What about the clown, then? I wondered. Maybe I’ve got them all wrong and they’re actually extraordinarily misguided zealots of a religion older than Earth itself.
I didn’t really give a shit either way. It was a nice enough distraction from my perilous reality, though, that I didn’t soil myself at the belated notion of stumbling into a service when I opened the doors. And if it turned out that a few demons were seated in the congregation worshipping an unknown deity (maybe the clown thing) in their own peculiar way—like raping and beheading innocents in the name of their god—I would either feign allegiance to that deity or collapse on the spot depending on convenience. I didn’t care which.
I stood before the large wooden doors with my right hand on the latch for a few moments, studying the grooves along the panels and the inscriptions overhead. Most of it was gibberish to me, but I recognized one word in particular straight away because it was written in English.
TSCHARIA, the inscription read.
Sha-rye-uh, I mouthed.
The word sounded familiar, but it took me a few seconds to place where I’d heard it last.
The bastards in the masks, I realized.
The demons had chanted the word when they’d nailed Aziza to the crisscrossed pillars in the corpse fields. It was also inscribed on the city walls amid a similar grouping of indecipherable symbols.
Tscharia, I thought.
I was familiar with the concept of morality as law and also the curious way morality had been interpreted in the Second Dark Age, but I didn’t think the two words were necessarily related. The abominations of Furnace had no moral law—at least none that made sense to me—so I wrote off the repetition as coincidence. Or, more succinctly, a combination of symbols in an alien alphabet which coincidentally resembled the word Tscharia in English.
Who gives a damn? I thought. The name didn’t matter. What interested me was the other symbols above the door, how they were apparently related to constellations even though the sky was barren of starlight.
Is that a map? I wondered.
The navigator in me was interested enough in the crude symbols that I forgot where I was for a moment, which only made the jolt back to reality more jarring when a scream shook the city street.
I can use this, I thought, quickly scanning the symbols to see if any of them were remotely familiar.
I couldn’t be certain that the symbols were stars, or that the word Tscharia represented the planet where the Hummel had crashed, but I didn’t have any better theories and I doubted the Hummel’s crew had come up with answers while I was away, assuming they were still around.
Another scream. This time, the wind howled in response.
Move.
I decided to revisit the issue once I’d poked around the cathedral for more evidence of where I was and how to navigate the Hummel back home, then pushed the oddly circular latch of the door handle and shouldered my way inside.
The interior was dark. The staggered rows of pews, the off-centered altar, and the general dishevelment of the décor all gave the building a funhouse effect. The theatrical atmosphere was only dampened by the human corpses that were nailed to the walls, hung from the rafters, and heaped before the altar. A collection of severed heads was arranged in a loose circle at the center of the room.
I wasn’t surprised. Accenting rooms with mutilated bodies and streams of blood was par for the course on Furnace, more or less. It was alarming to see so many human corpses, though, since I was sure none of them had come from the Rockne Hummel or any other fleet vessel. In fact, the bodies that were actually clothed seemed transported from another time. An era long forgotten in modern Earth politics except among archivist androids with exceptional memory processors. Medieval or earlier, by my guess. No one on Earth dressed in those tattered clothes anymore. Not even tribes in lesser populated regions. In fact, poverty-stricken colonists on other planets wouldn’t even have made such inefficient garments unless it was for a dramatic production, which didn’t seem likely, either. By my admittedly foggy deductive logic, I figured that meant the bodies had been taken from another time altogether, though how they could have possibly survived so long—even on Furnace outside the normal rules of physics—was beyond me. Mind you, that’s a very rough assessment from a navigator with no real background in ancient history, but their attire was at least reminiscent of the Two Dark Ages and the way they’re depicted in historical vids.
Luckily for me, the building was otherwise deserted, and though the exterior was in far better shape than most buildings within the city walls, it didn’t look like anyone had ventured inside for at least a few days.
If they were brought in that long ago, how are the bodies still intact? I wondered, limping toward the heap of corpses for closer examination.
As I knelt down beside them, hoping to answer the furious swirl of questions inside my head, my attention was abruptly drawn away.
I stopped moving mid-squat. “Hello…” I whispered.
Beyond the altar and beneath a realistically (which is to say, revoltingly) rendered sculpture of a beast defiling a woman stood a large throne. The woman’s vacant eyes seemed to lock onto me and nothing at the same time. The effect was chilling enough to make me shudder, but it wasn’t until my gaze wandered to the throne that my breath stopped completely and my muscles tensed.
Not again, I thought.
It was the clown demon.
His head hung between his shoulders so that his chin rested against his chest and his horns stood out prominently. He wasn’t looking at me.
Yet.
I backpedaled toward the door the moment I saw him but my legs tangled and I wound up falling into one of the wooden pews, as though the clown had pushed me himself.
I don’t know how things would have turned out if I hadn’t fallen and instead rushed out to the street. Probably I would have died, since a horde of monsters searched the city for me even then. At the very least, I never would have learned what Tscharia was or why I’d been brought there. I didn’t piece it all together until I reached home again, but I wouldn’t have been able to at all if I’d left prematurely.
