by Edward Lee
HIGH PRAISE FOR EDWARD LEE!
“The living legend of literary mayhem. Read him if you dare!”
—Richard Laymon, Author of Funland
“Edward Lee’s writing is fast and mean as a chain saw revved to full-tilt boogie.”
—Jack Ketchum, Author of Joyride
“He demonstrates a perverse genius for showing us a Hell the likes of which few readers have ever seen.”
—Horror Reader
“Edward Lee continues to push the boundaries of sex, violence and depravity in modern genre lit.”
—Rue Morgue
“One of the genre’s true originals.”
—The Horror Fiction Review
“The hardest of the hardcore horror writers.”
—Cemetery Dance
“Lee excels with his creativity and almost trademark depictions of violence and gruesomeness.”
—Horror World
“A master of hardcore horror. His ability to make readers cringe is legendary.”
—Hellnotes
TO SEE THE DEPTHS OF HELL
“You’ll have exactly six minutes to listen to the Trustee, ask any questions you have, and then accept or reject the offer. And even if you accept, which I pray you’ll do, you’re under no obligation. Nothing becomes binding unless you say yes upon completion of the tour.”
The tour . . . Those words bothered him more, perhaps, than anything else tonight. There was something potent about them. Even when he thought the words, they seemed to echo as if they were called down from a mountain precipice.
But then more thoughts dripped. “This is a pact with the Devil, you mean.”
“Not a pact. A gift. One thing to keep in mind. The Devil doesn’t need to offer contracts for souls very often these days. Think about that . . .”
Hudson’s eyes narrowed. “But I’m about to go to the seminary. To be a priest!”
Her voice drifted in delight. “Perhaps what you see will dissuade you. Your reward will be beyond imagination . . . .”
Other Leisure books by Edward Lee:
THE BLACK TRAIN
THE GOLEM
BRIDES OF THE IMPALER
TRIAGE (Anthology)
HOUSE INFERNAL
SLITHER
THE BACKWOODS
FLESH GOTHIC
MESSENGER
INFERNAL ANGEL
MONSTROSITY
CITY INFERNAL
EDWARD LEE
LUCIFER’S
LOTTERY
For Rex Miller—Rest in peace.
DORCHESTER PUBLISHING
July 2011
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © 2010 by Edward Lee
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 13: 978-1-4285-1126-2
E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0941-2
The “DP” logo is the property of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Visit us online at www.dorchesterpub.com.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project is a novelization of my previously published small-press novella The Senary. I liked the concept so much that my Muse demanded I transform it into a full-fledged novel for my mass-market readers. Ultimately, I must thank you, the reader, for buying it! I hope you like reading the book as much as I liked writing it. More thank-yous to: Don D’Auria, Wendy Brewer, Dave Barnett, Tim McGinnis, GAK, Bob Strauss, Larry Roberts, Jason Byars, William Patrick, Thomas Deja, and Christine Morgan. William at the Tyrone Barnes & Noble; Shroud Magazine; my friends at Wild Willy’s in Largo, Florida, the coolest bar in the world: Nick, Rhonda, Johnny, Bob Monday, Sheri, Roz, Stacy, Mitch, Randi, English Richard, James, Royce, Doug, and the rest. Krist at Diabolical Radio; Tracy Lee Hunt and Temple Arnold Corson IV. Also to the following fans and readers: Paul Legerski; Sandy Griffin and Tony Brock; Jonah Martin, Rob Johns, James L. Harris, Jordan Krall, splatterhead4ever, harleymack, Amy M. Pimental, mrliteral, Horror Freek, Lilith666, Bateman, Lazy Old Fart, vantro, TravisD, JameyWebb, reelsplatter, boysnightout, Nephrenka, carthoss, Amano Jyaku, Insalubrious, VT Horrorfan, bgeorge, Tod Clark, John Copeland, dathar, godawful, Ken Arneson, Bob & Jaime Taylor, Killa Klep, darvis, antitheism, Onemorejustincase, S. Howard, S. Eliot-O’Leary, FrederickHamilton, niogeoverlord, horrormike, Serra, swix, vladcain, Kerri, lazy2006, bellamorte, GNFNR, mpd1958, sassydog, IrekB, jesus was a robot, dk78, FeedMeaStrayCat, sunnyvale22, goregirl, Zombified420, Becki, Patricia Maier, Cyberkitty, squeakytherat, sikahtik, Craig Cook, Qweequeg. Plus, special thanks to Monica O’Rourke and Wrath James White for pulling off a dynamite Killer Con in Vegas.
