“You sure you’re up for this?” Spyder asked
Shrike nodded. “I told you I’d take care of you down here. I haven’t done a very good job so far. Let me do this.”
Spyder pulled Apollyon’s knife from his waist and gave it to Shrike, taking her hand for a moment after he handed her the blade. He looked at Ashbliss. “We’re not going to hump. Don’t even ask.”
“Treacherous and boring,” muttered the demon.
A fireball streaked at them from across the plains, turning away from them at the last possible moment. At the edge of the field, it turned and circled back, scorching a circle once around the group, enclosing them in a ring of fire. When the circle was complete, Spyder could see something in the flames. A man stepping down from a chariot.
“I couldn’t leave you all without saying goodbye,” said Xero. Great waves of heat cascaded off his body. He didn’t seem to be covered with fire so much as made of it.
“Do you remember that I was the one who taught you your first magic, Alizarin? But I gave you so little considering how much I got in return. Your bed. Your kingdom. Your father’s soul. I even had that boy gutted. Your old partner, Ozymand,” said Xero. Shrike held the black blade before her. Xero approached, but carefully stayed beyond her reach. “Your friend there, the pretty fool, injured me when my back was turned. I should be resting, but I needed you to know that even wounded, I’m stronger than you.”
“I’m not afraid of you. And I’m no longer shocked,” said Shrike calmly. “You don’t have any power over me.”
“You misunderstand. I’m not here to hurt you, girl. I’m here to give you a gift. Once upon a time, I took your sight. Now I’m giving it back.” Xero puckered his lips and blew across his hand, as one might blow a kiss. A roiling fireball enveloped Shrike for a second. When it faded, Xero was gone and Shrike was on the ground. Spyder ran to her and saw, thankfully, that she was unburned by the magic flame. He and Lulu propped Shrike up between them as Ashbliss peered from behind a pile of demon corpses.
“Are you alive?” Ashbliss asked. “The bargain is off if you’re dead.”
“Shut up!” shouted Lulu.
Spyder was murmuring into Shrike’s ear and patting her cheek. “You’re all right. You’re all right. Wake up, Alizarin. Come back.”
She awoke with a start. Spyder felt her go rigid in his hands. She screamed once and went very quiet.
“Can you hear me?” Spyder asked. “Are you all right?”
Shrike’s hands went to her face. She pulled off her shades and looked at Spyder. The ruin of her eyes, the cracked glass irises and spidery pupils were gone. Her eyes were greenish gray, perfect and open wide.
“I can see,” she whispered.
“I’m so sorry,” said Spyder.
“You’re sorry your woman can see?” said Ashbliss. “You mortals really are bastards.”
“I’m sorry because now she’s stuck here in Hell forever, like me,” said Spyder.
“I’ve already been stuck here for millions of years. Pardon me if I’m not more sympathetic.”
“Can you shut it for a minute?” Lulu said.
“Fine,” said Ashbliss. “In fact, you seem less and less like the champions I thought you were. I think I’m going to have to nullify our deal.”
Spyder snatched the black blade from Shrike’s hand and tackled Ashbliss, pinning the demon down with his legs.
“Are you mad?” Ashbliss cried. “My master will destroy you! Gigantic scorpions will suck the marrow from your bones! Beelzebub will fill your still-living carcass with molten lead!”
“No, he won’t,” said Spyder. “Because I’m going to kill him for you. And then you’re going to take me to the book, just like we agreed.” With the black blade, Spyder cut off one of the candles on Ashbliss’ scalp. The little demon screamed piteously as black blood flowed from the candle stump. “If you don’t stick to our deal, I’m going to use this magic Ginsu to cut off your arms and legs and make you my doormat. And that’s just the warm up. I’ll devote the next million years to inventing brand new ways of making your existence pure misery.”
“No!” cried Ashbliss.
“With the most treacherous animal in existence, you do not fuck. Got me?”
“Yes! Yes!” screamed the demon.
