Hellbound Hearts (9 page)

The perspiration that covered my body suddenly dried . . . but the walls in the suffocatingly warm room broke out into a sweat of their own, a rising damp of mounting temperature.

Two steps closer to each other, the figure remained silent.

“Who are you?” I asked, trying not to let my voice break.

When it offered no reply, I took yet another step forward, and the thing in the shadows aped me again. As the light, a warm, amber glow that seemed to somehow emanate directly from the walls and floor, bloomed into mere duskiness, I saw more clearly.

Standing across the bare room stood a soul even more naked: my own. One wall was fully occupied by a mirror, cracked like a road map, big patches of its silvered backing having flaked away. I had struck fear into my own heart. I walked to the mirror and was startled by the depth of pale fright reflected on my own visage as it stared back at me in relief. I was two of my own Marx Brothers, no, even more ridiculous, Lucy and Harpo playing peekaboo. If only I could laugh.

My pulse hadn't even the time to return to normal when I turned back toward the door and saw that the room that I had entered, the room that was reflected before me in the fractured mirrored wall, was not nearly so empty as I had assumed.

Now, filling the room that surrounded me, were implements that seemed concocted during the Crusades, oversized tools crafted of dark wood and heavy metal by the blackest of imaginations, obviously
constructed to coerce, to inflict pain, to torture. But these were beautiful in their viciousness: structures of oversized chains, hooks, wooden racks, gleaming metal blades, some kind of revolving apparatus that I knew without asking was intended for peeling flesh.

Was this apartment or abattoir?

The dense, fetid air took on a familiar rusty tang that filled my nose and mouth: the iron-rich scent of blood.

And then, again, that voice in my ear:

“What have you dreamed?”

I spun ‘round, but this time, I was not alone with my reflection. Rather, a being of indeterminate sex stood before me, shaded by the appalling tools of torture. It stepped out of the darkness to reveal itself to me, and it was a horror I shall not soon forget. It was dressed only in tight chains that were wrapped in haphazard fashion around its formless body. Rusted padlocks, surely not intended to ensure chastity, as this creature seemed to be made of sex, dangled from the chains. And on closer inspection, I saw that some of them were locked through folds of its horrid gray flesh, not just through the steel links. Its arms were wrapped in barbed wire, digging into its anemic tissue without drawing blood, despite the depth of its chew.

The chains kept its voluptuous, pendulous breasts from hitting the floor, and crisscrossed its leering, dangling phallus in a relentless metallic strangle.

I was repelled, but unable to look away, fascinated.

It's what a filmmaker does, isn't it? It is my job not to look away, to find fascination in the hideous as well as the everyday. It's my vocation as well as my avocation to look, and especially not to look askance. I leave it to the great unwashed to look away. In contrast to my mind, my eyes know no fear.

At least that is what I thought until I saw its face . . .

Taking another step closer, it stood fully revealed before me, daring me to stare at it without tumbling into madness. And I came close to losing the dare, as well as my breakfast.

Its head had sparse patches of hair in various tufts that welled
out of corrupted, dying flesh. There were scars and stitches wrapped around the face, and the eyes, my God, the eyes, one sea green and the other some kind of muddy shit brown, seemed to roam loosely in mismatched sockets, the lower eyelids open and an angry, wet red. Even the eyeballs had raw, primitive rows of stitches around the retina.

But worst of all was what passed for its mouth. It occupied most of its face, a long, vertical slash that roughly bisected its visage. If there had been a nose, it was long gone, replaced by this gaping hole that resembled nothing more than, okay, I'll say it, a huge, loose vagina. Its vertical lips were wet, hungry, horrid. And there was a row of teeth on either side, barely concealed by the labia majora: worn, round nubs, they looked like nothing more than miniature human heads trapped in a forever scream.

I ran from this beastly creature, needing the door more than I needed my breath. But there was no exit now; the door was hopelessly locked, no matter how madly I beat against it.

