Age of Desire

by Clive Barker

  Carnegie looked blankly at the elaborate setup of monitors and video recorders that dominated his office.

  “What is Christ’s name is this about?” he wanted to know.

  “The video tapes,” said Boyle, his number two, “from the laboratory. I think you ought to have a look at them, sir.”

  Though they worked in tandem for seven months, Boyle was not one of Carnegie’s favorite officers; you could practically smell the ambition off his smooth hide. In someone half his age again such greed would be objectionable. In a man of thirty it verged on the objectionable. This present display — the mustering of equipment ready to confront Carnegie when he walked in at eight in the morning — was just Boyle’s style: flashy and redundant.

  “Why so many screens?” Carnegie asked acidly. “Do I get it in stereo, too?” “They had three cameras running simultaneously, sir. Covering the experiment from several angles.”

  “What experiment?”

  Boyle gestured for his superior to sit down. Obsequious to a fault, aren’t you? thought Carnegie; much good it’ll do you.

  “Right,” Boyle instructed the technician at the recorders, “roll the tapes.” Carnegie sipped at the cup of hot chocolate he had brought in with him. The beverage was a weakness of his, verging on addition. On the days when the machine supplying it broke down he was an unhappy man indeed. He looked at the three screens. Suddenly, a title.

  “Project Blind Boy,” the words read. “Restricted.” “Blind Boy?” said Carnegie. “What, or who, is that?” “It’s obviously a code word of some kind,” Boyle said.

  “Blind Boy, Blind Boy.” Carnegie repeated the phrase as if to beat it into submission, but before he could solve the problem the images on the three monitors diverged. They picture the same subject — a bespectacled male in his late twenties sitting in a chair — but each showed the scene from a different angle. One took in the subject full length and in profile; the second was a three-quarter medium-shot, angled from above; the third was a straightforward close-up of the subject’s head and shoulders, shot through the glass of the test chamber and from the front. The three images were in black and white, and none were completely centered or focused. Indeed, as the tapes began to run somebody was still adjusting such technicalities. A backwash of informal chatter ran between the subject and the woman — recognizable even in brief glimpses as the deceased — who was applying electrodes to his forehead. Much of the talk between them was difficult to catch; the acoustics in the chamber frustrated microphone and listener alike.

  “The woman’s Doctor Dance,” Boyle offered. “The victim.” “Yes,” said Carnegie, watching the screens intently, “I recognize her. How long does this preparation go on for?”

  “Quite a while. Most of it’s unedifying.” “Well, get to the edifying stuff, then.”

  “Fast forward,” Boyle said. The technician obliged, and the actors on the three screens became squeaking comedians. “Wait!” said Boyle. “Back up a short way.” Again, the technician did as instructed. “There!” said Boyle. “Stop there. Now run on at normal speed.” The action settled back to its natural pace. “This is where it really begins, sir.” Carnegie had come to the end of his hot chocolate. He put his finger into the soft sludge at the bottom of the cup, delivering the sickly-sweet dregs to his tongue. On the screens Doctor Dance had approached the subject with a syringe, was now swabbing the crook of his elbow, and injecting him. Not for the first time since his visit to the Hume Laboratories did Carnegie wonder precisely what they did at the establishment. Was this kind of procedure de riguer in pharmaceutical research? The implicit secrecy of the experiment — late at night in an otherwise deserted building — suggested not. And there was that imperative on the title card—“Restricted.” What they were watching had clearly never been intended for public viewing.

  “Are you comfortable?” a man off camera now inquired. The subject nodded. His glasses had been removed and he looked slightly bemused without them. An unremarkable face, thought Carnegie; the subject — as yet unnamed — was neither Adonis nor Quasimodo. He was receding slightly, and his wispy, dirty-blonde hair touched his shoulders.

  “I’m fine, Doctor Welles,” he replied to the off-camera questioner.

  “You don’t feel hot at all? Sweaty?”

