The flame atop the signal tower flashed and turned green. Then the wooden gate embedded in the city wall flung open. From high up in the signal tower, Medusa called out, “Welcome back to Dith, the greatetht thity in all of Hell. Can I ekthpect you to warm my bed tonight, love?”
God-Art shoved Normal-Art toward the open gate with one hand and tugged on Drillbot’s leash with the other. “Sorry, babe, but not tonight. I’d love to, but I’m kind of in a hurry to leave this place.”
“Never thtopped you before,” she muttered as she ducked her head out of view.
Normal-Art and his companions passed through the open gate and into an arched stone passageway that led them through a winding path beneath the city wall. Grated murder holes loomed overhead in the stone at intervals of about every twelve feet. Art stared up into the darkness behind the grates as he passed underneath the first one, and he noticed feline eyes staring back at him from the gloom.
“Hey! Watch it!” he yelled when under the third such murder hole, a particularly large droplet of drool rained down and splashed onto his cheek.
A squelching feline hiss was the only reply from the drooler up above. God-Art shoved Normal-Art in the back and whispered, “They are feral, hungry demon-kittens. Their species is not necessarily the most housebroken of Hell’s minions, but they make for fantastic city guards—the most ferocious money can buy. And they keep the demon-rats in the city to a minimum. No need to worry for your safety so long as you keep moving. My presence should be enough to give them pause from pouring boiling oil on you and gnawing on your delicate bits, but only for a short while. So, I must reemphasize: move.”
After a few hundred more yards, the trio emerged from the passageway beneath the city wall and found themselves standing on a blackened cobblestone street. Stone buildings lined the avenue, and flaming torches set in sconces attached to the buildings provided flickering light to the street.
“In case you couldn’t understand the Gorgon sentry in the signal tower back there: this city is named Dis, and it is the greatest of cities in this version of Hell,” said God-Art.
“It seems familiar. I feel like I’ve seen pictures of this place somewhere,” replied Normal-Art.
God-Art smirked. “It’s modeled after your earth’s Florence, which I understand is responsible for a renaissance of culture on your reality. It never amounted to anything on mine, but that is another tale more appropriate for another time.”
“That’s never stopped you from droning on and on with a tale before,” replied Normal-Art with a shrug. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“This place,” God-Art continued, ignoring Normal-Art’s interruption, “is a replica identical in nearly every way to your Florence, except it is always night here, demons occupy the city rather than people, all marble is black rather than white, and the churches are all designed to worship that arrogant fraud, Lucifer. There’s even a sculpture with his flaccid manhood flapping about in the wind inside of Dis’s Accademia. It’s forked like a snake’s tongue, in case you wanted to know. Completely mundane and contemptable if you ask me.”
And with that, God-Art led the group toward the town center. Demons bustled to and fro past the trio. Normal-Art overheard many of them complaining about being overworked and underpaid as they headed toward different Circles to spend the day at work, torturing souls. He overheard even louder complaints from the demons headed to less-popular employment—but necessary in a city this size—like plumbing and masonry. Normal-Art watched several demons who had just finished their shifts scramble into different pubs with names like “The Vile Hag,” “Death to Unicorns,” and “The Scorched Earth.” These pub names were emblazoned on stocky wooden signs hanging on poles that jutted out from the walls above the entrances to the establishments. Normal-Art even witnessed a few demons carrying stacks of paper newsletters and wearing white button-up shirts with black ties rush into a building with a rounded golden “M” above the entranceway, yelling, “We told a dozen demons about the good news today!”
The trio arrived at an open square and picked their way through a market that occupied the space. Demon-Farmers hawked wares of rotted fruits and vegetables. The smell of spoiled cabbages and cantaloupes and carrots and gourds and lettuce filled Normal-Art’s lungs, and he gagged. Then he gagged again when he saw the carts toward the center of the market.
The hairy demon standing in front of one looked like a six-foot tall flea wearing a maroon robe. Behind him, human legs and arms turned on a spit over a fire. “Get’cher fresh meat heah! Fresh from the pits! I got little arms and big arms, from the tiniest pencil-arms up to twenty-two-inch pythons!”
