Burn, Beautiful Soul

by William J. Donahue

  He wonders: How will the underworld remember him when his final day comes? What sort of epithet will he earn based on his triumphs, misdeeds and missteps?

  His hooves leave the last stone step and travel the flat terrain of a cavernous chamber, strangely familiar. Flashes of neon green and orange paint the walls. The colors dance and leap. The pattern reminds Basil of moving water, of the cool creeks bordering Nebraska’s Sand Hills. As he walks, a distant rumbling finds his ears. The sound reminds him of his worldly noisemaker, the all-black Harley he both loved and hated. He turns a corner and enters a wide expanse. There he discovers the source of the rumbling: the air escaping the lungs of Lucifer himself.

  Lucifer crouches with his elbows resting on his knees, but even in this cramped position he easily towers over Basil. His ancient flesh the color of buttermilk, his body glows in halos of orange and green. Strands of long, gray hair flow over well-muscled shoulders. His left hand lacks two fingers, ring and index, just smoothed-over stumps in their place. Two gnarled horns twist toward the ceiling.

  “Stop cowering in the shadows and step toward me, son of mine,” Lucifer commands. “Show me that you look as dreadful as you smell.”

  Basil gulps as he emerges from a veil of shadow. His voice cracks as he speaks Lucifer’s name. The syllables echo.

  The Eternal One stands upright. Shackles clatter. Bones and tendons pop. The earth trembles beneath him.

  “Come to me,” Lucifer says, like air hissing from a gently pricked balloon.

  Basil obeys. He genuflects before the Eternal One.

  “I remember your face, though you smell different,” Lucifer says. “Speak.”

  “Call me Basil, the caretaker of your kingdom—the seventh to succeed you,” he says. “Hear me: A pretender to our throne seeks to destroy all we have built. He wishes to abandon the warmth of the fire and ascend to the surface. If he succeeds, all your children will follow, and the flames of Our Fiery Home will go out forever. All shall perish on the sun-kissed earth. The world will reach its end.”

  Lucifer wheezes, seems to contemplate Basil’s warning.

  “I demand your aid,” Basil adds. “With your brawn and cunning on my side, I may be able to prevent this possibility from becoming fate.”

  “Let it all crumble, beneath your hooves and mine.”

  Basil’s jaw hangs slackly. “You, more than anyone, know the consequences of inaction.”

  “Don’t pretend to know my mind,” Lucifer says. “You’re nothing but a wart on my belly.”

  “If saving what you’ve built is not enough, do it for the sake of vengeance. You will walk freely once you have fulfilled your debt. I give you my word.”

  “I’ll take what I want, starting with the marrow sucked from your bones!”

  “Respect me,” Basil says. “I could turn on my heel and leave you here to rot.”

  “But you won’t.” Lucifer laughs.

  “The world has gone on spinning just fine without you.”

  Lucifer sneers, adding, “So the Nameless have risen up.”

  “Aye. Led by an agitator named Lubos. He wishes to undo time.”

  “He has the right idea, though I’d hate for him to beat me to it. The world wants to die. It begs and pleads for a merciful end, to rid itself of the curse of man.”

  “You remember wrong, Eternal One. I have been to the surface. The human world deserves to go on living.”

  “What a pitiful ruler you must be.”

  “No more pitiful than you. Only one of us wears chains.”

  “Why not let our worst devils run free? What is there left to save, either above or below?”

  The question stops Basil. His thoughts return to days beneath blue skies and hot sun, beneath dark heavens pricked with far-off stars, pregnant with the swollen moon. Synapses in his brain explode as he envisions meadows alive with the blushes of black-eyed Susan, beardtongue and prairie phlox; the far-reaching shade of towering silver maples; cold, clear creeks lined with mossy stone; cottontail rabbits and mule deer, timber rattlesnakes and sharp-shinned hawks. And humans—yes, even humans. The worst of them aside, even they deserve preservation.

  “I have seen the good in man,” he says. “Let him settle his own discord.”

  “Good? What purpose does good serve?”

  “The world is not lost. Our people belong below. Let them stay here.”

  He eyes his surroundings, this lifeless pit reserved for a forgotten god who starves for fresh meat. Even here, in this hole, he has no doubt: The flames of Our Fiery Home must continue to burn. Given a fresh canvas, he can reimagine this place and then reinvent it.

  First it must survive this tribulation.

