What people are saying about
Burn, Beautiful Soul
Some books stay with a reader long after they’re read. Burn, Beautiful Soul is one of them. Donahue’s strong, clever narrative delivers a truly unique and entertaining story. The reader believes Basil, believes in Basil, and wants this monstrous demon to succeed as he walks among us. It’s Stranger in a Strange Land for literary horror enthusiasts.
Chris Bauer, author of Binge Killer, Hiding Among the Dead, Scars on the Face of God and Jane’s Baby
At times unnerving and unsettling, Donahue’s prose is as beautiful as it is frightening. … [He] reminds us that Hell isn’t just a place—it’s what we make of those places we call home. With enough humor to lighten the mood, and not discount the sensory experiences on the page, Donahue has written a masterful novel that fans of Christopher Moore and Joe Hill are sure to fall in love with.
H.A. Callum, author of Whispers in the Alders
Basil the demon escapes from Hell, eager to find a better world. The world he finds is ours. But is it better? He finds crass exploitation, abuse, and murder. He finds beauty in nature, and innocence and generosity in the hearts of friends. He finds the troubled and topsy-turvy world we know, a place so deranged that even a demon can fit in—for a while. Basil is not an innocent. He is a demon king, with baggage of his own. He kills the first two people he meets. His clumsy attempts at romance are touching but catastrophic. Eventually, his past and our world’s intolerance collide in a violent and shocking climax. Burn, Beautiful Soul is The Wizard of Oz with a demon Dorothy. It is Camus’s The Stranger of late capitalism. It is a loving but unsentimental dissection of America and its people. It is a story you will never forget.
John Schoffstall, author of Half-Witch
All hell breaks loose when an oversized demon bursts from the bowels of the earth to become an advertising exec in the American Midwest. Such is the ingenuity of William J. Donahue, whose often-unearthly characters manage to reveal much about the human condition. An imaginative farce.
Don Swaim, author of The Assassination of Ambrose Bierce: A Love Story, Man with Two Faces and The H.L. Mencken Murder Case
Burn, Beautiful Soul
A Novel
Burn, Beautiful Soul
A Novel
William J. Donahue
Winchester, UK
Washington, USA
First published by Cosmic Egg Books, 2020
Cosmic Egg Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., 3 East St., Alresford, Hampshire SO24 9EE, UK
[email protected]
www.johnhuntpublishing.com
www.cosmicegg-books.com
For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.
Text copyright: William J. Donahue 2019
ISBN: 978 1 78904 526 0
978 1 78904 527 7 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953644
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.
The rights of William J. Donahue as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design: Stuart Davies
UK: Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
US: Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, 7300 West Joy Road, Dexter, MI 48130
We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.
For Randy G., “only a phone call away”
Previous Books by William J. Donahue
Too Much Poison
ISBN: 978-1496957856
Filthy Beast: Fiendish Lullabies
ISBN: 978-0595337057
Brain Cradle: Menagerie of the Perverse
ISBN: 978-0595270293
“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”
Oscar Wilde
Contents
Prologue Too Far Gone
Chapter 1 A Knot Undone
Chapter 2 Cast Out, Into the Dying Light
Chapter 3 Fresh Tears and Brittle Bones
Chapter 4 Lament for the World Left Behind
Chapter 5 The Curse of Speech
Chapter 6 In One Hand Poison, the Other a Cure
Chapter 7 Cold, Wet and Damning the Maker
Chapter 8 Transcending Death
Chapter 9 So Many Sins, So Few Regrets
Chapter 10 The End of Hope and Prayer
Chapter 11 Revisions
Chapter 12 Slightly Crushing Pain
Chapter 13 Sunlight for a Stale Dungeon
Chapter 14 A Foot for the Serpent’s Tail
Chapter 15 The Bat Beneath the Bridge
Chapter 16 Stoked Embers
Chapter 17 One Lock, Many Keys
Chapter 18 Mercy
Chapter 19 Crude Self-portrait
Chapter 20 The Big Night
Chapter 21 The Reptile’s Quest for Love and Meaning
Chapter 22 An Unfamiliar Hand
Chapter 23 Some Kind of Idiot
Chapter 24 Consumed
Chapter 25 All Eyes on the Grim Horizon
Chapter 26 Ashes
Chapter 27 Let the Walls Close in, or Let Them Come Down
Chapter 28 The Quiet Chorus of Smashed Redbirds
Chapter 29 Counting
Chapter 30 What It Means to Suffer
Chapter 31 A Better Dragon to Slay
Chapter 32 The Fall
Chapter 33 Blind, Bloodied and a Long Way from Home
Chapter 34 Wasted Breath
Chapter 35 Meat to Tempt a Starved God
Chapter 36 Butchery
Chapter 37 Redemption in the Dreamless Sleep
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
Too Far Gone
On the surface, the mortal world feels the subtlest of shifts—a sour scent caught in the wind, a momentary quickening of Earth’s rotation, a darkening.
