What Hell May Come

by Rex Hurst

  “There’s just one problem, though,” Michael said. “Calach and I have discussed it at length and that’s tuition.”

  “Tuition?”

  “I can’t afford Stanford. Even with loans and grants and things, it’s just too much. My parents refused to give me any money, but there is a way they can fund it all. Insurance.”

  “Insurance.” Jon felt like a Mynah bird.

  Michael pulled a .45 automatic from his backpack and gleefully licked it. Instinctively, Jon jumped back, hands covering his genitals.

  “Where the hell did you get that?”

  “Does it really matter at this moment?” Michael said, bobbing the gun with every syllable.

  A reply stuck in Jon’s throat. His friend was gone, really gone, and he sensed that the wrong statement would loose a bullet into his chest.

  “How are you gonna get away with it?”

  “The man up here,” Michael tapped the gun barrel to his temple. “He knows how to type in the cheat codes of the Universe. He’s got it arranged. He gave those two people . . . what were their names . . . those people AIDS. He can do the same for me. Together we can do anything.”

  Michael bounded up to the screen door. Manic energy pumped through him from beyond, yet his body shook as if about to collapse. His hand gripped the door handle. Jon didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do, hoped it was all just a dumb game, but he knew it wasn’t. Michael’s parents were lazy dicks, but that shouldn’t be a capital crime.

  All he could think of was to say, “What about the limerick?”

  Michael stopped, thumb pressed on the door lock. “Limerick?”

  “You always have a limerick ready. What’s the one for this situation?”

  “No . . . I don’t think so.” Michael flung the door open and bellowed, imitating Ricky Ricardo, “Lucy, you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do!”

  Bang . . . query, bang, bang, scream . . . . Thump, thump, thump, bang, yell, bang, bang, scream, thump, thump, thump . . . smash, scream, bang . . . roar, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

  He must’ve emptied the clip. Jon ventured inside. The stink of gunpowder was thick. They were gone, all gone. Michael’s older brother was sitting hunched over in the front of the TV, a Road Runner cartoon playing on the screen. A hole the size of a human fist had been punctured into the back of his head. What was left of his brains dripped onto a pinhole ridden shirt.

  When he entered the kitchen, Jon slipped on Michael’s mother’s blood, the one who could never remember his name. He fell and came face-to-face with her corpse. Though, it was more like face-to-lack-of-face. Jon screamed and ran the fuck out of there. The last he saw of Michael was his former friend standing on the second-floor landing, where he presumably had killed the rest of his family.

  He was waving the gun about and screamed, “Everything’s comin’ up roses. Michael Dutch is the ten spot. The wheel of fortune’s got my number and I’m riding it to the good life. You wait and see. You fuckers, you slugs of the earth, you scum who rule. High aces and red roses.”

  And he ran. Jon tore away from the dead end house as fast as he has ever run in his life. Blood smeared on his jacket. The devil nipping at his heels. Lungs burning and squealing in rage. Sirens in the far distance. Strangers glancing at him fleeing. All would be well. All would be happy. He just had to reach safety, home base, like a game of hide-and-seek. There it was. For once, his family house was a beautiful thing of solace. A place of medieval sanctuary.

  No one was home, thank goodness. Jon stripped off his jacket. Bloody. That could be cleaned. His pants. Bloody. Toss that in the same load. Shoes. Bloody, not good. That would take some soaking. He imagined himself having left a literal trail of bloody footprints up to his own front door. On the other hand, his shirt was fine. Socks unsoiled. Cap . . . Panic. Panic. The ball cap was gone. Must’ve fallen off his head in Michael’s kitchen.

  Time to kick furniture. Time to scream at the world. Hit the wall. Blame the universe. Why did this stuff happen? Why couldn’t life be simple? Was this the end of Jon St. Fond? Would he be convicted as an accessory to murder and sent to prison, there to be passed around for a pack of smokes? Boldly, Jon opened the secret door in his parent’s closet and grabbed the expensive bottle of booze stashed there. If they didn’t like it, fuck ‘em. One gulp, two gulp, red gulp, blue gulp. Drink. Drink away the pain.