PROLOGUE
Six minutes after he officially died, Slydes found himself standing agog on a street corner like none he’d ever seen. He stood as he had in life: broad-shouldered, tall, dark dirty hair and a bushy black beard. Blue jeans and work boots, and his favorite T-shirt stretched tight over his beer belly; it read ST. PETE BEACH – A QUIET LITTLE DRINKING TOWN WITH A FISHING PROBLEM. Slydes was a redneck, tried and true, a shitkicker. A bad ass. He’d seen a lot of outrageous things in his day, but now . . . Now . . .
This?
The wind screamed. Winged mites swarmed in the humid air and splotched red when he swatted them against his brawny forearms. What kind of city is this? he thought as his gaze was dragged upward. Dim, drear-windowed skyscrapers seemed a mile high and leaned this way and that at such extreme angles, he thought they might topple at any moment. Twisted faces that couldn’t possibly be human peered out of many of the narrow panes, while other panes were either broken out or spattered with blood. The sky visible between the buildings appeared to be red, and there was a black sickle moon hanging between two of them. Slydes blinked.
A dream, it had to be. It was this notion that he first entertained. His Condemnation only minutes old, he couldn’t remember much. He couldn’t remember where he was born, for instance, he couldn’t remember his age, nor could he remember his last name. Indeed, Slydes couldn’t even remember dying.
But die he had, and for a lifetime of wincingly outrageous sins and wickedness, he’d been Damned to Hell.
So here he was.
A nightmare, that’s all, he convinced himself. A red sky? Office buildings leaning over at sixty-degree angles? And—
SWOOSH
A black bat with a six-foot wingspan and a vaguely human face glided by just over his head. Slydes felt a stinking gust, then recoiled when the impossible animal shat on his head.
“Fucker!” Slydes yelled.
The bat—actually a Hexegenically created Crossbreed of one of several genera known as Revoltus Chiropterus—looked over its leathery shoulder and smiled.
“Welcome to Hell,” it croaked.
Slydes stared after the words more than the creature itself. Hell, he thought quite obliquely. I’m not really in—
WELCOME TO ST. PUTRADA CIRCLE, HELL’S NEWEST FISTULATION & TRANSVERSION PREFECT,
the sign said.
Slydes could only stare at the sign as the splat of monstrous guano ran down the sides of his face.
Hell’s newest . . . WHAT?
At the corner another sign blinked DON’T WALK, and then a rush of pedestrians crossed the street. Slydes just kept staring . . .
He didn’t know what they were at first: People? Monsters? Combinations of both? A slim couple held hands as they strode by, flesh rotting from their limbs and faces. Several impish children wove through the crowd, with fangs like a dog’s and eyes as big and as red as apples. A werewolf in a business suit and briefcase passed next, and after that a fat clown with a hatchet in its face. To Slydes, the clown bid, “Hi, how are ya?”
Slydes could not respond.