As the month shifts from July to August in the calendar year 1997 A.D., the landscape five hundred miles north and south of the equator roasts in the grip of an oven-like swelter. Shallow streams run dry. Asphalt cracks. Mouths parch. Clouds of biting, stinging, burrowing insects choke the humid sky. The deep-fried human brain inches to the brink of incivility. With the gentlest of nudges, from agents both unseen and inhuman, madness erupts into gleeful acts of chaos, maiming and, naturally, murder.
In Indianapolis, Indiana, the slowly beating heart of the world’s greatest nation, a husband strangles his wife of nine years until her face turns purple. An hour later he twines an electrical cord around his own throat and steps off the edge of a folding chair, seeking something he imagines will somehow outshine the place where he has wasted thirty-six years of human life.
Two hours north, in a treeless neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, a twelve-year-old Haitian boy named Claude retrieves a nickel-plated revolver from an unlocked strongbox beneath his parents’ bed and wanders from room to room, intent on erasing all traces of his siblings. Within the span of four minutes, his three sisters, including a baby asleep in her wobbly thrift-store crib, and a brother—none of them older than ten—lie dead, leaking precious fluids onto crumb-speckled bed sheets and floor planks sprinkled with dried-up mouse droppings. He decides his parents deserve a similar end, so he slips a fresh bullet into each hungry chamber and waits for their return. As he eases the barrel back into its proper place, he delights at t
he satisfying click. He moves to descend the stairs. The blood-streaked tread of his left sneaker slips on the creaking wood of the second step and he tumbles forward, violently, helplessly, each step rising up to break his brittle bones. The injuries include irreparable harm to several segments of his spinal cord. He settles at the base of the stairs and waits for his final wheezing breaths to leave him, his mind screaming until the moment his body becomes a lifeless rag doll soaked in the gore of his slaughtered kin.
Eight hundred miles east, in Philadelphia’s University City neighborhood, a twenty-one-year-old man studying economics at Drexel University diligently grinds his naked genitals against those of an unconscious sophomore who stars on the girls’ lacrosse team. Done in by a mostly vodka screwdriver spiked with Rohypnol, the nineteen-year-old victim lies on her back, legs yawning open to expose her downy thatch, her head lolling from one side to the other, as the criminal grinding turns to criminal penetration. Her body protests, yet it fails to reject this alien thing inside her. No doubt the young man’s parents, both attorneys whose courtroom victories have earned them shared ownership of an ivy-shagged mansion on the prestigious Main Line and a summer home two blocks from the surf in Avalon, New Jersey, will be very, very proud. He has not yet considered what to do with this mousy little girl once he has finished filling her up, but he knows Mom and Dad will love their perfect little boy no matter what happens next.
It is a fine time in the world’s history for bad behavior. Given humans’ obsession with outdoing one another, escalation is inevitable.
