by Edward Lee
Ezoriel’s voice seemed to lower to a glittering whisper. “The time will be very soon. And just exactly what the massive Reservoir will be filled with . . . is this: six billion gallons of the Gulf of Cagliostro . . .”
“What!”
“It’s true,” Ezoriel said. “That Pipeway is impressive—hundreds of miles long and quite a feat for Lucifer’s Engineers. Oh, we might’ve been able to bomb it but then . . .” The refulgent Angel seemed to smile. “Powers far more lofty than I insisted that that not happen . . .”
Krilid refrained from sarcastic comment.
“All things for a purpose, yes? It’s all part of God’s plan, and we are tiny yet essential pieces of that plan. Expendable? Yes. But loved by God as well, even in our Damnation.”
Oh, that makes me feel MUCH better, Krilid’s thoughts sputtered.
“Have faith, in this place of the faithless.”
“Fine, fine,” Krilid interjected, “but . . . why does Lucifer want to fill that ridiculous Reservoir with six billion gallons of disgusting Bloodwater from the Gulf?”
Ezoriel’s undetectable gaze fixed on Krilid.
“All right, I get it,” Krilid droned. “I don’t have a need to know yet. You’re afraid if I get captured, I’ll spill the beans.”
The illumined presence seemed to nod. “God’s work calls me to depart. The coordinates for your next reconnaissance will be delivered telepathically very soon.” The Angel raised a finger. “Rest assured that, just as Daniel had no fear of the lion’s pit, you need not have fear of what awaits you.” Ezoriel passed Krilid a small cloth sack. “Until we meet again . . . go with God.” And then—
Sssssssssssssssss-ONK!
—the Fallen Angel’s Nectoport was gone.
Krilid opened the sack and withdrew—
“Oh, wow! What a great guy!”
—a big chunk of Ghor-Hound sausage.
(II)
What an ass I am, Gerold thought. A male intern who looked like he hadn’t slept in days wheeled him through the hospital lobby and out into blazing sun. Once outside, the stubbled assistant lit a cigarette and frowned right at Gerold.
“What?” Gerold asked.
“I’m supposed to be off now, that’s what,” the guy said. “I’ve been up thirty-six hours but now I’ve got to do this.”
“Sorry.” Gerold felt sheepish. “So . . . where am I going?”
“VA.” The guy rubbed his sandpapery chin. “You’re what we call a ‘punt.’ ”
“A . . . what?”
“A punt. We’re punting you. It’s tax dollars paying for this stunt of yours—”
Gerold’s well-developed arms tensed. “It’s wasn’t a stunt—”
“Yeah, it was. We get ‘em all the time. Look, I’m sorry you can’t walk but—shit. My brother can’t walk either—he got hit by a drunk. And you know what? He’s never pulled a stunt like this. Clogging up a busy hospital with bullshit is no way to vent your need for attention.”
Gerold winced. “You’re worse than that lady upstairs! I wasn’t trying to get attention! I was just trying to kill myself, but I fucked up!” His tempered sizzled. “And I wish to God I hadn’t.”
“You and me both . . .”
Gerold rolled his eyes.
“Anyway, we’re punting you.” The guy tapped ashes disgustedly. “See, we gotta file for the damn money we burned on you last night. We have to send in a bill, and then wait months for the provider to pay—”
“I didn’t burn any money,” Gerold spat.
“Sure, you did. Every square inch of this place costs money, pal. And us having to give you a bed in the precaution ward last night is a big ticket, probably a couple of grand—”
“Bullshit.”
“Yeah, see, you don’t even give a shit. Typical. You think everything should be free while guys like me gotta work our asses off catering to you. The fact is, caregivers—like me—love to help people in need. It’s our duty. But what we hate is having to help people who pretend to be fucked up in the head.”
“This is some real compassionate care, man . . .”
“Fuck off. Let VA have your ass. You can burn their tax dollars.”
“I was fuckin’ fighting for my country!” Gerold bellowed.
The guy expectorated loudly. “You were fighting for a bunch of political war pigs, man. If you want to be a patriot, you protest the war, you don’t fight in it.”
