~ * ~
The drawings continued unremittingly, each one lasting longer and proving more challenging than the next, despite Allieb’s growing physical form: his seven feet in height; his hulking physique rippling beneath a coating of snake-like scales; the protruding black horns surfacing from his head that curled inwardly like those on a ram; the tail emerging from the small of his back that now touched the floor, spaded not unlike his penis, which itself dangled black and wetly to his knobby knees. What appeared to be an escalation of strength and power on the outside fell in harsh contrast to his noticeable abilities to perform—to Danto, it became obvious that the demonologist was weakening on the inside; while each drawing had been successful up to this point, Allieb seemed not to have the strength to execute them with the unrestrained dynamism he’d exhibited on Thornton.
The platform and altar were littered with the discarded remains of nine vehicles: Thornton, three adult males, two adult females, two teenage boys, and a girl no older than five years of age. Each body lay twisted, partially cannibalized, mutilated beyond recognition beneath Allieb’s plodding and seemingly directionless footsteps. Tendrils of steam rose from the obscene display like evaporating mists materializing from sunshower puddles.
In addition to Allieb’s dazed performance, his hold on the occupants had also waned. The circle began to falter upon the drawing of the fourth demon. Two individuals had broken their trances and consequently swooned upon sighting the unforeseen butchery laid out before them. Others simply collapsed from exhaustion, their mindless states still wholly reliant on their physical capacities, which had evidently run their course. One man who had shed his robe and tried to flee the room discovered his heart on the receiving end of a large wooden spike telekinetically rendered from the wall just beneath the balcony. With members falling away, the circle tightened, bringing those still standing closer to Allieb’s daunting pursuits. Now, with the hours gone by and nine demons drawn, roughly twenty-five percent of those once positioned steadfast in prayer lay on the floor, either dead by Allieb’s hand, or unconscious.
The disorder of the situation afforded Danto an opportunity to shift his body at times, enabling him to gaze at Rebecca’s face. Her eyes remained bright and unwaveringly true to the complicated tasks at hand, only once peering back at Danto with a confidence and glow that unquestionably hadn’t been there before. She’s stronger, as though she’s become a totally different person, one entirely capable of handling this situation. And…she even looks different…
She did look different. Her face had changed, only slightly, but enough for Danto to notice the slight shift in her cheekbones, the gentle arching of her brow, the curvature of her eyes, the definition of her jaw. And, of course, her demeanor: the fear that had previously dominated her behavior had vanished, only to be replaced by a poised self-assurance that seemed to demonstrate a hint of insight to the unfolding events. During the drawing of the tenth demon, Baal, Allieb collapsed to the floor upon devouring the eyes of the human vehicle and remained writhing amongst the carnage, seemingly oblivious to the events at hand. Here, Danto broke his connection with the circle and faced Rebecca.
She seemed to stare right through him, her eyes ostensibly greener, her skin paler with a gorgeous blush of red at the cheeks. She looked totally different now, lips fuller, nose a bit smaller, hair a lighter shade of brown.
“Rebecca,” Danto whispered. “What’s happening to you?”
Her gaze came into focus, considered for a moment the wailing demonologist, then looked him straight in the eye. At once he felt mesmerized, as though she held some higher form of power he could never identify with. The world seemed to spin around him, everything set into a blurring whirl…except her face, which instantaneously fixed itself into an aura of positive light and came alive with the personality of someone other than Rebecca Haviland. In an ethereal voice that clearly wasn’t hers, she said, “Thomas, your job is not yet complete. Go back into the circle and allow the events to play themselves out. Do as I say, and you will be protected by the One who has looked over you your entire life.”
And then the reeling environment came back into focus, nearly sending Danto to the floor. He grabbed Rebecca’s arm to keep himself from collapsing, regained his balance, then dutifully placed himself back into the circle before Allieb rose up and commenced with the ceremony.
