Hellbound Hearts Read online

  HELLBOUND HEARTS

  HELLBOUND HEARTS

  Edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan

  Based on the novella The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker

  Pocket Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Hellbound Hearts volume copyright © 2009 by Clive Barker, Paul Kane, and Marie O’Regan

  Mythology and characters as contained in the novella The Hellbound Heart copyright © 1986 by Clive Barker

  Foreword copyright © 2009 by Clive Barker

  “Introduction—Raising Hell, Again” copyright © 2009 by Stephen Jones

  “Prisoners of the Inferno” copyright © 2009 by Peter Atkins

  “The Cold” copyright © 2009 by Conrad Williams

  “The Confessor’s Tale” copyright © 2009 by Sarah Pinborough

  “Hellbound Hollywood” copyright © 2009 by Mick Garris

  “Mechanisms” copyright © 2009 by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola

  “Every Wrong Turn” copyright © 2009 by Tim Lebbon

  “The Collector” copyright © 2009 by Kelley Armstrong

  “Bulimia” copyright © 2009 by Richard Christian Matheson

  “Orfeo the Damned” copyright © 2009 by Nancy Holder

  “Our Lord of Quarters” copyright © 2009 by Simon Clark

  “Wordsworth” copyright © 1993, 2009 by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

  “A Little Piece of Hell” copyright © 2009 by Steve Niles

  “The Dark Materials Project” copyright © 2009 by Sarah Langan

  “Demon’s Design” copyright © 2009 by Nicholas Vince

  “Only the Blind Survive” copyright © 2009 by Yvonne Navarro

  “Mother’s Ruin” copyright © 2009 by Mark Morris

  “Sister Cilice” copyright © 2009 by Barbie Wilde

  “Santos del Inferno” copyright © 2009 by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “The Promise” copyright © 2009 by Nancy Kilpatrick

  “However . . .” copyright © 2009 by Gary A. Braunbeck and Lucy A. Snyder

  “ ’Tis Pity He’s Ashore” copyright © 2009 by Chaz Brenchley

  “Afterword” copyright © 2009 by Doug Bradley

  Cover Illustration of VESTIMENTI Cenobite copyright © 2009 by Clive Barker All illustrations for

  “Mechanisms” copyright © 2009 by Mike Mignola

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Pocket Books trade paperback edition September 2009

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact

  Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected].

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Designed by Ruth Lee Mui

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-4391-4090-1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6475-4 (ebook)

  To Clive Barker,

  creator of this mythology—

  and all those who followed.

  With thanks to Clive Barker, Robb Humphrey, Stephen Jones, Doug Bradley, Ed Schlesinger, and the team at Pocket Books, and all the contributors for their help with bringing this project to fruition.

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  Clive Barker

  INTRODUCTION: RAISING HELL, AGAIN

  Stephen Jones

  PRISONERS OF THE INFERNO

  Peter Atkins

  THE COLD

  Conrad Williams

  THE CONFESSOR’S TALE

  Sarah Pinborough

  HELLBOUND HOLLYWOOD

  Mick Garris

  MECHANISMS

  Christopher Golden & Mike Mignola

  EVERY WRONG TURN

  Tim Lebbon

  THE COLLECTOR

  Kelley Armstrong

  BULIMIA

  Richard Christian Matheson

  ORFEO THE DAMNED

  Nancy Holder

  OUR LORD OF QUARTERS

  Simon Clark

  WORDSWORTH

  Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

  A LITTLE PIECE OF HELL

  Steve Niles

  THE DARK MATERIALS PROJECT

  Sarah Langan

  DEMON’S DESIGN

  Nicholas Vince

  ONLY THE BLIND SURVIVE

  Yvonne Navarro

  MOTHER’S RUIN

  Mark Morris

  SISTER CILICE

  Barbie Wilde

  SANTOS DEL INFIERNO

  Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  THE PROMISE

  Nancy Kilpatrick

  HOWEVER . . .

  Gary A. Braunbeck and Lucy A. Snyder

  ’TIS PITY HE’S ASHORE

  Chaz Brenchley

  AFTERWORD

  Doug Bradley

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  SPECIAL BONUS MATERIAL—WORDSWORTH GRAPHIC SHORT STORY SCRIPT

  Neil Gaiman

  Foreword

  Clive Barker

  The word “mythos” is used very liberally these days in regard to the characters and adventures of popular fiction. People speak of the Batman mythology, the Freddy Krueger mythology, and yes, the Hellraiser mythology. I have always been a little wary of this usage. It seems in some sense to be inappropriate, cheapening a word that I first encountered in reference to the deities of Olympus, or the gods and goddesses of Asgard. These mythologies are thousands of years old, and have survived many tellings and retellings, their underlying imagery often moved from one culture to another, yet still surviving at some fundamental level.

