by Mike Jones
The son, filled with awe, returned to his father and wept as he said, “Was there ever a more completely delicious epic as that tome, my father?”
“Even if you could write it, my son, you could not do it justice. But you can come here as often as you like and saturate yourself with the beauty, wherewithal.”
* * *
Nothing of interest was said after this chapter, but the students glared at him, knowing they could never trust him again. And they always kept their guard up after this.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“ANOTHER EPISODE OF BANKRUPT BEHAVIOR”
“My son,” said the demon as he bent to his work with passion, “is this not a delicious treat, for we are working together, and being together. What do you think?”
The vampire satyr lay still, unable to speak.
“Look, my son, the meat hook rises and falls with the blurring speed of a hummingbird’s wing. Your eye socket, a mere ruin.”
Crack! Split!
Red was laughing so hard that he fell on the burning earth and rolled around hysterically for days. The son barely moved; his massive hairy chest rose and fell with shallow breathing.
Later, the son felt a membrane growing over each shattered eye socket and saw (dimly) many things he wished he hadn’t.
He saw a small red demon forcing a knobby blackened branch up the rectum of a young, surprised man.
He saw a squirming man who was trying to crawl away from a dwarf who had managed to imbed himself halfway up the man’s arse.
He saw eternally starved serpents silently slurping up slimy fetuses in a boiling lake. And he did confess that this scene was actually pleasing him.
“Look, my satyr son, behold this horror of religion. Merely seeing this tableau will burn parts of your soul away for all time. You must experience this to become all things.”
And this is what the son saw:
There were two diamond towers standing fast in the blackened earth; one would say that they appeared to be 110 feet high. No heat could affect them. They were elaborately carved with 3,000 human figures, jutting out at odd angles as if they were agonizing in the flames. A green demon, five times larger than any mortal, stood next to these glittering twin towers. He had a new arrival gripped around the waist with a massive fist. He was jerking the newcomer back and forth between the cruel towers so rapidly that he was no more than a blur, a confusion of arms in the painful rhythm of the nerves of the dead.
It made Red laugh so hard that many golden tears were falling from his sightless orbs. The large green demon’s laughter kept him from seeing what he was doing; it was all instinct. There was snickering as well.
Red turned to his son after their shared experience and said, “This is what all beings ever created refer to as, ‘The Single Most Holy Vision!’ Spread your legs wide, my son, I must become one with you.”
And it was so.
* * *
“Another tableau, my son?” the father asked after he had sexually abused him for a [century] passing of a small time.
“Oh, my father, please, please me!”
A blister bug fell from one of the son’s sockets. He picked it up and shoved it into his arse. He heard its shell crunch.
They stopped before a cave. The entrance was soaked in evil blackness that roiled out at them, inviting them to move closer with invisible tentacles. They obeyed its calling. Within, as a white light came up, a little drama was being played out.
The son observed a man, black as slate, standing within a room. He was nude, huge and burning. He stooped to walk under a stone arch into an adjoining cave.
A gorilla stood there staring at a statue that was baked red as clay in a kiln. Its right shoulder was low, for it was leaning on the burning floor with a sizzling fist. The gorilla, its coat shimmering cobalt blue, casually looked his way.
“Come here, my son,” it said to the man, its eyes observing him with intelligence.
The statue, animated, was pointing in the distance with its left arm and tirelessly plunging a knife into its own chest, over and over again.
“What is this?” the man asked.
The gorilla drew him to his side with a massive, leathery paw and nuzzled his neck. He barely whispered into one of the man’s ears. “See the plaque on the pedestal? What does it say?”
“It says, ‘Man’s Best.’ What does that mean? ‘Man’s Best… Friend’? What?”
“No,” the gorilla replied gently. “This is the best that man can possibly do.”
The statue opened its mouth and spoke. “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.”
It kept its left arm pointing in the distance, at an unseen enemy. It continuously plunged the knife into its chest with malicious intent. And glee.
“This is the best that man has to offer?” the black man asked.
“That’s right.” The gorilla laughed.
“We’re screwed.” The man sighed. “Poor statue, thanks for reminding us how doomed we are.”
“It’s not a statue,” the gorilla calmly replied, then laughed at the shock on his pupil’s tormented face.
The gorilla took the man there, coupling with him in a pitch-black corridor. The connecting cave drew dark, signaling that it had shown them all of its great and secret show.
“That tableau seemed vaguely familiar to me,” the son said, clearly confused.
“I don’t suppose I have ever seen the likes of that tableau before,” Red stated.
They moved on.
* * *
They approached a gray and brown cemetery with two small buildings in the middle of the entrance. A weak sun, unseen, flooded the area with an amber overcast.
A metal track suspended on waist-high wooden poles ran between the buildings and disappeared into large concrete arches on either end.
The father and son walked through the entrance and stood in front of the track.
“What is this, Father?”
Before he could answer, his attention was captured by five young blonde girls marching with rigid, militaristic steps toward the track. Their ages were mere years apart, and one looked identical to another. Each held a long, broad-bladed knife in their right hands.
