The Hellbound Heart, Dissected
The Hellbound Heart is arguably Clive Barker’s peak horror writing before he changed his genre and style. His mind was in a different place those days. While working on the sequel, Barker expressed difficulties accessing that dark place where the original novella had once been conceived. And when he found his way in, he couldn’t stay there for long. He could no longer endure the darkness in which his creativity once had thrived.
The novella is an excellent example of something small making it big. The first edition was only 186 pages long. Still, it spawned a franchise of 11 movies, a plethora of comic books, an anthology, a pretty disappointing sequel novel, and inspired a couple of obscure video games. I’m talking about the Hellraiser franchise; you may have heard of it. Nevertheless, this essay is about the original novella. Not the media madness surrounding it.
Barker’s experiences as a hustler in the 70s inspired him to write a story about good and evil in which sexuality was the connective tissue. S&M clubs such as Cellblock 28 in New York inspired the esthetics and juxtaposition of pleasure and pain. There, Barker saw people getting pierced for fun, and the question about the limitations and differences of sensual experiences was born.
He even considered naming the film adaptation Sadomasochists from Hell. Fortunately, he didn’t commit that linguistic atrocity.
Lemarchand’s Configuration
Frank Cotton was a hedonist bored with worldly pleasures and aching for new sensual heights. He believed he may have found them in Lemarchand’s Configuration, a wooden puzzle box said to contain otherworldly delights unknown to ordinary human experience.
The legend of the box long eluded him as he followed vague rumors spoken by shady people. In Germany, Düsseldorf, he finally found their source. A man named Kircher claims to know about the box. He tells Frank he can have it if he does him some small favors. Frank did; he wasn’t beyond immoralities, and at last, he got his hands on what he had longed for.
His preparations before opening the box were meticulous. He knew everything there was to know, which wasn’t much. He and Kircher had gleaned hints in the diaries of Gilles de Rais and Bolingbroke, who both seemingly knew about the box.
He had prepared the room with objects conducive to his goals: things that might appeal to the beings he expected to greet: bones, bonbons, and needles; a jug filled with seven days’ worth of urine in case they required some gesture of self-defilement. He also has a plate of doves’ heads, as Kircher had told him. He had sprinkled flower petals on the meticulously scrubbed floorboards.
After hours of trial and error, Frank solves the puzzle and opens the box. A distant bell begins to ring with a somber tolling, seemingly coming from nowhere. The brick wall opens up into another world. He sees a tempest of vast blackbirds before the wall solidifies again. The single bulb in the ceiling goes out, and he stands in darkness. Then there is light again, phosphoric.
He had expected sighs, and languid bodies spread amongst flowers underfoot like a living carpet; had expected virgin whores whose every crevice was his for the asking and whose skills would press him — upwards, upwards — to undreamt-of ecstasies. The world would be forgotten in their arms. He would be exalted for his lust, instead of despised for it.
Frank’s expectations didn’t turn out to be true. Before him stands four sexless creatures bringing a stench intermingled with the scent of vanilla; their scarred flesh punctured, sliced, infibulated, and dusted down with what seemed like ash. They were theologians of the Order of the Gash, the Cenobites.
Their first words are, “What city is this?” This gives insight into their abilities. They seem not to be omniscient and don’t know where the Schism opens. It also suggests they can’t read minds.
Frank notices there are only four of them and asks where the fifth is. He says Kircher had told him there would be five of them.
How did Kircher know? The information can’t come from the diaries as Frank read those and, as such, wouldn’t specify that Kircher told him. We don’t know who had the box before Kircher — besides, perhaps Gilles de Rais and Bolingbroke.
One out of two things must have happened: someone was present as another summoned the Cenobites, or someone has escaped them.
They question whether he knows who they are, to which he answers, “Yes.” Then they ask what he wants from them, and he replies, “Pleasure.” They inquire about his hedonic fantasies, but he can’t articulate them. They say they already knew what he expected. They could give him pleasure, but “Not as you understand it” and “Your most treasured depravity is child’s play beside the experiences we offer.” Lastly, they ask him, “Will you partake of them?” and “There’s no going back.” He answers them with a defiant “Show me.”
