Hellbound Hearts (34 page)

He laughed again, enjoying her delicious agony, and began working his personal magic with his scourge over her naked breasts and genitals. How was it possible to feel more pain? How was it possible to feel more ecstasy? In the shadows, the other Cenobites applauded the show. They hadn't seen anything this entertaining in ages.

The metal hooks on the leather strips of his scourge dug into Sister Nikoletta's skin and gouged out her flesh. She felt that not only her body was being flayed, but her soul. She didn't care; she desperately wanted release from her old self. She was happy to trade that tired bag of flesh for something else, something beautiful—like
him
. She wanted to
be
him: intractable, indomitable, powerful, a slave to nothing but desire. She wanted his nails, pins, wires, fingers, and teeth to bite into her, to destroy and then transmute her sad sack of sin into a blood-drenched angel of darkness—the envy of all the other demons. She sent this message to him in her shrieks of horrified delight, pleasure, and gratitude.

He finally stopped and dropped his drenched whip. He walked over and stood astride her body. The pain hadn't abated and Sister Nikoletta still cried out. He sank down slowly, a knee planted on each side of her chest, and took out a thin-bladed surgical scalpel. He leaned over, placed his hand under her chin, and gently pushed
back her head. Unable to scream, feet pummeling the ground, Sister Nikoletta made muffled sounds of anguish as he slowly and artistically carved a new orifice for her. He laced thin platinum wires through her cheeks and, using these as an anchor, hooked and pulled the skin away from her gaping wound. When he had finished, he straightened up and lifted his apron to show her another present he had prepared for her.

The skin fire was nothing. Her bloody wound was nothing. The agonizing whips and chains were nothing. Whatever happened to Sister Nikoletta next would obliterate her forever, tear her apart and send her whirling down into an abyss of divine degradation, to that special place she had longed to go to for so many years.

The Cenobite entered her, using every orifice, old and new. Sister Nikoletta's choking, dreadful moans of passion gurgled from her lips, but the sounds were triumphant, and her frantically thrashing body echoed her exquisite feelings of the ultimate in sensual suffering.

Her shadowy Cenobite audience applauded yet again. What a girl! Sister Nikoletta's adoration for mutilation, sensation, and agony would be legendary, even in Hell.

For many years now, Sister Cilice has been in the service of the Subterranean Power. Hellbound to glory. She has no thoughts, no worries, no guilt, no empathy, no passion, no dreams, nothing to do but to satiate desires that can never really be quenched to the full, but hell, nothing is perfect. She assists her leader in his work; they are a perfect team. They even finish each other's threats to those who dare call upon them, and take turns flaying those unfortunates who thought they knew what they were doing when they opened the Box. The silence from above no longer greets her words, but screams for mercy. They pray to Sister Cilice now. They are her supplicants, not the other way around. The mortification of her flesh no longer gives her quite the pleasure it used to, but the delight in the pain of others is truly enriching. She is no longer concerned about
the demons in her mind. She is a demon herself now and woe betide the mind that comes across her.

In a tiny corner of the shriveled, blackened brain that once belonged to someone called Sister Nikoletta, Sister Cilice hears an echo of one phrase above all others: “Loved be pain. Sanctified be pain. Glorified be pain!”

They are the only words that can still make her laugh.

Jeffrey J. Mariotte

How does one gauge emptiness; calibrate the measure of sorrow? Or is a void defined purely by that which once occupied it? Ron Marks knew the timing of his loss, but not the degree. It took an instant, and when it ended, nothing would ever be the same.

When it ended.
Later, that idea would make Ron Marks laugh, bitterly and without humor. It never ended.

When it began, when that instant came and went—that, he knew with precision. Saturday, November 10. He had gone out into the New Mexico evening at 6:50 p.m. Hayleigh had a soccer game, and Linda planned to take some of the girls out for ice cream at game's end, but they should be home by seven. In the dying of the day, Ron decided to water the lawn. Family, home stability—these things defined him.