A distant clacking began until a gray flat car — glowing bright red, as if heated — rolled into view from the building entrance on the right. (Its ride, therefore, was clockwise.)
A woman was securely lashed to the car with massive chains. She was dressed in a white linen dress trimmed with lace. Her hair was golden and fell about her shoulders in long curls. Her face was smeared with despair and resignation. She had to look over her shoulder at the young girls, for she was turned away from them. The chains pulled her down toward the car’s surface and left her back stretched tight and exposed.
Two things happened when the car clacked and clattered and reached the equidistant place between the buildings:
Flames roared from the building’s arch on the left, which sounded like an angry animal.
The young girls began penetrating her back with the blades. They ripped them backward and out, looping thin strings, slung here and there, and covered the five girls and woman with wet red. The woman’s only response was that she desperately tried to disappear into the metal car, though it burned bright crimson. There was no cry from her. The girls did not shriek with delight, but merely grunted with their efforts.
Before the car entered the flaming arch of the building on the left, two more things happened:
The girls stopped stabbing the miserable woman. They held the blades over their heads, shook them like savages, but made no victorious cry. Red strings were flinging all over and down on them.
Then the flames intercepted the woman. Her body instantly bloomed bright orange and she became a fat crackling jittering lump before she disappeared into the glowing hole.
“Father-”
“Aaaah, this is a beautiful scene,” said Red, ignoring the son as he was often wont to do. “Do you wish to pretend this has meaning?”
“Yes.”
“Very well.” He sighed. “She was asked, many, many years ago if she knew why she was here. Foolishly, she should have said that there was no good reason she was there/here.”
“No?”
“No. She believed she came from another place called ancient Greece, where she had been a queen. She said her name had been Gamoor, and she had, in a strange fit of maladies, drowned her five daughters in a large vat of boiling pig’s blood.”
“But, why this punishment, Father?” The son swept his arms toward the comedy playing out before them.
“This is the revenge that was set before her for believing such nonsense. No such thing ever happened. And there are no daughters. It was asked of five demons if they would pose as her daughters that she’d dreamt and torment her for all eternity. Naturally, they were only too happy to comply.”
“How long has this been happening?”
“It cannot be expressed properly for you to comprehend, but it’s close to billions of infinities.”
“This cemetery is somber and beautiful, Father,” the son said as the woman came out of the building on the right once more, whole and ready to begin again.
Father and son watched, enchanted, with blood streaming from their sockets like warm tears.
* * *
Red light weakly flared up from within a cave. An eternal play continued inside, ceaseless.
“My son, this is a bit of drama from your dream world. From the past, we have an infinite number of these little plays. Only the sweetest ones play here. The daintiest morsels are repeated!”
The son gazed at the scene until he perceived the point. He then laughed so hard that his pain threshold increased.
A little boy of four or five was dancing around a replica of an earth kitchen while his mother stood above him with a large carving knife. Down upon his weaving head and waving arms, always connecting with the child, never once missing. She didn’t laugh — she was much too busy.
* * *
“Look at this hideous tableau, my son. What do you see?”
“I see a dark room beginning to glow red. It throbs there, a bloody-looking room. There are two men in the middle, lying flat on their backs on the floor. Writhing, oh, my father, writhing like little babies; like spoiled babies… ”
The demon looked at the son and loved him. “Yes, they are burning, as we all are.”
“Two giant, blood-muscled canines break through the shattering door, and — oh, my father! — make me turn from this vision!”
“You may not!” screamed Red.
“Oh, the monster dogs shred the men and leap on them — their screams — they plunge their broad members into them, and frothingly rape them as they disembowel them! Oh, my sad, sick father, what have you done to me?”
“Shown you that the one thing mortals think they leave behind in death is their conscience — it is only amplified here.” The son could almost swear he heard a piano playing dramatically in the background. “We’ve-” the demon begins to weep piteously. “thought of-” sob “-everything!”
“Look! Another room, my father.” The son ignored Red’s emotion, for it seemed to him quite irrelevant. “It blazes up, glowing yellow. What is this?”
“Surely there is beauty here, also, Son. Let’s listen in, shall we? I think we are coming in the middle of a conversation. First, what do you actually see?”
“I see a dwarfish, bright blue demon, his limbs all cramped and crabbed to the point of being morosely disabled, standing hunched over before a woman burning like a torch. I can barely see her features as they are blurred beneath roaring flames.”
“That’s right. What she looks like is, of course, unimportant. Pointless. Now, listen to what he is saying to his disciple.”
“No,” the blue demon whispered, clearly near the edge of being overcome with laughter. “That’s the shame of it all.” His teeth glittered bloody in the flames. “That’s not even the worst of it.” He fell into a sizzling urine pool, uncontrollably laughing.
