"The Room Where Love Lives" (1993) by Grant Morrison
Hottest Blood: The Ultimate in Erotic Horror (1993) edited by Michael Garrett and Jeff Gelb
Readers unfamiliar with "The Room Where Love Lives" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.
The Rutting Room
"The Room Where Love Lives" is a pitch-perfect pastiche of Conan Doyle, but brought forward and grafted into the lusty, refulgent, carnal bricolage of Clive Barker. It is an arousing short story, eloquently written and overtopped with taboo sex shading into cosmic devolution and physical ruin.
Grant Morrison slowly reveals to readers that this is a contemporary adventure of occult detective Valentine. His authorial voice so perfectly captures the Edwardian tone that it comes as a shock when Mrs. Below dumps her grocery bags on the kitchen counter or sips ersatz YMCA coffee. No domestic servants or Scotland Yard inspectors are present to be harmed.
Aubrey Valentine is a pastiche Sherlock, as is the Watson narrator. Morrison gives us an entire Valentine casebook, suggested by a few titles of previous adventures. They are tossed-off beautifully, and suggest we are really reading a modern pastiche of a cherished classic.
Morrison's style is acutely balanced, and like his plot, by turns sublime and horrifically dirty.
A wedge of sunlight draped itself across table and floor like a flag, and Mrs. Bedlow paused to observe the dust motes moiling in the gauzy light. There was something unusual about the movement of the particles; they seemed to follow some subtle organizing pattern. Like iron filings on paper, the dust motes arranged themselves into spiderweb formations. These then exploded, unable to sustain coherence, and were rearranged into new configurations. She admired this restless choreography for some time before the effect faded and it seemed as though her eyes had been deceiving her from the start....
....Carrying a small tray, she began to climb the stairs. Now she could feel a movement, a pulsation in the air. She touched the wall and her fingertips registered a deep, thudding concussion. It seemed as though the pipes beneath the skin of paper and plaster were pounding with a slow, metronomic rhythm. She had a brief vision of gas mains, water pipes, and electric cables carrying arterial blood through the substructure of the house. The pulse quickened and Mrs. Bedlow felt her own heartbeat accelerate to match it. Sweat broke across her forehead and she was aware of a spreading dampness at her crotch, an involuntary, exciting, lubrication. She bit her lip and forced herself to the top of the stairs, reeling dizzily.
“Imogen,” she said, and her voice was hoarse and breathless, preorgasmic. She had spoken her daughter’s name as though it were the name of a lover. She approached the door of Imogen’s room and stopped short.
The door handle was swelling and contracting slightly, inflating and deflating like a lung. And the sounds that came from beyond the door had no place in a girl’s bedroom.
Slowly Mrs. Bedlow reached out to touch the keyhole. It was wet, leaking a musky sexual fluid. She raised her fingers to her lips and licked at them. She closed her hand around the warm, pulsing door handle and opened the door.
The whole room inhaled, drawing her into its suffocating heart. The smell of animals in heat. Smell of stained sheets and stale come and heated flesh.
“Look at me, Mummy,” said Imogen, giggling.
She was bent over the bed, moaning and salivating. Giselle Barnes, kneeling, worked her hand between Imogen’s legs. They both turned to look at Mrs. Bedlow, eyes heated to incandescence.
“Oh, God!” was the best Mrs. Bedlow could manage before the girls descended on her, tearing at her clothes.
The daughter's bedroom has been activated by the budding sexual desire of its occupants.
* * *
Valentine explains the lineage of this "Rutting Room."
....He turned to face me. “There’s a book in my large suitcase,” he said. “Cults of the Pandemonium. Would you be so kind as to fetch it for me?”
....“I should have known!” he said. His eyes scanned a page. “Erich Horney. My God. Horney was a disciple of Wilhelm Reich. He worked at the Organon Institute in Maine in the late ’40s, before splitting with Reich in 1952.”
We listened intently as Valentine summarized a brief biography of the aptly named Horney. He had adapted many of Wilhelm Reich’s sexual theories and taken them in unusual and, some thought, unethical directions.
“His dream was to create something which he called the Horney Chamber,” Valentine explained. “This seems to have been a more extravagant version of Reich’s orgone accumulator. Basically, Horney intended to create a room which could harness sexual energy, which he believed was an expression of the fundamental forces of the universe.” As he spoke, Valentine paced up and down the room.
“He claimed to have succeeded in building a prototype in 1965, but development was hampered by the fact that the room’s mechanisms could only be properly activated by an act of ‘indefinitely long’ sexual intercourse. Nevertheless, by judiciously employing four porno actors, Horney claimed that his chamber was able to absorb and redirect sufficient sexual energy to power the flight of a small gargoyle-like homunculus.
“His ultimate ambition was to create a room which could have sex with itself, thus producing an unlimited supply of power. A perpetual-motion sex engine.”
The present crisis, per Valentine, is a battle with cosmic stakes.
“There are certain powers and dominions in our universe,” Valentine said. “I can say only that they come from outside and that they are inimical to humanity. Sometimes we catch glimpses of their manifestations on this plane of being. They travel in many shapes, all hideous. They come howling through our blackest dreams, feeding on our fears and doubts.
“We call them The Mysteries, and I have dedicated my life to fighting them. They destroyed the only woman I have ever cared for, and now they have taken possession of the activated Horney Chamber. They will try to use its energies to create a window, through which they can enter our world en masse.”
“But my daughter…” Mrs. Bedlow began. Valentine silenced her with a gesture.
“Your daughter, your husband, and the others are nothing more than raw material to The Mysteries,” he said. “They will use them to destruction in order to power the room. When they have exhausted all the possible combinations of the human frame, The Mysteries will push them beyond the limits of flesh. They will become expressions of pure desire, without stable form.”
Mrs. Bedlow was sobbing uncontrollably now, and she managed to say only six words: “What are we going to do?”
Valentine stood up.
“You’re going to stay here, well away from the house,” he said, and then looked at me. “We are going to take the fight to The Mysteries.”
Taking the fight to The Mysteries leads Valentine and the Watson into the Rutting Room. Like the room in Arthur Machen's "N." its window now looks out on another reality.
I glanced at Valentine, blinding surveying the room, and tried to describe what I was seeing. I knew that he saw something quite different. His “sealed vision” permitted him to penetrate to the normally veiled essential nature of things. He saw the naked room.
“My God!” I heard him say. “The taint runs deep…”
He raised his bandaged hand toward the tall, narrow windows on the far side of the room. I forced myself to look beyond the carnal chaos to those open windows. The scene there bore no relation to the cityscape one would have expected to see from that perspective. Instead of chimneys and treetops and clouds, I found a nocturnal sky, filled with strange liquid stars. Silhouetted against these dream constellations, I discerned vast structures. The windows of these threatening buildings were lit with a whole new spectrum of unearthly colors. The buildings spat vast streamers of aurorae into the sky, and I heard sounds I cannot explain. For just a moment, it seemed, I was granted a vision of a world beyond known philosophies. A world where amniotic seas raged through living cities.
“What is that place?” I said. “What are those buildings?”
“Those are not buildings,” Valentine said....
Because Valentine has stalemated The Mysteries in previous adventures, he alone can now trump them in the Rutting Room. They are exercised as completely as Moriarty was extirpated at Reichenbach Falls. And Valentine, our Sherlock, survives to take the cleansed Horney Chamber for a spin elsewhere. Valentine has evolved from Sherlock to Doctor Who.
* * *
Selected cases of Aubrey Valentin:
Jay