I turned to see that this creature, this beast made of sex and violence, was laughing at me. Its hideous, thumblike nipples curdled into excited prominence, leaking a milk of thrill; its horrific, rotted penis began to rise in a repulsive, desiring salute.

And, damn me forever, I could not look away.

I was backed against the door as this bastardization of human life approached me with what could only be described as an amused vertical smile.

“What have you dreamed?” it asked me again.

The question, now posed for a third time, unlocked memories of dreams, erotic and ferocious: the dreams that had erupted without my control in my sleep, dreams that drenched me in guilt and sweat and repulsion and desire. My mind, wherever it was hiding, was answering this thing's question without my control, and the dreams, no, the nightmares, the transgressions of the flesh that I had so carefully locked away from my conscious mind, were set free by this question.

“I don't dream!” I answered, but knew this living corruption
could tell I was lying. It could see the bodies, the implements, the flesh, the blood, the fluids that soaked my sleep. Again it laughed.

“You can have all that you dream and more,” it told me, but I wanted no part of it.

“I don't dream!” I repeated. “I dream awake! It's what I do, put dreams on the screen for others.”

The machines that littered the room stood high around us like a city of sadism, a testament to torture, the antithesis of love. It made sense that a creature like this would be here.

“It is why you are here,” the monster said to me. “Because you possess . . .
imagination
.”

It had been a long time since I had been accused of
that
.

“Surely you have needs,” this beast, neither man nor woman but assembled from both, prompted me.

Yes. I need a studio film, a return to prominence, more gleaming statuettes to fill out the mantel, a home back on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, the place where I was honored and catered to and respected and desired. Where ridiculous sums of money were exchanged for the value of my distinctive services, where my vision stood out among the others, where my style was adopted—no, coopted—by talentless music video directors who masturbated with their RED digital cameras and spattered their issue all over the Internet as they pretended to tell stories without words.

I still had tales to tell, I wanted to say to this bastardization of human sexuality, and new ways to tell them. This . . . this—ugh!—
horror movie
was my last hope to return me to creative solvency. If the tale of Lemarchand's Configuration could be told with enough sex and blood and rock 'n' roll to reignite interest in a fallow market for tales of cinematic terror, then I might too rise from the dead like one of George Romero's folk heroes.

But this creature stood before me, waiting for an answer, its rheumy eyes glinting in the waning light, its vaginal face lifted proudly—or tauntingly—as its slavering lips smacked lightly but wetly in the breeze of its rotted, piscatorial breath.

“Nothing you could help me with,” I finally answered. God
knows why I bothered. Well, if there was a God, he knew. Of course, if there existed demons so monstrous as this foul beast that stood before me, the concept of a Supreme Being no longer seemed so far out of the question.

It's difficult to tell if the thing smiled, since its orifice was vertical, but it seemed that that was the expression it took on. Its glistening, moist lips widened somewhat, revealing the nubby little tooth heads. It took a step closer to me, its horrific but stunted erection leading the way. Its penis had two mushroom-shaped heads, and both of them were pointing at me. I didn't know where to look. When it spoke again, I looked into its face. It drooled when it spoke, a thick, aromatic liquor that ran down its chin and dripped onto its tethered, swollen breasts.

“I can offer you much.”

“No,” I countered. “You can't offer me what I want.”

“Surely you know the voluptuousness of desire.”

At one time I had. Now I couldn't afford it. I just shook my head, wondering how I'd stepped into this dusky, seething cauldron of evil.

“Surely you desire the touch of flesh against your own, the penetration of one body part into another, the exchange of hot, percolating bodily fluids, the explosion of wet conclusion, only to start it all over again. Surely you recall its power.”

I stood my ground. I was repelled not only by the creature but also by what it offered.

“No. I have had all the bodily contact I need. My desire has atrophied along with my creative reach. My needs are more earthbound than that. I need box office more than I need box.”

“Thanatos sings your name,” the creature told me. Its voice was clogged, choked, gargly. “All your power is derived from your lust; all desire is ignited by arousal. Give in to your physical need and your more . . . grounded desires shall be fulfilled as well.”