Gerold groaned. “Your political views are your business, but I sure as shit—”
“What?” snapped the intern. “You don’t want to hear it, G.I. Joe? Well, tough.”
Gerold dared to laugh. “I’d love to see you on a bivouac. You wouldn’t last a day, you’d be cryin’ like a baby, cryin’ for your mother with your thumb in your mouth.”
The intern lurched forward, gnashed his teeth, then pulled back.
“Yeah, go ahead, tough guy,” Gerold said. “Punch a guy in a wheelchair. Shit, I’d still kick your ass.”
“In your dreams.”
The hits just keep on comin’, Gerold thought. “We’re sitting out here in the hot sun for what reason?”
“Waiting for your transport, and I have to go with you,” the intern seethed. “I have to check you in.”
“Tell you what,” Gerold posed. “Go on home for your much-needed beauty sleep, and I’ll check myself in.”
“Right. You’d just go somewhere and pretend you’re trying to kill yourself again, to get more attention.”
Gerold would’ve paid any price just to be able to stand up for one second and clean this guy’s clock.
“Aw, shit!” the guy spat, and looked at his watch.
“What? That time of the month again?”
“Fuck off. I forgot your out-pross papers.” He pointed right in Gerold’s face. “Listen, dick, I have to go back inside and get your papers. I’ll only be five minutes, and when I’m back you better still be here. Don’t even think about eloping.”
“Eloping?” Gerold stretched the word. “That’s what they call it?”
“Yeah, you’re an elopement risk. Says so right in your records. Elopement is when a pseudo–mental patient tries to escape from the people trying to help his sorry ass.”
“Where am I gonna go in five minutes, man!” Gerold yelled.
The finger kept pointing. “Just know this. If you do try to flee, I’ll find you, and you’ll be real sorry.”
“What, you’re threatening me?”
The stubbled face grinned. “Yeah. So what’re you gonna do about it, Hot Wheels?”
Gerold laughed hard now. “That’s what I like about interns. It puts the good ones into the system.”
The intern gave him the finger, then turned and headed back toward the building.
Gerold could only shake his head, chuckling morosely. This has been the worst twenty-four hours of my life. Wouldn’t it be nice if just once the Fates would let something GOOD happen to me?
A second after the automatic doors closed behind the intern, a city bus pulled up at the shelter not ten yards from where Gerold sat. “Yo, yo! Hold up!” Gerold launched himself forward with such force his wheels nearly left the pavement. Immediately the wheelchair lift began to beep, the ramp lowering.
“Come on in,” the uncharacteristically friendly driver invited. In no time, Gerold was on the ramp, going up. Come on! Come on! he fretted. “Is this a time point?” he asked. “I got a connection.”
“It is but I’m running late,” the driver said and belted Gerold’s chair into the cubby. “We gotta leave right now.”
All right! Gerold sat hunched, peeking with half an eye out the window. He just knew that before the bus pulled away, that intern would be running after them.
The bus pulled away.
No sign of the intern.
Go! Go! his thoughts pleaded, and he rocked back and forth with his fingers crossed.
The bus made the turn, roared onto the main road, and was on its way.
Gerold s
tared desperately behind until the hospital disappeared. He went slack in his chair. Thank you, Fates.
The bus was empty and deliciously cool.
“So what’s your connection?” the driver said.
“Uh, the 52.” Gerold picked the first bus route that came to mind.
“Oh, hell, we’ll be at the terminal at least ten minutes before that one leaves.”
“Great. Thanks.”
Gerold smiled, rocking over the gentle bumps in the road. But a glance down showed him a crumpled newspaper. He snatched it up.
It was the Tampa Bay Times, the local popified daily. His eyes idled over the “hip” articles and blaring ads for lingerie and singles clubs. It was a girl in a bikini holding a long fish that snagged more of his attention.
Gerold read the half-page ad—its headline: FUN & SUN AT BEAUTIFUL LAKE MISQUAMICUS!—to learn of a quaint, out-of-the-way camping and fishing resort several counties north of here. Jet Skis, parasailing, freshwater fishing, and, of special note, “Catch your own crawdads! Lake Misquamicus crawdads are the biggest in the state! We have delicious freshwater clams too!” Gerold really liked crawdads . . .