A whirlwind of emotions inundated Danto, that of uncertainty, of wonder, and awe. Would everything be all right? Somehow Rebecca had retained a bit of otherworldly influence, an unwavering conviction that the situation would conclude as they’d hoped and prayed for; that despite all that had gone wrong up until this point, good would ultimately prevail over evil. Yes, Danto thought, somehow, she knew this. And damn, he believed her.
More time passed. Hours, it seemed. Every nerve and vessel in Danto’s body pleaded for a respite. The muscles tightened in his face and body, bringing about stabs of excruciating pain. Still, he remained fixed in the circle that had been reduced to half its original size. Additional participants collapsed under the weight of events; others, killed at Allieb’s hand upon their attempts to flee the cathedral; despite Allieb’s outwardly declining strength, he still maintained the power and sharpness to punish those who attempted an escape. One man, upon an attempt to flee, collapsed to the floor near the doorway and writhed in scream-filled agony until he vomited what appeared to be a lung; others fell victim to impaling candelabras and flying hunks of wood. Soon, dozens of bodies littered the floor of the cathedral. It looked like a human slaughterhouse. In retrospect, it was just that.
Allieb eventually completed the drawing of the twelfth demon, Lucifer, but it had taken him a tremendous amount of time and effort to accomplish the monstrous task. The demon had been riding the body of a young muscle-bound man whose soul had seemingly found the will to struggle against the evil spirit inside, making Allieb’s task enormously difficult; the man’s personality continuously broke through that of Lucifer’s, screaming in his agony and fighting for his life, breaking the possessive flow that Allieb needed to accomplish the task; even with Lucifer’s compliance to walk the earth via the Legion, Allieb seemed not to have the fortitude to keep the demon present long enough to complete the drawing. The demonologist remained on his knees the entire duration, slapping his spaded tail against the wooden platform and praying in a chorus of twelve grotesque voices: his, and those of the eleven demons within.
In the end, it appeared that the vehicle holding Lucifer could handle no more physical abuse. The possessed man eventually grasped his chest and collapsed to the ground after an intense warring of souls that shook the house and brought the wooden pentagrams of the columnar supports crashing down. The platform collapsed, pulling the altar and the surrounding carnage to the floor. In the middle of the bloody sea, Danto spotted one of the beetles on its back, stuck in a puddle of gore, its chitinous legs swiping frantically in the air. The possessed man groped through the chaos, growling like an injured dog, pawing at the mess. He aimed his glowering sights toward Allieb. The demonologist must have been rationing his strength for this moment—with alarming alacrity, he pounced and drilled his blackened teeth into the man’s arching neck. A deafening wail filled the room as the man’s body collapsed inwardly, the eyes sinking back into their quickly-rotting sockets, muscles dwindling to slimy clots, limbs curling fetally against his shrinking body. As his flesh and blood was altogether extracted by Allieb, the skin of his face stretched out tautly against his skull, leaving behind a hollow rictus grin that sputtered and coughed its very last efforts to breathe. In the end, the black soul of Lucifer oozed out of the man’s body and covered Allieb like a membrane, which the demonologist quickly absorbed through his flaring scales.
Once the drawing was complete, Allieb pulled away from the withered mass of skin and bone of Lucifer’s vehicle and buckled back against the broken platform. His eyes rolled up into his skull, the glossy whites eerily stark against his blood-doused visage. Body shifting a
nd twitching into a greater monstrous form, he commenced with a spellbinding prayer.
And the congregation replied: “Hail Allieb, hail Belial, hail Abbadon, hail Lucifer, hail Rex Mundi, hail Ashtoroth, hail Dantalion, hail Malphas, hail Gadon, hail Gaap, hail Beleth, hail Bael, hail Moloch, hail Baphomet.”
After the prayer, the room fell into eerie silence. Danto peered nervously about, his heartbeats tremulous and staggering, his breath lost amidst the slaughterhouse in front of him. Finally the whole scene hit him. It tore at his sanity, filled his senses like a tangible force: the spectacle of the bodies, the pungent stench of their seeping fluids, the sounds of their escaping gasses, the bitter taste of copper in the air. He was a partner in death, in sin, no escaping the horrid truth, this mountain of atrocities. The revulsion factor flew off the chart, to a point where nothing seemed to matter anymore—humankind, butchered, bled, flayed, skinned, and devoured.