Out west, on the outskirts of Boise, Idaho, a mob of friends in their early twenties exits a nightclub looking to keep the party going. They find their fun at the expense of a fifty-year-old homeless man originally from Milwaukee, a battle-hardened Marine Corps veteran who survived the hell of Vietnam, no less. Teasing quickly turns to barbarism. They take turns raining blows upon this tattered man, whose sin consists solely of “stinking up” a neighborhood they cherish, even though none of them lives within ten miles of the place that will soon be labeled a crime scene. Instinct urges the vet to cover his head with both arms, leaving his midsection exposed. Two girls drive spiked heels into the victim’s ribs, while their boyfriends deliver multiple kicks to the face and back of the head. The assault is “all in good fun,” as one of them will tell the police the following morning, but they realize they have taken it too far when one of them caves in the veteran’s skull with the curved end of a tire iron.
Horrors of an even more atrocious nature unfold across the oceans, in Russia and North Korea, in India and Pakistan, in Afghanistan and Syria, in Somalia and Nigeria, and in the wildly overcrowded, smog-choked cities of China and Brazil, India and Egypt, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
The only logical explanation: The mortal world somehow senses the looming arrival of a new steward, a beast born and nurtured in a vile, shadowy place. Humans figure they might as well do their worst now so they can prepare themselves to witness misdeeds too repulsive for even the most diabolical mind to imagine.
Chapter 1
A Knot Undone
Far beneath the earth’s thick skin, a well-tended stew cooks in more than a hundred cauldrons. Oily bubbles pop to foul the air with the sweet stink of rot. The sheen of charred fat caulking each cauldron’s rim glimmers in the firelight. Aligned seven rows deep, the cauldrons hold enough parasite-rich slurry to feed an army of unimaginable size.
Starbursts of baked-on blood stain the walls a dark, syrupy brown. Charred roots and used-up bodies—limbless, headless and eviscerated or otherwise undone—pile in every corner as fuel for the eternal furnace. Life should not thrive here, yet creatures slither shyly through the shadows, wary of bigger things that might consume them. Or simply kill them, just because they can, because the opportunity arises, because this is the way it must be.
Humanoid skulls, ribcages and other trophies of torture litter the cavern floor, some hung as decorations on the jagged spires of rock that poke, like teeth, through a low-lying haze. The cavern serves as a graveyard as well as it does an able kitchen. Hand-carved runes decorate the red rock, and a massive metal sign spiked high into the wall serves as a makeshift billboard. Blackened from an age in the fire and smoke, the sign greets newcomers in more than a hundred languages.
Rahmat. Isibingelelo. Soo dhawoow. Vitejte. Tuaj los. Mwabonwa. Swaagatam. Willkommen. Bienvenue. Welcome.
Howls carom off bone-smooth arcs of rock to echo in the hollow spaces. The din of suffering drones on, uninterrupted, just as it has for centuries, and as it will, in all likelihood, until the end of time. Spirals of green, stinking-egg smoke seep from cracks in the floor and tunnel through matching cracks in the ceiling, toward the surface far more than a mile overhead.
Each species doomed to live here has steeled itself to the inhospitable environment, though the scaly bipeds lurking in the shadows and climbing the walls are a notable exception. Although their physical bodies have evolved to endure life in the smoke and darkness, their minds conjure dreams in which they live elsewhere—anywhere but here. Each of these ghastly humanoids has a stark choice: Endure the sentence quietly, or grumble to those who will not tolerate such weakness. Those with keener minds keep quiet to mitigate the risk of having their backs whipped, beaten or broken—or, more likely, face an even harsher punishment.
Mercy and understanding have no place here.
Reptilian vampire bats the size of pterodactyls fight for toeholds in high-rise rookeries, resorting to cannibalism when needed—anything for an easier route to the hunting grounds or a better view of the proceedings below. Guano drops to the cavern floor in thunderous globs, in turn providing food for parasites much farther down the food chain. Other gargantuan beasts scuttle across the crater-pocked floor.