If anything, the street was worse. Cars that looked more like small steam engines chugged by on spoked wheels, a smokestack up front gusted black-yellow soot and vapor. Carriages and buggies rolled by as well, hauled along not by horses but by things like horses, whose flesh hung in dripping tatters. One carriage was occupied by a woman with skin green as pond scum who wore a tiara of gallstones and a dress made from tendons meticulously woven together. She fanned herself with a webbed, severed hand. In another carriage rode a creature that could’ve been a pile of snot somehow shaped into human form. Then came a haulage wagon of some sort, powered by six harnessed beasts with festering carnation-pink skin pocked with white blisters; Slydes thought hideously of skinned sheep when they bleated and spat foamy sputum. A man perched behind them cracked a long, barbed whip—or . . . perhaps man wasn’t quite right. He wore a wool cloak and banded leggings like a shepherd of the old days, yet atop his anvil-shaped head grew a brow of horns. The whip cracked and cracked, and the bleating rose to a mad clamor. Slydes looked one more time and noticed that, like the bat, these bald “sheep” had faces grimly tainted by human features.
“Oh my God, I am in some shit,” Slydes stammered. Things were starting to click in his head, and with each click came more and more fear. Did a tear actually form in his eye? “I-I-I,” he blubbered. “I don’t think this is a dream . . .”
“It’s not,” sounded a voice that was somehow raspy and feminine simultaneously. The woman who approached him was nude, and yet—he thought at first—checkerboarded. Slydes squinted at her impressive physique and recalled women with similar physiques whom he’d raped and sometimes even murdered without vacillation. But this woman?
Every square inch of her skin was crisply darkened by black tattoos of upside-down crosses. Even her face, around which shimmered long platinum blonde hair.
“Slydes, right?” she asked. “My name’s Andeen, and I’m your Orientation Directress. You may not even realize this yet, but you’re what’s known as an Entrant.”
“Entrant,” Slydes murmured.
“And, no, this isn’t a dream. You should be so lucky. This is all real. Over time your memory will re-form.”
Before Slydes could mutter a question, his gaze snapped to another passerby: another impressively figured nude woman. Her arms, legs, abdomen, and face were but one colossal psoriatic outbreak. Only the breasts and pubis were without blemish.
“Rash lines,” remarked Andeen. “In the Living World you have tan lines, here we have rash lines.”
Slydes’s gaze snapped back to the tattooed woman. “Here . . . as in . . .”
“As in Hell. You’re dead, and for your worldly sins, you’ve been Condemned.” Her slender shoulders shrugged. “Forever.”
Slydes began to grow faint.
She grabbed his hand and tugged. “Come on, Slydes. We gotta get you out of this Prefect. Believe me, you don’t want to be here.” Then she tugged him down the street and ducked into an alley. “We’ll lay low a while, and try to get you someplace where your ass won’t be grass.”
“I-I,” Slydes blubbered. “I don’t understand.”
“Listen, there’s no good place in Hell, but there are places that are worse than others. Like this place, St. Putrada Circle. You must’ve been a real scumbag to be Rematerialized here. Yes, sir, a real humdinger of a shitty person.”
“I don’t understand!” Slydes now sobbed outright.
“A Prefect is like a small District. And this one happens to be a Fistulation and Surgical Transversion Prefect. I’ll keep an eye out for Abduction Squads. They’ll Transvert anybody here, Humans and Hellborn alike, but Humans are the desired target. The Surgery Centers pay the most for Humans.”
Slydes looked cross-eyed at her.
“The short version. Every Prefect, District, or Town has to have an active mode of punishment, while there are some areas, known as Punitaries, that exist solely for punishment. But anyway, this Prefect uses Fistulatic Surgery to conform to the Punishment Ordinances. Fistula is Latin; it means ‘communication between,’ and Transversion is, like, rerouting things. That’s what they do here—they reroute your insides.”
Even though Slydes didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, he stammered, “Whuh-whuh-why?”
Andeen smirked. “Because it’s perverse and disgusting, the way it’s supposed to be. This isn’t Romper Room, Slydes. This is Hell, and Hell is hard-core. Eternal torment, suffering, and abhorrence is the name of the game. It pleases Lucifer, therefore, it’s Public Law.” She smirked more sharply this time. “Look, go over to that public washbasin and wash the bat crap out of your hair. It’s grossing me out.”