Interestingly, they asked if he wanted to partake and told him there was no going back. They make it seem like he can choose not to participate. This contradicts their later statements about Kirsty having no choice for opening the box.
As a sample of what they could offer, they subjected him to a sensory overload, unlike anything he had ever experienced. His senses were heightened until the faintest of sensory stimuli became unbearable. His thoughts and memories became more vivid than reality had ever been. He masturbated to ejaculation only to collapse onto the puddle of sperm on the floor. The sensory onslaught kept increasing as he screamed.
Then it stopped.
The Cenobites were gone, and so were the doves’ heads, the jug of urine, and the petals on the floor — an interesting choice of things to take. The doves’ heads and the jug of urine seem like something they would be interested in. Those can be interpreted as representations of death and depravity. The petals are more complicated to explain.
There might be two explanations: the Cenobites appreciate beauty despite their motives and appearance, or perhaps they would use flowers as a memento of the human world — a means to torture their victims by reminding them of their previous lives. Otherwise, the subtle beauty of a flower petal seems uninteresting to beings pushing the boundaries of sensual experience.
Where two moments before, there had been and empty space, there was now a figure. It was the forth 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 rotten human heads, and smiled in welcome.
She has “twenty or more” tongues laid out on her thighs. This seemingly contradicts an earlier statement by the Cenobites that “A handful at best.” has opened the box. This suggests they can access victims through sources other than the box or create illusions.
And indeed, reportedly, there are other ways to summon the Cenobites, as Frank learns during his imprisonment. One is in the vaults of the Vatican, a chart hidden in a code in a theological work. Another comes in the form of an origami exercise. Reportedly once possessed by Marquis de Sade. Frank, however, questions the truth of the information.
It is not specified who told Frank about the other methods. He mentions questioning the verity of the information, as it is unverifiable. It is interesting if another prisoner told him, thinking it may have lied or given false information.
Another possibility is that the Cenobites told him, so he questions the verity. Be that in the conventional sense or through some torturous hallucinatory scenario. He believes he could have been deceived regardless of how he got the information.
The Cenobite says: “Oh, so you’ve finished dreaming. Good. Now we can begin.” That’s the last we see from Frank for a couple of months. He ended up getting more than he bargained for — a lot more. Or as he realizes a moment before the Cenobite takes him to the Gash: “He had made a mistake opening the Lemarchand’s box. A very terrible mistake.”
A glaring question is whether the Cenobites are malicious or only concerned with giving the person opening the box the most extreme sensual experience possible, having no other motives and not doing it for their enjoyment. Perhaps their concept of pleasure is so far removed from ours that it’s simply a misunderstanding.
Frank later muses that he had been naive in thinking his definition of pleasure significantly overlapped with theirs: “They called it pleasure; perhaps they meant it. Perhaps not. It was impossible to know with these; they were so hopelessly, flawlessly ambiguous.”
Another question is how much Kircher knew about the Cenobites’ motives and methods. He seemed somewhat familiar with the summoning process and the Cenobites themselves, for example, how many there were. He perhaps also knew they wanted doves’ heads. Maybe he knew what was going to happen. If so, what would be his motive for deceiving Frank? Did he have a deal with the Cenobites?
Nevertheless, Frank reminisces about forces encouraging such arrogance because they traded on it. Is he referring to the Cenobites, some other entity, or Kircher? Or perhaps Kircher was just as oblivious.
Lodovico Street Fifty-Five
Frank has a brother named Rory. They were different. Rory was a model citizen, while Frank lived a wayward life. Their paths had diverged in late adolescence despite being inseparable as children. They seldom met as Frank traveled the world fleeing problems only to create them anew. Rory regretted not staying in touch. However, he didn’t condone Frank’s wild lifestyle and the pain it had brought to their parents.
Four years before the main events, Frank returns to attend the wedding of Rory and his fiancé Julia. Frank seduces the willing Julia, and they end up having sex. She later remembers the situation as having “[…] all the aggression and the joylessness of rape.” A memory she would never forget.
Memory sweetened events, of course, and in the four years (and five months) since that afternoon, she’d replayed the scene often. Now, in remembering it, the bruises were trophies of their passion; her tears proof positive of her feelings for him.
