Status Updates From Hellbound Hearts

He hoped she found the box. There’d been many nights when he’d overheard the couple, mostly the man, talking about it, their voices filtering hollowly through the floorboards into the basement. From what Lewis had been able to make out, the box had some tremendous power to grant wishes. Maybe it was sort of like Aladdin’s lamp with a genie inside, except it was a puzzle you had to solve instead of just rubbing on it.

“Jeremy, what are you talking about?” Candy screams. She knows but does not want to know. But already the Cenobites are pulling Jeremy and Candy toward them with invisible strings. The female Cenobite opens her arms toward Candy like a dancer awaiting her partner. Candy’s screams become ear piercing and bone chilling; you are certain those screams will reverberate within you until your dying day.

She assists her leader in his work; they are a perfect team. They even finish each other’s threats to those who dare call upon them, and take turns flaying those unfortunates who thought they knew what they were doing when they opened the Box. The silence from above no longer greets her words, but screams for mercy. They pray to Sister Cilice now. They are her supplicants, not the other way around.

A voice beside his ear purred, “How far do you want to go?” Elliott tried not to flinch. “All the way,” he said. The throaty chuckle of the unseen speaker seemed to echo around him. “Are you quite certain of that?” Sweat dribbled into Elliott’s eye, stinging, making him blink. “Yes,” he said hoarsely. “Well, then,” said the voice, and a light came on.

The company of others did nothing but confuse him, annoy him, disgust and discomfort him. As far as he was concerned, there were only two things that made human existence worthwhile, only two experiences that elevated life above the numbing mire of the everyday: Sex and pain. Pain and sex. The exquisite agony. The unendurable rapture.

Hell has its dominions. Nor Man’s Desire or Demon’s Design, may extend its bounds. Apart from the prescribed portals and summonings in the hearts of humankind. Philip Lemarchand.