Age of Desire Read online

  Age of Desire

  Clive Barker

  Kevin Christiano

  Clive Barker & Kevin Christiano

  The Age of Desire

  The burning man propelled himself down the steps of the Hume Laboratories as the police car — summoned, he presumed, by the alarm either Welles or Dance had set off upstairs — appeared at the gate and swung up the driveway. As he ran from he door the car screeched up to the steps and discharged its human cargo. He waited in the shadows, too exhausted by terror to run any farther, certain they would see him. But they disappeared through the swing doors without so much as a glance toward his torment. Am I on fire at all? he wondered. Was this horrifying spectacle — his flesh baptized with s polished flame that seared but failed to consume — simply a hallucination, for his eyes and his eyes only? If so, perhaps all that he had suffered up in the laboratory had also been delirium. Perhaps he had not truly committed the crimes he had fled from, the heat in his flesh licking him into ecstasies.

  He looked down his body. His exposed skin still crawled with livid dots of fire, but one by one they were being extinguished. He was going out, he realized, like a neglected bonfire.

  The sensations that had suffused him — so intense and so demanding that they had been as like pain as pleasure — were finally deserting his nerve endings, leaving a numbness for which he was grateful. His body, now appearing from beneath the veil of fire, was in a sorry condition. His skin was a panic-map of scratches, his clothes torn to shreds, his hands sticky with coagulating blood; blood, he knew, that was not his own. There was no avoiding the bitter truth. He had done all he had imagined doing. Even now the officers would be staring down at his atrocious handiwork.

  He crept away from his niche beside the door and down the driveway, keeping a lookout for the return of the two policemen. Neither reappeared. The street beyond the gate was deserted. He started to run. He had managed only a few paces when the alarm was abruptly cut off. For several seconds his ears rang in sympathy with the silenced bell. Then, eerily, he began to hear the sound of heat — the surreptitious murmuring of embers — distant enough that he didn’t panic, yet close as his heartbeat.

  He limped on to put as much distance as he could between him and his felonies before they were discovered. But however fast he ran, the heat went with him, safe in some backwater of his gut, threatening with every desperate step he took to ignite him afresh.

  It took Dooley several seconds to identify the cacophony he was hearing from the upper floor now that McBride had hushed the alarm bell. It was the high-pitched chattering of monkeys, and it came from one of the many rooms down the corridor to his right.

  “Virgil,” he called down the stairwell. “Get up here.” Not waiting for his partner to join him, Dooley headed off toward the source of the din.

  Halfway along the corridor the smell of static and new carpeting gave way to a more pungent combination: urine, disinfectant and rotting fruit. Dooley slowed his advance. He didn’t like the smell any more than he liked the hysteria in the babble of monkey voices. But McBride was slow in answering his call, and after a short hesitation, Dooley’s curiosity got the better of his disquiet. Hand on truncheon, he approached the open door and stepped in. His appearance sparked off another wave of frenzy from the animals, a dozen or so rhesus monkeys. They threw themselves around in their cages, somersaulting, screeching and berating the wire mesh. Their excitement was infectious. Dooley could feel the sweat begin to squeeze from his pores.

  “Is there anybody here?” he called out.

  The only reply came from the prisoners: more hysteria, more cage rattling. He stared across the room at them. They stared back, their teeth bared in fear or welcome; Dooley didn’t know which, nor did he wish to test their intentions. He kept well clear of the bench on which the cages were lined up as he began a perfunctory search of the laboratory.

  “I wondered what the hell the smell was,” McBride said, appearing at the door.

  “Just animals,” Dooley replied.

  “Don’t they ever wash? Filthy buggers.”

  “Anything downstairs?”

  “Nope,” McBride said, crossing to the cages. The monkeys met his advance with more gymnastics. “Just the alarm.”

  “Nothing up here either,” Dooley said. He was about to add, “Don’t do that,” to prevent his partner putting his finger to the mesh, but before the words were out one of the animals seized the proffered digit and bit it. McBride wrested his finger free and threw a blow back against the mesh in retaliation. Squealing its anger, the occupant flung its scrawny body about in a lunatic fandango that threatened to pitch cage and monkey alike onto the floor.