“We’ve got a deal, right?”
Ashbliss nodded.
Spyder rolled off the demon and helped him to his feet. He held up the candle he’d sliced from Ashbliss’ head and when the demon reached for it, Spyder snatched it away.
“You can have this back in a minute,” he said.
Shrike was on her feet, but unsteady. She looked around Hell in childlike wonder.
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen anything, I don’t even know how to process all these images,” she told him. She took a step toward Spyder and wobbled. “My balance feels funny. All the cues are wrong.”
“Sit down,” Spyder said. He and Lulu helped her to the ground, so she wouldn’t fall. “Listen to me. I’m going to Pandemonium with Ashbliss. I’m going to put his boss to sleep and then I’m going to go and find the book.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Shrike said.
“You can’t do it. You can’t even walk,” he said. “Lulu can’t go. Cut up like she is, she’ll attract too much attention. That leaves me.”
“I hate this plan,” Shrike said and laid her head against Spyder’s chest. He hugged Shrike, then Lulu.
“You come back safe or I’ll find your ghost down here and kick your dumb, dead ass,” Lulu said.
“Take care of Shrike while I’m gone,” Spyder said.
“You got it.”
Spyder went back to Ashbliss and held out the demon’s candle to him. Sullenly, Ashbliss took it, and with a great deal of groaning and swearing, poured wax on the stump and stuck the candle back in place. The little flame popped back to life.
“I really am going to keep our bargain,” Spyder said.
“You had better. Now, get down and roll in the dirt like the pig you are.”
“What?”
“You’ll need a disguise to get into Pandemonium. You’re going as my slave. Get down and dirty yourself, meat.”
Reluctantly, Spyder did as he was told. When he’d rolled in as much filth as he thought necessary, Ashbliss took pains to inspect him, slapping more dirt onto Spyder’s face and especially his ass, “To give you an authentic sex slave patina,” he said.
“We done?” Spyder asked.
“Nearly. Get on your knees.”
“Don’t get carried away with the sex slave fantasies.”
“I need to chain your neck.”
“Where’re you going to get a chain out here?”
“Right here,” said Ashbliss. He squatted down and his face turned a deeper shade of red as he strained. A second later, a shockingly long length of silver chain slid from out of his round, pink ass.
“No goddam way.”
Ashbliss smiled. “If you want to call off our deal…”
“Put it on,” Spyder said, lowering his head.
As he and the demon started toward the city, Spyder heard Lulu singing Aretha Franklin’s ‘Chain of Fools.’
FORTY NINE
The Garden of Earthly Delights
“So, are you any particular kind of demon?” asked Spyder.
“Why do you care?”
“Just making conversation. You’re a horny little bastard. I thought maybe you were some kind of incubus or succubus or something.”
“Lust is just my hobby. I’m simply a demon.”
“Before you fell, were you any special kind of angel? Seraphim, cherubim, throne, archangel?”
Spyder and Ashbliss were stepping over the remains of demons and damned souls as they crossed the carnage-strewn alkali plain. The place stank, a combination of rotting flowers and scorched engine oil. Ashbliss was leading Spyder by the chain wrapped around his neck.
“I was simply an angel,” said Ashbliss.
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Spyder made a wounded sound. “Wow, that’s sort of bottom of the barrel, isn’t it? What are there, like nine ranks of angels? And you’re all the way down in the basement. Kind of the janitor of the universe.”
“We had to keep watch over the Earth. That’s how I learned what beasts you talking meat really are.”
“Is that how you ended up like this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your demon form. Looks like you were dragged behind the ugly truck over rocky roads all the way down from Heaven. They wouldn’t have pulled that on one of the heavy angel ranks, a seraphim or a throne, would they?”
“I like my form.”
“Course. I mean, you’d have to. Not having any choice and all.”
“Hush,” said Ashbliss, and yanked the chain hard.