Julia’s feelings for Frank never died despite not seeing him in four years. She fantasizes about being with him instead of Rory, which she does not love. She believes he doesn’t love her either, only her beauty.
They moved to Lodovico Street. The same house where Frank had opened the box some months earlier. The brothers inherited the property after their grandmother’s death. As Julia inspects the rooms to choose a master bedroom, she enters the room where Frank had opened the box. She hears a bell ring and assumes it’s the church. She thinks the room feels “hateful.” When she leaves, she locks the door for unknown reasons. At that exact moment, the bell stops ringing.
Despite her initial feelings, she repeatedly returns to the room. For some reason, it gave her a sense of comfort. Like “a dead woman’s womb,” she thinks. Her feelings are connected to Frank.
Some days later, Rory cuts himself on a chisel while working in Frank’s room. Through the sperm Frank left on the floor before the Cenobites took him, he has an anchor in the world. Through that anchor, he could open a portal and consume his brother’s blood to regain some of his strength. Frank’s insatiable urges would save him from the horrible fate they had also brought upon him.
He had been lucky. Some prisoners had departed from the world without leaving sufficient sign of themselves from which, given the adequate collision of circumstances, their bodies might be remade. He had. Almost his last act, bar the shouting, had been to empty his testicles. […] Rory (sweet butter-fingered Rory) had let his chisel slip, there was something of Frank to profit from the pain. He had found a finger-hold for himself, and a glimpse of strength with which he might haul himself to safety.
Frank knew it was possible because he had heard it whispered that loopholes in the system allow an individual to regress to the location from which it came. If a prisoner manages to escape, the Cenobites can’t follow. They must be summoned across the Schism.
During a party, Julia excuses herself, saying she will go to bed. Instead, she goes to Frank’s room. As she opens the door, she feels that something is different. She stood in the darkness for a while and heard a sound. The sound grew more urgent, and she approached it. The wall began to come apart before her. She heard tinkling music. Then she saw something. She didn’t know it then, but it was Frank. Or what little was left of him.
It was human, she saw, or had been. But the body had been ripped apart and sewn together again with most of its pieces either missing or twisted and blackened as if in a furnace. There was an eye, gleaming at her, and the ladder of a spine, the vertebras stripped of muscle; a few unrecognizable fragments of anatomy. That was it. That such a thing might live beggared reason — what little flesh it owned was hopelessly corrupted. Yet live it did.
Frank managed to whisper, “Julia. It’s Frank. Blood.” He would use Julia’s loveless marriage and longing for him to convince her to bring him blood. She reasoned that if blood would restore Frank, she would provide it. She had found a source of happiness again, hoping to be reunited with Frank.
Escaping the Cenobites
When Frank works, Julia goes to a bar to find someone to sacrifice. She convinces a man to come with her home. She is nervous but doesn’t seem to feel compassion for the man she will kill. She takes him to Frank’s room, closes the door, and hangs Rory’s jacket on the knob. The jacket contains a knife. The man attempts to leave for the restroom, and she kills him with the knife. Frank feeds on the shriveling body.
Already the blood on the floor was crawling away towards the wall where Frank was, the beads seeming to boil and evaporate as they came within sight of the skirting board. She watched, entranced. But there was more. Something was happening to the corpse. It was being drained of every nutritious element, the body convulsing as its innards were sucked out; gases moaning in its bowels and throat, the skin desiccating in front of her startled eyes.
Julia can’t see Frank. She calls for him, but he doesn’t answer. When he is finished feeding, she collects the remains. She hears Rory coming home and hides the remains in a spare room filled with junk. She tells Rory she feels ill and will soon come downstairs but sneaks back into Frank’s room and collects the bits and pieces left of the corpse.
She hears Frank in the corner telling her not to look at him. His voice is weak but stronger than the first time he spoke. He tells her not to let Rory near him and that he needs more blood as he is “only half-made.” She leaves the room, and behind her, she hears a sound, not unlike laughter or sobs.
Rory finds Julia’s recent behavior suspicious and asks his friend Kirsty to visit her the next day to speak with her. He hopes Julia will open up to Kirsty, who he doesn’t know is secretly in love with him.
