Hellbound Hearts (6 page)

The door opened as he pushed to lever himself upright. He heard a female voice, strident, calling from farther along a dark hallway. “Get in. Shut out that unwanted.”

He thought she meant the weather, but once the door was closed behind him, he felt sure she wanted the chill in, and him out. He couldn't understand why he'd even crossed the threshold, but there was something in her voice that brooked no argument. “Hello?” he called. “I'm a police officer. You should watch that door. I think the lock's faulty.”

“Come in. Take off your coat. And wipe your feet. I don't want muddy prints all over my pile.”

Gravier's heart was loud in the corridor. He took his hand off the latch and moved deeper into the house. Stairs vanished into a dark upper floor. A room to his left was a series of sagging browns: tired curtains, caved-in armchair, a rug, and a sleeping caramel cat. A kitchen containing a dining table covered with a protective plastic sheet. Dripping tap. A view through a back window of nothing but night's oily swirl of streetlamps and bad weather. He imagined himself closing the door on a filthy night like this and entering a kitchen filled with warm smells of good food and a woman who lit up to see him home.

A door under the stairs was open. He caught a whiff of patchouli oil and nubuck. Music was playing. Soft light curled against the bottom steps like smoke. Shadows swam languidly through it.

Gravier gritted his teeth and rapped on the door. “Could you come up here, madam? I need to have a word.”

A light chuckle that might have come in response to his demand. He heard a loud crack. He'd heard noises like that in shooting ranges. Small arms fire. He had his hand on his phone when a face swung into the stairwell and smiled up at him. Her hair was a painfully white pagoda frozen into position with lacquer that he could see glinting even in this poor light.

“Come down,” she said. Her voice had lost its edge. She laughed again and slipped back into the room.

Gravier descended. The smell of scented candles caught in his throat. He hesitated at the foot of the stairs when he saw the room and his first thought was,
Is there a crime being committed here?

“Welcome to my dungeon,” she said.

He couldn't focus on anything, because there was too much to take in. To settle on any detail for any amount of time was to invite insanity. His attention fluttered from the operating table to the dentist's chair to the cage and the things that writhed on and in them. There were glass shelves of glittering surgical instruments, wet from whatever task they had last been put to, ivory tables displaying
monstrous dildoes sculpted from raw bone. Masks that weren't masks at all hung from cords and turned in the hot, still air, drying, curling like strips of jerky.

“You know me,” she said. She ran a finger across his jawbone and it turned to a line of smoking powder. The pain didn't come at once. It was only when he raised his hand to his face that he felt a rind of necrotic tissue snap away, an icicle in his fingers. He screamed as the burn took hold and she was at the door, locking it, placing the key between her breasts. He tore his gaze away from her red lips, her black eyes. He tried not to look at the flesh that cracked and splintered between the shiny black curves of rubber, the vermiculate patterns of ice, like hoarfrost on a lawn at daybreak, or the leaves of ice that grow on the surface of a pond. Parts of her were studded with solid impact scars: white bruises. He heard the ding of the bell and turned, expecting to see the child on her bicycle, but there was only a woman on the operating table, her innards exposed, clamped back with pins like a dissected frog. Henry Johns was there, bent over as if in supplication, as if he was breathing in the aroma of her organs.

“Jesus Christ,” Gravier managed. “She's still alive. You bastards.”

The woman was arching against her bonds; blood squelched beneath the suck of her back.

The dominatrix hobbled to a bookshelf, her form cracking and squealing against itself. She hefted a volume in her hands and began to turn pages. She turned the book so that he could see a picture of the woman from his dreams, a sliver of a face from long ago. Despite the horror rising around him, he felt the familiar pang of a missed connection, of a chance gone by.

“Who is she?” he asked.

“Her name is Rebecca Tavistock. She is your soul mate. We all have one. The lucky ones find each other by a combination of detective work and good fortune.”

