Hellbound Hearts (28 page)

The light changed suddenly. The bulb, in the middle of the room, hung without a shade, swayed slightly. My heart started racing again as I realized what Caruthian's departure meant. So far, I hadn't been afraid of this box while he'd been with us. Now though, if this was a trap, then Justin and I were caught. My heart pounded again and I realized I had no idea how to get out.

I pulled Justin to his feet. “Come on,” I said. “I want out of here.”

He moved slowly as we left the room and I was forced to drag him.

“Shit, shit, shit!” I said. This wasn't going to be easy. Caruthian had built in mirrors and trompe l'oeil corridors, and I banged my nose twice on these. Where I did recognize a statue and thought I remembered the next in the series, another was in its place. I tried to calm myself, recited mantras in my head. What had I said to Justin a few minutes before? Something about overcoming your inner
demons. Yeah, right. It was my fear, always my fear: denying me dreams and lovers, hobbling my mind.

I dragged Justin behind me. He shouted: “You're hurting my arm!”

“Well, stop loitering and help me find the way out!”

“Oh,” he said. “It's this way. Why didn't you just ask?”

He pushed in front, took my hand, and walked off, with me stumbling behind him.

He was right. As I followed him, we passed statues that I recognized and in the order I remembered them.

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“You know, sometimes you simply have to ask me for help. Just because you're older, doesn't mean you're always right.”

Ouch.

“I told you, I spent the whole of today doing research. This is one of Lemarchand's designs.”

We emerged from the entrance and were greeted with a round of applause. Caruthian's voice came over loudspeakers: “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for that warm reception for these first two explorers in the further reaches of experience. Now, honored guests, you all have your tickets and maps, yes? Good. Simply follow your personal routes and you'll find treasures for you in the room you've been allocated. Remember, the tickets are numbered and you should enter in that order. And you may not end up with the partner you arrived with tonight.” There were titters of naughty expectation at that. I wondered just what they were expecting once they were inside the installation. Was this the prelude to some unique orgy?

“Justin, please bring your friend to join me here.”

We looked up and saw Caruthian standing alone on the bridge above us.

“We might as well,” said Justin.

We left the hundred or so guests politely allowing one another to walk into the narrow entrance to the installation, as they'd been asked. They were a strange bunch. A mixture of ages and nationalities, many of them dressed soberly in evening attire. Others were
fetishists wearing leather and chains or simply dressed erotically. All wore masks. They nodded amicably to one another.

“What are they going to find?” Justin asked Caruthian.

“That depends. Their destinations are based on my intimate interviews with their friends, other artists, and enemies. I've learned there are those who apparently hated, but relentlessly desired, others. There are some in there whose pursuit of forbidden delights, separated by marriage or childhood, have nearly ruined them. But tonight I've promised them anonymity and a taste of hidden desires fulfilled.”

As he talked we began to hear voices from the installation, cries of delighted surprise. After the last guest had entered, a man in overalls closed the door.

“You know, Justin, I realize you've never really understood why I used your stories and our fights for my work. I have to create from what I know of my life, and you're part of that. An important part. I've always loved you, you must know that.”

“How, Father? How am I supposed to know? You've never encouraged me, never praised me.”

“That was your mother's way. I want you to be strong enough to take the pleasures life has to offer. To experience all its wonders and those beyond this world.”

I've long believed that human communication is mostly based on fear and misunderstanding. They lapsed into silence.

“Time to play, I think,” said Caruthian. He looked up and signaled to someone in a gantry at the top of the hall. A walkway was lowered, allowing him to cross from the bridge to the center of the installation, where there was a large blank disk of the bronze panels.

Before stepping onto the walkway, he kicked off his shoes and loosened his tie. Crossing the walkway, he removed his clothes, so he was naked when his feet touched the installation. The walkway returned to the gantry.

Caruthian walked around the perimeter of the disk. As he did so, sparks of light snapped at his feet and for a moment he paused.
It had obviously hurt and briefly I thought he would stop, but he walked on.

