Daniel shit himself. His shaking fingers worked furiously at the unyielding pieces of the puzzle box as the cold air that blew through his basement raised gooseflesh on his skin. The stench of his excrement could not overcome the perfume of vanilla. His sobs echoed away through unseen chambers where there should only have been solid walls. The dark silhouette turned its shaven head towards him, a head whose human outline was broken by angular projections and the glinting lines of needles. Daniel could see that the left ear was shorn away almost entirely, while the right had been sliced into a ring of fleshy points. The figure walked forward slowly with an awkward lameness, all weight upon the right leg, the shoulders tilting to the left with every step. Each movement brought with it a tinkling like delicate chains. Daniel wiped the tears from his wide eyes, looking around himself in terror. The stairs up to the first floor were gone and there were other demons approaching through the darkness. To his right, he could make out a tall and horribly thin shadow, human but armless and jawless, its body pierced in a hundred places with glinting crescents of steel. To his left, a second shadow crawled clumsily over the floor. Daniel’s mind first told him that the shape was a huge bat. Then he realized that the outer edges were not wings, but ribs spread back and open, their owner lying flattened to the floor, scraping bones against the rock as it dragged itself towards him. Behind Daniel stumbled the figure of a man swathed in what seemed to be tattered rags. It was not until he saw an outline like gloves hanging from its wrists that he knew the rags to be the creature’s own skin peeled back from the flesh. “Oh Jesus” Daniel wept quietly, his numb fingers still pressing at the unmoving surface of the box.
The one in front of him raised its hands. Daniel could see that the index fingers were severed at the second knuckle and all the nails pulled back. He could see that the skin of the upper arms was stitched to the sides and cut away to form webbing between the arms and torso. The other three cenobites stopped and waited, the only movement a lolling of the tall figure’s head, which made a noise like a metal ratchet. “Please don’t. Please” Daniel cried, “oh Jesus, help me Jesus”. He fell to the floor and cowered backwards, his shivering hands squeezing at the puzzle. The one in front limped forwards, the thumb on its right hand toying idly with the loose fingernail of the little finger. Daniel’s sobs caught in his throat and choked him as the woman walked out into the light. Someone who had done less research might have doubted that such a pitifully injured individual could do him any harm, but Daniel’s books left him with no such illusions. “It was a mistake….it was a mistake…” he pleaded.
The woman’s scarred lips pulled back from teeth that had been filed to triangular points, in what might have been a smile. Her face had been cut and pierced until it was a mass of wounds. The nose had been hacked away altogether, the edges of the ragged hole sewn all around with gold thread. Her large blue eyes were glazed with hunger, the pupils fixed on him as if feeding on his terror. Daniel hissed “it was a mistake!”. She unhooked a glinting silver crescent from the leather belt than ran around and through her waist. A steel chain dangled from the handle, its lengths reaching away into the darkness behind her. Her grin widened, making the cuts on her lips bleed and baring gums studded with tiny gems. A pink tongue, bored through with holes, slowly made its way out past her teeth. As she gazed down on him, the tip of the tongue lifted and licked its way around her oozing lips. Daniel’s chest heaved. “Wait!” he whimpered. “Please!”. The woman’s tongue retreated back into her mouth and her smile returned, red blood smeared on sharp white teeth. She shook her head, making her silver chains jingle. “Eternity is not enough time” she said. Her voice was human, husky with her need. As she advanced, Daniel started to crawl away backwards, but there was nowhere to go. If he fled, he fled only into the arms of the demonic shapes that waited all around. Somehow, he backed into a stone pillar that should not have been there and pressed his spine to it, sitting with his shivering arms raised protectively in front of him, his hands still clutching the box. The woman was only feet away from him, now. The sight of her made him vomit – her nipples were pierced with wire and the skin of her breasts torn away and secured with hooks. The flesh of her belly was threaded through with the leather straps of her clothes. Her vagina was sewn shut with gold thread, the labia shredded. He searched her ruined face for some sign of humanity. Her eyes glinted as she ran her gaze over his body. “This isn’t what I wanted” Daniel begged. She leaned forward and extended the stub of her index finger, the little projection of bone at the end sharpened like a scalpel. Lovingly, she scraped it along the sides of the puzzle box. “Everyone changes their mind, Daniel” she told him gently, through the wound of her mouth. “Humanity is weak and we cannot enter heaven by will alone. We must be blessed. You asked us for pleasure. We bring it”. A low whir began to fill the air, like the stirring of a vast nest of hornets. Daniel heard metal clink against metal in the darkness and his skin began to prickle. “I didn’t call you! I was tricked!” he screamed. The woman’s glassy eyes widened. Grinning, she tilted her head to the left and looked him in the eye. “I can tell when you lie” she smiled.
