Hellbound Hearts Page 3

  “Oh, right,” he said, when Jack swung by to ask him about Walter. “Fat guy, Hawaiian shirts? Lives with his mother in some piss-poor shack the top of Van Nuys?”

  Jack deadpanned him. “Didn’t you just describe every one of your customers?” he said. Couldn’t help it.

  “Oh, really?” Carducci said, looking Jack up and down blankly, like the sneer was implicit. “Who died and made you Johnny fucking Depp?”

  Jack grinned, letting it go. “What about his friend Lenny?” he said. “Little guy? Horn-rims?”

  “He was there?”

  “Yeah. Like he had bragging rights. Thought he might have been, you know, the boyfriend or something.”

  “Stay the fuck away from that guy,” Carducci said. “Seriously. Grade-A creep.”

  “What? Like a prick?”

  “No. Like a fucking creep. As in creeps me out. For real. Him and his whole nasty little crowd. Used to hang around with Kenny Anger and LaVey. Seriously. They’re not into this stuff for the same reasons we are. Got their own agenda. Not nice people.”

  Carducci’s reads on people were usually pretty good, so when Jack got the phone call from Lenny a couple of days later, he wanted to be guarded and careful. But he couldn’t be, not when he knew that Lenny—creep or not—could have only one reason for calling, that he was going to offer access to a print of the real thing, to Prisoners of the Inferno. He wondered if this was how newly hooked junkies felt when they got the first follow-up call from their dealer. Because that’s what he was, Jack realized. Hooked. Hooked from the moment he’d stared at the still for the first time and felt that intoxicating rush of being allowed to gaze at the forbidden.

  He had no doubt that it was going to cost him this time. Wasn’t that how it always worked with junkies and their dealers? But he didn’t care. He’d empty his fucking savings account if that’s what they asked. He wanted to see more. He wanted to see, he wanted to know. For lust of knowing what should not be known, he thought, remembering Doctor Coppelius’s knee-jerk little mantra.

  But Lenny didn’t mention money at all.

  “You seemed . . . intrigued,” he said, as if that were perhaps payment enough.

  “Well, yeah,” Jack said. Because he, you know, was. The fuck else was he going to say?

  Lenny didn’t reply. Like he was waiting for Jack to ask, and enjoying the wait.

  “You said, not as good as the real thing,” Jack said eventually, but still got nothing in return. “The other night.” Just the sound of Lenny breathing. “In the rain.” He didn’t know why the fuck he mentioned the rain.

  “I’m going to give you an address, Jack,” Lenny finally said. “It’s a private address, and I don’t want you to write it down. Is that all right?”

  Jack said that, yeah, that was all right and Lenny gave him the address and Jack repeated it and Lenny said he’d see him in half an hour and hung up.

  It took only twenty minutes—no traffic for a change—and Jack circled the block a few times so as not to look too eager. It was a shitty apartment building on Franklin, one of those four boxes on top of four more with railed walkways running past all the front doors like the place had wanted to be a motel but had been too stoned to build a fucking lobby.

  Jack rapped his knuckles on the third door of the upper level because the bell didn’t work—quelle surprise—and Lenny opened it and ushered him inside. An old man sat in a La-Z-Boy with a blanket over his legs and smiled at Jack with a vague delight, like he couldn’t ever remember anymore if he’d met someone previously but had learned to err on the side of presuming he had. Really old. Like he’d cracked a century or was about to.

  “Hey there,” said Jack, returning the smile. And that seemed to be it for the socializing because Lenny already had his fingers on the handle of the door to the apartment’s only other room. “In here,” he said, waiting till Jack was practically bumping into the door before gently pushing it open and stepping back to let Jack enter.

  Lenny didn’t follow him in. “We’ll give you some privacy,” he said and, even as he was closing the door, Jack saw him half turn toward the old man. “Shall I make you a pot of tea, David?” he said, just before the door clicked shut.

  The room wasn’t dark at all, though the light from the three grime-encrusted bulbs in the ceiling housing was a dull and bilious yellow. It had been intended as a bedroom, Jack assumed, but it now served another purpose and was untroubled by either furniture or people.

  It wasn’t empty, though.

  There was no projector this time, because no projector was needed. Jack hadn’t been brought here to see a film. Lenny hadn’t been talking about a print, uncut or otherwise. When he’d said they had the real thing, he meant the real thing.

