Hellbound Hearts (41 page)

Smoke and fire and hush in here, in the glass by my bed, in the Lagavulin that I sipped; smoke and fire and noise out there, beyond the windows, in the storm, like a battle fought at sea. God's man-ofwar, the typhoon.

I may have said that aloud.

That, and other things equally foolish. The night was long, and short on sleep; he was interestingly delightful, even besides his unmentionable markings, and the storm brought an unexpected focus into the room and the moment. Every one of the moments, as though every single needlepoint jab of a tattoo mattered equally. Or, I suppose, every slice of a razor.

I said, “I'm sorry, did I hurt you?”

He said, “Don't be sorry.”

I said, “Roll over, then.”

Dawn must have come in some higher place above the clouds, sunlight trapped in the ridges of the whirl, sucked into the funnel of the eye. Even below, it did grow lighter.

Shen got out of bed, went to the bathroom; claimed to be surprised, a little, that we still had electricity. Half the city had gone dark, district by district, as the storm turned the lights out.

Then he went to stand naked by the window-wall, gazing out at the typhoon where it still thundered and rushed, young transient flesh and ancient eternal weather separated only by a fixity of purpose, glass as statement,
Here I stand and there you are, and this is the gulf between us.

Lightning made the patterns of his scarring stand out, stark and brutal.

Then I thought I saw another figure, stood beyond the glass.

In midair, that would be, on the solidity of wind, twenty-three stories above the city streets.

It was naked, too, that shadow-shape; and of course it was only a reflection, window turned to mirror, so that Shen was looking at himself and so was I.

Except that the storm must have distorted the reflection somehow, because the figure it held was none so straight as Shen and none so clean, it seemed twisted somehow and its scars were differently organized; I thought they cut a diagonal cross into its chest, from shoulder to hip both ways, as though it might unfold like origami. And then it moved; it lifted its hand to the glass, seeming as though it stood on the other side of a doorway, someplace still and bewildering, hints of a labyrinth behind, where a man might need another kind of compass to navigate . . .

And then I put the lights on, one bedside switch to brighten the whole room. I wanted to see quite clearly how wrong this all was, what a nonsense, no figure at all out there once the light fell onto it.

And there was the figure in full light, and there was Shen staring at him, lifting his own hand in the irony of a slavish reflection, and I saw that he had the compass between his feet there, box and all.

And then the window blew in.

Blew out.

Blew away.

Was gone, all that glass in a sudden shatter, all noise. Like a blast without wind, or a wind without direction.

The glass was gone, that separation was gone between one state and another, and Shen was gone, too. Just—gone. He had been standing in arm's reach of the window when it ruptured, and now that place was empty.

I hadn't been looking, not properly. I'd been flinching in anticipation of flying glass that never came, that never reached me. Even so, I had two contrary impressions in my head: one, that he'd been snatched away, that the figure outside had reached in and taken him; the other, that he had reached out. Stepped forward. Gone willingly.

Both were nonsense, of course. There had been no figure, stationary in a typhoon, two hundred feet above the city. There was no such Hell, to be glimpsed in storm and reached
in extremis
. Only a
reflection distorted and a mundane tragedy, a window imploding under pressure and a young man seized by dreadful wind, carried off to a dreadful death.

That same wind was in the room with me now, something living, appalling. It pulled the duvet from the bed and dragged it out into the sky; it took what furniture was closest, the TV on its stand and never mind the weight of it, that lifted too before I saw it fall. The standard lamp was seized and thrown, hurled across the room to break a mirror in the other wall.

For a little moment, perhaps my body wanted to hurtle over to that missing window, in a desperate lunge after the vanished Shen. I know my voice snatched after him, I know my arm flew up in echo, instinct over intellect. And met that wall of wind, felt it against my fingers, and—well, no.

If a sailor knows one thing, it would be the wind. If he knows another, too, it would be a lost cause, when not to reach for what is gone already. I have seen men washed overboard, lovers walk away. The trick is to survive them, not to chase.

I didn't shift a willing foot toward the window.

