranges. Small arms fire. He had his hand on his phone when a face swung into the stairwell and smiled up at him. Her hair was a painfully white pagoda frozen into position with lacquer that he could see glinting even in this poor light.

  “Come down,” she said. Her voice had lost its edge. She laughed again and slipped back into the room.

  Gravier descended. The smell of scented candles caught in his throat. He hesitated at the foot of the stairs when he saw the room and his first thought was, Is there a crime being committed here?

  “Welcome to my dungeon,” she said.

  He couldn’t focus on anything, because there was too much to take in. To settle on any detail for any amount of time was to invite insanity. His attention fluttered from the operating table to the dentist’s chair to the cage and the things that writhed on and in them. There were glass shelves of glittering surgical instruments, wet from whatever task they had last been put to, ivory tables displaying monstrous dildoes sculpted from raw bone. Masks that weren’t masks at all hung from cords and turned in the hot, still air, drying, curling like strips of jerky.

  “You know me,” she said. She ran a finger across his jawbone and it turned to a line of smoking powder. The pain didn’t come at once. It was only when he raised his hand to his face that he felt a rind of necrotic tissue snap away, an icicle in his fingers. He screamed as the burn took hold and she was at the door, locking it, placing the key between her breasts. He tore his gaze away from her red lips, her black eyes. He tried not to look at the flesh that cracked and splintered between the shiny black curves of rubber, the vermiculate patterns of ice, like hoarfrost on a lawn at daybreak, or the leaves of ice that grow on the surface of a pond. Parts of her were studded with solid impact scars: white bruises. He heard the ding of the bell and turned, expecting to see the child on her bicycle, but there was only a woman on the operating table, her innards exposed, clamped back with pins like a dissected frog. Henry Johns was there, bent over as if in supplication, as if he was breathing in the aroma of her organs.

  “Jesus Christ,” Gravier managed. “She’s still alive. You bastards.”

  The woman was arching against her bonds; blood squelched beneath the suck of her back.

  The dominatrix hobbled to a bookshelf, her form cracking and squealing against itself. She hefted a volume in her hands and began to turn pages. She turned the book so that he could see a picture of the woman from his dreams, a sliver of a face from long ago. Despite the horror rising around him, he felt the familiar pang of a missed connection, of a chance gone by.

  “Who is she?” he asked.

  “Her name is Rebecca Tavistock. She is your soul mate. We all have one. The lucky ones find each other by a combination of detective work and good fortune.”

  Gravier could hear the sound of the bell again, but everything was slowed down, deeper, more resonant. Now the tinkle of that bicycle toy was the great, monotonous din of a cathedral angelus. He felt each toll in the gaps between his vertebrae. The vibrations were so forceful that scraps of plaster were pulling away from the walls, showing the bones of the house beneath. Henry Johns’s exposed brain shook like a jelly against the collar of what remained of his skull. His feverish eyes were like those of a speed reader, sucking in as much detail as time allowed.

  “Rebecca,” Gravier breathed.

  The pages shifted under the dominatrix’s fingers. The photographs moved of their own volition. “Are you finished?” she asked Johns. She turned to Gravier. “You’ll have to excuse the Diploë. He has quite execrable table manners.”

  Gravier watched the girl beneath Johns die. He saw something of her drift up from the center of her body and vanish like inhaled smoke into Johns’s mouth and nostrils. Then she was still.

  “We’ve been looking for you since you were born. Hard to latch onto the cold, the ones who recognize the vacuum at the
ir hearts but do precious little about it. The warm are easy. But now that we have you, we can get you two lost souls together. How romantic is that?”

  “She . . . she’s here?” Gravier turned to the empty corners of the room, but that delicate woman he’d seen just once before was absent. The thin, pale tilt of her chin as she turned to regard him. The achingly lovely green of her eyes.

  “Will you go to her, gladly?” the dominatrix asked him. Her mouth was open and she was showing her teeth. They were tablets of ice. He felt he might melt her away with the heat of his sudden need.

  The sound of the bell raged through the walls, through the floor. It seemed to come at him from all angles, and it married precisely the beat of his heart. When he turned his head again, it was to view the ragdoll of something long dead come jerking through a gap in the floorboards. Its mouth was opened, a cracked, decayed ring of black teeth and unspoken secrets. The Diploë closed his eyes and flaunted the wet, black shreds that dangled from his fingernails. The dominatrix was panting, her hands a restless knot at the molten center of herself. There was a sense of sinking, of leaving what he knew for something almost too large to comprehend.

  For the first time in his life, as he folded beneath her arthritic grip and her jaws found a way into the softest part of him, Gravier understood what it meant to give yourself to the person you had been intended for, even if you had been born a couple of hundred years too late.

  The Confessor’s Tale

  Sarah Pinborough

  A wolf stole Arkady Melanov’s tongue when he was ten weeks old. It crept into the village from the surrounding forest and followed the sound of his cries as if they were the scent of a fresh kill. Eventually, its pricked ears reached the Melanovs’ tiny one-level dwelling at the back of the bakery where the boy’s father worked. The wooden door had been left an inch or two open to allow any passing breeze to alleviate the stifling trapped heat of the ovens, and the beast simply padded into the house. The source of the noise found, it tore Arkady’s tongue free from his screaming mouth before disappearing out into the summer night, leaving only a bloody trail of silence. When Arkady’s mother ran into the bedroom and found her mutilated baby, she couldn’t bear the weight of her own guilt at leaving him to cry. She stood by the crib and hacked at her wrists with the pin from her hair until she bled to death.