by Mike Jones
“See this, my son, and know what this scene is.”
The man looked out of the demon’s eyes. He saw a man bent over at the waist due to the weight on his back. A full-grown man was welded to him, joined back-to-stomach, and he was always in the penetration position. He never stopped pounding him from behind.
“In life, my son,” Red said, “the man had an uncanny fear of being raped.” The demon looked at the man lovingly and they both wept at the idea of anyone fearing such loving attention. Great red teardrops fell on the man’s uplifted face as he gazed adoringly at his father’s caring visage. “But, as usual, he was only remembering his future. For here it is the only thing that he will ever experience. It is the only place he has ever been.”
When the man looked again from the demon’s eyes, he saw the man beneath the tree, the one being pounded from behind. The eyes of this one were registering unnamable terror, and after seeing the man inside the demon, they widened further.
The thought splattered like acid in the man’s decaying brain. “Others see my humiliation, and they are much entertained!”
“Yes,” thought the man, his anger burning equally hot, “unless you are me in a thousand generations.”
“We are all one, my son,” the demon said. “When you learn that secret, thankfully, your threshold of pain will be awarded an increase of three greatness levels. Then, the Eternal Baptism will be yours: for your scream will widen and your skull will crack — and that is the baptism known as ‘The Mark of His Father.’
“My son, I must show you another dream. Even though you are deep inside me, I will lean over this precipice and you tell me what you see.”
When Red leaned over the edge, the son saw a barrel at the bottom. But what was most interesting about it was that it was not still…
“Inside the barrel is what looks like molasses or oil. I can barely see something brown and wet, churning and churning; never stopping.”
“See this woman being lowered into the barrel by a long chain, connected to a hook that is buried deep in her neck? Yes, above us. Well, let me tell you about a dream she has over and over in this place. Every few [times] here, she is pulled out and then she is lowered again to suffer [many million infinities]. When she is not in the barrel, she has a very foolish dream. Would you like me to tell you so you can laugh and laugh many times?”
“Yes, oh Father, I would love it.”
“Well, look in this churning barrel and despair, because when she has a respite from it, and she is burning in this fire, she dreams of another world, quite limp and unconscious; I assure you. A hideous world, but not as hideous as this world, of course. She dreams she is a young girl and has a child thing and puts it in a garbage dumpster, and that is the end of that. But sadly, in that world, the child thing was not alone, for the dumpster had a few permanent residents. Big, juicy rats. The mother did not know this, for she had left there, and went to meet a boyfriend, and they had a wonderful lunch at a restaurant. She did not know. She could not hear the screams, or know the terror of that baby as it was bitten to death and devoured by those sharp teeth. But now she continues to dream the same dream. Now do you know what churns in the barrel? That it is not molasses or oil, but the oily pelts of hundreds of rats as they gnaw and chew her repeatedly. How horrible it must be for her.”
And, indeed, they laughed for a few lifetimes at the sight of her, as she was lowered into the barrel, red spit slinging hungrily, and snapping white bone shined and churned and disappeared beneath the surface.
* * *
“Now this clearly is a breach of protocol!” a young female student stood and cried, giving no one else an opportunity to speak.
“Why is that?” he said simply, knowing full well what she was going to complain about. He had heard this before.
Her face was crimson. “Abortion is absolutely legal in our State. You are breaching protocol and common sense by condemning it!”
“If you had been listening, Student, you might have noticed that this was a live birth the dear woman trashed, not an abortion. I think maybe you can put away your Lectro-Current magazine and listen more closely next time, especially since you pretend to know so much.”
“I can see why so many people despise you.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“MORE LEGS IN THE PARK”
A woman was there when they had walked farther through great expanses of burning yards. She was barely visible beneath 17,000 layers of flame. She jittered and jerked, but could not free herself.
“I don’t know why she is here. I come because I love the memories of this light. Long, long before Bjorn blew across the night and threw out the Milky Way, I used to come here to dance at her light. I was new to her perfume then. I am her old flame now.”
The demon’s fathomless sockets gazed on her golden lights and he nearly loved again.
A PARENTHETICAL EPISODE
The demon walked and the man watched everything through his hot black holes.
“Look at this, my son. This exhibit is known in The Annals of Cruelty as ‘A Demon’s Abomination.’ There are a few things that even we cannot gaze at for long.”
A wasted man lay spread-eagled on the ground, facedown. Above him, pounding him with an enormous member, was another man. As the two bodies met, fifteen blades pierced them through. They writhed as they continued, unable to stop.
It cannot be truthfully said they were screaming, because with all that exists here, “The Scream” is The Base Unit. The Primary Law: “Nothing Ever Stops Screaming!”
“Can you tell, my son, which of them owns the blades that pierce the corpse of the other?”
“No,” he whispered in the demon’s head.
Red burst out laughing. “Neither can they.” He laughed for many times. “They will go on, blessedly, throughout eternity, in the heat, in the flames, in ‘The Burning,’ never ceasing in their stride. No horror can equal this. No mere man or demon can even imagine this, let alone look at it for long.”