Still, with all that, he could never prime himself for the horror to come.
The candles on and about the altar had been extinguished, eliminating much of the light in the center of the room…but there was still enough of a glow to witness Allieb’s inconceivable transformation. His body began to palpitate, his anatomy morphing into a beast never before beheld by human eyes: arms and legs elongating—tearing—into arachnid-like appendages, the scales on them flaring widely, blood spouting from the spreading crevices. The joints on his arms and legs cracked and swelled like balloons and eventually ruptured, discharging arcs of oily black fluids. His chest and back broadened, the scales shedding away to reveal the skin beneath, pink and premature. His jaw and brow developed hideous simian-like characteristics, while the horns on his head grew longer, curvier, bursting bloodily from his swelling skull. This beast, once a human being who had at first become possessed by the spirit of the ancient demonologist Allieb, was now possessed by twelve of Hell’s most powerful demons—Satan’s army, corralled into a single vehicle, for the first time in all of history able to walk the earth and take advantage of its worldly pleasures.
And, it appeared, a little piece of each demon had made itself present in his physical manifestation.
Allieb screamed, in either agony or triumph. It seemed not to matter. Its eyes rolled obscenely beneath the bloody slab of brow protruding from its head as it clambered on all fours out of the gore toward the wavering circle, trailing jagged splotches of blood behind. It shook its hulking head heavily, back and forth, tail thick and slapping the puddles of humanity on the floor. When its scream ceased, a low, unintelligible groan issued from its sizzling maw.
And still it morphed gruesomely further, crawling low-bellied to the ground, dragging its ulcerated teats, legs and arms indistinguishable from one another, sprouting thick insectine hair. A row of broad protruding spines ran along the length of its back. It crawled across the floor toward the waning circle, which at this point had lost all its cohesiveness; those that remained did so out of fear and not by any variety of hypnotic grasp. Many individuals had shed their hoods and gazed around in utter confusion; clearly this had been the first time these people found themselves released from Allieb’s influence since coming to In Domo. It seemed apparent to Danto that Allieb’s mental domination over the cabal fell low on his list of priorities at the moment.
Those conscious members in the room, perhaps fifty in all, backpedaled away from the emergent beast, many reaching down and grabbing the closest thing to a weapon they could find. Danto grabbed Rebbecca by the hand and led her to the only doorway leading into the cathedral, but others were already there, yanking furiously on the large oak doors that wouldn’t budge.
From Allieb, repulsive growls emerged.
Danto spun around and gazed at the beast that had become Allieb, as much reptilian and arachnid as it was simian, without the slightest hint of the human form it had once been. The thing raised its grotesque head, opened its jaw and leaped at the nearest member of the congregation, a twenty-something man whose insubstantial efforts to fend off the creature with a candlestick went unrewarded. The beast buried its jaws into the man’s waist, tearing away a meaty portion of his midsection, and nearly severing the leg. With a violent wrench, the gash opened even further, exposing the meat of his thigh, red and glistening. The beast dragged the body back toward the slaughter pit, then flung its huge head back, sending the mutilated body fifteen feet through the air. It slammed into the wall of the cathedral, leaving behind a splatter of obscene art before plunging to the ground.
Screams erupted from those still present to witness the beast’s actions. Its transformation still hadn’t yet reached a final stage, it seemed. The thing kept growing, expanded, shifting, reaching an intimidating ten feet in height despite its horizontal position on all six appendages, organic matter falling away from it in bloody ribbons. Even as this anatomical shedding took place, a fresh configuration began, fibers interweaving with fibers, tying themselves together into thick tendons. Elaborate tattoo-like patterns drew themselves on the rough skin that formed over the exposed sinew and muscle, and all Danto could do was squeeze Rebecca’s hand and wonder, What next?