They came to a rough highway that curved gently into the distance toward the city. Along both sides of the road were hundreds of crucifixes, stretching as far as the eye could see in both directions. Men and women, their skins stripped off, were secured to the crosses with nails through their wrists and wire around their chests. Their legs, which were free, high-kicked in unison, like some zombie movie chorus line. As he got closer, Spyder could see umbilicals running into their empty skulls. All their mouths were propped open with pockmarked mesh screens and tinny music flowed out. Polkas. African tribal dances. New Orleans jazz. Techno, and a dozen other styles Spyder couldn’t identify.
“You opening a theme park or something?”
“You looking for a job for eternity?”
“Seriously, what’s with all the urban renewal? Why’d you fill in the razor pits back there? And what the hell are you building over there?”
Spyder pointed to a what looked like a boarded-up mine entrance in the distance, but it was not like any Earthly mine. This entrance went up for miles, and the planks covering it could each have represented a whole forest-worth of trees. The metal beams that buttressed the planks could each have been melted down and provided enough steel for a battle ship.
“That’s always been like that, even before we were here. They didn’t bother finishing Hell before they cast us down here. It’s very rude, I think,” said Ashbliss. “As for the razor pits, they were fun, but never necessary. We had to clear the land for the project.”
“Which project would that be?”
“The only project. The only one Lucifer and the other master demons care about, at least.”
“And that is…?”
“Heaven,” said Ashbliss. “We’re building Heaven.”
“Interesting. I kind of thought there already was a Heaven. And they kicked your sorry asses out.”
“That’s God’s Heaven. This one is for us.”
“I get it. God looks down and sees your new and improved Heaven and slaps his forehead, realizing you fallen angels were right all along. Then, bang!, you win the argument.”
“You’re not as stupid as most of your kind. But you make up for it by talking to much.”
“Is that what that city is, beyond Pandemonium? Part of the new Heaven? Is that what Hell really is, one big hardhat zone?”
“You tell me,” Ashbliss said. “Behold.”
When he was still a child, Spyder had found a book of his mother’s. It was an art history text, left over from her brief attempt at community college. She’d lasted less than a semester and bad-mouthed the curriculum, the teachers and the other students non-stop whenever the subject came up. But even as a child it puzzled Spyder why she’d kept her school books if they brought back such painful memories. It wasn’t until years later that he realized that it was probably his father’s nagging that had propelled his mother out of school. Spyder’s father considered all forms of self-improvement, short of studying innovations in Detroit horsepower and chasing strip club tail, useless and in all likelihood, un-Christian. Spyder never understood why his mother had said that he was so much like his father. He knew that they were nothing alike, and he’d hated her for saying that. He hated his father just because.
The picture in his mother’s art history text that had captivated him as a child was the Hell panel from Hieronymous Bosch’s triptych, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” It wasn’t the clever and artful ways the demons tortured the damned souls that had fascinated Spyder. He’d studied the top, the far background of the painting, where none of the sexy tortures were happening. That section of the painting depicted a ruined, burned-out city, or a city that had been built along very different aesthetic lines from a human city. The buildings and the sky above were black, as if grimed under a permanent layer of soot. Shafts of lemon-colored light shone from the windows of each building and sliced through the smoky darkness, which only added to the feeling that this was ground zero for some unknown holocaust.
All those memories and images came back to Spyder as Ashbliss led him down the chorus line road and into the enormous construction site for Heaven 2.0.
The scale of the project was so vast, Spyder’s mind couldn’t take it all in. Looking at the place was like being in a car accident—it came to him as a series of still images flashing into his brain, but the whole of it was beyond his comprehension. In the far distance entire mountain ranges were being blasted away or gobbled up by machines whose steel jaws were almost as large as the tops of the mountains themselves. A white sea of activity surged around the giant machines and Spyder realized that this ebbing and flowing tide was made up of millions of souls moving the ore mined by the machines to the horrible open-pit foundry nearby. Flames, miles high, rose from the foundry and molten steel flowed into molds down dozens of chutes, each as wide and as deep as the biggest river Spyder had ever seen.