The installation juddered. Inside it, the groans, sighs, and screams of pleasure ceased. There was a sense of expectation like you get in the queue for a roller coaster. Now sections of the box began to shift and rise. I wondered how Caruthian was meeting health and safety rules here. I didn't remember seeing seat belts inside.

As one section rose, we heard screaming; screaming and calls for help, mercy and of despair. One of the men in overalls ran to the entrance door to open it, but that section was suddenly traveling toward the ceiling.

Hidden smoke machines came into action and Caruthian had obviously arranged for lights to be buried in the wall, as shafts of blue fell from them and became the only illumination in the hall.

A section rose and swung past us. Through the tang of the smoke, I smelled excrement and blood and saw a young woman, standing at the entrance to a room, which now moved over a fifty-foot drop. She looked at me and then stretched out an arm. She was yards away from us, ridiculously out of reach, but I raised my arms to her. The next moment, the floor beneath her swung down and she dropped. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears. Even then I could hear a church bell tolling.

I started to act sensibly. I ran.

No, no. I mean I ran for help, reaching into my pocket for my mobile phone to call . . . but my phone was out of power and . . . and I just ran. I left Justin throwing up on the bridge and I ran from the things coming through the walls.

I was scared and I don't like being scared.

The newspapers were bewildered. Justin's talk of
The Alignment of Regrets
and the work of an obscure French toymaker didn't add up. They concentrated more on the insane artist and his son, and speculated on an unnatural physical relationship between them. They crushed Justin, blaming him for not alerting the world earlier to his
father's plans. After all, he'd been living with him for months; surely he'd known.

Ah, well, Justin's subsequent suicide couldn't be helped. The police denied all connection with Lemarchand, and rightly so. They hadn't found any plans or diagrams by Lemarchand in Caruthian's studio or flat.

I'd made sure I kept the paper Justin gave me on the bridge. While he was calling me that final evening, I was removing the evidence of my dealings with Caruthian.

Part of my price for the plans had been his silence about my enjoyment of his son—a dalliance necessary to ensure Justin knew nothing of his father's wanton desires for that night.

I still have Lemarchand's designs. One day, I may show them to you.

If you have the desire.

Yvonne Navarro

Wikvaya found the sand painting a morning's walk from the wash.

The sun hung high in the sky, strong and hot, and the Almighty had made it a good growing season so far. The villagers' prayers and offerings had not gone unheard by Rain Cloud, and the seasonal rains had been regular and steady, occasionally overly generous and swelling the wash so that the water rose and the wind sang through the entrance and across its liquid surface. Because of this, the People had named this place Aponovi,
the wind that blows across the gap
. But all of that could change so quickly. And it
would
, if Wikvaya did not get back in time to warn the other spirit warriors.

He stared at the sand painting, unable to resist watching it shimmy and shift. The unseen hand wielding the colors was expert, the lines precise and myriad. Never in his twenty-two summers had he seen such complexity and beauty. The combination of textures and the odd, dark hues were mesmerizing, pulling him closer because he couldn't wait to see where the lines would go next. Was there a sound? Was it whispering to him, enticing him to reach down and try adding a line or two of his own to the pattern, something to bring it closer to completion? Another step—

Something screeched over his head and Wikvaya jerked, looking up. The wind had risen and an eagle, perhaps the largest one he'd ever seen, perched on the swaying branch of the old and battered acacia tree that overhung the ground where the sand painting was taking shape. The eagle's golden eyes seared into his and Wikvaya realized he was shivering, so cold that he felt like he'd been standing for hours in the snow. He was supposed to be running back to Oraibi, his village, to warn them of the sand painting. What had he been doing? How long had he been standing here? With horror Wikvaya realized the sun had sunk halfway to the horizon. It was the painting on the ground, of course; it had robbed him of precious time as surely as if it had formed hands and held him in place. Even now its surface squirmed and re-formed, beckoning, but Wikvaya forced himself to turn away. He would not let himself be bewitched again.