I sat in stunned silence for a few moments. Watched the clown demon slouch in his throne. Picked distractedly at my scabbing wounds. Bought time. Every once in a while, I scanned the cathedral to be sure we were alone, ignoring the presence of the human corpses altogether. There wasn’t another demon in sight as far as I could tell, though. I think it was meant to be that way, I thought. In the end, it had to be just the two of us. He had a plan for me—I knew that much already—and I thought there was a chance he’d let me live as long as his bloodthirsty disciples scattered across the planetoid didn’t spoil our party.
The clown never moved from his throne, though, and after a while, I started feeling a bit more comfortable. Maybe ‘comfortable’ isn’t the right word, I guess, because I was still just about shitting my combat-suit in terror. But I wasn’t about to turn tail and flee again. Part of me was tired enough of the whole goddamned business that I wanted the creature to engage me, if only because I knew he would give me the answers I needed. Maybe not the ones I wanted, but answers that would provide me a fuller perspective of the stakes—and potential loopholes—of my captivity on Furnace.
“Why am I here?” I finally asked.
My voice was even weaker than I remembered. The fluid I’d ingested in the alley hadn’t turned out to be the miracle elixir I’d hoped it was, after all.
Minutes passed in complete silence. I was content waiting. It may not have been the cheeriest of surroundings, but I felt oddly safe under the hidden gaze of the demon. The idea that he, out of all the creatures on Furnace, might have some capacity for discernment, some shred of rationale behind his actions, was comforting in its own way. He might eventually order up the same torture I would receive at the hands of other demons, but at least it would come with a measure of consideration. For better or worse, he would make a calculated decision. Otherwise, I would
have been dead the moment he bit through my helmet, not whisked away to some private sanctuary with a bone-chandelier where the prying eyes of his disciples couldn’t reach me. The demon ghost with the smeared, bleach-white face appeared to have a vested interest in me, and until I demonstrated that I wasn’t worth his time or bother, I thought I could count on his peculiar protection.
What the hell is wrong with me? I wondered. How fucked is this place that I’m looking to the clown demon for protection when he caused this shit in the first place?
The dose of perspective sobered me enough that I squirmed uncomfortably over the wooden pew. I felt a chill building in the small of my back again.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
I didn’t really expect an answer and I didn’t get one. He didn’t move at all.
But the bodies nailed to the walls did start to move, so subtly at first that I wasn’t sure where the creaks, moans, and rustling sounds were coming from. I rose to my feet slowly, trying to avoid eye-contact with the shadows in my periphery so I could pretend that the dead humans weren’t actually moving.
It didn’t do any good.
Panicked, I limped to the altar as fast as I could. I was determined to get answers before the end, no matter what ‘the end’ turned out to be.
“Why am I here?” I asked again.
My voice was still hoarse, both from thirst and the hooded demon’s grip. By sheer force of will, however, I managed to shout my next question.
“What the fuck do you want from me?” I yelled. The words faltered on my tongue as my vocal cords cut in and out. “What do I have to do to leave?”
There was a loud crash behind me. One of the undead bodies had fallen to the floor from twenty feet above the ground.
And then another.
And another.
They started dropping every couple of seconds. The impacts were so forceful that my bones rattled from head to toe.
“Answer me!” I shouted, stepping around the bodies and severed heads in front of the altar. I worked my way through them until I was covered in shadow just like the clown demon.
Except it wasn’t really him, and I should have realized it long before then. There was, indeed, a throne and the clown’s visage had been rendered imposingly upon it, casting judgment on a congregation of dead and undead alike. But it was just a bronze statue. Slightly elevated, yet otherwise completely lifelike and built to scale.
Damn damn damn! I thought.
Every second I remained in the cathedral brought me one step closer to a confrontation with the resurrected corpses that lined the walls and piled before the altar. And for what? A good fight? Bullshit. Yet again, I’d risked my life to beg answers from an inanimate object. Not much different than home, I guess.
I turned and saw a few undead humans had either crawled or limped to the cathedral entrance. They began streaming down the aisle ceremoniously. There was nowhere to go. They hadn’t noticed me yet but were blocking the only exit anyway. There was no telling what they would do if we made contact, or whether or not they would even be able to find me with their degraded senses. I figured a couple millennia was a long time to stay in shape. Most of them probably weren’t getting around so well.
I didn’t want to find out whether or not that was true, though. Somehow, the idea of undead humans—a comfortable familiarity suddenly corrupted by the Hell planet—was more unsettling than the monsters themselves, if not more terrifying. I knew how the people were supposed to look and act, but instead saw the moaning, mutilated wraiths that they’d been twisted into. Numb to the world around them.
Maybe I was more afraid of them because I knew I was staring at my future if I didn’t escape the planet before natives destroyed the Hummel. Maybe it would even be those undead humans who broke it down. Posing as living beings so the crew took pity on them, then offering themselves as sacrifices to the clown god as they sabotaged their brethren. Maybe they envied our vitality. Maybe they wanted to prevent the rest of us from returning to the lives they’d missed. Maybe they just wanted to please him.