“Excuse me, driver? Now that I think of it, I won’t need to go to the terminal. Just drop me off on Ninth Avenue.”
“Sure. You taking a Greyhound somewhere?”
“Yeah,” Gerold said, still eyeing the ad and its accompanying bikini-clad model. “I’m heading up to . . . Lake Misquamicus.”
The driver nodded. “Good choice. They’ve got great fishing there and crawdadding. They stock the lake every year, and the place isn’t all full of tourists.”
“Cool,” Gerold said. Suddenly he felt wonderful, and he was genuinely looking forward to some fresh-cooked crawdads. They seemed a perfect last meal.
(III)
. . . and you’re not sure what you’re looking at, but when your supernatural vision sharpens—
“It’s like a mansion, except it’s got to be over five hundred feet on each side . . .”
“Sixty hundred and sixty-six,” Howard redresses, “if you’re interested in exactitude, and six floors each precisely sixty-six feet in height. Six belfries and six towers per side, six spires and crockets per tower. Six windows per dormer section, sixty-six chimneys, sixty-six occuli, and six hundred and sixty-six crest spikes along each of sixty-six cornices, not to belabor the evidence of sixty-six—”
“Enough of the fucking sixes! Please!” you wail. “I’m SICK of the fucking sixes!”
Howard waits for you to settle down, a bemused smile subtly set into his sallow face. “It’s curious to observe the extent of your acclimation, Mr. Hudson.”
“What’s that?”
“Your slowly increasing tendency to use profanity—”
I did it again, you realize. This place is a bad influence on me, and it’s no surprise.
After all, it’s Hell.
You look back up at the bizarre edifice you’ve been escorted to, just as Howard announces:
“Mr. Hudson, it is my doubtless pleasure and unreserved honor to introduce to you the new personal abode of the Prince of Darkness . . . Manse Lucifer.”
By now, you’ve already noticed the most distinguishing characteristic of the colossal manse. Its walls are not constructed of brick, block, cement slab, nor wood, nor stucco.
They’re built with female Human heads.
The heads face outward and—to no surprise—they’re all still very much alive. They’ve been laid like mason work, with mortar meticulously packed around each. Millions of heads, no doubt, have been used to construct the mansion’s outer walls and immense mansard-style roof.
“The walls are double layered,” Howard points out, “so that living female faces form the walls inside, as well—God knows what they’re forced to witness. All the interior floors, too, are made from the heads, including buttresses and load-bearing walls.”
A house of heads inside and out, you can only think. A MANSION of living female heads . . .
You sense yourself lowering, then perceive that Howard has set your “stick” into a slab of sidewalk filled with bone and tooth fragments. He’s slipping something from his pocket. “As you can imagine, an equally spectacular interior exists.” Howard, next, holds a small stack of dim photographs before your face.
“Good old-fashioned photographs,” you remark. “I’m surprised you have stuff like that in Hell.”
“Not photographs, hectographs. Hell’s version of the tintypes of my early days. A process of gold nitrate merged with tin salt. Hectographs are, again, only a luxury for the very wealthy here . . .”
Your eyes hold wide on each macabre snapshot.
“The Atrium,” Howard defines.
You are shown an impossible room walled with heads. Columns that ought to be Doric or Corinthian stand at each side of the arched entrance; these, too, are constructed of heads. On one wall hangs a painting of Demons peering in on the Last Supper while platters of chopped infants and goblets of blood wait on the long table to be consumed; on another hangs the Messiah being crucified upside down in Hell.
Next, “Lucifer’s master bed chamber . . .”
Not only are the walls made from heads but so is the high poster bed, yet each head of the mattress has its tongue permanently protruded via studs through the lips. Mirrors shaped like inverted crosses ring the room.
Next, “Lucifer’s Great Hall . . .”
Columned peristyles stretch down the long, vault-ceilinged room fitted with scroll-backed couches and chairs upholstered in Human skin. The banquet table—which you assume must be sixty-six feet long—occupies the center, with higher-backed skeletal chairs around it. The faces in the floor, ceiling, and walls, here, appear more appalled than in other rooms, and you can only suspect the reason has something to do with what they are forced to watch the Prince of Darkness and his guests dine on.