It only increases in horror, thought the man, if you continue to think about it, which I choose not to do.
That’s true, thought the demon.
I will come out of you now, thought the man, and kiss your feet, Father.
Then it is done, thought the other. Out of the palms of his hands flew thick cords of silver that became glittering hooks. He plunged both into his own abdomen and savagely ripped (blurred) them sideways until his guts spilled onto the ground. “We call this, my son, ‘The Judas Solution.’ I cannot explain it to you, for it is an incredibly Holy Thing, and I would not anger the Chief of all demons by repeating the story of The Great Sacrifice.”
Burning and entwined in the gray and red entrails was the man, like a birthed adult. His eyes burst outward as the heat intensified. They bled out, dried up, healed over, opened, and behold, they were his eyes again.
ANOTHER PARENTHETICAL EPISODE
“Son,” said the demon, “you’re going to get your toast cooked.”
“My toast cooked?”
“No, your toes cooked.” Red grinned insanely. “Approach me.”
The man did so because he had no choice.
“Give me one of your feet.”
The man obliged. The demon pulled the man’s blackened foot into his mouth and his jaws glowed red with flames. The man’s toes blackened further.
The demon repeated the process with the other foot.
“Know by this, my son, my great love for you.”
And the man did know.
THE THIRD PARENTHETICAL EPISODE
“My son,” shrieked the demon in the man’s mind. “Come here and put your lips to my handsome chest.”
He obeyed and blood flowed fast from Red’s chest into the man’s gaping mouth.
“Guide my member up your hole so I can have my way with you, my son.”
The man obeyed and felt the writhing member tear him to pieces from the inside. Its thickness ripped him o
pen more as the flesh bore itself upward, chewing as it climbed.
The demon huffed and puffed as he became lost in the exercise. Over and over he pounded his son until, finally, the man felt fire fluid flash within his insides.
“That’s good, my son,” the demon said. “Let’s do that for 13,000 generations.”
And they did.
* * *
On another night, as the demon rubbed burning oil over the man’s naked bottom, a thought occurred to him. “My son, there is only one sight of beauty in all my park. Let us go and I will show it to you. In my holiness, I will commit this act.”
The man extracted the entire length of the member from within him, eventually able to spit it out and watch it fall to the demon’s lap. Red rose and walked. The man followed and they came upon a living (dead) horror.
Two figures could be barely seen through the towering flames. They writhed in the center of a burning arena. A dark man was lying on his back on the smoking ground. His large hands gripped the hips of a white man trying to escape the connection between them, but it was an eternal struggle.
“All his natural life,” began Red, “the white man feared being raped by black men. Ahhh, sadly, he was only remembering his future:
“He will always be here;
“He will always be trying to escape;
“He will always be raped; and
“For all eternity!
“This is the only truly beautiful thing in the park. I never have it far from my thoughts.”
* * *
After this session a student stood to speak. “Is there a point to this?”
A young woman nodded. “Yeah, where are you going with this?”
The old man laughed. “Maybe nowhere. But, then again, maybe I am leading you on a wild goose chase.”
“We have never heard that expression,” another male voice near the back said. “Is that ‘old speak’?”
“Yes, it is. It means you might think the book gets worse and worse, but the truth may be that when you see the ending, you will realize that, all along, things have been infinitely worse than you expected.”
He pulled his shirt over his head before he put his pants on, relishing the fact that the students had been drawing him for so long, and he loved his nude body.
“Well, when does the sex stuff end? You’re repulsive.”
“It’s true, I am. You have already passed the first invisible act of three that make up the book. Not that there aren’t nauseating passages still to come, but I had to establish, right from the beginning, that when you come to Infernus, you lose all hope. That is gone. You no longer choose options; you are chosen. The first act is sexual brutality. The second act we are about to enter is hyper-violence.”
“It hasn’t been that until now?”
He laughed again. “It has, but now we enter a realm where it is mostly just that. Would you like me to tell you what the third invisible act is?”
Another student stood to be heard. “Why didn’t you just write it in three acts?”
“Because I didn’t want to write it in three acts. This is the only opportunity you have to learn them. I never had any desire to delineate them plainly in the text.”
“Why not?” asked the same student.
“Because I sincerely believe there are women and men in this world that are a hell of a lot smarter than I am, and it would insult their intelligence to write down to them. They would tell me I was pretentious and superficial. The third invisible act is hyper-violently surreal.”
“But, I already think it is hyper-violently surreal,” another student said.
“Uh, no you don’t,” the man said, smiling, and left it at that for the week.
CHAPTER NIGHT
“BLOOD AND GUTS”
The demon’s elbow rested just below the man’s chin. The rest of his arm (including his forearm) was down his son’s throat.
“This proves my love for you, my son. Put your hands under my massive genitals, and hold onto those two black stones.”
He wrenched his goo-covered arm from his son’s throat instantly, shredding flesh in the process. The man wrapped his hands around the leathery black bags and gripped them tightly.
“Yes, that’s right, my son. Now burst them with your grip.”