Normal-Art must have stared for too long, because the giant flea shoved a burnt pinky into his hand. “Free sample! Whole arm’ll cost yah five golds!”
Normal-Art thought he had become acclimated to Hell’s eccentricities by now, but for reasons he could not put his finger on, this scene was too much for his sensibilities. He vomited on the ground, and when he looked up, a new salesman from the next cart over shoved a glass of milk into his hand. “Here, this’ll make you feel better,” said this demon, a gigantic platypus with blue fangs poking outward from the edges of his mouth. “Fresh bone milk, made from the finest bones from the finest pope in Bolgia 3 of the Eighth Circle. It’ll only cost you nine golds.”
Normal-Art glanced around and felt the crowd closing in on him. He saw no sign of God-Art. A flash of panic crept over him, and he realized that the god must have kept walking when Normal-Art stopped to vomit, not realizing he was leaving the mortal behind.
And then the panic was replaced by an overwhelming sense of freedom as Normal-Art realized he was alone once more, and he could now dart away on a side street and escape the god. He briefly considered his options. He decided that he would stay here in Dis and build a new life, maybe find an apartment with a television. No matter what, he would never be bothered with any of God-Art’s schemes again.
He smiled, dropped the glass of milk, and dashed to the left, intending to dart behind the cart selling human limbs. The platypus shrieked at the dropped milk, but Art did not care. He twirled past the giant flea and around a pair of praying mantises in yellow robes, and then something knocked him across the back of the head and he fell, sprawling across the cobblestones. He would have described the cobblestones as “mud-covered,” but the fecal smells accosting his nostrils told him that the brown muck in which he landed was not mud. He sighed.
God-Art hefted Normal-Art over his shoulder. “Pay attention, you bloody fool,” said the god. “You wander off like that and you’ll be the next human to be cooked on those spits.”
Now that Normal-Art had experienced a few brief seconds of potential freedom only to have it ripped away from him, despair overflowed his heart. He silently shed a tear as God-Art carried him the rest of the way to the center of Dis, where the god dropped him when they reached the outside of a gigantic domed basilica. This domed basilica looked just like pictures that Normal-Art had seen of the Duomo in Florence, except it was completely different.
This Duomo’s façade was made of black marble, and every square inch seemed to be covered in an elaborate carving of a demon performing some sort of torture. Its doors were golden, and they featured twelve panels that each depicted a human performing a different type of sin. They all looked so lifelike that Normal-Art felt like a peeping tom as he stared at the panel for adultery.
But most oddly of all, the basilica was built upside-down, with the dome’s crest touching the ground and the gigantic behemoth of a building rising high into the air, its gigantic foundation blocking out the view up above.
“It’s called the Damned Duomo,” said God-Art. “Took a hundred damned souls working constantly for a hundred years to build it. Its shape is just like the cathedral on the surface of this earth’s Florence, but it’s all inverted. C’mon.”
God-Art led Normal-Art and Drillbot around the side of a six-story tower that had also been built upside-d
own, and then shoved them toward some scaffolding, which they used to climb up to the upside-down golden doors high in the air. God-Art pushed the doors open. Then he then grabbed Normal-Art by the scruff of the neck and tossed the mortal through the threshold.
Normal-Art’s stomach leapt into his throat. He began to fall toward the dome, but then gravity reversed, and he found himself standing on the “floor” of the cathedral, which had been upside-down from the outside. He felt confused and disoriented.
The floor inside the Damned Duomo was covered in mosaics of Lucifer, who God-Art identified as the giant red angel with six wings and three lion-like faces—one black, one red, one yellow. The mosaics depicted the story of Lucifer’s fall from heaven and his eventual dominance of Hell. Pews lined the wide-open nave, and all along the walls lay alcoves filled with statues of demons carved from black marble. Instead of an altar, at the far end of the basilica stood a six-story tall, black marble statue of Lucifer crashing to the earth like a meteor. The craftsmanship was mesmerizing, and Normal-Art felt as though he was actually witnessing the action of the moment of impact.