  The door slammed downstairs. Father called out his name. Jon sluggishly walked out, whiskey on his breath, decked in T-shirt, underpants, and sparkling white socks. Father tossed Jon’s cap at his feet. The world immediately became lighter. How had he gotten it?

  “Are you done playing the fool?” Father demanded. “Time to stop groveling and bargaining with these creatures and start commanding them. That’s what the family does. These creatures put up a strong front, but underneath are weak, easily cowed. They have no substance, no identity to call their own. So what kind of a person falls prey to them?

  “You are a man, the most powerful being ever forged in the fires of creation. Man is the destroyer. All things eventually crumble to him. There is nothing that he cannot conquer. Where you’re going, you will need to stand on your own two feet. I can protect you no longer. The test ahead is for you to pass or fail. In light of what just happened, I’m shipping you out to France tonight.”

  Jon drunkenly burped in reply.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Devil’s Bellows

  Was there ever a city fouler than Paris? The whole place was putrid. The food stank, the air stank, the water stank, and the people stank worst of all. No wonder it was the French who invented perfume. It was needed to knock out the fetid odors leaking out the hairy crevices of every Parisian. The metropolis was built on a foundation of human waste. Take two steps across any yard and your feet would scuff up some vile fart entombed two millennia ago by Roman soldiers.

  Adding to their stinkiness was their foul attitude. People say New Yorkers are rude, but they are nothing compared to the average Parisian. They all speak English but pretend not to. They will shove you aside. They don’t break for traffic lights. One whiff of an accent will bring on a barrage of insults spouted right to the person’s face—in French, of course. They assume the average tourist doesn’t speak their lingua. Even if you make an attempt to speak their language, it makes no difference. Everything costs double when they hear Uncle Sam’s twang.

  Not that Jon tried to endear himself to the locals. He wallowed away in his overpriced tourist hotel, bored and angry, forced to eat over-rich and saucy French cuisine. And forget about getting decent French fries in Paris

  Jon had been stuck alone in that stink pot for two weeks while waiting on his family to contact him. Father had literally shoved a passport—something Jon did not know had been acquired for him—a plane ticket, and a fat wallet of francs at Jon, then kicked his son onto a plane. After a quick stopover in Toronto, it was off to the land of the croissant.

  The only good thing was that he could legally drink here. So, he downed as much as he could. His temper didn’t improve after three bottles and that led to many brash altercations with wine merchants, each pretending they couldn’t understand Jon’s insults.

  “Just gimme the fucking bottle, you lazy snail eatin’ faggot frog,” Jon yelled, throwing a handful of francs at a beard in a beret. “Take your goddamn monopoly money and go fuck yourself.”

  He stumbled down the corkscrew streets at night, screaming over and over a limerick Michael had composed in saner days, much to the hatred of the locals he awoke.

  “There once was a fellow named Glantz

  Who, on entering a toilet in France,

  Was in such a heat,

  To paper the seat,

  That he shit right into his pants.”

  It was Jon’s farewell to his oldest friend. One that he’d never be able to complete in person. Apparently once the cuffs were slapped on, Michael went into a delirious state then lapsed into catatonia
. There was a debate on whether to stash his body in a regular slob hospital or go right ahead and warehouse him in the loony bin.

  Jon did have one task to perform while in Paris. A letter had been waiting for him at the hotel when he arrived after an aggravating taxi ride. In it was a pamphlet about the life of St. Fond, the Catholic Saint, and a note instructing Jon to memorize the contents. The family promised to come for him once he had. Jon had put it off for a while, the lure of alcohol and intense wine hangovers were very distracting, but eventually boredom drove him back to its study.

  The Life of St. Fond

  In the third century after the crucifixion of our lord and savior, Jesus Christ, Emperor Diocletian unleashed the last and most terrible of the ten persecutions of the early church. Unto the land of Gaul was sent Dacian as prefect and procurator. He was stern of face and harder at hand. He was to wipe out this new scourge of Christians once and for all. Anyone who would not renounce their faith to the Lord was executed. Thousands perished under his direction.