The next day, Julia returns to the bar to find another victim. She takes him home to Frank’s room and tells him to close his eyes. He obliges. She sneaks to the door to get the knife, but a sound makes the man open his eyes. It’s Frank anticipating the feeding. The man notices Frank in the shadows. Julia attacks with the knife, cuts him in the neck, and stabs him to death. Julia noticed Frank seemed stronger than the last time she saw him.
The doorbell rings, and Frank tells Julia to answer the door. It’s Kirsty. Julia tells Kirsty she was sleeping. Kirsty doesn’t believe her but doesn’t say anything. She notices a damp gaberdine on the coat stand behind Julia. Kirsty says she wants to talk, but Julia tells her she doesn’t want to and slams the door. Kirsty suspects Julia is cheating on Rory and contemplates telling him but decides she needs more evidence.
Julia returns to Frank and finds that he has dismembered the corpse. Pieces of bone and dried meat lay scattered about the room. She noticed he had regenerated since she left him just a moment ago.
In that brief time he had changed out of all recognition. Where there had been withered cartilage there were now ripening muscle; the map of his arteries and veins was being drawn anew: they pulsed with stolen life. There was even sprouting of hair, somewhat premature perhaps given his absence of skin, on the raw ball of his head.
He complains about the pain caused by his nerves regenerating and needs more blood. Julia tells Frank she has to clean up the room as Rory will come home soon. Frank angrily says, “Rory! My darling brother! How in God’s name did you come to marry such a dullard?” Julia becomes angry and says, “I love him,” but immediately corrects herself, “I thought I loved him.” Did she, in anger, blurt out the truth, or has she tried to convince herself she loved Rory for so long it’s the natural answer, but she knows it’s not true?
Looking down at the dismembered man, she’s almost overwhelmed with self-revulsion. For the first time, she questions what she has done and dreams about doing. She realizes she’s no better than Frank, “no fouler ambition could rest in his head than the one that presently cooed and fluttered in hers.” Then, she concludes that what is done is done.
Frank says that after she has healed him, they will be together. He will convince Rory she should be with him instead. He says that if they had been together, he would never have given away his body and soul so cheaply. She would have been his reason to live. Julia touches Frank’s body and thinks that she has made him. It gave her a thrill of ownership. Is this feeling of ownership important for Julia? Perhaps it’s a way for her to feel control over something in her life.
Kristy decides to gather more evidence against Julia. She finds a vantage point where she can spy on the house and waits for Julia to come home. A couple of hours later, Julia returns with an unknown man. He didn’t seem like someone from Julia’s social circle. He makes a nervous backward glance before entering the house.
Kirsty waits for a while before sneaking around the house and entering the backdoor. Meanwhile, Julia tries to lure the man up the stairs and into Frank’s room. The man realized what he did was wrong and became agitated. Julia tried to calm him, but he started flailing. He stops when he hears Frank’s voice from the top of the stairs. Frank attacks the man with superhuman strength and drags him toward his room.
Kirsty has entered the house. She goes up the stairs to find the bedroom door ajar, but Julia and the man aren’t there. The man comes out the door from Frank’s room. His body was withered. He throws himself at Kirsty, but Frank gets hold of him and begins consuming him as he withers up before her eyes. Kirsty runs down the stairs towards the front door.
When Frank calls for her, the voice sounds familiar. She stops and turns around. It’s Rory’s voice, or a voice very similar. She turns to flee again, but Frank grabs her and drags her toward his room. Kirsty thought she glimpsed Julia.
In the room, Frank begins molesting her. He tells her he’s Frank. Kirsty attacks his face, tearing off globs of flesh. She hurries towards the door in the darkness, but Frank pursues. She sees a box with items and finds Lemarchand’s Configuration.
One can question why the Configuration is in Frank’s room. Either Frank brought it with him as he fled the Cenobites, or it has been in the room all along. Both alternatives are bizarre. Why would he have access to the box in the Gash? The other victims didn’t get to keep it. One can assume the Cenobites want others to open it. It doesn’t make much more sense that Frank wouldn’t have looked for it while staying in the room.
