Looking for a story title - about Crossword puzzle from hell

[Cheshire_Snark]

Hello -

This story hasn't been a podcast (AFAIK, though I think it would be an awesome candidate) but I'm hoping that the collective Horror fiction mojo of Pseudopod listeners might help me locate the story title -

The story is about someone who starts doing a crossword puzzle, and it turns out that the answers to the puzzle are things that only the main character could know. Example: "how did your pet rabbit die?", answer: "drowned".

The puzzle questions get increasingly unpleasant and the main character follows the instructions to get the answer right, eg: "what does rebecca's flesh taste like?" = "pork" ("though I could have guessed, it seemed important to make sure"), "what was the final course at the coprophages' banquet?" = "coffee" ("proving that the compiler of the puzzle had a sense of humour").

The answer to the final clue in the story is "Gate" or "Hell"... by finishing the puzzle the main character assures his/her damnation.

I read this about ... 6? years ago in a paperback anthology in a library. It feels like it should be a Clive Barker or (very grim) Neil Gaiman story but I don't have any of their books with me. The bits in quotes are as close to verbatim as I can remember.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, though I know it's a long shot.

[Sgarre1]

I think I've read this story but not as text fiction - it was in a very early issue of Marvel's HELLRAISER comic book.  And I think it might have been Gaiman.   It might be "Wordsworth"

[Cheshire_Snark]

Y'know, I think that's the one. I dimly remember some sort of B&W imagery going with the story (the one pic I found online just now seems a bit familiar), and it'd explain why I had both Gaiman and Barker coming up as references - I'll see if I can find the graphic novel at the library or online.

Thanks so much - I really thought this would be a long shot

[Moritz]

It sound's like Gaiman's "Wordsworth", illustrated by Dave McKean. I have it in Boom Comic's "Clive Barker's Hellraiser Masterpieces Volume One", it's also in Checker BPG's "Clive Barker's Collected Best Hellraiser", both are in color. A black and white version can be found in Pocket Book's "Hellbound Hearts". Yes, I am a Hellraiser fan 

[Cheshire_Snark]

Thank you!

This has been a dangerous discussion... now I'm working my way through the Hellraiser movies (well, Hellraiser & Hellraiser: Inferno so far, as I'm limited to what I can find on Netflix & youtube), and I've finally read the original Hellbound Heart.

My grandparents owned a video store when I was a kid and I had this fascination for the covers of the Hellraiser films (though I think we only had the first three or so) - I was just entranced by the aesthetic but not quite brave enough to borrow the tapes to watch*. Probably for the best, really, I was a precocious kid, but not THAT precocious!

Looking back, a LOT of my early story characters were very Cenobite in style but OH I could not have got the mindset more wrong....

Does anyone remember "Nightbreed"? That was a Clive Barker one as well, right?



*though I like to think my parents would have stopped me! Then again, I did get through the Alien franchise, John Carpenter's Vampires, Dusk til Dawn, the Friday 13th, Hallowe'en and Scream series without much parental intervention. And my stepdad took me to see Event Horizon at the cinema when I was about 13. Hm.

[lowky]

nightbreed was the movie based off of the short story Cabal, that was at the end of the Paperback version of Hellbound Heart.  I loved both the story and the movie.  It was set up for a sequel, but I don't think Barker ever wrote a sequel and there was no movie sequel.