“Then you know I didn’t ask for this! I didn’t know! I didn’t know!” He screwed his eyes shut and covered his face with his arms. She lowered her face to his. He whimpered vomit, tears filling his eyes. “Look me in the eye and say it” she whispered indulgently. He dropped his arms and locked his eyes on hers, though the mad desire in them made him cringe. She gazed back, slowly drinking him in. Her pupils were wide. She was so close that he could see dark flecks of coloration amidst the cold blue of her iris. She told him “you were warned that the way would be hard – I can see it... My companions have been patient”. She threw back her shoulders and lifted her arms. The air was still, but there was a sound like rising wind. The other three cenobites stepping into the light. Daniel glanced around himself, and started to scream. He buried his head in his arms and howled “this is a mistake! Please listen to me, I beg you!” He heard the heavy feet drawing near and the sounds of metal scraping. A stench of rot suddenly overpowered the smell of vanilla and his own shit. He look up pleadingly at the woman. She stood with her pink eyelids closed and her bleeding mouth open, stretching her muscles against the hooks and stitches in her flesh, so that red wounds tore open in her skin. “Help me!” he screamed. Her eyes flickered open, but they were a glaze of hunger, like the eyes of a shark. “You have beautiful skin” she told him, staring into his crying face. He locked his eyes on hers. “If you know I’m telling the truth then you know I didn’t want this! You know this is a mistake!”
From behind, the flayed man gurgled “a pleader”. The woman bent down with a tinkle of chains. She lowered her bleeding and pierced face to his, searching his terrified eyes. A long silver knife flew up before the armless cenobite to his right, hanging with its serrated edges glinting before her blind sockets. There was a rising hiss from behind him and Daniel screamed again. The woman reached out her injured hands for the puzzle and took it from his shaking fingers. “Too late” she said. She held the box close to her leaking stomach and ran her fingers around the edges so that the box shifted shape, its pieces moving until it was almost a simple square once again. Only one piece was out of alignment – a cylinder that jutted from the top. Her hands grew still. She looked up at him. Her blue eyes were no longer glazed. A thin and bloody film of tears had begun to form. Silently, her lips moved – “I will always want you”. Gently, her right hand touched the cylinder and pressed it down into the body of the box. The crawling cenobite roared in rage, from a tongueless mouth, past lipless teeth. The skinned man jumped forward with a wail, his red fingers stretched to snatch the puzzle away. Then Daniel Gray sat alone in his dark basement, covered in his own vomit and shit, as the Chinese box clattered to the floor.
Daniel left the box lying in the basement. He changed, threw some clothes into a bag, and moved to a cheap hotel. He was trembling so hard at the desk that he could barely sign in. Once he had his room, he closed the windows and brooded for days over what to do. Sometimes, he told himself that he just should move as far away as possible and eliminate his tracks. But he couldn’t do it. He knew that if he left the box where it was, someone would soon find it, and hell. Had he himself not searched for years for LeMarchand’s puzzle?
One morning in the early hours, sleepless and guilty, Daniel drove his car back to the house. He started weeping again on the road, his skin clammy from fear. He went to the basement, wrapped the box in a towel and set it on the floor of his bedroom. He did not sleep for two days, but sat with his back pressed against the wall, looking at the shrouded puzzle lying on his faded carpet. After that, he slept by night and by day watched television, or gazed at the towel. After a week, he had to go out for food. He stuffed the towel under his sweater and took the box with him to the supermarket, afraid that a thief might find it if he left it at his room.
