Hellbound Hearts (22 page)

His name is Wordsworth.

The final clue, 12 down:

Inferno
.

He writes it down and sighs dustily.

Then, crossword completed (6 minutes, 12 seconds), Daily Telegraph abandoned, Wordsworth stares out of the carriage window at a parade of allotments, at the ugly backs of houses.

Unsatisfying

The train shudders into the city centre and a fly makes languorous love to the grimy window.

Half an hour to go before he arrives at the library.

Half an hour to kill.

Wordsworth gazes at the paper in dismay. No true crossword here. He scans the first clue, expects nothing of substance.

Wordsworth ponders. An anagram, perhaps? He Combines permutation of ‘you', and ‘U', ‘Rabbit' and ‘hare', and, as an afterthought, ‘lapin'

It isn't coming.

But deep inside his dry soul something flutters. He knows he knows the answe…

he just doesn't know what it is.

And then…

(Wordsworth was seven)

(His rabbit was called Flopsy.)

…he knew.

Wordsworth worked in the museum library, in the stacks of books, organising and classifying.

There were over 200,000 books and manuscripts in the museum. They were friends, albeit friends composed of words and stories.

True friends, unlike his workmates - creatures so incomprehensible to him as to be almost alien: Miss Watson; Miss Priddow; Mrs Kelly._

The second clue was this:

2. Miss Watson's cry if book-borne pain (5, 7, 4).

Wordsworth doesn't know where the puzzle comes from, nor does he care. The puzzle is all. The words are everything.

3. Thee gift of thee Scavenger's Daughter? (5).

He finds out, and fills the answer on the puzzle in his precise, neat handwriting.

Blood

Answers.

Wordsworth discovers there is a specialised vocabulary in the more uncompromising realms of bondage and flagellation.

From that province he takes away a scarred back and expertly pierced genitalia; and more importantly, he fills another nine squares on the puzzle.

Wordsworth attends a meal, at which noble and affluent coprophiliacs dine for twelve courses on forty kinds of human shit.

He's there for the last word on the menu: it turns out to be
coffee
. Someone gas a sense of humour…

The delights of reluctant perversion chill him, although each new experience has a specific end in view.

Words.

For a word he cuts a dog apart and casts its entrails upon his kitchen floor, seeking sense in the loops and whorls of its intestines.

For a word he violates a small child.

he could guess. But he had to
know
.

All his life he had loved words; now he found his love to be a demanding, meticulous mistress.

His job was abandoned, following the fire that destroyed the museum and almost claimed his life.

He no longer ate. His actions were solely define by the puzzle…

And, in the end, there were only four spaces to fill in. One word.

One clue.

And the thing that had once been Harrison Wordsworth grinned through messy, suppurating lips, and wrote:

Ohhh the sweetling pulsing joy, the coming through the pain, Wordsworth feels the probe slide down the throat, pierce the wrecked anus, puncture the skull…