by Clive Barker
Dr. Krackomberger’s office had been suite 212. The plush beige carpeting that had covered the passageway leading up to it had been rolled up and removed, leaving just the bare boards. With every second or third step Harry took, one of them creaked and Harry grimaced. Finally, Harry reached the door of his onetime psychiatrist’s office and tried the handle, expecting it to be locked. The door opened without protest, and Harry was faced with yet another spectacle of vandalism. It looked as though somebody had taken a sledgehammer to the walls inside.
He chanced a word: “Norma?” Then several words: “Norma? It’s Harry. I got your message. I know I’m early. Are you here?”
He went through into Krackomberger’s office. The books that had lined the doctor’s walls had not been taken, though it was obvious that at one point they’d all been stripped from the shelves and a pile of them used to make a fire in the middle of the room. Harry squatted beside the makeshift fire pit and tested the ashes. They were cold. Finding nothing more, Harry took a peek inside Krackomberger’s private bathroom, but it was as trashed as the rest of the place. Norma was not here.
But she had led Harry to this place for a reason; of that he was certain. He chanced a glance at the bathroom mirror and there he saw, scrawled on the surface of the grimy glass, an arrow drawn in ash. It was pointing downward, toward the lower floors. Norma had left him a bread crumb. Harry left the office where he’d met his sightless friend so many years ago, and headed to the basement.
14
The members-only club that had once occupied the basement of the long-forgotten building had been designed for elite New Yorkers with more outré tastes than could be satisfied at the sex emporiums that had once run along Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. Harry had glimpsed it in operation many years before when he’d been hired by the building’s owner—one Joel Hinz—to do some detective work regarding his wife.
Despite the fact that Hinz ran an establishment dedicated to hedonism of every stripe directly under the feet of the city’s lawmakers, he was a deeply conservative man in his personal life and was genuinely distressed when he began to suspect his wife of being unfaithful.
Harry had done his investigations and about three weeks later had brought confirmation in the form of incriminating photographs of Mrs. Hinz to the grieving Mr. Hinz in a large manila envelope. As Hinz had requested, he’d sent his assistant J. J. Fingerman to take Harry down into the club and get him a drink and a quick tour of the premises. It was quite an eye-opener: bondage, whipping, caning, water sports—the club offered a smorgasbord of perversities, practiced by men and women, most of them dressed in costumes that announced their particular proclivities.
A fifty-year-old man whom Harry recognized as the mayor’s right hand was tottering around on stiletto heels in a frilly French maid’s outfit; a woman who organized celebrity fund-raisers for the homeless and the destitute was crawling around naked with a dildo impaled in her ass, from the base of which hung a tail of black horsehair. On the main stage one of the most successful writers of Broadway musicals was tied to a chair having the flesh of his scrotum spread out and nailed to a piece of wood by a young woman dressed as a nun. To judge by the state of the lyricist’s arousal, the procedure was pure bliss.
When Harry’s tour had ended, he and Fingerman returned to Hinz’s office and found his door was locked from the inside. Rather than wait for the keys to be located, Harry and Fingerman kicked the door open. The cuckolded husband lay sprawled over his desk where the photographs Harry had taken of Mrs. Hinz in her various liaisons were spread. The photographs had been spattered with the blood, bone fragments, and brain matter that had emptied in all directions when Hinz had put his gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The party was over. Harry had learned a lot that night about the close relation of pain and pleasure, in certain situations, along with what fantasy and desire could drive people to do.
Harry found a cluster of light switches at the top of the stairs and flicked them on. Only two of them worked, one turning on a light directly over Harry’s head, which spilled down the black-painted stairs, the other turning on a light in the booth where guests had paid their entrance fee and received a key for a little changing room where they could shed their public skins and don the masks of who they really were.
Harry cautiously headed down the stairs. There were a few small twitches and a flutter of activity in one of his tattoos: the rendering of a ritual necklace that Caz had dubbed the Scrimshaw Ring. While many of Caz’s tattoos were simple talismans and made no pretense to solidity, the Scrimshaw Ring had been so meticulously rendered in the trompe l’oeil style, the shadow beneath it so dense that it made the necklace appear to stand proud on Harry’s skin.
Its function was relatively simple: it alerted Harry to the presence of ghosts. But given that the spirits of the dead were everywhere, some in states of panic or agitation, others simply taking the air after the suffocations of death, the Scrimshaw Ring discriminated nicely and did not alert Harry’s presence to any revenants except those that posed the greatest possible threat.
And apparently there was one such ghost—at least one—in Harry’s immediate vicinity now. Harry paused at the bottom of the stairs, contemplating the very real possibility that this was another trap. Perhaps it was a ghost hired by the powers he’d confronted and embarrassed in New Orleans. But if they wanted revenge why come all this way to send only a few phantoms? They could frighten the unwitting, to be sure, but Harry was scarcely that. A little spook show wasn’t going to leave him trembling. Harry pressed on.
The club seemed to have been left in the very state it had been in when Hinz put a bullet through his brain. The bar was still intact, the bottles of hard liquor still lined up, waiting for thirsty customers. Harry heard the glasses stacked underneath the bar start to chime as one of the ghosts began its performance.