“Thank you, Kwahu,” he murmured to the eagle. It merely watched him with unblinking eyes. Its silent disapproval weighed on his shoulders like boulders, but Wikvaya did not know how to make amends for his foolishness. All he could do was turn his back on the sand painting and begin the long run back to Oraibi.

His strength and youth carried him well, and even though he'd run the entire way, fear made Wikvaya arrive at the village with energy to spare. His brothers were waiting in the family pueblo, and Wikvaya could see the irritation in their expressions. He was supposed to have been here hours ago to help weave his future bride's wedding clothes.

“Where have you been?” Cheveyo, his eldest brother, was sitting next to their father and the youngest boy, Hania. It was clear that they'd been working on Cha'kwaina's wedding clothes for quite some time. He and Cha'kwaina were to be married in five days, and tradition dictated that the males of his family would all help weave her attire. Wikvaya should have been here earlier in the day to do his part, but things would be altered a great deal from the plans that had already been set. A lot of people would be unhappy, most of all
his bride-to-be, but that could not be helped. “Cha'kwaina will be here at sunrise to grind corn,” her father told him. “Your mother is looking forward to her help and to making sure she will be a good wife for you.”

His thoughts spun and for a moment Wikvaya said nothing. Was he absolutely sure about what he had seen? It all seemed so far away now, and there was a part of his mind, a small, insidious voice, that insisted the sand painting had been nothing but his imagination, the result of too much time spent beneath the high desert sun and too little water. There was so much to do in the coming days—

No . . . it
had
been true. Nothing else could explain the hours he had lost or the painful redness on his shoulders where the sun's rays had scorched his unmoving skin. “I bring news,” Wikvaya said hoarsely. “I have seen the gate of evil.”

The other men stopped their weaving and looked at him, their eyes wide. Honaw, his father, set aside his work, then stood. His movements were slow and ponderous, much like those of his aged namesake, the bear. “Tell us.”

“It is as the stories have always foretold.” Wikvaya chose his words carefully. “An image in the sand that forms by itself, created by something unseen.”

“Perhaps it was the wind,” Cheveyo said. “You were gone for most of the day. The sun can play tricks on a man.”

“It can,” Wikvaya agreed. “But it was the image—a sand painting—that spirited away the hours. It . . .
called
to me, and I wanted to help complete it.” At his father's look of alarm, Wikvaya added hastily, “But I did not touch it.”

“Are you certain?”

Wikvaya turned to stare at Hania. “What do you mean?”

“You admit that the sand painting stole many hours from you. What did you do during that time? Do you recall?”

“I . . .” Wikvaya could not finish. Instead, he looked at his hands, but the flesh seemed unchanged and told him nothing.

“As I thought.” Hania settled back, Cha'kwaina's wedding
clothes forgotten. “We must ready ourselves for battle. According to the dark prophecy, we must be strong and stop the gate to the Underworld before it can open.”

“In case we are too late, the village must be rendered sightless,” Wikvaya added. “Legend says that any beast that comes through cannot harm those who cannot see it. Those who see it, fear it, and the creature's power comes from fear. So—”

“—only the spirit warriors may have vision,” Cheveyo completed.

“Yes,” Honaw said. “Only the four of us.”

Cha'kwaina had just finished gathering her things for her three-day stay at the home of Wikvaya's family when she heard shouting outside. Grandmother Chochmingwu, ancient and becoming hard of hearing at fifty-seven summers, was bent over her grindstone, and the old woman looked up only when Cha'kwaina touched her on the shoulder. “Something is happening outside,” she said in a near shout. “Everyone's running around.” Reluctantly the elderly matriarch pushed herself to her feet and followed Cha'kwaina to the doorway, leaning heavily on a twisted mesquite cane. Not for the first time, Cha'kwaina was silently amazed that one so old and frail could be so revered in the village, so powerful. Chochmingwu's daughter—Cha'kwaina's mother—had died birthing her second child, a son, so someday Grandmother Chochmingwu's position as village matriarch would pass to her granddaughter. As it always did, the prospect brought a roll of anxiety deep into Cha'kwaina's belly. How would she deal with such huge responsibility? How would she lead?