  “Not really,” the guinea pig replied, slightly apologetically. “I feel ordinary.” That you are, Carnegie thought; then to Boyle: “Have you been through the tapes to the end?”

  “No, sir,” Boyle replied. “I thought you’d want to see them first. I only ran them as far as the injection.”

  “Any word from the hospital on Doctor Welles?” “At the last call he was still comatose.” Carnegie grunted and returned his attention to the screens. Following the burst of action with the injection the tapes now settled into non-activity: the three cameras fixed on their shortsighted subject with beady stares, the torpor occasionally interrupted by an inquire from Welles as to the subject’s condition. It remained the same. After three or four minutes of this eventless study even his occasional blinks began to assume major dramatic significance.

  “Don’t think much of the plot,” the technician commented. Carnegie laughed; Boyle looked discomforted. Two or three more minutes passed in a similar manner.

  “This doesn’t look too hopeful,” Carnegie said. “Run through it at speed, will you?” The technician was about to obey when Boyle said: “Wait.” Carnegie glanced across at the man, irritated by his intervention, and then back at the screens. Something was happening. A subtle transformation had overtaken the insipid features of the subject. He had begun to smile to himself and was sinking down in his chair as if submerging his gangling body in a warm bath. His eyes, which had so far expressed little but affable indifference, now began to flicker closed, and then, once closed, opened again. When they did so there was a quality in them not previously visible, a hunger that seemed to reach out from the screen and into the calm of the inspector’s office.

  Carnegie put down his chocolate cup and approached the screens. As he did so the subject also got up out of his chair and walked toward the glass of the chamber, leaving two of the camera’s ranges. The third still recorded him, however, as he pressed his face against the window, and for a moment the two men faced each other through layers of glass and time, seemingly meeting each other’s gaze.

  The look on the man’s face was critical now, the hunger was rapidly outgrowing sane control. Eyes burning, he laid his lips against the chamber window and kissed it, his tongue working against the glass.

  “What in Christ’s name is going on?” Carnegie said.

  A prattle of voices had begun on the soundtrack. Doctor Welles was vainly asking the testee to articulate his feelings while Dance called off figures from the various monitoring instruments. It was difficult to hear much clearly — the din was further supplemented by an eruption of chatter from the caged monkeys — but it was evident that the readings coming through from the man’s body were escalating. His face was flushed, his skin gleamed with a sudden sweat. He resembled a martyr with the tinder at his feet freshly lit, wild with a fatal ecstasy. He stopped French-kissing the window, tearing off the electrodes at his temples and the sensors from his arms and chest. Dance, her voice now registering alarm, called out for him to stop.

  Then she moved across the camera’s view and out again crossing, Carnegie presumed, to the chamber door.

  “Better not,” he said, as if this drama were played out at his behest, and at a whim he could prevent the tragedy. But the woman took no notice. A moment later she appeared in long shot as she stepped into the chamber. The man moved to greet her, throwing over equipment as he did so. She called out to him — his name, perhaps. If so, it was inaudible over the monkey’s hullabaloo. “Shit,” said Carnegie, as the testee’s flailing arms caught first the profile camera, and then the three-quarter medium-shot. Two of the three monitors went dead. Only the headon shot, the camera safe outside the chamber, still recorded events, but
the tightness of the shot precluded more than an occasional glimpse of a moving body. Instead, the camera’s sober eye gazed on, almost ironically, at the salvia smeared glass of the chamber window, blind to the atrocities being committed a few feet out of range.

  “What in Christ’s name did they give him?” Carnegie said, as somewhere off camera the woman’s screams rose over the screeching of the apes.