Daniel longed for the women in the parking lot. He had been of a lustful nature ever since puberty, and his recent near loss of earthly pleasures made him hungry for them. He cursed his own weakness and told himself to concentrate on the task at hand. He shopped. As he stuffed plastic bags of bread and Ramen noodles into his car, a woman walked up to him. She was young, and fair and thin. He found her beautiful. “Hello” she smiled at him. “I saw you looking at me. I’ve been looking at you too”. Daniel clutched fearfully at the towel in the trolley’s basket, certain that the box had brought her to him. “What’s that?” she asked curiously, pointing. Grimly, he told her “go away and leave me alone. I’m sorry that I looked at you”
“Don’t be sorry. Are you sure you want me to go away?”
“Yes! Go away!” he snapped, picking up the towel and hugging it to his chest. She looked hurt but she answered “sure”, shrugged and left him.
Daniel went back home. He masturbated for the first time since he had opened the box, and then regretted it, knowing where the search for pleasure leads. He thought about the woman from the supermarket a lot over the next two days and on the third day, he started to watch women from behind the curtains of his bedroom window. Eventually, he found a young cyclist. She stood on the sidewalk, watching traffic, right foot on the pedal and left foot on the ground for balance. She was black-haired and slim, her eyes large like the eyes of a child. As he watched her, he saw her turn and notice him in the window. He looked at her with longing and she stared back into his eyes. Then she smiled at him. Daniel snapped the curtains shut. He grabbed the towel and sat in the corner with his back to the wall, holding the box to his pounding heart. His doorbell rang. He held the box tightly and panted with fear. After a few minutes the ringing stopped.
Daniel spent the next three days with the blinds drawn, getting drunk on beer and watching pornography. At the end of that time, he decided that he had to destroy the box. That meant returning to his studies.
Daniel had not come across the puzzle box easily - he had spent a great deal of effort and a great deal of money on tracking it down. He had poured over books and articles, obsessively looking for clues, and had scoured antique shops on both sides of the Atlantic. Now he searched those same books for a way to annihilate the treasure he had fought so hard to get – but even LeMarchand denied that it could be done. Disappointment made Daniel’s mind wander. The books make his thoughts turn, as they so often had before, to the box’s promise of pleasure beyond mortal comprehension. He knew half of the references by heart, but he read them all again and again.
After a week, Daniel gave up his reading, and told himself that to live as he was doing could only drive him to insanity. He drove the city streets, looking for a prostitute, but he wanted no-one he saw. Eventually, he went back to the supermarket and watched the parking lot for four hours. The woman he had spoken with never arrived, but he found a young goth. He stared at her with hunger. She turned and saw him. He smiled at her and she smiled back. She waved her hand at him. He just looked at her, devouring her with his eyes. The woman walked over. “You are friendly” she told him with a shy grin.
“What do you want from me?” he asked her quietly. She was taken aback for a moment. She answered “I want to fuck you, is what I want”.
“You want this of your own free will?” he asked, trying not to sound as if he were begging her for the right answer. She frowned. Then she nodded. “Of course” she told him. “I wouldn’t do it otherwise. Look, I know this is unusual, but I know you want me because I can see it in the way you look at me. Well - I want you back. Isn’t that good? Why don’t you fuck me?”. She had started to pant and her skin was beginning to sheen with sweat.
He took her home and fucked her and then told her to get out of the house and never return. She wrote down her address, kissed him on the cheek and left. After she was gone, Daniel wept and burned the address, swearing to himself that he would not have sex again for as long as the box was in his possession. He watched the puzzle for awhile, then watched football on television until he fell asleep. When he woke, he tried to watch CNN. There was war in Iraq, marches in London, elections in the USA. He tried to concentrate but his attention drifted back to his books and their promises. Daniel did not want the bloody paradise he had glimpsed, but he still yearned for heaven. He stayed up reading the Bible until dawn, then looked at his pale and unshaven face in the mirror and told himself aloud that anything he could be doing would be saner than reading the books that had brought him to the verge of hell itself. He put his books away and cleaned his house everywhere except for the cellar. He wrapped a new towel around the box and threw the old towel in the wash. He showered, shaved and dressed in fresh clean clothes. Then he went out to look for women.