High above—or below, if your perspective was originating from outside the cathedral—the dome was covered in paintings that depicted deeds performed by many different demons. He saw one where a red cherub stood on a pope’s shoulder, convincing him to sell indulgences to a roomful of plague-riddled children. He saw one where a serpent-shaped demon wrapped around the neck of a man and whispered into his ear as the man stabbed a knife into a woman’s abdomen. He saw one where a demon the shape of a hippopotamus whispered into a woman’s ear as she baked children into a pie. Normal-Art stopped looking from panel to panel because the paintings appeared so lifelike that it seemed he was actually witnessing the tales depicted in them, and they were too violent and disgusting even for his tastes.
God-Art directed Normal-Art’s attention to a black gash that lay in the center of the dome, cutting through a painting that depicted a dozen demons playing trumpets that shot fire from their ends. In the center of the gash was the entrance to a tunnel. A small stone platform stood to the left of the tunnel’s entrance.
“That’s our destination,” said the god.
God-Art led Normal-Art and Drillbot onto a circular stone block directly underneath the tunnel entrance at the center of the dome. The stone block had a radius of about five feet and was covered in a mosaic that depicted an image of the upside-down Damned Duomo.
“Look up,” ordered God-Art. “Keep staring at the hole in the dome, and you’ll be OK.”
Normal-Art and Drillbot obeyed. God-Art stomped his right foot in a pattern just like the one he had used to knock on the signal tower outside the gate. The gravity, somehow inverted inside this cathedral, reverted to normal. God-Art, Normal-Art, and Drillbot fell upward toward the black gash in the center of the dome. Normal-Art screamed before he could prevent himself from doing so.
Just before the trio crashed through the hole in the center of the dome, God-Art flipped them over and their feet—or wheels, in Drillbot’s case—landed gently onto the stone that lay outside the black gash. “OK, get moving,” said God-Art, pointing down toward the black gash in the dome.
Normal-Art sighed. Much like every other moment since he met this annoying god-version of himself, something astronomically odd had just happened, and he was not given the opportunity to take a moment to come to grips with it. Instead, he inhaled deeply, steeled himself, and then leapt into the black gash in the dome.
He felt stupid when he landed on a staircase just inside the darkness. He tumbled down a few flights and crashed to a halt, dazed.
Above him, God-Art yelled, “I meant walk into the opening, you idiot. There are stairs. Demons use this path to get to work. A blind leap would be unnecessary and dangerous. Sometimes I forget what a fool you are.”
*
The staircase ended inside a gargantuan cave filled with row upon row of open tombs. The tombs stretched far off onto the horizon in all directions until they disappeared from view. Each tomb was alight with pale blue flame, and a voice moaned from within each of the blue flames. The sounds filled this Circle with an odd chorus of destitution.
“Christmas down here must be extra depressing,” muttered Normal-Art, imagining the moaning voices humming the most pathetic version of Jingle Bells ever.
“They aren’t likely to celebrate much,” replied God-Art. “You wouldn’t, either, if a minor thing like heresy got you stuck down in a place like this.”
Normal-Art sighed. He thought about responding with a comment about how he had been stuck down in a place like this, and for something much more minor: just wanting to be left alone to lie on his couch. But he thought better of it and remained silent. He had almost forgotten how tedious it was to say anything around God-Art. For being a god of mischief, he cared little for wordplay and his sense of humor was severely lacking.
A few souls sat up in their open tombs as the trio passed. Despite the blue flames dancing across their bodies, they attempted to strike up a conversation with Normal-Art between moans. But he stalked sulkily along the path leading out of this Circle and ignored them, resigning himself to the reality of being stuck with yet another joyless captor.
The trio reached the exit of the Sixth Circle of Hell, a small tunnel in the rock at the opposite end of the cave. A set of well-worn stairs had been carved into the tunnel’s floor. Halfway down, a fist-sized opening in the tunnel wall allowed Normal-Art to preview the Seventh Circle, so that’s just what he did.