  Jerome woke in the early afternoon feeling hungry and sore. When he threw the sheet off his body he was appalled at his state. His torso was scored with scratches, and his groin region was red-raw. Wincing, he moved to the edge of the bed and sat there for a while, trying to piece the previous evening back together again. He remembered going to the laboratories, but very little after that. He had been a paid guinea pig for several months, giving of his blood, comfort and patience to supplement his meager earnings as a translator. The arrangement had begun courtesy of a friend who did similar work, but whereas Figley had been part of the laboratories’

  mainstream program, Jerome had been approached after one week at the place by Doctors Welles and Dance, who had invited him — subject to a series psychological tests — to work exclusively for them. It had been made clear from the outset that their project (he had never even been told its purpose) was of a secret nature, and that they would demand his total dedication and discretion. He had needed the funds, and the recompense they offered was marginally better than that paid by the laboratories, so he had agreed, although the hours they had demanded of him were unsociable. For several weeks now he had been required to attend the research facility late at night and often working into the small hours of the morning as he endured Welles’s interminable questions about his private life and Dance’s glassy stare.

  Thinking of her cold look, he felt a tremor in him. Was it because once he had fooled himself that she had looked upon him more fondly than a doctor need? Such self-deception, he chided himself, was pitiful. He was not the stuff of which women dreamed, and each day he walked the streets reinforced that conviction. He could not remember one occasion in his adult life when a woman had looked his way, and kept looking; a time when an appreciative glance of his had been returned. Why this should bother him he wasn’t certain. His loveless condition was, he knew, commonplace. And nature had been kind. Knowing, it seemed, that the gift of allurement had passed him by, it had seen fit to minimize his libido. Weeks passed without his conscious thoughts mourning his enforced chastity.

  Once in a while, when he heard the pipes roar, he might wonder what Mrs. Morrisey, his landlady, looked like in her bath; might imagine the firmness of her soapy breasts, or the dark divide of her rump as she stooped to put talcum powder between her toes. But such torments were, blissfully, infrequent. And when his cup brimmed he would pocket the money he had saved from his sessions at the laboratories and buy an hour’s companionship from a woman named Angela (he’d never learned her second name) on Greek Street.

  It would be several weeks before he did so again, he thought. Whatever he had done last night, or, more correctly, had done on him, the bruises alone had nearly crippled him. The only plausible explanation — though he couldn’t recall nay details — was that he’d been beaten up on the way back from the laboratories. Either that, or he’d stepped into a bar and somebody had picked a fight with him. It had happened before, on occasion. He had one of those faces that woke the bully in drunkards.

  He stood up and hobbled to the small bathroom adjoining his room. His glasses were missing from their normal spot beside the shaving mirror and his reflection was woefully blurred, but it was apparent that his face was as badly scratched as the rest of his anatomy. And more: a clump of hair had been pulled out from above his left ear; clotted blood ran down to his neck. Painfully, he bent to the task of cleaning his wounds, then bathing them in a stinging solution of antiseptic. That done, he returned to his room to seek out his spectacles. But search as he might he could not locate them. Cursing his idiocy, he rooted among his belongings for his old pair and found them. Their prescription was out of date — his eyes had worsened considerably since he’d worn them — but they at least brought his surroundings into a dreamy kind of focus.

  An indisputable melancholy had crept up on him, compounded of his pain and those unwelcome thoughts of Mrs. Morrisey. To keep its intimacy at bay he turned on the radio. A sleek voice emerged, purveying the usual palliatives. Jerome had always had contempt for popular music and its apologists, but now, as he mooched around the small room, unwilling to clothe himself with chafing weaves when his scratches still pained him, the songs began to stir something other than scorn in him. It was as though he were hearing the words and music for the first time, as thought all his life he had been deaf to their sentiments. Enthralled, he forgot his pain and listened. The songs told one seamless and obsessive story: of love lost and found, only to be lost again. The lyricists filled the airwaves with metaphor — much of it ludicrous, but no less potent for that. Of paradise, of hearts on fire; of birds, bells, journeys, sunsets; of passion as lunacy, as flight, as unimaginable treasure. The songs did not calm him with their fatuous sentiments. They flayed him, evoking, despite feeble rhyme and trite melody, a world bewitched by desire. He began to tremble. His eyes, strained (or so he reasoned) by the unfamiliar spectacles, began to delude him. It seemed as though he could see traces of light in his skin, sparks flying from the ends of his fingers.