Daniel had sex with increasing frequency, until he was growing tired from the abundance. He began to have some women back for a second visit, and eventually began to keep them around for longer than it took for him to come. Soon he was reveling in his wealth of female flesh, spending hours lingering over their naked bodies, caressing every inch of skin. He kissed them, petted them, and eventually, talked to them. He asked them how they were employed, and what they did for pleasure, and what relationships they had. He quickly learned that the women usually had boyfriends and that made him feel guilty. He established a rule that he would not fuck any girl who was already taken, and he followed it except in cases where the women told him that they were mistreated. Daniel’s bank account had been shrinking, but it wasn’t hard for him to ask for cash gifts from his wealthier female friends. It was a short step from there to seeking out rich women. He soothed his conscience by giving half of all the money he made to Amnesty International, and he lived comfortably on the other half.
Without intending to, Daniel started to spend every night with Alice Baker, a blonde twenty-four year old medical student with two dead parents. Daniel and Alice had little in common, but she was beautiful and intelligent, and like other women, her desires soon conformed to his. He wanted her to be happy with him, and so she grew to be happy with him. He felt guilty when she began to lose interest in her studies in favor of devoting all of her time to his pleasure, so he encouraged her to continue with her education and rekindled her enthusiasm for medicine.
One midnight, Alice woke Daniel by running her fingers through his hair. “Mmm?” he asked, lazily moving his hand to her thigh.
She smiled softly, gazing at him with her wide green eyes. “I want you to know that I love you” she told him. “I don’t care if you love me or not. I’m just happy to be with you”. The muscles in Daniel’s body tensed. He looked at her across the pillow, finding her beautiful beyond words. “Don’t love me” he whispered.
“I can’t help it” she whispered back with a smile, running her fingers gently down his cheek. He took her hand and held it still. “Alice, I don’t want you to love me” he told her firmly, entirely awake now. She leaned over to him and kissed him on the lips. “Yes you do. I can tell” she softly assured him. “And I do. I’m happy. I’m happy loving you just the way you are”. She draped her naked body over his and held him tight. He meant to throw her out, but instead he lay with her in his arms. He tried to sleep, but stayed awake, lying on the bed and feeling her soft skin against his.
The next night, she softly asked him “Daniel, you know what I would like?”. He reached down and stroked her head. “What would you like?” he asked, smiling.
“I’d like you to spank me” she said. Daniel froze and his body tensed achingly.
“No. Never” he told her. She craned to look up at him without taking her head from his chest. “Why?” she asked.
“I don’t want to” he lied, taking his hand away from her skin.
“I want it. Wouldn’t you do it for me? You know I do anything you want”
“I can’t do it, Alice. I’m sorry”. His heart hammed so hard that he was sure she must be able to feel it. He was scared that his voice would start to waver. She stopped craning her neck and closed her eyes. “Wouldn’t you try it for me?” she asked.
“You never mentioned it before”
“I didn’t want it before. I want it now. I just want to try it”. Cold sweat started to form on Daniel’s skin. “What changed?” he breathed.
“I changed my mind, Daniel. Everybody changes their minds. I’m free to pick new interests if I want. Why won’t you just try it for me? I try everything for you”. There was hurt in her voice and tears were starting to well.
“I can’t, Alice. I just can’t. Please don’t ask me”. He was starting to shake, startling her. “I’m sorry Daniel” she promised, clasping him tightly. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Really, I’m sorry. Do you want to talk about it?”
“No Alice, I want you to be quiet and go to sleep”. Alice looked at him with worry, then nodded, closed her eyes and snuggled against him. He held her and stroked her hair until she went to sleep, her tears on his chest. Even more than his fear, his lust kept him awake all night, staring at the wall.
In the morning, Daniel threw Alice out and told her never to come back. She cried like the bereaved. Her tears hurt him more than he expected, but they only strengthened his resolve. When she was gone, he unplugged his telephones and sat on his bedroom floor with his head in his hands. He thought about cutting his penis off, but he knew he couldn’t do it. He thought about suicide, but he knew he couldn’t do that either. He took out his books to console himself, but immediately put them away again, his hands shaking. He crouched and wrapped his arms around his head until he couldn’t stand his own thoughts. He tried to watch television, but he couldn’t concentrate on anything. He tried to get drunk, but threw up everything he swallowed. He paced from wall to wall until his feet ached, and as he walked, the sound of his heart grew louder in his ears. Finally, he just closed his eyes and stood, listening to his heartbeat thunder, feelings the pressure of the blood in his veins rise until it seemed like he would burst from inside. “It will pass” he firmly told himself. “Calm down. It will pass”.