  “You’ll need a tetanus shot for that,” Dooley commented.

  “Shit!” said McBride, “what’s wrong with the little bastard anyhow?” “Maybe they don’t like strangers.”

  “They’re out of their tiny minds.” McBride sucked ruminatively on his finger, than spat.

  “I mean, look at them.”

  Dooley didn’t answer.

  “I said, look…” McBride repeated.

  Very quietly, Dooley said: “Over here.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just come over here.”

  McBride drew his gaze from the row of cages and across the cluttered work surfaces to where Dooley was staring at the ground, the look on his face one of fascinated revulsion.

  McBride neglected his finger sucking and threaded his way among the benches and stools to where his partner stood.

  “Under there,” Dooley muttered.

  On the scuffed floor at Dooley’s feet was a woman’s beige shoe; beneath the bench was the shoe’s owner. To judge by her cramped position she had either been secreted there by the miscreant or dragged herself out of sight and died in hiding.

  “Is she dead?” McBride asked.

  “Look at her, for Christ’s sake,” Dooley replied, “she’s been torn open.” “We’ve got to check for vital signs,” McBride reminded him. Dooley made no more to comply, so McBride squatted down in front of the victim and checked for a pulse at her ravaged neck. There was none. Her skin was still warm beneath his fingers however. A gloss of salvia on her cheek had not yet dried.

  Dooley, calling in his report, looked down at the deceased. The worst of her wounds, on the upper torso, were masked by McBride’s crouching body. All he could see was a fall of auburn hair and her legs, one foot shoeless, protruding from her hiding place. They were beautiful legs. He might have whistled after such legs once upon a time.

  “She’s a doctor or technician,” McBride said. “She’s wearing a lab coat.” Or she had been. In fact the coat had been ripped open, as had the layers of clothing beneath, and then, as if to complete the exhibition, the skin and muscle beneath that. McBride peered into her chest.

  The sternum had been snapped and the heart teased from its seat, as if her killer had wanted to take it as a keepsake and been interrupted in the act. He perused her without squeamishness; he had always prided himself on his strong stomach.

  “Are you satisfied she’s dead?”

  “Never saw deader.”

  “Carnegie’s coming down,” Dooley said, crossing to one of the sinks. Careless of fingerprints, he turned on the tap and splashed a handful of cold water onto his face. When he looked up from his ablutions McBride had left off his t?te-?-t?te with the corpse and was walking down the laboratory toward a bank of machinery.

  “What do they do here, for Christ’s sake?” he remarked. “Look at all this stuff.” “Some kind of research facility,” Dooley said.

  “What do they research?”

  “How the hell do I know?” Dooley snapped. The ceaseless chatterings of the monkeys and
the proximity of the dead woman made him want to desert the place. “Let’s leave it be, huh?”

  McBride ignored Dooley’s request; equipment fascinated him. He stared entranced at the encephalograph and electrocardiograph; at the printout units still disgorging yards of blank paper onto the floor; at the video display monitors and the consoles. The scene brought the Marie Celeste to his mind. This was like some deserted ship of science — still humming some tuneless song to itself as it sailed on, though there was neither captain nor crew left behind to attend upon it.

  Beyond the wall of equipment was a window, no more than a yard square. McBride had assumed it let on to the exterior of the building, but now that he looked more closely he realized it did not. A test chamber lay beyond the banked units.

  “Dooley…?” he said, glancing around. The man had gone, however, down to meet Carnegie presumably. Content to be left to his exploration, McBride returned his attention to the window. There was no light on inside. Curious, he walked around the back of the banked equipment until he found the chamber door. It was ajar. Without hesitation, he stepped through.

  Most of the light through the window was blocked by the instruments on the other side; the interior was dark. It took McBride’s eyes a few seconds to get a true impression of the chaos the chamber contained: the overturned table; the chair of which somebody had made matchwood; the tangle of cables and demolished equipment — cameras, perhaps, to monitor proceedings in the chamber? — clusters of lights which had been similarly smashed. No professional vandal could have made a more through job of breaking up the chamber than had been made.