Hose in hand, arcing water gently over patchy grass, he watched a family from the next block start across the street. He had never met them, but saw them around the neighborhood. A single mother, he believed, young, with black hair and dark eyes. She pushed an infant in a stroller, a little boy in grass-stained jeans and a flannel shirt walking beside her.

Just then, Ron heard the truck. He stepped around the corner and saw it barreling north toward the intersection: a monstrous three-quarter ton, jacked up on huge shocks and giant tires, all shiny black and chrome and pure macho aggression. It came too fast, and in the blue light of dusk, he wasn't sure its driver had seen the family stepping into the road.

Ron dropped the hose and ran into the street. At the same moment he heard a lesser engine coming from the west—Linda's Maxima. He scissored his arms over his head, trying to warn the pickup's driver to slow down. There was a stop sign at the corner, but the guy wasn't braking.

After that, it all happened suddenly. The truck swerved, missing the young family. The woman screamed and yanked her stroller so hard it tipped over in the middle of the street. The swerve put the truck in the wrong part of the intersection at the crucial moment, as Linda, presumably thinking no one would tear past the stop sign—and perhaps, Ron had to admit, distracted by the sight of her husband waving like a madman—proceeded through the intersection.

The pickup broadsided her sedan. The crunch of steel against steel, the squeal of skidding tires, and the burning stink of brakes and shredded rubber seared into Ron's brain. The car and truck, a single interlocked whole, scraped across the pavement and onto the sidewalk, coming to rest with the Maxima pinned between the truck's massive bulk and a power pole on the far corner.

Linda and Hayleigh were dead long before the authorities were able to work through bent steel and broken glass—a retrieval, one said, believing Ron couldn't hear, far too late for a rescue.

The days before the funeral were full of phone calls and e-mails and cards, flowers and food. Linda's parents and sisters came to town, as did old friends Ron hadn't seen in months or years. Then it was over and Linda and Hayleigh were in the ground and everyone went away.

And Ron fell apart. He felt as if someone had tapped his heart
and broken the spigot, so all the blood and love flooded out, pooling on the floor.

Linda had been the family's main breadwinner, and her million-dollar insurance policy named Ron as sole beneficiary. The check arrived just as Ron's chronic absence cost him his government job. He couldn't bring himself to care. Work had been interfering with his drinking anyway, and he decided to apply himself to that pursuit with the dedication it deserved.

Ron became a connoisseur, not of fine liquors but of whatever concoction could speed him most rapidly into oblivion. He found that mixing his poisons worked well. He poured a fifth of the cheapest rotgut whiskey he could find into a gallon pitcher, then threw in vodka or gin, maybe some beer for flavoring. The pitcher would generally last a couple of days, because he would pass out long before he finished. If it didn't spill, he could start in again whenever he woke up.

During the hours between blackouts, he wandered the increasingly filthy house, like a ghost haunting a place in which he had once been happy. He left all three of the house's televisions on, and occasionally thought he heard Linda's voice or Hayleigh's shrill giggle. But it was always some actress or newswoman or “personality,” those false friends of lost and lonely Americans living empty lives in empty houses.

When November 10 came around again, he was barely aware of the date. But his drinking took on new urgency, and although by now it took most of the pitcher to knock him out, he worked hard at spending fewer hours of each day awake and aware. The weather was unseasonably cold, with a piercing wind that whisked through the window he had broken in a blind rage that spring, then taped up instead of replacing.

Ron was on the bathroom floor when someone pounded on his front door. He came around slowly, first thinking it was the TV. Finally he realized it was a person, and that person wasn't leaving.

The pitcher was tipped on its side. Ron sniffed it, tasted the rim.
The pounding continued. He would have to mix another pitcher, but he couldn't remember if he had really run out of whiskey or only dreamed it. He couldn't remember the last time the pitcher had been washed, the last time he had showered. He ran a finger through greasy, tangled hair. His cheeks felt bristly and sharp.

The pounding would give him a headache if it kept on, especially without more whiskey. Gathering himself enough to go to the store would put a damper on his plan of spending the rest of the week unconscious, but maybe his visitor had brought a few bottles of something.