He looked on as a disinterested observer as his hand opened the kitchen draw. As he watched, his fingers retrieved the gleaming steak-knife and held the cold point to the soft skin at the underside of his forearm. He looked up at the fluorescent kitchen light and at the dusty brittle moths that clung to it in death. He felt the point of the knife bite his skin and slowly exhaled, eyes wide open, as the warm liquid welled up from inside. He closed his eyes against the light as the pressure within him was released. “Only a little” he promised himself, as the blood dripped from his fingers and onto the linoleum floor. “Just enough to let me calm down”. His head lolled forward, the thunder in his ears receding. “Just listen to yourself”. Daniel lifted the knife away from his arm and examined his cut carefully. It hurt, but was not deep. He held the blade of the knife under the leg of a kitchen chair, gripped the handle, and sat down. The knife bent and finally snapped. He threw the pieces in the trash and ripped a bed-sheet into bandages to stop his bleeding. Then he soaked some of the blood from the floor with a rag, stood on a chair in his bedroom, and wrote the words “NEVER AGAIN” above the door, where it would serve as a reminder that could not be ignored. He promised himself that he would buy paint in the morning and mark the lesson properly. Then he would find Alice and take back his key – there must be no loose ends. Then he would make a plan – he would work out once and for all what to do about the box. Feeling weak, he crawled onto his bed and hugged his legs to his chest until sleep overtook him.
The sound of a scream ripped Daniel back from oblivion and when something jumped onto his bed, he screamed back. The room was cold. Something liquid and salty spattered against his face and into his mouth. He shrieked “I didn’t touch it!” and fought against the blanket that wrapped his limbs. He freed his right arm and snapped the bedside lamp on. “Help me!” pleaded Alice, her blood running from the barbed steel spike that projected from the back of her right hand. Her wet fingers were clasped around the box that was now nailed to her palm. “It wasn’t me!” squealed Daniel, kicking against the mattress and driving himself back from her. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to!” she cried to him, clutching her right hand in her left. “I’m hurt Daniel! Please!”. She fell to her knees, holding her wound out in front of herself and looking away from it. A glass on the bedside table shattered. The beer cans on the floor burst their tops, bleeding foam onto the carpet. Daniel’s painted words above the bedroom door dripped redly onto the white wall. Alice screamed again, stumbling towards him on her knees, her green eyes wide with terror. He rolled away from her, falling from the bed to the floor, where broken glass gouged his thigh. When he staggered to his feet, she wasn’t looking at him any more. Her back was pressed hard against the wall as she looked up, her mouth hanging open, tears glittering on her cheeks. Daniel followed her gaze. A forked crack was soundlessly working its way across the ceiling, bluish light shining through from beyond. He yelled “we have to get out!”. She didn’t move, her eyes fixed on the crack, her bleeding hand held out in front of her.
Daniel lunged and caught her by the collar of her sweater. It tore as he dragged her away from the wall and she bellowed with pain as the spike twisted in her hand. He pulled her to the door and fought against the knob. It was frozen solidly in place, so cold that it burnt his fingers to touch it. He slammed his shoulder against the wood, but its surface was as unyielding as stone. “What’s happening?” yelled Alice. A cold wind blew though the room from nowhere, bearing with it the scent of vanilla. Daniel grabbed her right arm, turned his back to her, and sandwiched her limb between his right arm and his body, her maimed hand held tightly in front of him. “I’m sorry” he shouted over her crying and grabbed the box in his left hand to pull it free. He grimaced, feeling faint at the sight of her wound. His will failed him and he hesitated. She realized what he was planning and screeched, yanking at her arm. He stumbled backwards into her but did not let go. He gripped the slippery puzzle tightly, wedging his left hand between her palm and the top of the box. He released her arm and pulled at the box with all of his strength. Daniel had never heard a scream like the one Alice made when he tore the barbed spike backwards through her hand – a prolonged high-pitched shriek that hardly sounded human. She kept screaming, stumbling backwards from him on her heels, clutching her wrist, the ragged hole in her hand pouring blood into the floor, bone visible where the meat had been cut back. Her white face was a mask of shock.