  Fond was the name of a little maiden born in the Auvergne region of modern day France. Her parents were wealthy, and she was taught to be courteous and gentle to everyone. Her nature was sweet and pure, and her face was fair with the kind of beauty that shines from within. The town where they dwelled was mostly Christians and they all lived happily together.

  Then one day, a great calamity was heard in the center of town. On the horizon, Dacian and his column of Roman soldiers were seen approaching. The reason of his coming was known to all. Upon entering the town, Dacian proclaimed in the marketplace that every Christian who refused to sacrifice to the heathen gods should be tortured and put to death. To make his meaning quite plain, the soldiers spread out all the terrible instruments of torture, so that men might know exactly what lay before them if they refused to deny Christ.

  One by one, that night, the Christians in the town slipped away and scuttled to cower in caves in the nearby mountains. Even the bishop of the town was afraid to stand up to Roman might. In the morning, the only one to stand in the marketplace was the maid, Fond. Dacian, angered that so many others had escaped, focused his fury upon the little girl.

  Making the sign of the cross on different parts of her body, she uttered this prayer, ‘Lord Jesus, who art always ready to assist your servants, fortify me at this hour, and enable me to answer in a manner worthy of you.’

  Dacian then asked her, ‘What is your name?’

  She answered, ‘My name is Fond, and I am a servant of the Lord. I am His and you cannot hurt me.’

  Dacian asked, ‘What is your religion?’

  ‘From a babe, I have served Christ and to Him, I have consecrated my entire soul.’

  ‘Deny Him, and sacrifice to our gods,” thundered the prefect. “Else shalt thou endure every kind of torture, until there is no life left in thy young body.’

  ‘You serve the will of devils. How can I sacrifice to them?’

  ‘Dacian, in a rage, said: “You call our gods devils! Well, devils they may be, but you must sacrifice either an animal or your life to them.’

  ‘Without hesitation,’ Fond replied, ‘My life for my Lord.’

  To insult her honor, several townsmen were brought forward to claim that she had prostituted herself to them in order to turn them to the Christian faith. With the lie of her lack of virginity in place, she could be tortured under Roman law. A brazen bed was produced and Fond was tied to it with iron chains. A great fire was kindled under the bed, the heat of which burned her terribly. She was then taken from the bed and salt was pushed into her wounds. Then she was tied to a pillory and scourged with barbed whips.

  Just before she perished, a white dove came gently flying down from heaven, and rested on the child’s head. Soft dew fell from its wings, which healed the girl’s wounds so that her body might rest in perfect state while her soul was transplanted into heaven. Many of the Roman soldiers were touched by the child’s death and became Christians. They began to think that such a religion was worth living for if it could teach even a child to die so bravely.

  St. Fond’s feast day is October 6th and she is represented in art by the gridiron and scourge. She is the patron of soldiers and falsely accused women.

  The pamphlet then went on to describe various miracles attributed to St. Fond and the resting places of her relics, none of which was interesting.

  The next day, Jon received a call in his hotel room. It came in at five in the morning, before he could shake off the inevitable pounding wine hangover. Having gotten only a few hours of sleep, it took fifty rings before he could drag himself to the receiver.

  “Wake up, wake up,” a heavily accented Frenchman chirped. “It’s time to check out. We go.”

  “Go? Where?”

  “To Saint-Fond. Hurry up, I want to miss the early traffic. In Paris, it is the worst.”

  That was easier said than done. A beach ball inflated inside his skull every other second that was stomped on by a thunderous horse hoof. A brisk shower did nothing to help. He hadn’t bothered to unpack, so all he needed to do was toss his toothbrush back in the bag, and then drag it down four floors.