Kirsty hits Frank in the head with the box. Frank attacks her, injuring her in the face and upper chest. When she raises the box to hit him again, Frank recognizes it and stops attacking her. Its presence makes him uneasy. He tells her to give it to him, but she refuses and throws it out the window. Frank panics, and she flees.
Frank was so nervous about the box he didn’t dare take it from her with force. Perhaps he was afraid of it being opened and summoning the Cenobites. Why was he so shocked when she threw it out the window that he forgot about Kirsty? One can assume he has some rather bad PTSD from his experiences related to the box and didn’t behave logically.
Kristy takes the box with her as a souvenir of her defiance as she leaves the house. Injured and dazed, she wanders some unknown street as “[…] words began to come — a hopeless babble, fragments of things seen and felt.”
Again, the Bells Toll
Kirsty wakes up in the hospital. A nurse says she was clutching the box when they found her and asks if she wants to have it back. Kristy takes it. She thinks about the events and decides to rest and tell the authorities tomorrow.
She plays with the box out of boredom and solves it. Again, the bells begin to toll. She gets up from the bed and looks out the window, trying to find the source of the sound. She realizes it doesn’t come from the outside. It comes from behind her.
At the end of the bed stands a Cenobite, bathed in a phosphoric light. It says, “The box is a means to break the surface of the real. A kind of invocation by which we Cenobites can be notified.”
What does it mean to break the surface of the real? Is everything an illusion, or does the Cenobite define the “unreal” as that which lies beyond our world? Does it say the Gash isn’t real? Considering Frank’s injuries when he returns, one can assume they are real. The Cenobite must refer to that which is beyond our world. Later, it says they should leave them [the humans] to their patchwork and enter the Schism. It’s unclear what it’s referring to.
As she talks with the Cenobite, a nurse enters the room and asks if Kristy called for someone. The nurse can’t see nor hear the Cenobite and leaves when Kristy says she’s okay.
The question reemerges about choosing not to participate in the Cenobites’ games. They asked Frank if he wanted to participate and told him there was no going back, as if they were trying to warn him not to make the wrong decision. The Cenobite tells Kristy she has no choice and says, “It’s quite beyond your control.” It also says the Schism can’t be closed before they have taken what is theirs.
A solution could be that the Cenobite is deceptive and knows Kristy could help them get Frank back. But that idea falls upon the earlier statement that they can’t read minds nor know where the Schism opened. In that case, they could not know who Kristy was or where the Schism led.
Perhaps they played a game with Frank. They inquired about his hedonic fantasies as if they would consider those. They seem to appreciate talking to their victims before they reap them. It gives another layer to the sadism. The victim goes into the experience willingly and unknowingly, forever going to damn their decision.
The Cenobite tells Kirsty, “No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering.” That implies suffering is their goal, answering the earlier question about their motives.
Kirsty asks the Cenobite if it’s interested in where she got the box. The Cenobite replies, “Not particularly.” However, it shows interest when she says she knows where Frank is. It asks her if she’s proposing giving them him to take instead of her, and she says yes. The Cenobite says that if she succeeds, they maybe “[…] won’t tear your soul apart.” And that she has to make Frank “confess himself.”
The Ghosts in the Box
Rory comes home and finds Julia standing at the bottom of the stairs. She seemed troubled. He thinks she’s going to confess to being unfaithful. She clutches her victim’s banister in her hand. Rory tells her to say whatever she has to say. She answers that it would be easier if she showed him and led him upstairs, where Frank was waiting. They kill Rory and skin him so Frank can wear his skin and take his identity.
Kristy arrived at the house and rang the doorbell. Julia opens the door. Kirsty asks where Rory is. Julia says he’s there. Kirsty asks to see him, and Julia lets her in. Frank sits by the table in the dining room, drinking, wearing Rory’s skin. Laid across an adjacent chair is Julia’s wedding dress.
Kirsty notices blood on Rory’s (Frank’s) face. She asks him what happened. He says everything is right and that Julia told him everything that happened the previous day. During the following conversation, Rory acts suspiciously. He’s seemingly oblivious to having asked Kirsty to talk with Julia the day before. He says he and Julia killed Frank.
They ask if she wants to see the body, and she says yes. Kirsty and Julia go to Frank’s room, where a skinless body lies on the floor. Kirsty hears the bell begin to ring and thinks the Cenobites are coming.