Next, “And Lucifer’s Grand Courtyard . . .”
Nauseating topiary has been meticulously clipped into the configuration of the number six. Noxious rosebushes bear heads of not petals but vaginas, while an ivy of severed penises crawls up a glimmering silver lattice. Human heads only comprise the outer walls and curtilage, but then you see their evidence in one more place: the circular swimming pool that exists at the center of the “six.” The entire pool is lined with them, and the pool appears to be filled with urine ever so faintly tinted with blood.
Next, “Ah, and Lucifer’s throne in the Central Nave . . .”
Not only is the room floored and walled with heads but the great throne itself is composed of them as well. The throne bears a similarity to a Victorian bishop’s chair, with even side-stiles, head backs, and armrests made of heads. The heads forming the center of the seat seem understandably more weary than the rest. To the right sits an ornate grandfather clock, whose pendulum chains are no doubt arteries of more unfortunates; its face has no hands. To the left hangs a painting of a glorious conqueror in a shining breastplate engraved with sixes. He wields a sweep-bladed cutlass while he stands over the headless corpse of, apparently, Christ. The sword-wielder’s face seems to glow to the point that detail cannot be discerned.
“And lastly, Lucifer’s commode-chamber, which you in your modern parlance would call a bathroom . . .”
The head-formed walls here are circular, presumably so that all may watch the Morning Star’s elimination. A beautifully cut mosaic of amethysts make up the actual toilet bowl but the rim of the seat is made of more Human heads. The oddest adornment here, though, is a gilded, flat-topped stand, and on top of it sits a lone Human head on its side. The head is not connected or mortared to anything; it’s just sitting there. You squint at it. It’s that of a blonde woman, slightly chubby-faced, with an expression of utter revulsion.
“What’s with the single head on the stand?” you ask.
“Surely you’ve noticed a disheartening absence of toilet paper, Mr. Hudson,” Howard says. “The unfortunate blonde belle’s face serves the p
urpose . . .”
Your facsimile for a stomach sinks, then sinks further when you suspect you’ve seen the face before in some entertainment magazine but you can’t quite recall her name.
Howard puts the hectographs away and rehoists your head-stick. “The main house has obviously been completed, but constant additions are in perpetual progress.” He points down an empty street—Mephisto Avenue—as a queue of clattering steam-trucks and monster-drawn wagons approach, all manned by various demonic workmen. Several wagons are heaped high with heads while others haul sacks of occult cement. At a certain point near the house, two hooded Bio-Wizards depart from the mansion’s entrance. They touch a pair of crooked wands together, then draw them apart to a distance wide enough to permit passage of the construction crew. After said passage, the Wizards reverse the odd procedure, and return to the entrance.
“What was that all about?”
“They were opening and closing the mansion’s impenetrable defense perimeter. Nothing may gain entrance without proper clearance.”
“Perimeter? I don’t see any perimeter.”
“It’s a Hex, Mr. Hudson. It’s called an Exsanguination Bridle. Ah, and how convenient! Watch what befalls this gaggle of very unwise insurgent ruffians and ne’er-do-wells . . .”
You look up and see a spectacular white Gryphon flying urgently toward one of the mansion’s towers. Saddled to its back are several very determined-looking Imps and Humans, each hefting a keg of explosives. But when the Gryphon’s swift wings take it past a certain point—
FFFFFFFFFFWAP!
—white feathers fly as the beast and its riders are immediately stricken by an energy that causes their blood to fire out of their bodies through every orifice. Then the bodies, and a rain of blood, hit the street. The kegs burst harmlessly, poofing billows of something akin to gunpowder.
“Wow,” you say, impressed. “That’s some security system.”
“The very latest Senarial Science. And anyone who is granted entrance is thoroughly screened by Prism Veils operated by Warlocks with the Psychical Detection Regiments. They’re able to read any and all negative or anti-Luciferic thoughts.”
Then you look back at the obscene house; even in the utter evil of its design, you have to be impressed. But your confusion couldn’t be more intense. “So this is the clincher? This is the final sight that’s supposed to make me accept the Senary—a house of heads?”