When he ignored the noise and continued his advance, the spirit threw several of the shot glasses into the air. They were then pitched down onto the bar with such violence that a few of the flying shards struck Harry. He didn’t respond to the display. He simply made his way on past the bar and into the big room with the Saint Andrew’s cross set on the stage, where whip wielders once showed off their expertise.
Harry ran his light around the room, looking for some sign of the presence here. He stepped up onto the dais, intending to continue his search for Norma backstage, but as he crept closer toward the velvet curtain he heard a noise off to the right. His gaze shot in the direction of the sound. The opposing wall there had an array of canes, paddles, and whips hung on it—maybe fifty instruments in all. A few of the lighter items dropped to the floor and then one of the heavy wooden paddles was pitched in Harry’s direction. It hit his knee, hard.
“Ah, fuck this!” he said, jumping off the stage and walking straight into the assault. “My tattoos are telling me you’re a threat. But I’m not remotely intimidated by whoever you are, so if you go on throwing shit at me I will spit out a syllogistic that’ll make you wish you’d never died. I promise you.”
Harry had no sooner voiced this threat than one of the biggest whips on display was pulled down off the wall and drawn back, in preparation for a strike.
“Don’t do it,” Harry said.
His warning went disregarded. The phantom wielding the whip either was very lucky or knew its business. With the first strike it caught Harry’s cheek, a sharp sting that made his eye water.
“You dickhead,” he said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He started to speak the syllogistic, which was one of the first he’d ever learned:
“E vuttu quathakai,
Nom-not, nom-netha,
E vuttu quathakai,
Antibethis—”
He was barely a third of the way through the utterance, but the incantation was already revealing the presences in the room. They looked like shadows thrown up on steam, their edges evaporating, their features scrawled on the air like an artist was working
on the rain. There were three of them: all men.
“Stop the syllogistic,” one of them moaned.
“Give me one reason why I should.”
“We were only following orders.”
“Whose orders?”
The phantoms exchanged panicky looks.
“Mine,” said a familiar leathery voice from the darkness of the next room.
Harry let his guard down immediately. “Norma! What the hell?”
“Don’t torment them, Harry. They were only trying to protect me.”
“All right,” Harry said to the phantasms. “I guess you guys get a reprieve.”
“Stay at your posts, though,” Norma said, “He could have been followed.”
“Not a chance,” Harry said, all confidence as he walked into the back room.
“Famous last words,” said Norma.
Harry tried the light switch, and the wall-mounted lights went on, the bulbs red so as to flatter the nakedness of the old customers’ gristly hides.
Norma was standing in the middle of the room, leaning on a stick, her hair gray, going to white, unpinned for the first time in all the years Harry had known her. Her face, though still possessed of the elegant beauty and power of her bones, was slack with exhaustion. Only her eyes had motion in them, the colorless pupils appearing to watch a tennis match between two absolutely equal players—left to right, right to left, left to right, right to left, the ball never once fumbling.
“What in God’s name are you doing down here, Norma?”
“Let’s sit. Give me your arm. My legs are aching.”
“They’re not being helped by the damp down here. You should be more careful at your age.”
“We’re neither of us as young as we used to be,” Norma said as she led Harry through to what had been the room where the players only went when they were in the mood for the extreme games. “I can’t do this much longer, Harry. I’m damn tired.”
“You wouldn’t be damn tired if you were sleeping in your own bed,” Harry said, looking at the tattered mattress that had been laid on the floor, strewn with a few moth-eaten blankets to keep her warm. “Christ, Norma. How long have you been down here?”
“Don’t worry about that. I’m safe. If I was in my own bed now I’d be dead. If not today, then tomorrow, or the day after. Goode set us up, Harry.”
“I know. I walked into a serious trap at his place. Barely made it out alive.”
“God, I’m sorry. He was damn convincing. I think I’m slipping. This never would have happened if I were a younger woman.”
“He got us both, Norma. He was working with some powerful magic. You know all the magicians that have been murdered? One of them is still alive. Well … depending on your definition.”
“What?”
“It’s a long story, but I know who killed them. A demon. I met him at Goode’s house. He’s a serious player.”
“Oh Lord. I was afraid of that. That’s the other reason I’m holed up in this filthy place. I think they wanted to split us up. As soon as you left, my apartment was compromised. I felt the bad juju coming and I got the fuck out of there, but quick! There’s roads open, Harry. Roads that should be closed, and there’s something coming down one of those roads—or maybe all of them—that means me and you and a whole lot of other people harm.”
“I believe it, but that doesn’t change the fact that you can’t stay here. This place is disgusting. We have to relocate you to some place where you won’t be sleeping on a damp floor with rats running over your feet. Not to mention what’s been done on that mattress. You can’t see the stains, Norma, but there’s a lot of them, in a variety of colors.”
“You got a place in mind?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. I’m going to get everything ready, and then I’m coming back for you, all right?”
“If you say so.”
“I do. I’ll see you soon. We’re gonna make it out of this thing. I promise.”
As he gave her a gentle kiss on the cheek she caught hold of his hand.