“Oh, really,” she said, watching the fire constantly engulf her naked body, her skin popping and sizzling. “Something worse than dying, and leaving that drunk of a husband of mine, who beat me for ten years, to die and come here, or at least maybe dream this hell hole?”
“Yeah,” he said, his eyes literally bugging out of their leathery sockets, his idiot smile mindlessly agape, drooling. “Even worse than all of that. In fact, it’s soooo funny, my head might explode from the sheer hell of it.”
“Hit me, creature,” she said, baiting him to top her hideous reality.
“Are ya ready? Here goes. You’re so pathetic; you don’t even know that the other world is the dream world. You were ruined when you woke up here. In other words-”
The dead woman looked to the son as if she might begin screaming now.
“-you’ve always been here! And, here’s the kicker, you are so stupid, you created that life with the abusive husband to forget about this place.” He began laughing until the top of his head actually did explode. He grinned from ear to ear. “I got one last bit of news for you, my little roast-pork suckling.”
“Worse than what you just told me?” she asked.
“Oh, yes, a lot worse!” His eyes were winking rubies. “Ready for a shot of love?”
“What could be worse than the knowledge that I’ve always been here and dreamed my former life? Hit me, creature!”
“You didn’t begin your life here as a woman.” He began tittering, searching her face for the reaction he knew would eventually come.
“You mean-”
He laughed in earnest now, fell to the burning floor, and rolled around hysterically.
She began an endless scream.
The father addressed the son. “That story always moves me to tears of joy.” He sighed, and moved the son to other tableaus of bliss and perverse beauty.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“THE MILLING MURDERERS”
“Look, my son, the end of The Hall of Tableaus. Was it good for you?”
“Yes, my beloved. Look!”
The demon entered his son from behind and they both gazed at a golden arch with purple veins running through it, encircled with carvings of the finest diamonds. It led into a garden legitimately thought at one time (before the souls crowded its borders and it became a city) to once be a mere tableau.
As the father filled the son with love, they both wept openly. It was as still as a freshly vanquished life.
“My son!” the demon screed into his son’s ears. “We now come to a pit in the vast park known as ‘The Milling Murderers.’”
“Is it so, Father?”
“Yes, it is. It is a vast land of Hate Cults. It belongs to people who invented religion in their dream world and then used it to slay their fellow man through the service to their egos. It is the only place in my jurisdiction whereas if you don’t participate to increase their horror and pain, you will replace them in their torment. You would have found out, anyway, if you had been patient enough to watch the various threads of continuity. This is the place where the religionists have been throughout eternity. Thankfully, they are unmoved by facts or discussion; their minds are closed to anything other than the so-called reality of their self-righteous world, which means that you can torture them most heinously and they won’t even believe it is happening to them. To escape their torment here, they dreamed of a world where they were superior to others. Their man-made religion allowed them to believe they could treat any mortal with contempt, or kill, or slaughter thousands in holy wars. Or, better and funnier, they thought they could oppress children or other mortals with breasts. Infernus is too good for them. Their reality is that they burn and burn, as they always have.”
“Suppose,” the vampire satyr replied, licking his blood-encrusted lips, “I do both. I mean, refuse to torment them, then torment them.”
“You are truly the most hideous son ever born by a father. And you are my burden to b
ear. Prepare for my mounting.”
The father tore the son open from behind and intercoursed the wound for many lifetimes. The son screamed throughout, as did everything else that died there.
“Now we may enter, my child.”
“It is indeed a large pit, Father. Look here at the entrance. What do I see? On the left side of the wicker, decayed gate, it looks like a corpse lying — is its eyes nothing but seething worms? Yes! With a long wad of cloth rolling out of its mouth.”
“This is delightful!”
“Oh, Father, it is so enigmatic! It has writing on it. It says: ‘Suppose that servant is wicked and beats his fellow servants. He shall be torn to pieces and assigned a place for hypocrites.’ Is that what this place is, Father?”
“Let us proceed and see, shall we? Your threshold of pain will be increased many fold by the time you approach ‘The Wall of Full Cycles’ on the other side.”
“Please do not tell me, Father, that this is a place of religion, for my fury at what these demons have done in the names of the gods is hideous.”
“It is!”
“Then I now see how unnecessary it is to make us participate here. It will be my pleasure.”
“And mine,” Red said, blood flowing from his blackened sockets in pride for his son. “Look at our first charade.”
“But wait, Father — you have not allowed me to say what scene is repeated over and over on the right side of this wrecked wicker gate.”
“Oh, well, if you must, you pus-born bastard, proceed!”
“There are seven or eight men dressed in flowing robes that are chained to a great chest.”
“And what sign is attached on the treasure chest, my son?”
“It says: ‘It was for freedom that you were set free! Do not become slaves to legalities again.’ What can that mean?”
“There never was a more stupid race than man, my blood-filled bag. Not only would this foolish lot lock up the freedom they were given in a great chest of rules and regulations, but they willingly kept their own eyes from seeing it. Watch what the approaching beasts do to them. You won’t stop laughing for many lifetimes.”