  “Release,” Lucifer whispers.

  Lucifer rolls his head from one shoulder to another. A line of black spittle spills from his lips, painting his chest. Basil does not compare to this magnificent beast. If and when Lucifer roams freely again, Basil wonders about his own place in Our Fiery Home. Assuming Lubos can be deposed with Lucifer’s aid, what then if Lucifer attempts to reassert his hold on power?

  This, he thinks, is tomorrow’s problem.

  “I want to trust you,” he says, “but give me assurance. Tell me you will not ascend to the human world. It’s far too precious.”

  “My blood flows through your veins,” Lucifer wheezes. “My mind is your mind. We are different but the same—a father and his child. I, too, am meant to return.”

  Lucifer stretches each hircine leg, flexes the muscles in each arm until blood-thickened veins riddle his skin like highways on a roadmap.

  “Release,” the Eternal One pleads.

  “If I agree, you are bound to me.”

  “We shall see.”

  Loose rock falls from the ceiling and shatters against the cavern floor. Basil eyes the massive shackles adorning each of Lucifer’s wrists and pasterns. A pale yellow crust discolors the runes on the face of the silvery metal. Basil steps forward to utter the words that will free this demon-king-turned-prisoner. With the emancipation grammar on his tongue, he measures the odds of meeting his doom beneath the Eternal One’s massive hoof.

  “Release!”

  The venom in Lucifer’s voice freezes Basil where he stands. Only then does he feel the weight of Lucifer’s request. Only then does he realize the horrors he could set in motion by unleashing this ancient monster. But he has no choice.

  Chapter 36

  Butchery

  “Volunteers?” Lubos asks.

  Not a soul steps forward.

  Lubos claws the shoulder of the demon nearest to him, Gideon.

  “You’ll do fine,” Lubos says.

  Dozens of demons catch Gideon in a net of flesh and bone—the lamb chosen. They force Gideon onto his back, bind his wrists and pasterns, and tether a leather cord to his neck.

  “Your brothers and sisters appreciate your sacrifice,” Lubos utters. “Let this knowledge numb your pain.”

  Lubos heaves Gideon onto his shoulder and scales an outcropping at the edge of the Pool of Infinite Perdition. He presses Gideon over his head and tosses him into the lake of blood. Gideon lands with an awkward splash. Thick droplets of blood splatter the shore. Gideon’s head dips beneath the surface and then bobs up a moment later. He gasps. Blood, as viscous as melted candlewax, slicks his bald skull and paints the whites of his eyes red.

  “Please,” he gasps. This is all he can manage before his chin dips below the surface and blood fills his mouth. He thrashes as best he can.

  “Good,” Lubos says. “Let the dim-witted fiend know exactly where you are.”

  A line of ripples moves toward Gideon’s bobbing head. The telltale hump crests the surface. Cthaal.

  “Please! Lubos!”

  Lubos smiles. He hands the tether to the nearest troglodyte so he can climb to a better vantage point. In return, the trog hands him a sleek iron rod with a sharpened tip. There, perched on a boulder, Lubos waits.

  A massive tentacle rises above the su
rface, poised like a cobra, and slams down onto Gideon’s skull. Tentacle and demon disappear. A second later the surface boils as the kraken reveals itself: bulbous black mantle, each slit-like eyeball larger than the head of the largest troglodyte, venom-barbed tentacles slicing the air, including the one bearing Gideon’s limp body. Three tentacles lash out and grip the boulder-strewn shore, and the monstrous cephalopod pulls its girth free of the muck. The tentacle bearing Gideon’s corpse curls under to feed the parrot-like beak on Cthaal’s marbled underside.

  Lubos hurls his harpoon. The iron barb pierces the kraken’s rubbery mantle, and the beast screeches. Lubos waves his arm, ordering two other demons to release their harpoons. Both irons find their meaty targets. Three muscle-bound troglodytes hold the tethers taut, awaiting Lubos’s command. Cthaal thrashes in retreat, dragging the trio of trogs toward the lake’s edge.

  “Hold your ground,” Lubos bellows from his roost. “A slow disemboweling for anyone who loses his line!”

  Cthaal slips beneath the surface, but the trogs hold tight. The lines stretch to their breaking point, each fiber voicing its distress. Then the lines go limp.