Daniel hurled the puzzle at his window but the glass didn’t break. The box bounced away and landed neatly in the middle of the floor, where its midsection rose smoothly, the projecting red spike uppermost. He dived onto the floor and tried to stop the configuration from reaching completion, but unseen razors on the edges cut his fingers, making him cry out and drop the puzzle. Alice slumped against the corner and slid down the wall, her breath ragged and eyes starting to roll as she fought for consciousness. “Daniel” greeted a high lilting voice, almost purring. He looked up into eyes of icy blue and howled. He fell and clawed his way backwards across the carpet. “I thought of you. I longed for you” the woman told him, limping forward on toeless feet whose engraved anklebones shone white. “It wasn’t me!” shrieked Daniel, his body jammed defensively between the bed and the nightstand. “It was her! It was her!”. The cenobite turned her stiff neck slowly, the silver chains of her head tinkling as she followed his pointing finger to the woman gasping for breath in the corner, her clothes drenched in her own dark blood. Alice shook her head without taking her eyes from the horror. “It was him!” she hissed. “It was Daniel”. The cenobite’s gaze drifted between them. She held out her mutilated hand, smiled through bleeding lips and murmured “I think I know who it was”. The puzzle leapt from the floor and into her palm, clacking against the studs in her skin. She parted her pointed teeth and let her tongue loll forward. It had been torn in two lengthways since Daniel had seen it last and the red meat of its center glistened with pink saliva. She wrapped her tongue around the bloody spike in the center of the box, closing her eyes and moaning with pleasure. Daniel’s instincts told him to run while she was not looking, but there was nowhere to go. The cenobite drew back her tongue, strands of spittle glittering between the spike and her mouth. She set her blue eyes on Alice and drew her lips back over her studded gums in an expression Daniel could not recognize. She turned fully towards her, leaving him staring at a spine that was partly exposed, lined on both sides with glinting hooks that held the muscles open. His words were little more than a weak aspiration – “stop”.
“She chose” she told him. She lifted her hands into the air, palms uppermost, the box held high. There was a flickering of the shadows and a low burr that made the windows rattle. Gracefully, the cenobite lowered her left arm and drew a filthy gray cloth from a fold of her harness. “We don’t need him” she told Alice and flicked her wrist. There was a crack like a gunshot as the cloth flew through the air and Alice’s shriek was cut off suddenly as it wrapped about her head, filling her mouth, her nose, her eyes, her ears. She fell forward silently, scratching frantically at the featureless mask that had become as hard as steel. She flopped on the floor like a fish. Daniel picked up the lamp as a weapon, making shadows dance crazily on the white walls. “Don’t excite me, Daniel” said the cenobite softly, the muscles in her back tensing, making her hooks click against the bone. Daniel’s fingers went dead. The lamp fell to the carpet where it rolled, spinning the darkness itself as the injured creature drew closer to Alice. “No!” he wailed, defeated, pressing his back against the wall, tears streaming from his eyes. A chain flew through air with a whistling roar, somehow locking into place at the base of Alice’s skull. The cenobite made a fist and the chain pulled tight, yanking the woman to her feet and backwards against the wall, her limbs flailing and striping the wall with the blood from her hand. Daniel clutched his hair hard enough to tear roots from his scalp. “Leave her alone! She never chose this!”. The cenobite reached out to Alice with her left arm, running her hand gently across the woman’s sternum. She closed her eyes and groaned. Alice caught her wrist, her body shaking spastically as her fingers drove down through a gash in the demon’s arm and into the wet muscle beneath. She tried to pull the arm away from her, but her straining did nothing but draw fresh blood to make her grip slick. “She read your books” the cenobite sighed in husky ecstasy.
“Let her go! The books explain nothing! She was tricked!”
“How could they explain?” she replied, slipping the box away into a wet cut in her belly and smoothly drawing a rusty, claw-headed blade from her belt. “Is a word a sensation? Some things can only be experienced. Sometimes, you need to make a leap of faith”. She ran the back of the blade artistically down Alice’s arm, parallel red welts rising and bleeding at its touch. Daniel crawled across the wet carpet. “Please spare her! This isn’t her fault!”. He prostrated himself at her feet, his falling tears mingling with Alice’s blood. “This isn’t what she wants! For the love of Jesus, can’t you understand that?”. There was a tinkling of chains as the woman looked down, her arm still extended as Alice tore the skin from it. “She changed her mind. No-one can endure what must be endured of their own free will. The box gives us the strength of others”
“Let her choose!” he howled.