  He meant the Cabinet.

  It stood in the center of the room, looking surprisingly substantial for something that was supposed to have been built over seventy-five years ago for a low-budget movie. Good condition, too, with only some rust stains here and there on its patterned brass filigree to show the passage of time.

  If Lenny locked the door to the room from the other side, Jack couldn’t hear it. Not above the waltz-time minor-key melody that began to sound from somewhere inside the Cabinet, mechanical and painful, like it was escaping a music box built from razors and bone.

  The Cabinet door creaked slowly open.

  And Alice Lavender stepped out.

  She was beautiful still, unchanged from what those audiences must have seen nearly eighty years ago. Unchanged by age, at least. But the Cabinet had done its work and her transmutation was long complete.

  The doll girl, pale stitched face expressionless, black marble eyes glinting only with reflected light, came toward Jack with a mechanized grace, her head tick-tocking rhythmically from side to side and her slender limbs clicking audibly with each automaton step.

  The fingers of her left hand ratcheted open one by one as she extended her hand to Jack.

  Not in threat.

  In dreadful invitation.

  The transition from the initial darkness of the Cabinet’s interior to the infernal light glowing endlessly from vast and distant furnaces was seamless. Jack was one place, and then he was another.

  He couldn’t tell when Alice had let go of his hand.

  “Welcome,” said the Doctor as he turned his own hands to show Jack his palms and the terrible implements that bloomed from their stigmata. “Time to play.”

  The Cold

  Conrad Williams

  December sleet, Shude Hill, Manchester. Six in the evening. Temperature dropping. Jesus wept. The things we do. The things we grow to be. No, Simmonds, I do not want another fucking coffee. Get on to Arley and find out when forensics are going to bring their tents and toothpicks over. And get that cordon sorted. We’ve had two scoops already from the Evening News, nosing around this offal. Do your fucking job.

  Rachel Biddeford. Second this month. Obviously the same Joe. Dirty bastard. DNA not on our records. A newbie. Knows his way around a body, mind. Hospital worker? Medical student? Nylon ties around the wrists and ankles. Goes deep with his cutter. Deep vein. Cuts the jugular. Why does he do that? Why not the artery? Get it over with. But no. Slower death, see. He wants them conscious. He wants them to see him while he’s masturbating.

  Vein man. Vain man.

  After death, a professional Y-cut. Postmortem spot-on. And what’s he taking? Nothing. Organs intact. Sewn back up with neat little sutures. What is this clown? Ex-morgue? Did he watch too much police procedural on TV?

  Talk to the residents. Talk to the vagrants. Talk to the brick wall. Nothing going on. Nobody knows. No. Nothing. I wasn’t. I didn’t. Victim killed elsewhere, then dumped, same as in Whalley Range, same as in Denton. No pattern to the locations. Faces laced with dried come. Pale as the time-whitened covers of the wank mags in the bookshops on Thomas Street. Girls from the university, no older than twenty. No obvious link so far, other than pretty, coltish. A blonde and two brunettes. An En
glish student and two sciences. Merry fucking Christmas.

  Forensics take pictures, take swabs. Midnight before the crime scene’s secure and the body’s on a trolley on its way to Path. Simmonds is pulling his coat on and I hoik him my way. Souness first, I tell him. I’m buying. I don’t care how fucking tired you are, Simmonds. Sleep when you get to Hell. And believe me, son, that’s where you’re going. Anybody who makes tea as bad as you do . . .

  Gravier fiddled with shreds of salad peeking from the lips of his bacon sandwich and put that morning’s newspaper to one side. He had failed to progress beyond the first few lines of the article for fifteen minutes and could feel a headache assembling a nest at the back of his skull. When had a Souness ever really meant a swift half and then off? Why did boozing hold hands so tightly with officers on the Force?