Gravier could hear the sound of the bell again, but everything was slowed down, deeper, more resonant. Now the tinkle of that bicycle toy was the great, monotonous din of a cathedral angelus.
He felt each toll in the gaps between his vertebrae. The vibrations were so forceful that scraps of plaster were pulling away from the walls, showing the bones of the house beneath. Henry Johns's exposed brain shook like a jelly against the collar of what remained of his skull. His feverish eyes were like those of a speed reader, sucking in as much detail as time allowed.

“Rebecca,” Gravier breathed.

The pages shifted under the dominatrix's fingers. The photographs moved of their own volition. “Are you finished?” she asked Johns. She turned to Gravier. “You'll have to excuse the Diploë. He has quite execrable table manners.”

Gravier watched the girl beneath Johns die. He saw something of her drift up from the center of her body and vanish like inhaled smoke into Johns's mouth and nostrils. Then she was still.

“We've been looking for you since you were born. Hard to latch onto the cold, the ones who recognize the vacuum at their hearts but do precious little about it. The warm are easy. But now that we have you, we can get you two lost souls together. How romantic is that?”

“She . . . she's here?” Gravier turned to the empty corners of the room, but that delicate woman he'd seen just once before was absent. The thin, pale tilt of her chin as she turned to regard him. The achingly lovely green of her eyes.

“Will you go to her, gladly?” the dominatrix asked him. Her mouth was open and she was showing her teeth. They were tablets of ice. He felt he might melt her away with the heat of his sudden need.

The sound of the bell raged through the walls, through the floor. It seemed to come at him from all angles, and it married precisely the beat of his heart. When he turned his head again, it was to view the ragdoll of something long dead come jerking through a gap in the floorboards. Its mouth was opened, a cracked, decayed ring of black teeth and unspoken secrets. The Diploë closed his eyes and flaunted the wet, black shreds that dangled from his fingernails. The dominatrix was panting, her hands a restless knot at the molten
center of herself. There was a sense of sinking, of leaving what he knew for something almost too large to comprehend.

For the first time in his life, as he folded beneath her arthritic grip and her jaws found a way into the softest part of him, Gravier understood what it meant to give yourself to the person you had been intended for, even if you had been born a couple of hundred years too late.

Sarah Pinborough

A wolf stole Arkady Melanov's tongue when he was ten weeks old. It crept into the village from the surrounding forest and followed the sound of his cries as if they were the scent of a fresh kill. Eventually, its pricked ears reached the Melanovs' tiny one-level dwelling at the back of the bakery where the boy's father worked. The wooden door had been left an inch or two open to allow any passing breeze to alleviate the stifling trapped heat of the ovens, and the beast simply padded into the house. The source of the noise found, it tore Arkady's tongue free from his screaming mouth before disappearing out into the summer night, leaving only a bloody trail of silence. When Arkady's mother ran into the bedroom and found her mutilated baby, she couldn't bear the weight of her own guilt at leaving him to cry. She stood by the crib and hacked at her wrists with the pin from her hair until she bled to death.

That was how the story went.

There was, as always, another, quieter story whispered in the narrow alleys and smoky cook rooms of the village. It poured from mouth to ear, accompanied by nods of knowledge and raised eyebrows. The gestures spoke of Arkady's mother, the dark Ekaterina,
discovered over her baby's cradle, her rosebud lips full of blood and meat and her eyes equally red with the madness of too many sleepless nights brought on by her infant son's incessant rages against the world. The Boyar's men took her to the castle and, after he and his entourage had had their fill of her, with one last glance back at daylight she was buried alive in the flower garden, as was the fate of those unfortunates who broke the law in the region of Kashkent.

That was how the other story went.

By the time he was five, Arkady had heard the second version of events several times through the cracked walls of shops and houses; the words carried easily on the fresh, hot summer winds. They didn't affect him. He found he didn't care much at all which story was true; the outcome remained the same. He would never scream again, nor gurgle with laughter, nor utter a single word. Arkady had learned his lesson young.