North Sea gale or Gulf hurricane or roar down in the Forties, your first massive wind will blow all pride, all shame out of you. I crawled from the bed to the door, crawled naked on my belly except to snatch my money belt from the nightstand as I passed. I dug my hands deep into the thick, heavy carpet and dragged myself along, didn't try to stand, even at the door. I reached up from the floor to work the handle, hauled it open and slithered through, let it slam behind me and felt my ears pop at the change of pressure.

Stood up cautiously into no wind at all, the still air of a hotel corridor and the faint distant buzz of voices, someone having a room party, entirely safe behind their window-walls; and made it only halfway to the lift before a member of staff appeared, calm and utterly unsurprised. Perhaps she had seen me on the CCTV and come to intercept; perhaps it was purely routine to discover naked men astray outside their rooms, in times of storm or otherwise.

She took me into a linen cupboard, found me a robe while I was telling her about the window gone, my friend gone with it. Her shock was swift and professional, impersonal, efficient; my own was climbing me like a monkey in the rigging, I could feel the tremor of it in my fingers, knew what it was, could do nothing about it.

Then there were police, the hotel doctor, a large whiskey and a little pill, another bed in a room without a window. I had tried to say, I had said—time and again, I think I said it—that I was used to this, I had seen men die this way; but to the hotel of course it was terrible and they were determined that it should be terrible to me, too.

The pill gave me a deeper, perhaps a better, sleep than I could ever have achieved on my own account; my body doesn't like to sleep in storms. I woke to the hush and ruin of what follows on land, and longed to be at sea where all the damage is swept away or left behind. When I called to ask for food, I got the manager instead, still horrified by the morning's news. A window gone and a life lost—a guest's friend, subtly and discreetly to be distinguished from a guest—such a thing might be common news in the typhoon, might almost be commonplace at other establishments but had never happened, should never have happened, here. Should not have been possible. The glass was guaranteed, promised to be proof against the strongest wind. There must have been a fault in that one sheet, that triple-sheet, or perhaps an unregarded twist in the frame, damage from the last quake, though the whole hotel was promised to be earthquake-proof also. There would be an investigation, of course. And in the meantime, of course, I was a guest of the management for so long as I cared to stay; and if my, ah, friend had any family living locally, the hotel would do everything in its power to ease their transition through this difficult period . . .

Did Shen have family? I couldn't say; I found it hard to care. Johnnie would know, perhaps. I put him on to Johnnie.

The police, too, I sent them round to Johnnie with their questions and my apologies. It's no kind thing to bring the attention of the law down on a waterfront trader, who may lack import licenses
and invoices, whose contacts might well prefer their anonymity; but I couldn't be kind that day. I answered what questions I could, not many, and most of those with “Best ask Johnnie.”

I asked one question of my own: What of the yacht I'd left in the marina, had she survived the storm and the tidal surge? The management there had claimed their covered berths in their isolated dock to be typhoon-proof, but then, so did the management here . . .

They promised to let me know, as soon as practical. They implied that they had more urgent matters to attend to first, the recovery of bodies, Shen's among them, and how could I be asking about a boat?

I didn't say it, but I doubted they would ever find Shen's body.

I didn't say much of anything, indeed. I gently let them infer that I was still in the grip of shock or tranquilizers, both; I said I wanted to go back to my room, and they obliged me. Offered an escort, indeed, which I declined.

For good reason, because I had let them assume I meant the new room, the windowless, the safe.

I still had my original keycard in my money belt, and they hadn't thought to recode the door; why would I go back there, why would I
want
to go back?

There was no watch in the corridor, for much the same reason. The police had been, had seen, had taken what evidence, what photographs, they needed; why should they want to go back? Or to keep guard? It wasn't a crime scene, after all. Officialdom was done with this place. A minor tragedy, after all, in a city overtaken by them . . .

I let myself in and found that the absent window had been replaced with deadlights, boarded up. Otherwise, the room had been left largely untouched except by storm. The police would have wanted it preserved, of course, at least for their cursory inspection; the management would see no hurry in it now, when they had live guests to attend to.