A twenty-foot-long millipede gnaws on a heavily tattooed forearm with four clawed fingers. Loose crumbles of rock dance beneath its thousand feathered legs. The mammoth invertebrate senses the approach of something it wants no part of, so it retreats into a tear in the wounded earth.
* * *
“I could vomit, not that I would permit anyone to see,” Basil whispers to his companion. His coal-black flesh craves the shadows. His right hoof kicks a loose stone across the cavern floor. The stone strikes a boulder and ricochets like a shot pinball.
“Methinks they would consider your discarded bile a gift,” says Kamala, her voice rising from the darkness. “They would sip from the puddle, lap up every drop.”
“I’d sooner choke on it or swallow it back down.”
“Irritable, I see. What troubles you, sweet prince?”
Basil ticks off the laundry list of offenses deserving of his indignation: the stink of death and feces; the tedious, unchanging terrain; the stale and smoke-dense air he is forced to breathe; his weary mind, tired from lack of sleep; the cruelty of every beast he must keep under hoof, mostly the rabble of soulless villains he must rule; memories of the horrors he has committed in the name of theater, all to maintain his fragile hold on this thing called power.
Discontent consumes him as the pair approach a massive lake of blood, bordered by ancient stalagmites slowly turning to powder. Bubbles burp to the lake’s sludge-like surface. He quickly realizes his error—his hooves much too close to the crimson shore—and turns away, eager to keep his distance from the reaches of the clever thing lurking in the depths.
The simple act of existing too long as lord and keeper of this wretched pit has spent his patience. He retreats into the deep shadows, seeing but unseen. For too long he has wished to remain hidden and, more to the point, unbothered.
Across the cavern, two demons bicker over a mostly denuded femur flecked with bits of charred flesh. The smaller demon holds the bone close to his chest, while the taller one attempts to pry the prize away. The smaller one suggests the bone is his and his alone because he found it first, because he earned it. The larger one disagrees and then proves his point by gouging out both of the smaller demon’s eyes. The blind
ed demon screams and drops to his knees, palming the floor, seeking, as if his eyeballs have tumbled from their sockets and he can undo his blindness simply by finding the rogue orbs and then returning each one to its rightful place. The larger demon picks up the dropped femur and, unsatisfied with the lack of sustenance it might afford, tosses the bone aside. The aggressor then decides to replace his trophy with something more generous, so he pins the smaller demon to the floor and removes one of his victim’s legs, followed by the other. Tendons pop. Muscles tear. Bones snap. The smaller demon, now legless and eyeless and screaming in agony, begs to wake up from this nightmare.
Basil recognizes the victimized demon, though this one is among the Nameless—those who have done nothing to earn a sobriquet and the freedoms that come with it—and, therefore, insignificant. A demon’s will to survive is incredibly strong, Basil knows, yet he foresees the outcome to the episode: The wounded demon will burrow into the nearest crevice, where he will wither, starve and soon enough become prey for beetles and other diminutive critters pleased to consume him in the most efficient manner. He is proven wrong when the taller demon stands over his vanquished brother, raises one of the severed legs and, mercifully, clubs him into oblivion.
Basil knows he should have intervened, for the sake of fairness, of justice, but he stops to consider his inaction. He does not want to lead today. Better put, he is no longer fit to lead. He wants only to close his eyes and sleep. But to sleep here, he knows, is to show weakness. And to show weakness is to welcome death, or at least become an eyeless, legless, pitiful creature, a bludgeoned heap waiting to be reborn as vermin excrement.
“I could vomit,” he tells Kamala again. “Kiss my lips and you can taste the puke warming the back of my throat. I just hate it. This damned place.”
“Let’s walk. Your kingdom has no bounds. I always say you should make a point to see more of it.”
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