Ron pushed off the toilet, ignoring the vomit flecking its rim, and gained his feet. The pounding had settled into a steady rhythm, unchanging as he staggered toward the door. When he opened it, a man stood there, a few years younger than Ron, Latino and stocky, with black hair, big brown eyes, and a wispy goatee. He hadn't brought any bottles. Ron stared at him, waiting for an explanation.

“You don't remember me?”

“Should I?” Ron hadn't looked into a mirror in so long, he wasn't sure he'd remember himself.

“A year ago, dude. I'm the guy who was driving the truck. I killed your wife and kid.”

Ron wasn't sure how to respond. The driver had been charged with manslaughter, but a sharp lawyer had managed to get him a deal: time served and community service. Now here he stood.

Ron's guts churned like someone was twisting them, and he threw a jerking, unsteady punch. Momentum tugged him off balance. His fist slid off the man's shoulder, and the man grabbed his arms and shoved him back against the wall.

“Look, I know it's weird.” His breath was hot in Ron's face. “Me coming here like this. I wanted to tell you that I am so sorry. There hasn't been a single day I haven't remembered what happened and felt like shit about it, okay? I'm not saying what I've gone through is anything like your loss. But that day changed all of our lives, right? Mine too.”

“How so?”

“My girlfriend left me after that, dude. Took our kids. I lost my job. Most of my friends stopped talking to me. And I know I wasn't in the system that long, but that was rough, man. Shit I seen . . .”

“Sorry for your pain,” Ron said, retreating. “Now get lost.” He started to close the door. The guy blocked it with his leg.

“You gotta let me in, dude. What's your name? Ronald something, right?”

“Ron Marks.”

“I'm Leonardo Montoya. Lenny.”

“Is there some reason I shouldn't just kick your ass, Lenny?”

Lenny laughed.

“Dude, you can't fucking stand up without hanging on to the wall.”

Ron had been trying to ignore that. Now that it was pointed out, he almost lost his balance and had to take a couple of backward steps. Lenny took the motion as an invitation, stepped inside, and shut the door behind him. He was right. Whatever Lenny wanted to do, Ron couldn't stop him.

It turned out that Lenny wanted to talk, to make amends somehow. He took a key, went to the store, and brought back plastic bags that made the satisfying clink of glass on glass. One had real food in it, too. Lenny made chicken tacos drizzled with lime, mixed a pitcher to Ron's specifications, and they sat in the living room. Lenny talked. Some of the time, Ron listened.

Days passed. Lenny was there a lot, cooking and cleaning and shopping. The house started to smell more like fresh air, cleaning solutions, and cooked food than rotting meat and greasy hamburger wrappers. Ron drank marginally less; with someone around to listen to, oblivion seemed minutely less important. Lenny started speaking to Ron like a friend or a spouse, discussing things they might do together, purchases they could make. Weeks went by before Ron realized that Lenny was living on Ron's insurance money.

When he called Lenny on it, Lenny laughed. “Dude, we're connected by our loss. We're brothers in pain,
compadres
of the lonely life. You have every reason on Earth to hate me, but you can't. Because I'm part of you now. We're living inside the same skin.”

“I guess,” Ron said, and had another drink.

A couple of weeks after that, Lenny suggested that they make the two-hour drive into El Paso. Ron hadn't been out of the house in months, except to the grocery store and gas station.

It turned out what Lenny had in mind was a strip club by the interstate. Ron didn't want to go in. Once he stopped paying the cable bill and televised porn ceased being piped in, he had mostly forgotten about sex. All those writhing bodies had been a blur to him anyway.

But the grinding, perfume-soaked attention of a voluptuous woman from across the border caused memories of that once-pleasurable activity to stir and swell, along with the usual physical manifestation of same. He could only understand every fifth word she breathed into his ear, but with pillowy breasts in his face and her devoted attention to the bulge in his pants, he decided he didn't care.

It was the first time he had truly
felt
in more than a year.

“That was nothing,” Lenny said on the way home. “What I've heard, you could have a dozen virgins a day and it wouldn't compare to what you can get if you really want it.”