‘Show me,’ he said.
‘There’s no going back. You do understand that?’
‘Show me.’
They needed no further invitation to raise the curtain. He heard the door creak as it was opened, and turned to see that the world beyond the threshold had disappeared, to be replaced by the same panic-filled darkness from which the members of the Order had stepped. He looked back towards the Cenobites, seeking some explanation for this. But they’d disappeared. Their passing had not gone unrecorded, however. They’d taken the flowers with them, leaving only bare boards, and on the wall the offerings he had assembled were blackening, as if in the heat of some fierce but invisible flame. He smelt the bitterness of their consumption; it pricked his nostrils so acutely he was certain they would bleed.
But the smell of burning was only the beginning. No sooner had he registered it than half a dozen other scents filled his head. Perfumes he had scarcely noticed until now were suddenly overpoweringly strong. The lingering scent of filched blossoms; the smell of the paint on the ceiling and the sap in the wood beneath his feet: all filled his head.
He could even smell the darkness outside the door; and in it, the ordure of a hundred thousand birds.
He put his hand to his mouth and nose, to stop the onslaught from overcoming him, but the stench of perspiration on his fingers made him giddy. He might have been driven to nausea had there not been fresh sensations flooding his system from each nerve-ending and taste-bud.
It seemed he could suddenly feel the collision of the dust-motes with his skin. Every drawn breath chafed his lips; every blink, his eyes. Bile burned in the back of his throat, and a morsel of yesterday’s beef that had lodged between his teeth sent spasms through his system as it exuded a droplet of gravy upon his tongue.
His ears were no less sensitive. His head was filled with a thousand dins, some of which he himself was father to. The air that broke against his ear-drums was a hurricane; the flatulence in his bowels was thunder. But there were other sounds – innumerable sounds – which assailed him from somewhere beyond himself. Voices raised in anger, whispered professions of love; roars and rattlings; snatches of song; tears.
Was it the world he was hearing? Morning breaking in a thousand homes? He had no chance to listen closely; the cacophony drove any power of analysis from his head.
But there was worse. The eyes! Oh God in Heaven, he had never guessed that they could be such torment; he, who’d thought there was nothing on earth left to startle him. Now he reeled! Everywhere, sight!
The plain plaster of the ceiling was an awesome geography of brush strokes. The weave of his plain shirt an unbearable elaboration of threads. In the corner he saw a mite move on a dead dove’s head, and wink its eyes at him, seeing that he saw. Too much! Too much!
Appalled, he shut his eyes. But there was more inside than out; memories whose violence shook him to the verge of senselessness. He sucked his mother’s milk, and choked; felt his sibling’s arms around him (a fight was it, or a brotherly embrace? Either way, it suffocated). And more, so much more. A short lifetime of sensations, all writ in a perfect hand upon his cortex, and breaking him with their insistence that they be remembered.
He felt close to exploding. Surely the world outside his head – the room, and the birds beyond the door – they, for all their shrieking excesses, could not be as overwhelming as his memories. Better that, he thought, and tried to open his eyes. But they wouldn’t unglue. Tears or pus or needle and thread had sealed them up.
He thought of the tales of the Cenobites: the hooks, the chains. Had they worked some similar surgery upon him, locking him up behind his eyes with the parade of his history?
In fear for his sanity, he began to address them, though he was no longer certain that they were even within earshot.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’
The echo of his words roared in his ears, but he scarcely attended to it. More sense-impressions were swimming up from the past to torment him. Childhood still lingered on his tongue (milk and frustration) but there were adult feelings joining it now. He was grown! He was moustached and mighty; hands heavy, gut large.
Youthful pleasures had possessed the appeal of newness, but as the years had crept on, and mild sensation lost its potency, stronger and stronger experiences had been called for. And here they came again, more pungent for being laid in the darkness at the back of his head.
He felt untold tastes upon his tongue: bitter, sweet, sour, salty; smelt spice and shit and his mother’s hair; saw cities and skies; saw speed, saw deeps; broke bread with men now dead and was scalded by the heat of their spittle on his cheek.
And of course there were women.
Always, amid the flurry and confusion, memories of women appeared, assaulting him with their scents, their textures, their tastes.
The proximity of this harem aroused him, despite circumstance. He opened his trousers and caressed his cock, more eager to have the seed spilt and so be freed of these creatures than for the pleasure of it.
He was dimly aware, as he worked his inches, that he must make a pitiful sight: a blind man in an empty room, aroused for a dream’s sake. But the racking, joyless orgasm failed to even slow the relentless display. His knees buckled, and his body collapsed to the boards where his spunk had fallen. There was a spasm of pain as he hit the floor, but the response was washed away before another wave of memories.
He rolled on to his back, and screamed; screamed and begged for an end to it, but the sensations only rose higher still, whipped to fresh heights with every prayer for cessation he offered up.
The pleas became a single sound, words and sense eclipsed by panic. It seemed there was no end to this, but madness. No hope but to be lost to hope.
As he formulated this last, despairing thought, the torment stopped.
All at once; all of it. Gone. Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. He was abruptly bereft of them all. There were seconds then, when he doubted his very existence. Two heartbeats; three, four.
On the fifth beat, he opened his eyes. The room was empty, the doves and piss-pot gone. The door was closed.
Gingerly, he sat up. His limbs were tingling; his head, wrist and bladder ached.
And then – a movement at the other end of the room drew his attention.
Where, two moments before, there had been an empty space, there was now a figure. It was the fourth Cenobite, the one that had never spoken, nor shown its face. Not it he now saw, but she. The hood it had worn had been discarded, as had the robes. The woman beneath was grey yet gleaming, her lips bloody, her legs parted so that the elaborate scarification of her pubis was displayed. She sat on a pile of rotting human heads, and smiled in welcome.
The collision of sensuality and death appalled him. Could he have any doubt that she had personally dispatched these victims? Their rot was beneath her nails, and their tongues – twenty or more – laid out in ranks on her oiled thighs, as if awaiting entrance. Nor did he doubt that the brains now seeping from their ears and nostrils had been driven to insanity before a blow or a kiss had stopped their hearts.
Kircher had lied to him; either that or he’d been horribly deceived. There was no pleasure in the air; or at least not as humankind understood it.
He had made a mistake opening Lemarchand’s box. A very terrible mistake.
‘Oh, so you’ve finished dreaming,’ said the Cenobite, perusing him as he lay panting on the bare boards. ‘Good.’
She stood up. The tongues fell to the floor, like a rain of slugs.
‘Now we can begin,’ she said.