  It was Absolom below, sitting in a wire chair, eating an apricot. When Jon stumbled into view, Absolom threw a handful of bills at the desk clerk and offered Jon the pit from his fruit.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I am Absolom,” the older man said, throwing the rocky pit away. He didn’t need to introduce himself. It would near impossible for Jon to forget the man he saw in a tag-team three-way with his parents. “We are third cousins, once removed. But this has been explained, about the family, oui?”

  Oh, yes. Before parting, Father explained a great many things, revealed his grand plan and the insanity of it. By this time, Jon had learned to take it all in stride and let alcohol smooth out the rough edges of life.

  I will become number one. The Magus. Father had told him. And I will shape the world in my own skin. Here Jon was still the fool, still blindly walking the path towards destruction. Hopefully after this crucible, he would be forged into something else. That was how the unknown test ahead was explained to him.

  They zipped away in a red convertible through the dusk-lidded city, at an hour when even the night riding rats had decided to catch a few Zs, and coasted southwards to the commune of Saint-Fond, several hundred kilometers away. Communes, Jon discovered, were left-over bits of villages from ancient times that had been blanketed under a single term in the brief period when the shifting governments of the French Revolution stopped beheading each other long enough to get some paperwork done. The area paid its taxes, were told what national policies to implement, but otherwise Saint-Fond was pretty autonomous. The town, in one form or another, had been there since at least the 5th Century.

  “So, you know the story,” Absolom said, the wind whipping over his bald head. “And how does our family fits into it.”

  That seemed a no brainer. “We’re all descended from the Saint’s family. They probably didn’t have a last name, so they took hers.”

  He laughed and lit up one of those abnormally strong French cigarettes. “No. No. Think of who we are. What little you know of what we do. We are not saints, nor do we pretend to be. It is not the little imbecile we come from, but the one who is strong. We are of the line of Dacian.”

  “The one who put her to death?”

  “Mais oui. After the wholesale and violent conversion of people to the Christian faith, we kept the old ways, but hid them in the new. It’s an excellent trick.”

  “But weren’t her bones kept in a church at Saint-Fond village.”

  “At our private chapel, oui. Well, bones were kept there, probably not hers. But the casket was beautiful, done up in gold and velvet. People would come from all over the continent to pray before her and ask for a healing miracle. An excellent source of revenue.”

  “There are a lot of reports of actual healing from people touching her bones.”

  “Fake,
fake, fake. The original bones were stolen by revolutionaries and the gold melted down to pay for more guillotines. After Napoleon took power, we ‘recovered’ the bones and built a new casket. Then Hitler stormed in and the Church, with misguided zeal, moved them to a ‘safe’ spot in Spain and there they have remained ever since. The Church has repeatedly refused to hand them back.”

  “Couldn’t you like sue or something?’

  “We considered a lawsuit, but that would involve an international court and a lot of bad publicity. People don’t like it when you’re seen to be attacking Jesus. So we had no choice but to accept. One of our traditional cash cows gone.”

  Another trick. Another dodge for money. Was that all his family did? It couldn’t be. He remembered his great-aunt Charlotte and her undying remains. Father proposed a very different route from that which she took to power. Father saw himself as the High Priest of the family’s unnamed religion, and the others seemed to regard him this way. Jon had mentioned the old woman and Brian Elder to him and wondered which Father would end up like.

  They all attempted to go on beyond to fulfill their power dreams. And to what end? Even if they did succeed, who are they? Their fundamental personality is ripped off and thrown down like a threadbare suit. I want to remain who I am. So instead we will bring one of them here and through that, I will have my power.

  How? How? Jon had asked. How will that help you?

  By having it conceive the next messiah, a blending of here and beyond. Your sister has been raised to be this creature’s womb. A degraded vessel. A defiled conception. She will spawn this new dark messiah, shaped by our wills into our instrument. I will take charge of it and it will elevate me to the cosmic powers.

  Father refused to divulge anymore, especially about how exactly this dark messiah would escalate him. More would be revealed later, it was implied. Jon wasn’t certain of that. He wasn’t certain that this wasn’t another massive con.