Well, that didn't make a whit of sense to me, and I told this creature so, wondering why I bothered. It drew even closer to me, reached out long fingers that were more like talons, grabbed me
forcefully by the shoulders, and pulled my face to its own. Its damp stench was overwhelming as it planted a greedy, moist kiss along the length of my face, leaving my head shellacked in its ooze. I should have been repulsed, but instead, I felt nature's heat coursing through my body. I had barely shaken hands with arousal in the last couple of years, but here it was, like an old girlfriend back for an eager onenight toss, and my body responded in kind. I tried to fight off the raising of my manhood's flag, but the
cranial minora
had a mind of its own. The otherworldly being devoured me with its hungry patchwork eyes, then it slid its mouth-pussy around my head, sucking on it as if on the head of a six-foot penis.

I couldn't breathe . . . but I ejaculated furiously almost immediately after my head was swallowed in hot, wet darkness.

I woke to the call of the first assistant director, an able old Irishman who'd been working the boards since the Roger Moore Bond days. I was lying on the floor of the empty third-floor room, which was now free of the torture devices, the smell of seafood, and old Cunt Face. Terry Deakins stood over me, assuming another drug casualty by way of Hollywood, doing his best to keep from judgmentally clucking his tongue. Luckily, my sticky wet crotch was hidden by my coat, though the ooze covering my face must certainly have given him pause. The scent, though diminished, was still unpleasant at the very least.

“James,” he said to me, “are you all right?”

Well, if I were all right, surely I would not be a puddle on the floor, my face covered in pussy jam, unconscious under my spurts of ecstasy. I looked up to see the rest of the key crew members on the location-reconnaissance mission fanned behind him, eyes wide in near horror. Most of them were young or old, not much in the in-between. If they were the top of the game, they wouldn't be working on this piece of shit, no matter how revered the fable. And this one wasn't.

The windows were no longer covered in black paint, and the room itself was no longer suffocating in sultry heat. It was cold
enough to see breath. Only the huge, decaying dancer's mirror remained, reflecting our little group innocuously.

I stammered as I stood: “I came in early and must have gotten locked in. Guess I panicked when I tried to get out and the door wouldn't give. It was so oppressively hot in here. I suppose I passed out.”

The gathered minions looked at one another. Surely they were watching the further decline of Hollywood's crash and burn, the toppling of another British genius who'd abandoned the mother country until being forced to return to her arms, tail between his legs, to direct a scary movie. There was no pity in their gaze. Perhaps only I minded that the audience for this grotesque piffle was in its teens, years, if not lifetimes, away from their first sexual encounter, their spotted faces agape at the spurting blood that was the closest they'd get to an explosion of bodily fluid that did not rely on their own right fists.

It was a man's world here; only the script supervisor, a comely young woman named Iris something-or-other, provided some balance of estrogen to our little army. She reached out to help me to my feet, and I could see at least a trace of pity in her eyes. I could also see the tiny bleat of a pulse in a soft blue vein barely revealed when she brushed the golden cascade of her hair from her eyes.

I zipped the coat tight over my telltale wet spot before my little, what—experience? Dream? Fantasy?—was revealed, but I was not embarrassed. Instead, I could not keep my eyes and mind off of the increasingly alluring Iris, whose charms kept blooming, reigniting memories of heat and arousal. When she looked briefly at me and found that my eyes were already locked on her, she blushed sweetly and looked away.

I wanted her in a way I hadn't wanted in a long, long time.

Her scent pulled me like a magnet, and it was fortunate that I was draped in a long overcoat that cloaked my carnal desire for her. I could tell with a single intake of breath that she was on her menses. Far from repelling me, it made my own blood boil. I stayed close to her like a nervous puppy as we continued the reconnaissance,
making notes on lighting, camera angles, scene placement, and the like, my filmmaker's sense jumping into its autopilot mode. But this brief creative explosion was overshadowed by the pounding of Iris's heart when I stood close to her. I wanted our pulses to beat in a passionate, accelerated union.