“She chose” lilted the cenobite and gracefully swung her blade across Alice’s stomach, neatly opening her body with three parallel gashes from which glistening white intestine bulged and slid. Hot blood poured over Daniel’s head.
Daniel dreamed that Alice was laughing. She lay on a bare wooden floor in paroxysms, hammering the boards with her arms and legs, tears shining on her cheeks. Instead of the sound of her normal laugh, though, she made a noise like the ringing of a thousand little bells. She tried to stand, but the joke was too good and it made her weak and clumsy. It grew funnier and funnier as she lay there, roaring a symphony of delicate jingles, pounding and pounding helplessly on the floor as the glittering tears fell from her face.
Daniel woke shivering in the semi-darkness. The lamp was out. His bed was cold and wet and sticky, the sodden sheets embracing his body. The cuts on his forearm and thigh burned. Across the room he could make out the shadowy shape of a woman sitting on the floor, cradling a vague human form in her arms, running her fingers along the shoulders. But the body in her arms was thin and incomplete, the bare frame of a person – a jagged spine, the bones of a pelvis and shoulders with just enough meat to keep them in place, the scarecrow cores of arms and legs, bone and cartilage held together in a lattice of stringy muscle. The cenobite’s toy was handless, footless, and headless, the vertebrae jutting uselessly into empty space. Over on the wall, Alice’s cloth mask hung limp and dripping from its chain. When Daniel recoiled, he disturbed a neatly arranged circle of human teeth sitting at the foot of his bed, sending them clattering to a floor that should have been carpet, but was stone. The woman raised her head from her contemplation of Alice’s remains. “Would you like to touch her?” she asked him softly. He started to cry again, instinctively clutching the bloodied sheets to his chin. “You wanted to touch her once” she reminded him.
“Let her go” he croaked.
“She’s gone. Alice is in heaven now”. His sob was a strangulated wail. The corpse slid limply from the woman’s grasp, spilling onto the floor with limbs spread out in casual abandon. Daniel dropped the sheet and desperately searched the darkness for the puzzle box, praying that she couldn’t see his movements. The cenobite’s silhouette raised its right arm, palm up and fingers open. Instinctively Daniel followed the gesture. LeMarchand’s box sat on his bedside table. It was almost configured as a cube – only a raised cylinder remained out of place. He swallowed the burning vomit that rose in his throat. Was it a game? He hesitated. She slowly lowered her hand again and tilted her head, watching him. He snatched the box and she cringed and froze, head lowered, hands clenched, shoulders stiff. He held his hand on the cylinder. She was perfectly still, the shadow of a statue.
“How do I destroy the box?” he demanded. She exhaled her held breath and released her clenched fists.
“You cannot. If you keep it, it will open. Another will come in my place. He will not listen to your excuses”
“Someone will find it”. She tilted her head again and tiny bells tinkled.
“Someone wants it” she told him.
“No! You made a mistake! Jesus Christ, you made a mistake! No human wants it!” he wept. She straightened her neck again. When she spoke, her voice was flat and emotionless. “Don’t want it. Your books. Your years of searching. Don’t want it. You lie to me. I never lied to you”. Daniel tensed his hand on the cylinder. The cenobite cringed in the darkness, head lowered, her fingers to the floor. “Where is paradise?” Daniel demanded, almost hissing. “You exist. Hell exists. There must be a heaven”. She did not raise her head. “Heaven. Hell. It is perspective alone that makes the difference. All pleasures lead to us, Daniel. Pleasure satisfied brings only hunger for pleasure. Pleasure is a puzzle with many shapes but one solution”. She looked up at him, her face hidden by the darkness. “No!” he spat. “There is a true paradise! You must know the way!”
“How hard the living have searched for doorways. How much harder, the damned have searched. Books of promises are written in flesh and bone. Books that promise final death. Books that promise the escape into some other world. But there is no escape. There are no other worlds. Heaven is not a place. Heaven hides wherever there is feeling – shining at the outer edges of sensation”
“There is a God!” Daniel yelled in rage. She regarded him calmly.