  The girl on the bicycle across the street would not stop thumbing at the bell on her handlebars and the sound was growing to irritate him. It carried through the traffic, permeating the glass and the hubbub in the café. His appetite having failed pretty much the moment he’d bought his breakfast, Gravier sat in the window seat staring through a halo of mist at the figure straddling her pale blue three-speed. With a frustrated grunt, Gravier gave up on his meal and barked his leg in his eagerness to be out of the door. The girl on the bicycle was gone, but the sound of the bell remained like a stain in the air. He walked across the road to where she had been, feeling vague and purposeless, and stood there for a while, fighting the urge to reach out and stay fingers that were no longer busy at their mischief. Something was itching at his mind, something about the murderer and his way with a needle and thread. Opening and closing bodies. Taking nothing away.

  West Didsbury. South Manchester. February 1. Burton Road shops closed and dusty from the credit crunch. Browning Christmas trees dumped in back alleys. Buses advertising horror films dragging sullen, featureless occupants to and from the desk. Condensation in every window, every heart. Everyone’s spunked money they don’t have on presents nobody wanted. Pay it off just in time for Santa to come calling at the arse-end of this year, wagging his “I Want” list. Manchester winter. Everyone saddled with one sort of shit or another. Jenny Beaker most of all, at least today. And she’s the only one not complaining. What the fuck is this, Simmonds? Café au porridge? I don’t do froth, son. Take it back and get me a proper drink. I wanted a flask for Christmas. So I could whack a pint of honest UK tea inside it and flick the Vs at these wankhole coffee shops with their crappuccini and shatté and Ameriguano. What happened to the greasy spoon and the chipped mug of milk and two?

  Jenny B. Twenty-one. Born in Swansea. Studying for a Creative Writing MA at MMU. You’ve found yourself a hell of a story here, babe. Talk to her student pals at the student house in Withington. Student faces slack as an old man’s clothes rail. I don’t. I didn’t. Quiet as student mice. Kept herself to herself. Yeah, don’t we all. Except him. Our friend the surgeon. Talk to the neighbors. Boo to a goose. Mrs. Vearncombe wouldn’t be surprised. Mrs. Craven shudders to think. The only leads I have are the ones tying Jenny’s wrist to the lamppost.

  Jesus Christ, Simmonds. Milk again? I want my coffee black. Black as the eyes you’ll be wearing if you don’t pull your thumb out of your chute and do something right for a change.

  He walked away and it wasn’t Simmonds behaving like a queynt that got his feet moving. It wasn’t the sight of Jenny Beaker gazing up at him with eyes that were large and wide, love-filled, almost. It was the paint on the wall by her body. Graffiti was everywhere these days, but not like this. It bothered him more than the gray, unresponsive flesh.

  Thou art all ice. Thy kindness freezes.

  What kind of spray-can fan came out with that stuff?

  Later, at home, he discovered that the line was from Shakespeare. He snorted laughter as he closed his web browser and turned to the rank of bottles gleaming on the cabinet in his living room. He poured himself a glass of Scotch and sat by the window. Outside, he had a view of the main road that ran through Heaton Moor. Bars he didn’t patronize, shops he didn’t buy from. He didn’t know why he was here. He’d prefer a small apartment in the center of town, but this was where his wife had wanted to be. Gemma had left him two years previously. Nothing to do with his drinking, or the hours he put in at the office. She’d met another guy, that was all. He didn’t argue with her when she laid it all out before him. He reserved his bitterness for when the apartment was empty of her things. He tried to purge her merry ghost with elegiac songs by Interpol and Editors. He ate the food she didn’t like, despite his not liking it either. One night he brought back one of the girls from the switchboard and fucked her standing up against the wall, a position his wife could not abide.

  He downed the drink.

  “Thou art all ice,” he said, and his own voice made him jump.

  Gravier had been in love once. And not with his wife. This was before he got married. It had been the breathlessness, the heart-stopping moment he’d heard about and scoffed at for so long. She was one of those glimpses-in-a-mirror women. A once seen, never forgotten type. The kind of girl you find rhapsodied over in the Personal columns of listings magazines. You were by the bus stop, wearing coffee-colored eye shadow. That kind of thing. He’d never swapped a word with her. No exchange of addresses or telephone numbers. Just a look. Less than that, really, but she had stayed in his thoughts with a kind of pain, like a piercing, like a branding. He’d been in his car. A winter afternoon. The sun little more than a trembling line, a careless scrape of orange crayon on a pale blue page. He’d seen a shadow fall across the hood. He’d been in a bad mood. Headache. It felt as though he was being gripped at the temples by some industrial tool. She had hurried by, raising a hand to move the black hair from her face. He caught a crystal peep of her eyes, the green of sour apples. Simple clothes. He’d opened the door without thinking, his heart fidgeting. He didn’t know what he meant to say, but his mouth was open and something was coming. She was gone though. He ran around the corner of the street, but she had vanished into the concrete, it seemed. He’d been shocked by the force of his disappointment. The sudden grief of wanting something that you couldn’t have. She flitted at the periphery of his dreams after that, maddeningly out of reach. He never was, and when he wakened he was always cold, as if she were a ghost reducing the temperature of the room.