  How then could the same word ever be applied with any seriousness to the products of a medium that is barely a century old? Does Pinhead’s “mythos” really bear any comparison with the massive bodies of narrative that have collected around such legendary figures as Hercules and Jesus?

  In one sense, of course not. Maybe a thousand years from now, some profoundly evolved version of a human being sitting at the console of a starship, exploring some distant star system, might chance upon an image of Pinhead and find that the creature means something to him. If so, then the word “mythos” may indeed be applicable.

  Why would I even breathe such a possibility? On the face of it, a screenwriter/director such as myself referring to his own story as a mythology is immensely arrogant. But here, a more subtle distinction comes into play that may be worth a moment’s study.

  Even though I am the man who had the good fortune to bring this image to a popular medium and therefore facilitate its dissemination throughout much of the world, I am not the creator of this mythology. In fact, I think the real creators fall into three categories. First, there are all those nameless men and women who over the last many centuries created the fetishes of clay, rope, bone, and nails, which are in some part the inspiration for the character called Pinhead. These fetishes are
, I was told, chiefly representations of anger, which seems oddly inappropriate given how chilly and dispassionate Pinhead is. But under all that cool reserve lies a massive potential for rage, as I think most audiences understand. So those fetishes and Pinhead have a good deal in common.

  The second creators are of course the special-effects men who have, over the course of many movies, variously interpreted and reinterpreted the appearance of the character. There have been beautiful renditions of his appearance in comic books and on the skins of innumerable Hellraiser fans who have shown me the parts of their bodies where tattooists have left their interpretation.

  Finally, there are the people who see these movies, read these comics, and wear these tattoos who in conversing with one another—and occasionally, at conventions, with me—further enrich the complexities of the idea. Their motives for doing so are occasionally erotic (there is a healthy appetite for the Hellraiser stories in the S&M community) or maybe metaphysical (one of the most complex articulations of the original Hellraiser story, The Hellbound Heart, came from a Russian Orthodox Priest).

  In sum, perhaps it isn’t so monstrously arrogant to speak of the mythos. I am not its maker. If it survives for another hundred years or is forgotten tomorrow, I have no say in the matter. Hellraiser—its stories and images, its metaphysics and its sheer visceral energy—is the work of other hands and other minds. I am very happy and very lucky to have stepped into the river of the collective unconscious and to have found there a stone with the nails hammered into it.

  Clive Barker

  Los Angeles, 2009

  Introduction: Raising Hell, Again

  Stephen Jones

  For many of us who worked on it, Hellraiser was a life-changing experience.

  For Ashley Laurence, who made her movie debut as ingénue heroine Kirsty Cotton, it lead to a successful acting career that includes three Hellraiser sequels, two screen adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft stories, and a third entry in the Warlock series. She is also a very talented artist.

  After portraying the coldly homicidal Julia Cotton, Clare Higgins has gone on to become one of Britain’s most acclaimed stage actresses, winning numerous prestigious awards. Meanwhile, Oliver Parker, who portrayed one of the luckless moving men (a role he basically reprised in the sequel), is now better known as the director of such successful British movies as An Ideal Husband (1999), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), St. Trinian’s (2007), and a new version of Dorian Gray (2009).

  Although originally conceived as a minor character with only a few minutes’ screen time, Doug Bradley’s Lead Cenobite became the character that most resonated with audiences—rechristened simply “Pinhead” for the sequels. The actor created one of the most eloquent and iconic cinematic monsters in popular culture and has become indelibly identified with the role.

  For Doug and some of the other Cenobite actors, it has also led to a profitable side career attending conventions all over the world and signing stills of themselves buried under the time-consuming prosthetic makeup.

  With Hellraiser, Bob Keen consolidated his skills as a special makeup effects designer, later expanding his talents into special effects and directing, while for producer Christopher Figg it was the start of a career that has led to such box-office hits as Trainspotting (1996) and Dog Soldiers (2002).

  Of course, Clive Barker was already established as the author of the six groundbreaking Books of Blood collections and the novel The Damnation Game before taking on the mantle of both screenwriter and first-time director. He has subsequently enjoyed a successful career as a bestselling novelist, playwright, painter, and film producer—most notably of the Oscar-winning Gods and Monsters (1998).

  And then there’s me, listed way down at the end of the credits under “unit publicist” as “Steve Jones,” Hellraiser was the first movie I ever worked on. John Carpenter had sown the seeds while I was interviewing him in Los Angeles, and upon my return to London, I contacted Clive—to whom I had been introduced a couple of years earlier by our mutual friend, horror writer Ramsey Campbell.

  Clive liked the idea, and after meeting Chris Figg, I got the job. As a freelance film journalist I had visited the sets of a number of films and had often come away disappointed. So for a relatively low-budget film like Hellraiser, I decided to do something radically different.