  There was a smell in the air which McBride recognized but, irritatingly, couldn’t place.

  He stood still, tantalized by the scent. The sound of sirens rose from down the corridor outside; Carnegie would be here in moments. Suddenly, the smell’s association came to him. It was the same scent that twitched in his nostrils when, after making love to Jessica and — as was his ritual — washing himself, he returned from the bathroom to bedroom. It was the smell of sex. He smiled.

  His face was still registering pleasure when a heavy object sliced through the air and met his nose. He felt the cartilage give and a rush of blood came. He took two or three giddy steps backward, thereby avoiding the subsequent slice, but lost his footing in the disarray. He fell awkwardly in a litter of glass shards and looked up to see his assailant, wielding a metal bar, moving toward him. The man’s face resembled one of the monkey’s; the same yellowed teeth, the same rabid eyes. “No!” the man shouted, as he brought his makeshift club down on McBride, who managed to ward off the blow with his arm, snatching at the weapon in so doing.

  The attack had taken him unawares but now, with the pain in his smashed nose to add fury to his response, he was more than equal of the aggressor. He plucked the club from the man, sweets from a babe, and leaped, roaring, to his feet. Any precepts he might once have been taught about arrest techniques had fled from his mind. He lay a hail of blows on the man’s head and shoulders, forcing him backward across the chamber. The man cowered beneath the assault and eventually slumped, whimpering, against the wall. Only now, with his antagonist abused to the verge of unconsciousness, did McBride’s furor falter. He stood in the middle of the chamber, gasping for breath, and watched the beaten man slip down the wall. He had made a profound error. The assailant, he now realized, was dressed in a white laboratory coat. He was, as Dooley was irritatingly fond of saying, on the side of the angels.

  “Damn,” said McBride, “shit, hell and damn.” The man’s eyes flickered open, and he gazed up at McBride. His grasp on consciousness was evidently tenuous, but a look of recognition crossed his wide-browed, somber face. Or rather, recognition’s absence.

  “You’re not him,” he murmured.

  “Who?” said McBride, realizing he might yet salvage his reputation from this fiasco if he could squeeze a clue from the witness. “Who did you think I was?” The man opened his mouth, but no words emerged. Eager to hear the testimony, McBride crouched beside him and said: “Who did you think you were attacking?” Again the mouth opened; again no audible words emerged. McBride pressed his suit.

  “It’s important,” he said, “just tell me who was here.” The man strove to voice his reply. McBride pressed his ear to the trembling mouth.

  “In a pig’s eye,” the man said, then passed out, leaving McBride to curse his father, who’d bequeath him a temper he was afraid he would probably live to regret. But then, what was living for?

  Inspector Carnegie was used to boredom. For every rare moment of genuine discovery his professional life had furnished him with, he had endured hour upon hour of waiting for bodies to be photographed and examined, for lawyers to be bargained with and suspects intimidated. He had long ago given up attempting to fight this tide of ennui and, after his fashion, had learned the art of going with the flow. The processes of investigation could not be hurried. The wise man, he had come to appreciate, let the pathologists, the lawyers and all their tribes have their tardy way. All that mattered, in the fullness of time, was that the finger be pointed and that the guilty quake.

  Now, with the clock on the laboratory wall reading twelve fifty-three a.m., and even the monkeys hushed in their cages, he sat at one of the benches and waited for Hendrix to finish his calculations. The surgeon consulted his thermometer, then stripped off his gloves like a second skin and threw then down onto the sheet on which the deceased lay. “It’s always difficult,” the doctor said, “fixing time of death. She’s lost less than three degrees. I’d say she’s been dead under two hours.”

  “The officers arrived at a quarter to twelve,” Carnegie said, “so she died maybe half an hour before that?”

  “Something of that order.”

  “Was she put in there?” he asked, indicating the place beneath the bench.