  He stared at his hands and arms. The illusion, far from retreating in the face of this scrutiny, increased. Beads of brightness, like the traces of fire in ash, began to climb through his veins, multiplying even as he watched. Curiously, he felt no distress. This burgeoning fire merely reflected the passion in the story the songs were telling him. Love, they said, was in the air, around every corner, waiting to be found. He thought again of the widow Morrisey in the flat below him, going about her business, sighing, no doubt, as he had done; awaiting her hero.

  The more he thought of her the more inflamed he became. She would not reject him, of that the songs convinced him. Or if she did he must press his case until (again, as the songs promised) she surrendered to him. Suddenly, at the thought of her surrender, the fire engulfed him.

  Laughing, he left the radio singing behind him and made his way downstairs.

  It had taken the best part of the morning to assemble a list of testees employed at the laboratories. Carnegie had sensed a reluctance on the part of the establishment to open their files to the investigation despite the horror that had been committed on its premises. Finally, just after noon, they had presented him with a hastily assembled who’s who of subjects, four and a half dozen in toto and their addresses. None, the offices claimed, matched the description of Welles’s testee. The doctors, it was explained, had been clearly using laboratory facilities to work on private projects. Though this was not encouraged, both had been senior researchers, and allowed leeway on the matter. It was likely, therefore, that the man Carnegie was seeking had never even been on the laboratories’ payroll. Undaunted, Carnegie ordered a selection of photographs taken off the video recording and had them distributed — with the list of names and address — to his officers. From then on it was down to footwork and patience.

  Leo Boyle ran his finger down the list of names he had been given. “Another fourteen,” he said. His driver grunted, and Boyle glanced across at him. “You were McBride’s partner, weren’t you?” he said.

  “That’s right,” Dooley replied. “He’s been suspended.” “Why?”

  Dooley scowled. “Lacks finesse, that Virgil. Can’t get the hang of arrest technique.” Dooley drew the car to a halt.

  “Is this is?” Boyle asked.

  “You said number eighty. This is eighty. On the door. Eight. Oh.” “I’ve got eyes.”

  Boyle got out of the car and made his way up the pathway. The house was sizable, and had been divided into flats. There were several bells. He pressed for J. Tredgold — the name on his list — and waited. Of the five houses they had so
far visited, two had been unoccupied and the residents of the other three had born no resemblance to the malefactor.

  Boyle waited on the step a few seconds and then pressed the bell again; a longer ring this time.

  “Nobody in,” Dooley said from the pavement.

  “Looks like it.” Even as he spoke Boyle caught sight of a figure flitting across the hallway, its outline distorted by the cobblestone glass in the door. “Wait a minute,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Somebody’s in there and not answering.” He pressed the first bell again, and then the others. Dooley approached up the pathway, flicking away an overattentive wasp.

  “You sure?” he said.

  “I saw somebody in there.”

  “Press the other bells,” Dooley suggested.

  “I already did. There’s somebody in there and they don’t want to come to the door.” He rapped on the glass. “Open up,” he announced. “Police.” Clever, thought Dooley; why not a loudspeaker, so heaven knows too? When the door, predictably, remained unanswered, Boyle turned to Dooley. “Is there a side gate?” “Yes, sir.”

  “Then get around the back, pronto, before he’s away.” “Shouldn’t we call—?”

  “Do it! I’ll keep watch here. If you can get in the back come through and open the front door.”

  Dooley moved, leaving Boyle alone at the front door. He rang the series of bells again and, cupping his hand to his brow, put his face to the glass. There was no sign of movement in the hallway. Was it possible that the bird had already flown? He backed down the path and stared up at the windows; they stared back vacuously. Ample time had now passed for Dooley to get around the back of the house, but so far he had neither reappeared nor called. Stymied where he stood, and nervous that his tactics had lost them their quarry, Boyle decided to follow his nose around the back of the house.