My things: someone might have been sent to fetch out my things, but they had not. Not yet. They might still come, of course, at any moment. I didn't overly care. If they caught me here, they caught nothing but a disturbed guest among his own possessions.

Among what was left of his possessions. Anything that had been lying loose in the room was gone, scoured away by too much wind,
tai feng
, and its attendant water. But I'm a sailor, long trained to neatness and alert to storm; I had unpacked, of course, and put most of my things away.

The nightstand was gone, with its drawers. With my watch, my phone, my cash purse and medications. No matter.

The wardrobe was extant, built-in. The sliding doors were off their tracks, but only wedged more firmly in place; it took ocean muscles and a degree of ocean experience to shift them. Behind, everything was sodden that could be soaked: which meant my better clothes, but there were few enough of those. All my practical wear is waterproof by necessity, by definition. As is my bag, and the useful stuff it carries; and . . .

And I was here for none of that. Of course. I was only displacing the moment.

Close by the boarded window stood the compass box, not quite where Shen had left it: set aside, I supposed, by the men who came to seal up that appalling breach.

I thought Shen had meant to take it with him, and had not been given the chance.

Left behind, it was closed up tight against the weather. Locked up tight, apparently, when I tried the lid; although there had only been one key and that was with me, in my money belt.

When I tried it, the brass lock moved as sweetly as if it sat in an oil bath; when I lifted the lid and looked inside, so did the compass needle.

It pivoted and spun, reacted to any movement of the box, paid no heed to any outside force or inclination: nothing to point at, nowhere to go.

Wherever Shen had been taken, you couldn't get there from here. Not anymore.

Next day, I carried the box back to Johnnie's place. On foot, necessarily, through streets still full of ruin, busy with people, no wheeled traffic at all.

I found him dealing with the aftermath of his own broken window, sweeping up glass in the street.

I put the compass down and helped haul out ruined stock—all those things that no one had ever wanted; anyone could have them now, if they would only take them away—and said, “I thought you were safely boarded up before the typhoon hit?”

“I was,” he grunted. “Someone came, ripped down the boards, broke the window to get in.”

“Christ. What did they steal?”

“Nothing. Nothing's gone.”

How he could tell, I was not clear; everything was overturned, broken open, torn apart. He was entirely certain, though. And oddly phlegmatic, I thought. If he was angry that morning, it was with me. “Sending the police to me—to me!—over some whore-boy I do not know . . .”

“Wait, what? You didn't send . . . ?”

“I did not. I am not your pimp.”

That was a blatant lie; he had pimped for me for longer than either of us would credit, but I let it by.

And went on fetching and carrying, until there was as much sodden trash outside as in; and then, remembering, I glanced aside for the compass where I had set it down just by the step there.

No one had come, but it was gone, and I was somehow not surprised at all.

Doug Bradley

Hello. Welcome to the other end. Did everyone make it out okay? I do hope so, we can't go back in for the bodies, you know.

For some reason, I seem to be getting the last word here. If this was a film, I'd be the credits. Half of you are already grabbing your coats, stuffing your empty popcorn buckets under your seats, and heading for the neon EXIT signs. “Sorry! Excuse me! Sorry!” While the other half—the cinephiles or cineastes: it always sounds faintly wrong, don't you think?—are determinedly watching, convinced it's going to somehow do you good, but really wanting to get the hell out. Or in this case, perhaps get the hell out of Hell.

Anyway, bear with me. I promise I'll try to be brief. . . .

Great labyrinths, it seems, from little puzzle boxes grow. The thread that Clive began to unwind somewhere in Crouch End, North London (sometime in the early eighties), and unraveled somewhat farther among the weeping willows and duck ponds of Cricklewood (a handful of years later), shows no sign of reaching the end of its skein: it has raveled on cinematically through Carolina and Holly, through Captain George Vancouver's place to the Paris
of the east where, at the time of writing at least, it seems to have ground to a halt.