  The kraken bursts from the muck and flops onto the shore, whipping the trogs toward their respective ends. One smacks into the cavern’s back wall and becomes a rose-red starburst. Another clips a stalagmite, which frees his head, and the rest of him helicopters into a waiting thatch of irons. The third rockets toward the ceiling to be impaled by a stalactite.

  Demons scatter, but Cthaal has no shortage of targets. Its barbed tentacles effortlessly shred bodies into strips and residue. As its enormity emerges fully from the lake, the kraken reveals a long, prehensile tail.

  Lubos abandons his perch and fetches an ax. Intent on taming this beast, he strides toward Cthaal and raises the ax over his head. He singles out one of its more than a dozen undulant tentacles. As he prepares to swing, another tentacle wallops his gut and sends him sprawling to the ground. His ax skitters into the shadows.

  He stands, dazed. The kraken scales the walls of the cavern. While two tentacles rake the cavern floor, sweeping up fleeing demons, two more tentacles scrape a rookery of vampire bats from the ceiling. Leathery wings flap like flags as the bats’ dead bodies hurtle toward the cavern floor.

  Lubos smiles at the kraken’s sheer size, its overwhelming ferocity and, above all, his gift for unleashing such a catastrophe. Even if he cannot cajole Cthaal into laying waste to the human world, at least he will have succeeded in reducing Our Fiery Home to rubble. Either way, he will have his vengeance on a place that deserves to meet its end.

  An odd sensation pulls Lubos from his reverie. The ground trembles beneath his hooves. His ears home in on a distant grumbling, a murmur distinct from the high-pitched squeals of his people succumbing to the barbs and beak of his irascible new pet.

  With a deafening roar, the outer wall to the Hall of Ignoble and Prodigious Elders splinters. A curtain of rock cascades to the cavern floor. With a second boom, the wall crumbles. Massive boulders topple, crushing everything in their path. As the dust clears, Lubos sees the silhouette of a massive bipedal figure. Its yellow-white flesh seems to glow. With outstretched arms, the figure unleashes a roar that loosens Lubos’s bowels.

  The legends are true: The Eternal One has awoken. Lucifer has returned to reclaim his throne.

  Lucifer wags his head from side to side, as if struggling to choose a path. As the Eternal One clops away, another figure, though much smaller by comparison, steps into the void.

  Impossible.

  Basil steps across the shards of collapsed boulders. His wounds healed, he looks strong, capable, whole. The gash in his forehead has scabbed over.

  Lubos scours the earth for his ax. His weapon of choice nowhere in sight, he bends to retrieve a sturdy spear. He sneers as he slips into the cover of shadow, seeking a route to higher ground.

  * * *

  Warm blood slicks the cavern floor. Motionless bodies and severed limbs make for gory litter. The carnage reminds Basil of the turmoil that led to his crowning so long ago, the revolution that ended when Basil struck down his predecessor, Byron the Scarred Back.

  Though the demons have done their best to flee Cthaal’s roving tentacles, dozens appear to have fallen. For now the beast busies itself on the ceiling, making meals of juvenile vampire bats that haven’t yet learned to take flight.

  Basil watches Lucifer skulk, ape-like, through the cavern. A demon missing its legs drags its torso toward the safety of the shadows, painting the pane of rock black with its blood. The Eternal One stomps the halved demon. Lucifer twists his hoof and grinds the creature—bones and all—into the red rock.

  As if a switch has been flipped, the demons stop their flight. A shared knowing, or perhaps a cloud of pheromones, tells them they now have a new enemy. Dozens emerge from the shadowed perimeter to form a ring around Lucifer. The Eternal One drops to a knee and tilts his head toward the floor, as if in submission. The demons pounce. They claw, bite, carve ruts in Lucifer’s exposed flesh, tangle their limbs in his stringy hair.

  Lucifer’s restraint confounds Basil. Then Lucifer rears up and extends every limb, shaking off the demons as if they are flakes of dead skin. One flails from Lucifer’s flank, talons lodged deep in the flesh. Lucifer doesn’t seem to mind. He takes joy in butchering every demon within reach—playing—and then pursues any demon trying to escape his wrath. His yellowed flesh shines black with blood.

  Basil’s skin grows hot. His pulse quickens.

  “Basil!” a voice booms. “This scourge is Basil’s doing!”

  He lifts his chin to see Lubos dangling from a ledge by an outstretched arm.