There were workshops nearby where demons supervised souls in some of the more delicate work needed for the structures: the polishing and cutting of precious stones, the stripping of huge sheets of mother-of-pearl from enormous shells, the goldleafing of delicate statuary. Outside the workshops fortunes in diamonds, rubies and sapphires were piled, along with amber boulders the size of a man.
Millions of tons of concrete sluiced into giant foundation holes from thousands of storage tanks. At the bottom of the holes, souls were directing the lines that spewed the wet concrete evenly across the floor. Souls too slow to move or too clumsy to escape slipped under the gray, oozing mess like they were drowning in quicksand, and disappeared. The skeletons of a thousand new buildings were being lifted into place by massive claws and welded together by souls linked to other machines through yet more umbilicals. The one constant Spyder could make out in all the chaos was that the demons were the supervisors, while the damned souls were the work gang slaves. This knowledge was nailed down when Spyder looked to the far side of the site and watched demons feed the bodies of injured and unruly souls into huge presses that squeezed all the fluids from them. The liquid was drained into tanks to be used as lubricant for the construction machines.
Spyder’s heart was beating fast. His brain was on overload. This was not the Hell in the books. A demon grabbed a soul sporting a mohawk, kneeless black jeans and a safety-pinned T-shirt, some squirming, hard-luck punk, and tossed him into the fluid press. A stray thought popped into Spyder’s mind: Jenny, you would love this.
FIFTY
Holy Shit
Spyder and Ashbliss skirted the edge of the construction site and entered Pandemonium by a side street in what appeared to be the butchers’ quarter.
Heavy-muscled demons in stiff rubber aprons hacked, gutted and sliced mystery meats in stinking shops on a dim boulevard whose gutters ran black with blood as thick and dark as chocolate syrup. Wriggling tentacles and the snouts and bellies of giant coal-colored hogs hung on rusty meat hooks next to the egg white entrails of horse-size beetles.
They rounded a corner and entered a wide public plaza. The place was spotlessly clean and a pleasant scent of roses filled the air. Across the boulevard was a great, domed crimson building. Below the large central dome were a cluster of smaller domed ou
ter buildings, with spiraling white minarets at the cardinal points. The place reminded Spyder of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, though this structure was a dark and dismal parody of the ancient church-turned-mosque.
“Is that the palace?” Spyder asked.
Ashbliss pulled him quickly through the plaza. “Of course. Keep your head down. Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to, slave.”
“Let’s walk by the entrance and see if there are guards.”
“There aren’t. We’re going to my master’s home.”
“I don’t trust you. Five minutes isn’t going to kill you.”
“It will if one of Beelzebub’s other attendants sees us and asks questions.”
Spyder stopped in his tracks, but Ashbliss didn’t notice. When he reached the end of the chain, he was jerked back and almost fell over. The demon yanked Spyder with all his weight.
“Move, slave.”
“No.”
“We had a deal.”
“Let’s walk by the palace.”
“Someone will see us!”
“They will if you keep arguing with a slave.”
“You selfish beast. You want to trick me!”
“No, this one usually keeps his word. Though, some women might argue the point.”
Spyder looked at a nearby bench, the apparent source of the voice, but no one was there. Then, by his ear he heard, “Bring hither the fatted calf, and let us eat, and be merry. The Prodigal son is returned.”
“My lord!” cried Ashbliss, dropping onto his belly.
“Countdown? How did you get down here?”
Count Non smiled and clapped Spyder on the back. “Guess,” he said.
“You’re on the guest list?”
“I make the guest list, little brother.”
Spyder looked at Count Non and in his eyes he saw unfathomable expanses of time. A heart wounded more desperately than Spyder had ever imagined was possible. A pit of reckless and brilliant fury. Desolation and pride—these most of all. They seemed to unfold from Count Non like a pair of dark wings.
“Holy shit,” Spyder said.
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