Dazed, Slydes noted the elevated stone basin only feet from the alley mouth. He dunked his head in the water, agitated the rank guano out of his hair, then seized up and jerked his head out when he realized what he was washing in.
“That’s not water! That’s piss!”
“Get used to it,” Andeen said. “Unless you’re a Grand Duke or an Archlock, you’ll never get near fresh water. Only other way is to distill it yourself out of the blood of what you kill.”
Revolted, Slydes flapped the urine off his face, then noticed lower basins erected intermittently along the smoky street. “What are those things? They look like–”
“Oh, the commodes. It’s another Public Law. In this Prefect, it’s mandatory that everyone urinate, defecate, and give birth in public.”
Slydes’s bearded jaw dropped.
“And there”—Andeen pointed—“across the street. There’re the various Surgery Suites.”
Slydes scanned the signs over each transom . . .
RECTO-URINARY TRANSVERSION
URETHRAL-ESOPHAGEAL REVERSAL
UTERO-RECTAL FISTULA
And many, many more.
Slydes could not conceive of any of this.
When he glanced inadvertently between two more spiring buildings, he could’ve shrieked. Far off in the distance, some monumentlike thing stood impossibly high, but it was a figure. He remembered seeing the Statue of Liberty once a long time ago, on a drug run between Florida and New York—that’s what this reminded him of . . . sort of. A giant statue, he thought. But . . .
Andeen caught him staring. “Oh, the Demonculus. It hasn’t been up long. Pretty awesome, huh?”
Slydes peered at her, incredulous, then peered back up at the statue. “A Deeeee—”
“Demonculus. It’s farther away than it looks—that’s actually the Pol Pot District over there. The Demonculus is 666 feet high. Looks like a statue, right?”
Slydes dumbly nodded, noting the pointed crown about the form’s head, akin to the Statue of Liberty. But . . . was it a crown, or horns?
Andeen inspected her black fingernails with tiny white upside-down crosses. “Well, it’s not a statue, it’s a living thing—just another one of the Boss’s obsessions.”
The impact of her words finally registered. Slydes looked pleadingly at her. “Living . . . thing?”
“Um-hmmm. Once it’s activated, it will tear the shit out of whole Districts to root out insurgents.” She smiled at his trauma. “For the rest of eternity, Slydes, you’re gonna be seeing some really wild and really awful stuff.”
; Her evilly tattooed hand pulled him back into the alley. “And look, there’s an Abduction Squad. The clay men are called Golems. They’re like state employees, public works, police, security, stuff like that . . .”
Slydes watched with a cheek to the edge of the alley wall as a troop of gray-brown things shaped like men thudded down the sidewalk, each shoving along a handcuffed Human, Demon, or Hybrid. The Golems were nine feet tall and walked in formation. Then they all stopped at the same time, and marched their prisoners into various Surgery Suites.
“And like I said, the state pays more money for Humans, so that’s why we gotta get you out of the Prefect.”
Slydes whipped his face back around, and repeated, helplessly now, “I don’t understand . . .”
“Once you’ve seen what goes on here . . . you will. Oh, and check out this chick.”
Slydes watched as a morose-faced nude woman who appeared to be half Human and half Troll staggered toward one of the street commodes. She leaned over, parted her buttocks, and began to urinate out of her anus.
“See?” Andeen asked. “Oh, wow, and check this out! Here comes a Uteral-Oral Fistulation . . .”
A woman in a bloody smock labored down the street. She was covered with red-rimmed white scales . . . and was obviously quite pregnant. She held a scaled hand to her bloated belly, and when she could walk no longer she stopped, leaned over, and—
SPLAT!
—out gushed a slew of amniotic water from her mouth. She maintained the uncomfortable position, and as her belly began to tremor, her jaw came unhinged. Her throat began to impossibly swell, and as her stomach shrunk in size, a squalling, demonic fetus slid hugely out of her mouth and flapped to the pavement.