Hellbound Hearts (27 page)

Nicholas Vince

You're scaring me. I don't like being scared,” I said. “And can we please stop running?” “We don't have time.”

I stopped. “Justin, I'm not going further till you tell me what the hell is going on.”

He turned and looked at me, slowed as he saw I wasn't following. He half smiled: “Hell is indeed going on, or will be unless we stop it.”

We were standing near the middle of a bridge over the Thames, with St. Paul's Cathedral at our backs. Our breaths frosted in the light of the full moon as he walked to me, his back to the power station converted into an art gallery. This was about eleven o'clock.

“Listen,” I said. “I know your father's not the ‘manly hug for his only son' type, but what you said . . . I mean, you're not really telling me he intends to kill dozens of people at midnight. You are joking, aren't you?”

He looked at me.

“Okay,” I said. “You
are
telling me he's going to kill dozens of people and we've only got an hour to save them.” I paused. Smiled. “Why not twenty-four?”

“What?” He looked exasperated with me.

“Well, that Jack guy gets twenty-four hours, and even Dale and Flash Gordon got fourteen hours to save the world.” We'd watched that movie the previous weekend, both loving the camp OTT performances. We'd only been seeing each other for a couple of months and it was our first source of private jokes.

“Well, if you'd had your bloody phone on, we'd have more time. I've been calling since six o'clock this evening, trying to find you . . .”

He raised, then dropped, his hands in frustration and started to walk on. He didn't want to say, “Where were you?” It would have been too possessive of him. We weren't at that stage; not yet.

I ran a few steps, put my hands on his black duffel coat and turned him. I kissed him on the lips and then rested my forehead on his.

“Okay. Okay. My bad. I let it run out of juice. Look, I'm just having trouble processing this thing with your dad. I mean, why aren't we going to the police with this?”

He pulled away and we started walking hurriedly toward the gallery. “I don't think they'd believe me.”

“Okay. So tell them some convincing lie.”

“No, I mean, they wouldn't even begin to listen to me.” He looked slightly guilty.

“Uh-huh . . . and the reason for that?” I folded my arms and looked at my feet.

“It was before I met you. Last year. I was using back then and . . . I reported that one of his pieces on display at a prominent gallery of modern art was the remains of a real person—pickled.”

“I see . . . all right, no, I don't see. Why did you tell the police that?”

“He'd pissed me off.”

He pushed his shoulder-length blond hair from off his forehead and started rubbing the back of his neck.

“How, Justin?”

“Does it really matter now? If we're going to stop him—”

“I'd never heard of this . . . I mean, you've never told me much about him, and the more I know about you and your father, the mighty modern artist Caruthian Sanders, the more . . . the more . . . well . . . just tell me. Please.”

He slumped slightly and rested against the railing of the bridge, his hands in his pockets against the cold.

“I'd gone to him for help. I hadn't been home for months—I just turned up on his doorstep a few weeks after Mum died. I suddenly realized all the safety had gone from me. There was just empty darkness. My mouth always tasted of ashes.”

He looked across at the gallery building and started walking toward it. I followed.

“Mum could always lift my spirits,” he continued. “I never knew how she did it—but whenever the depression really hit, half an hour talking to her on the phone and I had some perspective. I mean, we didn't need to discuss what was bothering me. We'd just talk. She'd tell me about my cousins and the old people she helped. Just stuff, but I'd know, I'd really know, it would be all right.”

“So what's this got to do with the police?” I asked.

“I told my father how I was feeling—it was like the Buddhist hell of the crimson lotus.”

“What's that?”

“Despair. True despair. Imagine you pull your head so far forward—fold into yourself with such ferocity—the ribs of your back split from your spine and open your back like a gory flower. That is the cold hell of the bloodred lotus.”

“Yeuch. What did he say?”

“Something about me being a ‘Mummy's boy.'“

He paused as we turned onto the ramp at the end of the bridge, leading to the embankment outside the gallery. Then he stopped.

“A month later he asked me to the opening of his new show. It was the usual canapés, champagne, white walls, celebrities, chatter,
chatter, and then the unveiling of his . . . you've guessed it, his
Hell of the Crimson Lotus
. You can't quite see it, but I know it's got my face. He even dedicated it to me.”

He was choking back water in his eyes. I hugged him.

“You should have seen their faces. Everyone looking at me with embarrassed pity. I ran to the nearest police station and told them about the installation being a human cadaver.

“Father came down a couple of hours later and ‘explained' how the drugs had affected my mind and promised he'd get me professional help. In the car home he didn't speak and when we got to his place, he showed me my room, said the one word: ‘Sorry.' Then he left me. Next day he made a lot of phone calls, got me help, and I've been clean ever since.”

We started walking away from the bridge, my arm still around his shoulders, toward the entrance to what had been the power station's turbine hall.

“And why do you think he's about to kill all these people?”

“I found this in his studio this morning.”

He unfolded a piece of paper and passed it to me. He'd copied it by hand from the original. I read:

Hell has its dominions. Nor Man's Desire or Demon's Design, may extend its bounds. Apart from the prescribed portals and summonings in the hearts of humankind. Philip Lemarchand.

I looked up from the paper at him.

Before I could speak, he said, “There were some drawings with it, disturbing drawings. I did some research on Mr. Lemarchand. He was a French toymaker in the late seventeen hundreds. It's all a bit confused. Some stories say he sold his soul to the Devil, others that he was tricked into using his skills as a mechanical toymaker to create puzzles: the portals he refers to here. Wherever these puzzles turn up, then there's always flesh for the flies to feed on.”

“You didn't just Google this, did you?”