The man squeezed until yellow blood flowed freely between his fingers. He bowed his head to the sizzling liquid trickling between his knuckles and lovingly lapped it up with a slave’s humility.
“Thank you, Father,” the man said.
Later, after they passed many miles along the shore of a boiling lake, they came upon a beach. They looked out across a sea of sand. Many humans lay roasting like meat on the burning grains.
“Let’s walk among them,” the demon said, and they did, entering the field of the flesh. “This one was known in life as ‘The Killer.’ No such proud designation can be given him; here he would be referred to simply as, ‘The Killed.’ ‘The Killer’ was possessed of a specialty — the eyes — it was his favorite thing to gouge out with a scoop in his dreams.”
Red drove one of his clawed feet into the eyes of the gaping head. He did this over and over and over…
“And this was a human with breasts,” the demon said as they moved on to another specimen. “It had a will to tell lies to anyone who would listen. So now, if any of our ears hear one word issuing forth, we all urinate on the top of the head. This is great humiliation to this creature of ego.”
And to prove it, he covered the protesting head (for five spaces of time) with his acidic urine. The man laughed at that and kicked it from behind for one thousand times. He loved to watch the bleeding head reel from the violent strikes, and loved hearing it make little mewling sounds.
“Son, I give you the gift of The Satyr.” The demon waved his great arms wide.
The man felt the changes and looked at his body. His legs began to cramp as they cracked backward and sprouted hooves. Black wire hair grew rapidly from his ankles to the tops of his thighs. The satyr’s arms thickened, becoming corded with large veins and matted with black hair. It flowed wildly across his chest and around his back like water. A black goatee instantly grew on his chin and he stood in glorious, handsome masculinity before his father.
“You will forever be ‘Satyr.’ It is a gift from your father, who loves you.” He approached the satyr. “Now your body is ‘suited’ for my affections. It has been strengthened to the point where I won’t rip you to shreds, although it was joyous for both of us, I know.”
The demon knelt before the satyr and sifted through the thick patch of pubic hair. “My son, I now, in sacrifice, take your member in me, and I will dine from you.”
And he did.
* * *
“Let me have some of your precious blood, my son.” The demon held out a hand. The satyr lifted one of his legs and placed a wool-covered hoof into it.
Red held it between his teeth and suddenly bit down, cracking the split hoof into four bloody pieces and pouring salty blood into his mouth. He pulled the hoof in further and sucked loudly.
* * *
“Oh, Dr. Mountfountain, you were coming along so well, too. Now, after three days, big Barney drags you back in a straightjacket after your failed escape attempt. Don’t you want to get better? What did you say, Barney? You ‘nailed’ him in the woods and now Dr. Mountfountain is a wide receiver? Was there blood? Ahhh, a virgin. Well, you go along now, Barney. I’ll do an extensive cavity search — I hope you didn’t leave any deposits behind.”
Big Barney and the small man laughed quietly for a few moments.
After Barney left, the other doctor guided the bewildered Mountfountain onto a flat metal trough.
“The water is shallow, Doctor. I’m not going to drown you. I’m just going to lay you down in it, all right? I’m pulling off your pants now. My, aren’t you a big boy? I’m attaching two small clips to your testicles — oh, you baby, that didn’t hurt! The wire goes to this generator. Now with the added condu
ctivity of the water, you’ll feel like a piece of -
… brrzzzapppp!…
* * *
The class was mostly quiet after this session. The Legend — although no one referred to him this way, and he would be unknown by this name until Infernus was, well… known by others later — packed up his things and left until next week.
CHAPTER TEN
“WASTING WITH TIME”
“My son,” screamed the demon in the satyr’s mind. “Do you know what my parting gift will be to you in three billion, trillion generations?”
“Why must there be a parting?” cried the satyr weakly in Red’s mind.
“The toils we pass through will have honed your body to invisible perfection. My final parting gift to you in three billion, trillion generations,” and here a blood tear fell hissing to the stony ground, “you will become ‘The Scream.’”
Satyr gaped. “Is such a treasure possible to attain?”
“Not only is it possible, but it is necessary. In your path to become Everything, you must literally become everything. Are you pleased?”
“More than pleased — my pain threshold just increased three greatness levels.”
“Then all is proceeding as planned,” gushed the demon lovingly.
* * *
The truth that the two shuddering, smoldering lumps at the bottom of the mile-deep shaft may yet discover was that nothing was done or said lovingly here. All was stated in the most naked horror imaginable. No love lay behind the intent. Rather, the satyr now knew that his body was being distilled and rarified so that he would lose the detritus of his individuality and become assimilated by “The Scream.” To be invisible, to scream forever and be, in essence, that scream made the two smoldering corpses shudder and clatter their bones together more violently. But, they could not wake themselves. They could never do that.
* * *
[This next section, considered by even some ardent Satanists as The Most Hideous Profane Thing, is survived in only phrases and a few pages of text. What follows is, according to the foremost expert, Doctor Helen Gaines, to be all that survives.]