"I asked you a question," it said. Frank made no reply. The name of this city was the last thing on his mind.
"Do you understand?" the figure beside the first speaker demanded. Its voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy-the voice of an excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jeweled pin driven through to the bone. Its tongue was similarly decorated. "Do you even know who we are?" it asked.
"Yes." Frank said at last. "I know."
Of course he knew; he and Kircher had spent long nights talking of hints gleaned from the diaries of
Bolingbroke and Gilles de Rais.
All that mankind knew of the Order of the Gash, he knew.
And yet...he had expected something different. Expected some sign of the numberless splendors they had access to. He had thought they would come with women, at least; oiled women, milked women; women shaved and muscled for the act of love: their lips perfumed, their thighs trembling to spread, their buttocks weighty, the way he liked them. He had expected sighs, and languid bodies spread on the floor underfoot like a living carpet; had expected virgin whores whose every crevice was his for the asking and whose skills would press him-upward, upward-to undreamed-of ecstasies. The world would be
forgotten in their arms. He would be exalted by his lust, instead of despised for it.
But no. No women, no sighs. Only these sexless things, with their corrugated flesh.
Now the third spoke. Its features were so heavily scarified-the wounds nurtured until they ballooned-that its eyes were invisible and its words corrupted by the disfigurement of its mouth.
"What do you want?" it asked him.
He perused this questioner more confidently than he had the other two. His fear was draining away with every second that passed. Memories of the terrifying place beyond the wall were already receding. He was left with these decrepit decadents, with their stench, their queer deformity, their self-evident frailty. The only thing he had to fear was nausea.
"Kircher told me there would be five of you," Frank said.
"The Engineer will arrive should the moment merit," came the reply. "Now again, we ask you: What do you want."
Why should he not answer them straight? "Pleasure," he replied. "Kircher said you know about pleasure."
"Oh we do," said the first of them. "Everything you ever wanted."
"Yes?"
"Of course. Of course." It stared at him with its all-too-naked eyes. "What have you dreamed?" it said.
The question, put so baldly, confounded him. How could he hope to articulate the nature of the phantasms his libido had created? He was still searching for words when one of them said:
"This world...it disappoints you?"
"Pretty much," he replied.
"You're not the first to tire of its trivialities," came the response. "There have been others."
"Not many," the gridded face put in.
"True. A handful at best. But a few have dared to use Lemarchand's Configuration. Men like yourself, hungry for new possibilities, who've heard that we have skills unknown in your region."
"I'd expected-" Frank began.
"We know what you expected," the Cenobite replied. "We understand to its breadth and depth the nature of your frenzy. It is utterly familiar to us."
Frank grunted. "So," he said, "you know what I've dreamed about. You can supply the pleasure."
The thing's face broke open, its lips curling back: a baboon's smile. "Not as you understand it," came the reply.
Frank made to interrupt, but the creature raised a silencing hand.
"There are conditions of the nerve endings," it said, "the like of which your imagination, however fevered, could not hope to evoke."
"...yes."
"Oh yes. Oh most certainly. Your most treasured depravity is child's play beside the experiences we offer."
"Will you partake of them?" said the second Cenobite.
Frank looked at the scars and the hooks. Again, his tongue was deficient.
"Will you?"
Outside, somewhere near, the world would soon be waking. He had watched it wake from the window of this very room, day after day, stirring itself to another round of fruitless pursuits, and he'd known, known, that there was nothing left out there to excite him. No heat, only sweat. No passion, only sudden lust, and just as sudden indifference. He had turned his back on such dissatisfaction. If in doing so he had to interpret the signs these creatures brought him, then that was the price of ambition. He was ready to pay it.
"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 smelled 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 eardrums 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!