They’re too slow, I thought. Yet they’d still done a hell of a job of cornering me, if that was their intention.
Instinctively, I backed deeper into the shadows surrounding the clown’s throne while the undead humans continued their somber, shambling approach. The procession was unnerving. I’d seen similar rituals every Sunday as a boy when the congregation visited the altar to offer a sacrifice or eat the flesh of their crucified savior. Except, on Earth, the parishioners typically hadn’t been mired in various stages of decomposition. Some of these ghouls were missing limbs. Some had their heads tilted at absurd angles from broken necks. Some were even worse.
“Here…here…here…” they began chanting.
I shuffled back toward the statue until I was practically in its lap. For whatever reason, I felt more comfortable in front of the throne than the altar, and more comfortable in front of the altar than out on the street. I guess I should have counted my blessings.
“Here…here…here…”
The low murmur from the undead grew louder as they approached.
Desperate, I turned to face the clown.
“What do I have to do?” I asked.
People will tell you the definition of insanity is performing the same action over and over again while anticipating different results, but I think speaking to an inanimate object and fully expecting conversation with a sentient demon creature ranks right up there with a simple failure to learn from mistakes. In fact, I think it’s a lot worse.
“Why am I here?” I asked again. In case there’s any doubt I’d lost my grip on sanity, you can add the first definition to my resume, as well. Even I didn’t have any optimistic delusions about how far I’d fallen.
Which is why I wound up and threw my fist into the clown’s face as hard as a I could with a hoarse shriek of rage.
“Answer me!” I shouted.
“Here…here…here…” the congregation droned on, shambling nearer with each futile plea to the demon king. Their deity. The lord of Furnace and all its miseries.
I drew my fist back again, ignoring the hot blast of pain where the bones had been badly bruised (but not quite broken) in the first strike. I punched the clown’s head.
“ANSWER ME!”
“Here…here…here…”
I shrieked again. A pathetic, strangled thing which barely escaped my esophagus on its way up. Then I threw my fist into the clown’s face one last time.
The head exploded away from me and slammed against the back wall. It landed beneath a painting of a malformed beast congregating with a spherical object, which might well have been a planet or some alien creature beyond my modest understanding of extraterrestrial physiology.
“Tscharia…Tscharia…Tscharia…” the congregation whispered.
I stared at the gaping hole in the clown demon’s neck, paralyzed by a mixture of skepticism and wonder.
“Tscharia…Tscharia…Tscharia…”
Leaning on trembling legs which barely kept me upright, I stared down into a vision of the cosmos that was utterly incomprehensible for my human mind. I simply couldn’t process it. It was either the essence of God or His utter absence, and both prospects were equally terrifying and magnificent.
Before I could venture deeper or pry open the rest of the statue, however, the entire undead congregation screeched at once and turned their attention my way.
What now?
I slowly pivoted and looked back toward the altar.
Every human had risen. The ones pinned to the walls had wiggled themselves free and assembled before the altar. The squelching heap of corpses had likewise untangled into two-dozen wraiths. Their faces were all covered in shadow, but their white eyes bore into me through the darkness. They sneered as their chant reached a fever pitch.
“Tscharia…Tscharia…TSCHARIA!” they shrieked.
I stepped behind the statue for refuge, terrified beyond rational
thought or action.
They all charged at once.
“TSCHARIA!” they howled.
I pulled the SX pistol from its holster and ducked behind the statue, waiting for the first wave to get close so I could use my few remaining bullets as efficiently as possible. There was no indecision anymore. I wanted to get the hell out of the cathedral, and I wanted to get the Rockne Hummel the hell off of that planet. I didn’t want to become one of them.
“TSCHARIA! TSCHARIA!”
I had no idea what the word meant and I wasn’t about to ask for an explanation. As soon as the first corpse-woman was within arm’s reach, I aimed the pistol between her eyes and pulled the trigger. With the cathedral’s acoustics, the impact was deafening. Her skull and rotted brain blew out the back of her head and sprayed the onrushing wraiths. It didn’t deter them in the least.
I used the back of the throne to kick myself farther away from the attackers and fired another shot. This one caught the intended target—an adolescent boy—directly in the throat. He staggered backward and fell to his knees, clutching his neck with wide eyes as though he hadn’t been dead already.
What are these things? I wondered. Why are they coming after me? I’m human!
I scrambled backward until I was flat against the wall. The press of the undead was so thick around me that all I could see was caved-in chests, eviscerated stomachs, and twisted legs.
Stay calm, I told myself, making sure each shot I lined up landed a kill. My brain wanted to panic as they closed in around me, but I fought back. You can still get out of this. They’re stiff and slow. Just clear the front line and make a break for it. If you push yourself, you can beat them to the door.
I took a deep breath and straightened to stand at my full height. Three corpses made a play for me and I threw my whole weight into them, knowing there was no way I could fire three kill shots before one of them managed to pull me to the ground. The strike worked, at least in the sense that it knocked the three of them onto their backs, but it dragged me down, too.
“Fucking shit…” I growled as I slipped over top of them. A sea of hands enveloped me.
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