The beast lunged about the room, seemingly testing the resiliency of its new body. People screamed, cowered, huddled together against the walls. It rose up on two legs, raised its other four segmented extremities high and gripped the edge of the balcony twenty feet in the air. Ribbons of red light burst from the spreading slits in its skin, beaming about the room like lasers and panning the recoiling occupants. People screamed as the light washed over them. A single beam lanced over Danto’s forearm. He screeched, gazing at the smoldering burn it left behind. He shook his head back and forth, wondering furiously if he’d live to see another day.
Where is Bev Mathers? Was Thornton wrong in his assumptions? Is this how it’s going to end?
Soon, the beams of light coalesced into a solitary shaft that burned the floor before a single hooded occupant. The beast that had been Allieb bounded back down on its six limbs and advanced upon the individual with alarming speed, treading through the tendrils of smoke rising from the smoldering wood. Those nearby screamed and scattered like rats. The light exploding from its skin faded, then extinguished itself as the creature settled before the cloaked being.
It remained utterly still, staring down at the individual. Currents of green smoke geysered out of its palpitating snout. It grinned ferally, thick strings of spittle seeping from its mouth, searing as it hit the floor. For a few tension-filled moments the thing remained still and staring, breathing hoarsely.
Then, in the voices of one man and twelve demons, it spoke: “Reveal yourself.”
The person remained unmoving, trembling with fear.
With a calculated swipe of its upper right appendage, the beast clawed away the person’s robe, exposing their identity.
The first thing Danto saw was her hair, long tresses flowing down past her shoulders, covering her face. Then, her jeans, fitted cleanly upon a youthful figure; a solid black tee shirt completed the common outfit. She cowered, arms folded against her chest, then jerked her head away from the looming beast, revealing a tear-filled face to Danto.
His mouth fell open, but he could not draw a breath.
Kristin Mathers. Bev Mathers’s daughter.
The beast reached down, grabbed her by the neck and hugged her against its hulking chest; white fluids burst from its wriggling teats, dousing her face. Everyone in the room screamed, men and women alike; sobs arose from every direction. Now, in what appeared to be his complete form, the beast that had been Allieb held Kristin close in its spiny extremities, like a mother monkey would her baby.
It then roared in thirteen fiendish voices a single, demanding word:
“SATAN!”
FORTY-NINE
The guillotine sliced down on Bev’s neck for the third time in as many hours, his head rolling away from his body, the pain registering just as intensely as it had the first two times. It took a few seconds for the sting to kick in, w
hich was instantly followed by a tremendous agony localized across his entire throat. He gasped like a landed fish, the odor of something rotten filling his nostrils. Strangely, he maintained his sense of smell, and even his sight, although it quickly turned blurry on him. Something inside his brain exploded, sucking away what remained of his vision, and then, the odor infesting his nose. Once that was gone, his mind triggered the survival synapses in his brain, allowing him to remain alive for what might have been two minutes of bodilessness. Then, death came, followed by a respite of blackened silence. A wave of dizziness washed over him, and soon thereafter Bev found himself whole again, mired in the shallow sea of acid, staring at the black heavens of his stomach beneath the looming shadow of the guillotine.
In the distance, a voice shook the universe: ”SATAN!”
He scrambled to his knees and looked up toward the black hole of his esophagus, afraid as to what might happen next. His world shifted from side to side: his hulking body moving rapidly through the halls of In Domo under the dominion of Satan.
Then, a scream, seeping in from the outside world, through the organic walls of his universe, his personal Hell.
Kristin. Satan had not told a lie after all. She was here! Bev stood, looked up, all around, pursuing another sign of her presence, but heard nothing. Outside the organic walls of Hell, he could feel his heavy body moving quickly, arms scraping the walls, feet slamming down, splintering wood. Bev realized now that the tortures had ceased. Had Satan finished playing his games? Was the war about to begin? Here, Bev thought, Satan had told a lie: his promise of unimaginable agonies would not take place after all. Perhaps those coined as mere child’s play were the actual agonies he spoke of? He reminded himself that the Devil is the ultimate liar, and despite the circumstances, would instinctually amuse himself by playing games.
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