  “Oh certainly. There’s no way she hid herself away. Not with those injuries. They’re quite something, aren’t they?”

  Carnegie stared at Hendrix. The man had presumably seen hundreds of corpses, in every conceivable condition, but the enthusiasm in his pinched features was unqualified. Carnegie found that mystery more fascinating in its own way than that of the dead woman and her slaughterer. How could anyone possibly enjoy taking the rectal temperature of a corpse? It confounded him. But the pleasure was there, gleaming in the man’s eyes.

  “Motive?” Carnegie asked.

  “Pretty explicit, isn’t it? Rape. There’s been very thorough molestation; contusions around the vagina; copious semen deposits. Plenty to work with.” “And the wounds on her torso?”

  “Ragged. Tears more than cuts.”

  “Weapon?”

  “Don’t know.” Hendrix made an inverted U of his mouth. “I mean, the flesh has been mauled. If it weren’t for the rape evidence I’d be tempted to suggest an animal.” “Dog, you mean.”

  “I was thinking more of a tiger,” Hendrix said.

  Carnegie frowned. “Tiger?”

  “Joke,” Hendrix replied, “I was making a joke, Carnegie. My Christ, do you have any sense of irony?”

  “This isn’t funny,” Carnegie said.

  “I’m not laughing,” Hendrix replied with a sour look.

  “The man McBride found in the test chamber?” “What about him?”

  “Suspect?”

  “Not in a thousand years. We’re looking for a maniac, Carnegie. Big, strong. Wild.” “And the wounding? Before or after?”

  Hendrix scowled. “I don’t know. Postmortem will give us more. But for what it’s worth, I think our man was in a frenzy. I’d say the wounding and the rape were probably simultaneous.”

  Carnegie’s normally phlegmatic features registered something close to shock.

  “Simultaneous?”

  Hendrix shrugged. “Lust’s a funny thing,” he said.

  “Hilarious,” came the appalled reply.

  As was his wont, Carnegie had his driver deposit him half a mile from his doorstep to al
low him a head-clearing walk before home, hot chocolate and slumber. The ritual was observed religiously, even when the Inspector was dog-tired. He used the stroll to wind down before stepping over the threshold. Long experience had taught him that taking his professional concerns into the house assisted neither the investigation nor his domestic life. He had learned the lesson too late to keep his wife from leaving him and his children from estrangement, but he applied the principle still.

  Tonight, he walked slowly to allow the distressing scenes the evening had brought to recede somewhat. The route took him past a small cinema which, he had read in the local press, was soon to be demolished. He was not surprised. Though he was no cineaste the fare the flea pit provided had degenerated in recent years. The week’s offering was a case in point: a double bill of horror movies. Lurid and derivative stuff to judge by the poster, with their crude graphics and their unashamed hyperbole. “You May Never Sleep Again!” one of the hook lines read; and beneath it a woman — very much awake — cowered in the shadow of a two-headed man. What trivial images the populists conjured to stir some fear in their audiences. The walking dead; nature grown vast and rampant in a miniature world; blood drinkers, omens, fire walkers, thunderstorms and all the other foolishness the public cowered before. It was all so laughably trite. Among that catalogue of penny dreadfuls there wasn’t one that equaled the banality of human appetite, which horror (or the consequences of same) he saw every week of his working life. Thinking of it, his mind thumbed through a dozen snapshots: the dead by torchlight, face down and thrashed to oblivion; and the living too, meeting his mind’s eye with hunger in theirs — for sex, for narcotics, for others’ pain. Why didn’t they put that on the posters?

  As he reached his home a child squealed in the shadows beside his garage; the cry stopped him in his tracks. It came again, and this time he recognized it for what it was. No child at all but a cat, or cats, exchanging love calls in the darkened passageway. He went to the place to shoo them off. Their venereal secretions made the passage stink. He didn’t need to yell; his footfall was sufficient to scare them away. They darted in all directions, not two, but half a dozen of them. A veritable orgy had been underway apparently. He had arrived on the spot too late however. The stench of their seductions was overpowering.