  Two troglodytes step in front of Basil. Although huge and heavily built, the troglodytes are dumb and slow, made even slower by thick armor. Basil kicks the first in the groin, and as it drops, he thrusts his talons into the cushion of its throat. The second trog takes a wild swing with a scimitar-like blade. Basil ducks the assault, leaps up and stabs out the trog’s eyes. The trog does not acknowledge the injury, just keeps swinging and hoping to land a deathblow. Basil gives the blinded trog a wide berth and waits for his moment. As the trog sinks the blade into rock, Basil scales the trog’s back and grasps both of its gnarled horns. With one sharp jerk, he crushes to bits the vertebrae in the trog’s neck, and the trog falls violently to the floor.

  As the paralyzed trog takes its final breath, Basil raises his head and realizes he is being handed a gift: an unpolluted view of two cataclysms coming together.

  Cthaal descends from the ceiling, a twitching vampire bat dangling from its beak. The tentacled beast writhes before Lucifer, who makes a show of licking fresh blood from his thin lips. The kraken shrieks as it slides down the wall, seeming to respect the might of a worthy foe. With the quickness of a viper, Cthaal lashes Lucifer with a tentacle, trailed by a second and a third. Venomous barbs sink into Lucifer’s left arm. He howls and drops to a knee, and three other tentacles snake around Lucifer’s limbs, hundreds of venom-tipped barbs biting into the buttermilk-tinted flesh. The tentacles yank Lucifer forward and drag him along the ground, then lift him up and use his mass to pulverize a boulder. The kraken repeats the action three more times and, with a triumphant shriek, hurls its foe into the far wall.

  Lucifer drops in a heap and lays still. As Cthaal moves closer, Lucifer turns onto his side and dashes toward the beast. He swiftly detaches a tentacle with his fangs and spits out the arm as if bitter. The disembodied limb wriggles away like the body of a decapitated snake. Lucifer grabs two more tentacles, one in each hand, and pulls without mercy. Ink sprays Lucifer’s face and chest, floods his mouth. Cthaal’s rubbery skin stretches until the tentacles snap.

  Basil winces at the rout, having expected more fight from the flagging kraken.

  Lucifer sinks his talons into two more of Cthaal’s tentacles and whips the mammoth cephalopod over his head, clipping rocky outcroppings, and then bashes its mantle into the cavern floor. Air dribble
s from Cthaal’s tube-like siphon. The sound reminds Basil of a wet fart.

  Lucifer lifts the kraken into a bear hug and squeezes until the mantle seems ready to pop. Inky fluid spills from the pores of its skin, like water from a sponge. Lucifer then hurls the beast toward the field of cauldrons. The kraken’s mantle bowls over more than a dozen cauldrons, spilling their bubbling contents. Soft flesh melts against hot metal. Cthaal screeches as it twists its scalded tentacles free.

  Basil smiles, his plan playing out—his monster getting the better of Lubos’s.

  An electric pain sizzles inside his head. A warm sensation builds behind his right ear. He suddenly finds himself on his knees, staring at a severed ear—his ear—glowing black against the red rock.

  Lubos stands in front of him with spear in hand. Basil’s blood drips from the spear’s blackened tip.

  “This time I’ll leave nothing intact,” Lubos says.

  Basil regains his hooves, shaking the fog from his head. He snatches the tip of the spear and thrusts a fist into Lubos’s face. Lubos sails backward, sliding along a bed of dust and pebbles. Basil twirls the spear and moves in on Lubos, now weaponless. He stabs at the earth, but Lubos rolls out of the way and gets to his hooves. Lubos limps away, his talons teasing the cavern wall, hiding the pale scar that runs the length of his torso.

  “Nothing can stop what I’ve set in motion,” Lubos says. “Our Fiery Home has already fallen.”

  Basil hurls the spear. It catches Lubos in the left shoulder and pins him to the wall. Basil steps forward, ready to tear Lubos apart. He then feels a blade enter his back, just to the right of his spine.

  Demons loyal to Lubos rush in to overwhelm him. An immense weight—a troglodyte’s three-toed foot—presses him to the floor.

  “Let him up,” Lubos commands, still pinned to the wall. “One of you wretches, fetch my ax.”

  The troglodyte drives its foot deeper into the center of Basil’s back. Two demons work to free Lubos, breaking the spear off at the shoulder. Another places the ax in Lubos’s hand, kneeling and then extending an open palm to receive his earned praise. Lubos knees the demon out of the way.