When he was seven, Arkady's father died. This came as no surprise to anyone, not even the young boy. Whereas Mikhail Melanov had once been a strong and handsome man, he had aged and weakened since his son lost his tongue and those two stories were born. He was often plagued by coughs and chills, until eventually his broad chest crumpled into itself, a hollow space where only a broken heart lived. Arkady would watch his father's arms tremble as he lifted the heavy trays of hot bread, often nearly dropping them before the next bout of racking coughs would hit him, the boy doing what he could to help and fetching his father water from the jug in their small home at the back of the bakery. Mikhail Melanov would take it and nod in awkward thanks to his silent son, and the young boy would pretend not to see the distaste in his father's eyes.

When the long winter of that year came, the temperatures fell far below zero as they did each cycle, but this time the breath of the cold blew hard, and in the face of the ice and the winds, Mikhail Melanov's lungs decided enough was enough and breathed their last. It was not without a sense of relief. Arkady dutifully held his father's hand as he passed, and then stared long and hard at the
cooling body and wondered where the man inside had gone. With no outlet, the question stayed trapped inside the isolated boy.

It was natural that the widow Samolienko and her son Sasha, who had stepped in to help when it was clear that Melanov was reaching the end, should take over the running of the bakery, and most of the village were pleased with the transition. The bread no longer had a coating of germs, and the babushka and her son worked hard to make sure enough loaves were baked each day for no one to go hungry. Young Arkady had a knack for kneading the dough and she kept him on, providing a small bed for him in the room where the wolf or his mother had stolen his tongue. Being neither sentimental nor unkind, she treated the boy with relative indifference. Having only ever lived with his father, who had never hidden well his unease with his son, this seemed perfectly normal to the young boy.

A few days after the widow Samolienko took up residence, she called Arkady away from his work. Arkady saw his father's few clothes and possessions had been piled up in the middle of the dusty floor. The babushka's weathered eyes appraised him.

“I need to make space for my own and my son's clothes.”

Arkady nodded. He wasn't quite sure what the widow wanted with him. Her hands stretched out and nestled in their floury palms sat an oblong box.

“I found this hidden at the bottom of the cupboard. I think it belonged to your mother.” She shrugged. “It has her name scratched on the lid anyway.”

His eyes fell to the box.

“I think it is some kind of game. Perhaps a puzzle of sorts.” She shook it, and Arkady heard the pieces rattle inside. “Anyway, it seems poorly made and can have no value, so it is yours if you want it.”

Somewhere behind the hardness in her charcoal eyes, Arkady saw a hint of pity for the orphaned boy with no tongue. He took the box and gave her a rare smile. She nodded, satisfied, and sent him back to his work.

Arkady waited until the widow and her son were sleeping before he lit the tiny candle by his bed and pulled the rectangular box out from under his pillow. His breath formed a crystal haze in the night, even the heat from the cooling ovens not enough to keep the arctic winter at bay. He ran his fingers over the rough surface, feeling the strange shape of his long-ago disappeared mother's name under them. He swallowed hard, his heart beating with an unfamiliar anticipation.

There were ten oblong pieces in all—carved and worked into uneven two-inch tiles—and he carefully took each one out of the box and placed it on the bed next to the one before it, creating a line, before picking the first up again and examining it more thoroughly. He swallowed, his throat dry. Its pale surface was smooth and cool and he knew with a certainty he couldn't place that it and the others were formed from the bones of dead things. Each piece had a distinct pattern carved into it in fine lines, the grooves stained with black ink. Arkady frowned, his eyes flitting from tile to tile as his numb hands rearranged them, finding each one that linked with the next. When he was done he sat back, vaguely disappointed. He'd expected more from seeing the finished arrangement. Being quietly shunned by the other children of the village whose mothers' superstitious natures saw too many bad omens in the one thus far defining moment in his short life, Arkady had little experience of puzzles or games, but he thought they should take longer to complete.