A terrible odor attacked his nose. If three tons of sunbaked mayonnaise, rotten eggs, three-day old corpses, and bleu cheese had all been stranded on an island somewhere and had to eat each other to survive, their resulting excrement would represent but a tiny fraction of the stench that wafted up from the Seventh Circle. It overwhelmed Normal-Art, and he had to sit on the winding staircase. He gagged.
When he gathered himself enough to stand and look once more through the hole in the tunnel wall, he cursed when he comprehended the Seventh Circle’s sheer size. It stretched three-times longer than each of the Circles before it, and it consisted of three concentric rings that were separated from one another by tall, thin dikes made of dirt.
Normal-Art looked over at God-Art with a pleading look. “Let’s just go back the way we came and walk out the front door.”
God-Art smirked. “Oh, brilliant idea. I wish I would have thought of that. But I really, really wanted to give you a tour of one of your reality’s stupid, backward, idiotic hells,” replied God-Art, sarcasm dripping from every syllable.
Normal-Art continued with the pleading look, not deigning to respond, so God-Art sighed and continued, “The entrance to this damned place only works one way. It’s all magicked up, and though I have overcome it before, it was not without great cost. I’ve found it’s easier and faster to simply walk out the exit, way down in the Ninth Circle.”
Normal-Art groaned in despair. “Nine circles? We’re never going to make it.”
God-Art grabbed Normal-Art by the neck. “I’m not a patron god of motivation—that’s the sister I flayed and fed via pot pie to my brothers several millennia ago—but I do control certain str-”
“You control certain strains of pestilence, and if I refuse to get moving, you can give me the worst case of crabs in the history of the Multiverse,” interrupted Normal-Art. “Yeah, you used that line on me before.”
God-Art frowned. “Well, take it to heart, then, and get moving.” He kicked Normal-Art on the backside, and Normal-Art staggered forward down the stairs.
At the bottom of the stairs, the trio came to an arched stone bridge. The bridge spanned the outer concentric ring—the first of the three—and ended at the first thin dike of dirt. Below the bridge flowed a river of boiling blood occupied by moaning damned souls. At the entrance to the bridge, a minotaur about fifteen-feet tall lay napping on the ground, its mace under its head like a pillow. God-Art put a finger to his lips to signal his compan
ions to stay quiet.
The god tiptoed just past the beast, little ping-ping-ping sounds emanating from his toes like a cartoon character as he did so, and then he signaled for Normal-Art and Drillbot to do the same. Normal-Art did, and Drillbot rolled as quietly as he could—which still resulted in a raucous roar erupting from his engines. But the minotaur did not stir as they passed.
And then, as soon as they were past the minotaur, the god signaled for his group to spin around so they faced the beast and their backs were to the direction they intended to travel. He mouthed, “Trust me. Done this kind of thing before.”
The minotaur’s nostrils twitched and it awoke with a start. It leapt onto its feet and looked around. “Me smell some souls who be in trouble,” it called as it raised its mace high over its head.
It spun about until its eyes locked on the trio, and then it glared at them.
“Stay quiet, and let me handle this,” whispered God-Art, who promptly fell to his knees and crawled pathetically over to the minotaur’s feet.
“Please, sir, just let us past you,” God-Art begged the minotaur. “We don’t deserve to be way down in the Seventh Circle. We just want to go back up to the Third, maybe the Second where we promise we’ll be good souls and won’t do nothin’ bad.”
The minotaur growled. He slammed his mace into the rock near God-Art’s head. He grabbed the god by the neck and lifted him up onto his feet. He studied the god, looking like a rather unintelligent toddler attempting to comprehend astrophysics. “Hmm,” said the minotaur. “Hmmph. Me likes your respect, but me can’t lets you pass.”
The minotaur pointed toward the far end of the bridge to which the three companions’ backs were now facing. “Get back to the punishments where you belong, before me thinks better of me leniency and decides you needs some extra torture.”
“OK, I understand, sir. Thank you, sir,” said God-Art with a bow of his head. He turned, grabbed Normal-Art by the crook of the arm, and led him over the bridge, deeper into the Seventh Circle. Drillbot followed on his leash.
The Endless War That Never Ends Page 32