“Yes. There is. But the path to Him is too hard for human will to endure alone. We must give ourselves into His hands”
“The god that did this-”. He gestured at her and at Alice, his words choking off in a sob. “That is not my god and your heaven is not my heaven. I am not like you. None of the ones you have taken have been like you”. She moaned, a soft gurgle.
“But Daniel I am like you. I am just flesh and blood”. A light from nowhere fell across her, illuminating her face and body. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. You can’t be alive” said Daniel, quietly. The wounded woman clumsily rose to her feet, her raw flesh leaving bloody stains behind. “You can’t be alive” Daniel repeated, his voice barely above a whisper. She looked down at herself, then back at him, spreading her arms to clear his view. “But I am alive, Daniel. I have died many times but I am alive. Feel the warmth of my hands and you will know I am just flesh and blood like you”. She raised her arms to him, as if to embrace him. In one swift motion, Daniel stood and pressed his back to the wall. The brick was cold and rough. “I let you go. I gave you the box. No tricks” she told him. There was a new huskiness to her voice. Daniel looked into her begging eyes and believed her. He had to know. He took a step towards her, the box clutched tight. Her lips parted as he approached, pulling back over the triangular stumps of what had been her teeth. As he reached out to her, her eyes began to shine.
Daniel’s fingertips brushed lightly against her palm. Her skin was smooth and soft and warm. He looked into her hungry eyes and found his fingertips drifting down her hand. His digits skirted the cuts, navigating through a maze of scars. He slowed and stopped as he reached the edge of her palm and he stared at the stump of her index finger where the tip had been stripped of meat and the bone had been sharpened to a knife’s edge. The red stump where the muscle had been still oozed blood, a drop swelling at the base. The droplet trickled over a ridge of torn skin and fell to the stone floor. “The body can endure anything when there is no escape” she said, her breaths growing deeper and more rapid. Her exhalations smelt of rot.
Gently, she took his hand. She held his gaze with her own and slowly drove his index finger against an infection on her palm. He winced as her crusty scab broke. He felt his finger push back the skin and force its way into the hot wet wound beneath. She gritted her teeth and pressed hard at the back of his hand, driving him into her. A tear formed at the corner of his eye, but he did not pull his hand away. “I don’t understand” he whimpered. She kept his gaze, her eyes shining. She whispered to him “reason cannot lead you to heaven. The truth cannot be explained – it can only be felt. There must always be a leap of faith. You must die and be reborn”
She released his hand. He drew his finger back from inside her. He could feel that it was slippery with blood as he rubbed it against his thumb. Daniel looked down at the woman’s body. He thought of a car accident that he had once seen, and of a man rolled over the scouring surface of the tarmac until his humanity was scrubbed away. As he watched, the cenobite let her right hand drift upwards over ribs that were woven through with leather straps. Her hand cupped her lacerated breast. Her thumb and jagged finger bone tenderly closed around her nipple, jingling the silver bell that hung from it. She squeezed, lightly at first and then harder, until the dark pink skin split where the edge of her finger-bone touched it and drops of dark blood trickled free. Daniel’s lips opened and moved wordlessly for a moment. Then he said “please God, have pity on us. Save us. I believe in you. Make me Your servant. We can’t save ourselves”. The cenobite grew still. She lowered her hand again, flicking away a loose sliver of skin. Her cracked lips were open and her eyes were like glass. “Please God” prayed Daniel, “save me”. They both waited, the only sound their own breathing.
Daniel stepped towards her and shut his eyes. Her arms circled around him and his around her. Afraid, he clasped her tightly, feeling the warm flesh of her body. Metal points that were embedded in her wounds pricked against him. He lifted his hands to her shoulders and ran them down her back, caressing her torn skin and gashed muscles with his slick palms. He could feel the beating of her heart and her hot stinking breath on his face. He opened his eyes and looked into hers to find them glazed and ravenous, like the eyes of shark. “I choose to go with you” he told her. “I believe”. He gave her the box. Her fingers closed around it. She hesitated, the gleam in her blue eyes dulled for a second by some other emotion. She stared deep into his pupils. “I need to know that I didn’t trick you. I never meant to trick you, Daniel” she said, a trace of pleading in her voice.
“You didn’t trick me. I choose this of my own free will” he answered. “This is what I want”. He changed his mind when the hooks tore into his eyes.