He scowled at me. “I used my reader's card for the British Library.
There were more recent stories. A couple of brothers in North London, in the 1980's. One of them apparently got hold of a Lemarchand toy. Both brothers and the wife of one were killed or disappeared. Don't you see? What if I was right? What if
The Hell of the Crimson Lotus
was really a person?”

“In other words,” I said, “what if he's really insane and—”

“Ah, Justin, I'm so glad you could make it. And I see you've brought a friend with you.”

Caruthian Sanders was standing a couple of feet away. My mouth opened and closed a couple of times, like a hooked fish. I dropped my arm from around Justin. I could see in Caruthian's face he'd heard me.

He was a tall man in his late thirties, dressed in a smart suit, and he'd shaved all his hair, apart from a mustache and goatee—which he'd dyed blond.

In a world of chaos, where beliefs—only slightly understood by the majority of the public—encouraged young men to murder by suicide and a tattered world economy, his works of symmetrical forms satisfied a public craving for certainty and stability.

He didn't look insane, just rather concerned for his son. I wasn't sure if that was the way he usually regarded Justin or a reaction to seeing us together.

He walked past us down the ramp to the turbine hall, calling back over his shoulder. “Come on, the both of you. I expect you're dying to see my greatest masterwork.”

We entered the hall, and beyond the bridge, halfway down the hall, I could see the installation. It was a cube, around sixty feet high. Made of metal girders and stairways, you could see through the framework in some parts into the interior. Scattered around the surface were panels in bronze.

It wasn't much warmer inside the hall than outside, and our breath still frosted. There were a few men in overalls, working on the installation, plus waiters and catering staff. They were all men and wore the same shaved head, mustache and goatee—also dyed blond.

There was no sign of the other guests yet. If Caruthian was planning mass murder, then he didn't seem worried about witnesses.

The installation was so magnificent, I naturally walked straight to it, leaving Justin with his father. The things attracting my attention were the bronze panels. I realized these were more than just the abstract swirls and curves I'd taken them for from a distance. Each showed carved figures, and I worked out that if you solved them correctly, there were stories here. Not nice stories. Mostly, people died—some pulled apart by hooks on lengths of chain. Many pictures included what looked like escapees from the most extreme S&M club I could imagine. In other panels there were objects, some of them small boxes around four inches square, and these toys changed, transformed.

I admired the scale of this thing and how much work Caruthian must have put into it. His passion for this piece must have been extraordinary. I realized he was driven by desires far deeper than I'd imagined.

One panel stopped me dead. It clearly showed Justin and me on the bridge, talking, walking, and kissing. I looked for the next picture in the sequence. Here we were shown meeting Caruthian, next standing in front of the installation. I scanned the walls for another picture, the next in the sequence, but found none.

I became aware of my heart in my chest. It felt trapped, tight.

I started working out how we might escape this place—without simply screaming and running. Turning to speak to Justin, I saw he was walking with his father to the entrance to the installation. I hurried to catch them up.

All right, I hesitated for nearly a minute, trying to catch my breath—just wanting to run. Then I had to practically drag my legs, muttering to myself, “This is stupid, this is stupid . . .”

Caruthian spotted me approaching and they waited for me to reach them.

“Justin's just been telling me about his researches today. It's good to know he's taken such an interest in my work,” said Caruthian. He stepped inside the installation, assuming we'd follow.

Without looking at me, Justin also walked in. I was finding it really hard to breathe normally, but I followed.

“I call it
The Alignment of Regrets
,” said Caruthian, leading the way down one corridor after another and climbing or descending stairs. It was labyrinthine and the carvings continued here. The corridors led to small rooms and in some there were life-sized statues. Some were cast in metal, others were made from plaster. He'd used every material I could think of, including what looked like animal remains coated in plastic. They had a simple theme: the manipulation of flesh. Each character was pierced and twisted and standing proud. Where a face could be discerned, the expressions were serene and in some cases smiling seductively. I touched or stroked most as we passed. Caruthian saw me doing this, but didn't indicate I shouldn't. Rather he seemed pleased. Absurdly, I still felt guilty. Memories of school trips to galleries and museums and the teachers' brays of “Don't touch, don't touch.”

As we walked, listening to Caruthian describing the inspiration for some of the statues, I looked for anything in the construction of the installation that could be considered dangerous. There was nothing, no sharp edges. There were no pumps or moving pieces of any kind. Nothing there to harm anyone—that I could see. I began to relax.

We turned a corner and Justin groaned. “How could you? Jeeesus! After last time!” He slowly sank to his knees.

I didn't understand what had upset him. His father was standing in front of more statues. He looked confused.

“But I haven't used your name, have I? No one will know.” He turned to me. “You speak to him. I . . . I give up.” He stalked from the room.

I sat beside Justin and put my arm around him.

“I'm guessing this is another piece where you can see your pain put on display.”

He turned his head to me. “No, not really. But it's the longest-standing argument between us. I asked him once, ‘Which is stronger? The man who beats another man to the ground or the other,
who holds out his hand to the fallen and supports him to his feet. Which shows more courage?'“

I could see his father's answer. Either side of a small neon sign saying
STRENGTH?
there were two tableaux. To the left a masculine, virile, and handsome man, stripped to a loincloth and priapic beneath it, was spearing another man through the chest who lay on the ground. To the right was the figure of a third man, standing with arms outstretched, supporting a man on each shoulder. These two men, also with arms outstretched, were each supporting two more men. This went up three levels, so the lowest supported fourteen companions. The expression on that man's face was terrible strain and despair. He was dressed as a clown.

Justin continued, “He told me that being strong enough to beat your enemies was the only strength that really mattered.”

“What about the strength to fight evil?” I asked. “I don't mean with violence. Having the strength to do what is right, facing down the bully, fighting your own negativity and overcoming your own fears and phobias. Beating the demons within. I think that's what strength is, that's what takes courage.”