She hurries down the stairs to leave the house, sparing Rory the sight. She stops and looks at him and notices how damaged his face is. He says that he and Julia will go to the authorities. When he says, “Come to daddy,” and attempts to hug her, she realizes it’s Frank. It’s something Rory would never say. She tells Frank she knows it’s him.
The coming of the Cenobites makes the hallway lights burn dazzling bright before going out. The walls and floor begin to glow and dance, changing color. Frank attacks Kirsty, but she dodges. He pulls a knife from under his jacket and says he’s Rory now. Julia attacks Kirsty from behind, and Frank accidentally stabs Julia in the chaos. He starts to feed on her as he had fed on the men Julia provided him.
Kristy flees and hides in the junk room. Frank enters the room and looks for her but soon leaves again. After a while, she tries to sneak out but gets hiccups. Frank notices her and attacks her. She dodges and runs into Frank’s room to throw herself out the window. She stumbles over Rory’s skinned body and lets out a scream. Frank enters the room and attacks her again.
He stops mid-motion. The Cenobites’ hooks and chains immobilize him. They tell Kirsty to leave and kill Frank by ripping him into pieces and taking him back to the Gash.
His limbs separated from his torso, and his head from his shoulders, in a welter of bone shards and heat. She threw the door closed, as something thudded against it from the other side. His head, she guessed.
She barges down the stairs but is stopped by Julia’s pleading. She is sitting on the floor “in the middle of this domestic wasteland,” clad in her wedding dress with the bride’s veil covering her face. Kirsty notices the pleading isn’t coming from behind the veil but from Julia’s decapitated head on a pillow in the bride’s lap. The veil rises and levitates, and from under it shines a powerful light with “the brilliance of a minor sun.” A voice sighs from behind the veil, “I am the Engineer.”
Kirsty flees out of the house. She stops at the corner of Lodovico Street and looks back at the house, which is now quiet and still. A pedestrian collides with her, and she sees that it is the Engineer before it disappears. She realizes she holds the box in her hand, which was placed there by the Engineer. It’s sealed and polished to a high gloss.
She turned it over in her hand. For the frailest of moments she seemed to see ghosts in the lacquer. Julia’s face, and that of Frank. She turned it over again, looking to see if Rory was held here: but no. Wherever he was, it wasn’t here.
But why didn’t they take both Frank and Kirsty? The Cenobite had said they would perhaps not tear her soul apart. What would be the reason for saying so if it wasn’t a reality if they couldn’t or wouldn’t have done it? If they only wanted Frank. Perhaps it was to extract also that little bit of suffering. But what are their criteria for choosing suitable subjects?
Did they take Julia because she helped Frank? In that case, they can take others than those that summoned them, which hasn’t been mentioned before. Again, that makes one question their criteria for suitable subjects. Or did she ask to be taken by them? Is this a darker version of Romeo and Juliet? An even more twisted version where Juliet doesn’t just kill herself when she realizes Romeo is dead; she sentences herself to eternal torture and damnation.
Barker leaves us with yet another unanswered question.
Regarding Barker’s Prose
Barker’s prose is a thing of beauty, especially in juxtaposition with the grotesqueries it often describes. Perhaps Barker’s biggest strength is description. Few, if any, can create a more visceral depiction of horror and gore. Barker has said that stories come to him as visual scenes, and his job as a writer is to describe them and translate them into literary form. Being a skilled graphic artist likely also helps.
I will use the final paragraph of the novella as an example of Barker’s literary skill. It’s also a great contrast to everything else in the story. All else is bleak and void of hope, drenched in the feeling of impending doom. On the other hand, this quote talks about hope and being content with the situation despite it all.
The context is Kirsty thinking about the possibility of a puzzle that could bring her and Rory together again. This is an excellent way to end this long, all-too-long essay about horror and darkness — a bittersweet ending to an all-but-sweet story.
She would wait and watch, as she had always watched and waited, hoping that such a puzzle would one day come to her. But if it failed to show itself she would not grieve too deeply, for fear that the mending of broken hearts be a puzzle neither wit nor time had the skill to solve.
Thank you for reading.
