Hellbound Hearts Read Online Free Page A

surrounding a thing’s loss was far more entertaining than the found artifact itself, but once he’d let himself relax into the film’s willfully leisurely pacing, he realized he was starting to enjoy it.
    The lead girl—Alice Lavender, the girl from his still—helped a lot. She was just adorable as the feisty little heroine trying to impress both her crusty editor and her policeman boyfriend by cracking the story surrounding the mysterious deaths. And the life-sized dolls produced from the toymaker’s Cabinet and sent forth to murder and mutilate anybody dumb enough to piss off Doctor Coppelius were quite successfully creepy. Their skin, post-transmutation, had a pale inhuman smoothness and there was stitching—rather convincing stitching—on their faces and limbs. Their eyes were completely black—the blackness, unfortunately, put in with a traveling ink-out like they’d given Tom Tyler in one of the
Mummy
sequels—but the fact was that, when the actors stood still long enough for the blobs not to move, the effect was surprisingly powerful.
    What was really fascinating—and torturously enticing—was how obvious it actually was that the movie had been cut and had had new scenes added, with both the cuts and the additions serving to dilute whatever power the original may have had. Some of the nastier doll-demon murders simply
stopped
midcarnage and jumpcut to the next scene, for example, and there was a higher than usual quota of those annoying bits where an Irving the Explainer figure went to quite ridiculous lengths to explain how what might have appeared to be supernatural was actually a combination of engineering wizardry and showmanship gone all evil-genius.
    The most egregious and frustrating alteration came at the climax. The movie built to the capture of Alice’s character by Coppelius and his toymaker and her insertion into the Cabinet. Thrillingly,unlike every other transformation, the camera followed her in. The Cabinet was bigger on the inside. Much bigger. So much so that it soon became clear that the inside of the Cabinet wasn’t the inside of the Cabinet at all. The Cabinet was a portal to Hell and its unlucky entrants were quite literally prisoners of the inferno. This was where Jack’s still had come from, this sequence in which the fetishized binding of the girl took on an overwhelming and shaming erotic power. And then, just as she was being dragged from the pillar toward the disturbingly elaborate doll-making machinery, another of those obvious cuts happened and the whole sequence was revealed as being merely the nightmare of the kidnapped girl
before
she was put into the Cabinet. And then, of course, the door burst open and her policeman boyfriend rescued her.
    Jack
knew
that it hadn’t been a dream in the original and that
Prisoners of the Inferno
must have culminated not only in the activation and operation of the machinery but in the reopening of the Cabinet and the disgorging of whatever doll-demon Alice had been turned into. He ached to see it.
    It was starting to rain when they came out, and Jack found himself standing on the curb next to Lenny, both of them looking up at the sky with the vaguely hard-done-to expression common to non-native Angelenos whenever the weather wasn’t perfect. As if Southern California had misled them, brought them here under false pretenses, strung them along like a lover who waits till after the wedding to mention that occasional little problem with bipolar disorder.
    Lenny caught Jack’s eye. “Did you like it?” he asked.
    â€œYeah,” Jack said. “I did. Overall. How about you?”
    â€œNot as good as the real thing,” Lenny said, almost distractedly, as he pulled his jacket over his head like a makeshift hoodie and ran for his car.
3
    Carducci had a small store in one of the commercial alleys off Hollywood Boulevard. Some nice stuff, but mainly repros and shit for the