  He walked winter streets, angling into the sleet, wishing for the chill to climb up through his bones and seize his mind. It wasn’t right, having her in his thoughts while the murders were piling up. She deserved a cleaner host, a better moment. Without any kind of predetermination, Gravier found himself moving through the black slush of Shude Hill where the body of Rachel Biddeford had been dumped. All cleaned away now. All nice and tidy and back in its nasty little box. Just a yellow police sign, a piss into the wind: WE ARE APPEALING FOR WITNESSES. CAN YOU HELP US? MURDER. IN STRICTEST CONFIDENCE PLEASE PHONE. The forensics tents gone. The body gone. No trace. No angelic shape in the snow; nothing to say that a young, beautiful girl lay here. Gravier stood with his hands in his pockets, blowing steam at the cold, blue edges of the buildings. He didn’t know what he was waiting for, but he felt something was about to happen. He had been blessed with some kind of itchy trigger, a sense of things about to arrive, whether they be clarity of thought, or something more concrete. It had served him well in the police and he always paused to answer its call when it came. Other people called it copper’s instinct. Gravier wasn’t so sure. He didn’t want to dwell upon it for too long in case it went away. It was magic, of a sort.

  Now he glanced around him. Sleet against the sodium-lit night like ash at the end of the world. Buses shifting through low gears, ploughing filthy slices of old snow onto pavements riddled with litter and grime. The muffled beat of a band playing the MEN arena. He used to love live music. He’d go to a couple of gigs a week in his twenties, if he could afford it. Gemma hated the sweat and the stink. The beer in plastic. She was a CD to his scratched
vinyl. The glossy black windows of the Arndale Centre. The electric cables for the trams stretching out like exposed veins. Low-wattage bulbs burning in upper-floor flats. Secret homes. What went on? Who dared to know?

  Over to the right, in an alley adjacent to a fish and chip shop, a line of industrial bins disgorged their contents onto paving stones that had cracked in the cold. On the wall above them was a faint silvery line, like the trail of a slug across a dewy lawn. More graffiti. He realized now why he had come here. He knew what he would find. A killer with a calling card. It was all the rage. He thought of Rachel Biddeford’s torn body and thought of the pain she must have endured. The silent screams on these victims’ faces seemed ingrained. They must have been so very violent to cause the corners of their mouths to split. No Hollywood shrieking here. No C-sharp in plum lipstick. No handsome A-list star to come to their rescue. They lay in the shit and the sleet, their eyes cramming up with snow until some drunk or graveyard-shifter stumbled over their solid bodies. And they remained frozen forevermore. In time, in the minds of the people they left behind. Iced hearts beyond thawing. Always associated with violence and loneliness and death.

  “I’ll warm you up, love,” Gravier whispered. There were tears in his eyes and he couldn’t even begin to kid himself that it was the cold bringing them on. He thumbed the lock on his mobile phone and called Simmonds.

  “Hands off cocks, on socks,” Gravier said, when Simmonds eventually picked up. “I want you to take a ride out to the SoCs in Whalley Range and Denton. Check the walls for graffiti. Yes, Simmonds, graffiti. What do you think I fucking said? Tahiti? Look for silver paint. References to the cold or winter. Call me when you find it. I also want a list of all spray-paint manufacturers and suppliers in the Greater Manchester area. Automotive finishers, decorator centers, varnishing and coatings trades. The lot. And I want that about ten minutes before I called you. Check this out as well. Three feet of ice does not result from one day of cold weather. I found it at the Shude Hill scene. Very clever, isn’t it. Well find out where it comes from. Oh, and Simmonds? Next time you don’t pick up on the first ring, you’ll be wearing your phone as a butt plug. Got it?”