  I invited numerous journalists from all types of publications—but particularly the specialist genre periodicals—down on set to interview key personnel during filming. It helped immeasurably that the location was only two stops away on the London Underground from where I was living in North London at the time. (If only getting to work on a movie was always so easy!)

  I also created extensive press kits during shooting so that the writers had all the background material they needed for their articles way ahead of time, and I produced T-shirts and button badges (“There Are No Limits”) that we gave away to visitors and offered as competition prizes.

  As a result, Hellraiser received unprecedented publicity for a film of its budget and expectations—while it was still in production. As planned, this extended coverage led to a heightened sense of expectancy long before the movie was released.

  Even though my career as a writer and editor was starting to take off at this time, I also had a promising future as a producer and director of television documentaries and commercials. So I used my contacts to shoot an EPK (electronic press kit) featuring behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with the principle cast and crew. Again, this was almost unheard of at that time for a small film like Hellraiser. (And here’s a piece of trivia for the fans: Many of the interviews on that EPK were conducted by a young journalist just starting out who wanted the experience. His name was Neil Gaiman.)

  Anyway, when it finally opened in September 1987, Hellraiser was both a critical and commercial hit thanks to its literate script, strong performances, and stylish visuals. I also like to think that my innovative prepublicity campaign helped in some small way toward its success.

  I never returned to my old occupation. Instead, I went on to work on a number of other low-budget horror movies on both sides of the Atlantic, including the next two Hellraiser films (or “the good sequels” as I like to think of them). Although I had very different experiences working on Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) at Pinewood Studios, just outside London, and Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992) in High Point, North Carolina, by that time we had formed a tight little production unit that was committed to keeping Clive’s creative vision intact.

  Unfortunately, this was apparently not the case with many of the films that followed in the Hellraiser franchise. Increasingly it seemed that the Lemarchand Configuration Box and Doug Bradley’s articulate harbinger of pain and pleasure were shoehorned into existing scripts that had little or nothing in common with Clive Barker’s original themes or characters.

  But even as the movie series became more and more diluted, so the Hellraiser brand profitably expanded into boxed DVD sets, collectable action figures, posters, T-shirts, comics, trading cards, and countless other spin-off merchandise. Despite being produced more than two decades ago—and with the prerequisite remake currently in development—Hellraiser continues to hold a fascination for film audiences and readers alike.

  Which brings us to this current volume. Let us not forget that Hellraiser has always had literary origins. It was initially based on Clive’s 1986 novella “The Hellbound Heart” (first published in George R. R. Martin’s anthology Night Visions 3), and the new compilation that you hold in your hands is merely the next logical step in the story’s fictional evolution.

  Editors Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan have asked some of the best-known and most creative writers and artists in the horror genre—several of them already intimately connected with the series—to extrapolate upon Clive Barker’s original concepts.

  Over the past twenty years, numerous people have worked in the Hellraiser universe, perhaps not always successfully. However, this book probably repres
ents the most impressive gathering of creative talent yet to add their own unique interpretations to one of the most powerful and enduring horror mythologies ever invented.

  As a result, you will find a selection of stories that are guaranteed to shock, seduce, and surprise any Hellraiser fan. Prepare to be hooked by tales of puzzles both oblique and obvious, where hellish doorways lead to extreme gratification or endless torment as the unwary encounter some familiar Cenobites and entirely new demonic creations.

  This anthology proves that after all this time, the images and ideas behind Hellraiser continue to be as vital and imaginative today as they were when Clive Barker first conceived them. Whatever your pleasure may be, the inventive contributors to this volume have such sights still to show you . . .

  Stephen Jones

  London, England

  December 2008

  HELLBOUND HEARTS

  Prisoners of the Inferno

  Peter Atkins

  1

  It’s Mickey Rooney,” Carducci said, as soon as Jack arrived at his table. “Mickey fucking Rooney. No shit.”

  The memorabilia dealer’s head was twitching in urgent indication and Jack looked back up the length of the convention room in the direction of its spasms.

  Flanked on both sides by good-looking young blondes—who, even sitting, had a good five inches on him—Mickey fucking Rooney was indeed seated at one of the autograph tables against the top wall. Jack was surprised that he hadn’t noticed him when he came in, but then he tended to ignore the signing tables at these bimonthly events—usually manned only by second-string TV stars from the sixties and seventies—and head straight for the regular dealers’ tables.

  “What’s he asking?” Jack said.

  “About the same as the kid from Rin Tin Tin,” Carducci said in a can-you-believe-it voice. “Twenty-five if you buy a picture, fifteen for a bring-your-own. You should get something.”

  Jack shrugged noncommittally. “Not my area,” he said.

  “Not my area,” Carducci mimicked. “Get over yourself. He’s fucking golden age, man! He banged Dorothy, for Christ’s sake.”