“Why are you so good to me?” she said.
“As if you didn’t know.”
“Indulge me.”
“Because there is nobody in the world who means more to me than you. And that’s no indulgence. It’s the plain truth.”
She smiled against his hand. “Thank you,” she said.
Harry regarded her affectionately for a moment, then without saying a word turned and went in search of a safer haven.
BOOK TWO
Into the Breach
The ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
1
The Monastery of the Cenobitical Order was a large-walled compound built seven hundred thousand years ago on a damned-made hill of stone and cement. It could only be entered by one route, a narrow stairway that was carefully watched by the monastery guards. It had been built during a time of imminent civil war, with factions of demons in constant skirmishes. The head of the Cenobitical Order, his identity known only to the eight who had raised him from their number into that High Office, had decided that for the greater good of the Order he would use a tiny part of the vast wealth they had accrued to build a fortress-sanctuary where his priests and priestesses would be safe from the volatile politics of Hell. The fortress had been built to the most rigorous of standards, its polished gray walls unscalable.
As the years had passed and the Cenobites were less and less in the streets of the city that Lucifer had designed and built (a city called, by some, Pandemonium but named Pyratha by its architect), the stories about what went on behind the sleek black walls of the Cenobitical fortress proliferated and the countless demons and damned alike who glanced its way all had favorite stories about the excesses of its occupants.
Between the monastery and Hell’s great city, Pyratha, sat the vast shantytown called Fike’s Trench, where the damned who did service in the mansions, temples, and streets retired to sleep, and eat, and, yes, copulate (and, if they were lucky, produce an infant or two who could be sold at the abattoir, no questions asked).
The stories of the fortress and the monstrous things that went on behind its walls were exchanged like currency, growing ever more elaborate. It was an understandable comfort to the damned, who lived with so much terror and atrocity in their daily lives, that there be a place where things were even worse—where they could look and tell themselves that their situation could be worse. And so each man, woman, and child nurtured acknowledgments that they were not among the victims of the fortress where the unspeakable devices of the Order would scour even the most treasured of memories. And in this fashion, the damned existed within the framework of something approximating a life; living in excrement and exhaustion, their bodies barely nourished, their spirits unfed, they indulged in the almost happy thought that at least a few others suffered more than they.
All this had come as a shock to Theodore Felixson. In life he’d spent much of the fortune his workings in magic had earned him (what he’d liked to refer to as his will-gotten gains) on art, always buying privately because the paintings he collected moved, when they moved at all, outside the sniffing range of the museum hounds. All the pictures he’d owned had related in some way to Hell: a Tintoretto of Lucifer falling, his wings torn from his body, trailing after him into the abyss; a sheaf of preparatory studies by Lucca Signorelli for his fresco of the damned in Hell; a book of horrors that Felixson had purchased in Damascus because its unknown creator had found a way to make the meditations of each hour turn on sin and punishment. These had been the most horrific pieces in his rather sizable collection on the subject of the infernal, and not one of them even remotely resembled the truth.
There was an elegant symmetry to Pyratha, with its eight hills (“one better than Rome,” its architect boasted), which were crammed with buildings of countless styles and sizes. Felixson knew nothing of the city’s rules, if it had any. The Hell
Priest had referred to it in passing on one occasion only and spoke of it with the contempt of a creature who thought of every occupant of Pyratha as a subspecies, their mindless hedonism matched only by their lavish stupidity. The city that Lucifer had built to outdo Rome had fallen, as Rome had fallen, into decadence and self-indulgence, its regime too concerned with its own internal struggles to cleanse the city of its filth and return it to the disciplined state it had been in before Lucifer’s disappearance.
Yes, surprising as the architecture of Hell was to Felixson, finding out that the angel who had been cast down from Heaven for his rebellious ways was absent from his throne defied all expectations, even if it did make a certain amount of sense. As above, so below, Felixson thought.
There were countless theories concerning Lucifer’s disappearance and Felixson had heard them all. Depending on which story you chose to believe, Lucifer either had gone mad and perished in the wastelands, escaping Hell entirely, or was walking the streets of Pyratha disguised as a commoner. Felixson didn’t believe any of it. He kept his opinions on the subject, and all other opinions for that matter, to himself. He was lucky to be alive, he knew, and though the torturous surgeries had destroyed his abilities to form an intelligible sentence, he was still fully capable of thinking clearly. If he bided his time and played his cards right, sooner or later, he knew, an escape route would present itself, and when it did he’d take it and be gone. He’d return to Earth, change his name and his face, and renounce magic for the rest of his days.
That had been the plan right up until he realized that living without power wasn’t the nightmare he’d envisioned it to be. He had been among the most accomplished and ambitious magicians in the world, but holding on to that position had taken staggering amounts of energy, will, and time. When he finally allowed himself to learn from the Cenobites, he discovered that the matters of his soul, the complex business of which had first drawn him into the mysteries of his craft, had been neglected entirely. It was only now, as a slave to a demon, that Felixson was again free to begin the long journey of self-within-self, the journey from which the getting of magic had distracted him. Living in Hell kept him aware of the possibility of Heaven, and he’d never felt more alive.