Upstairs there was another hallway lined with doors, probably leading to more small bedrooms. Downstairs, there was a much more open space...
And she could sense people down there...
She focused in on her hearing, let her mind gradually remove the filters that kept her from constantly being overwhelmed by every little noise, and she heard heartbeats—little ones and big ones, and murmurs like someone chanting something, and very soft weeping.
And a wet plopping sound, repeating again and again.
Plop. Plop. Plop.
All these impressions rapidly filtered into her mind along with the information she got from her radar sense, and she was able to combine both sets of data together to form a kind of picture. But it was a strange picture, and she couldn’t quite make any sense of it.
They started down the stairs, Simone in the lead, moving very slowly. Not because she wanted to cloak the sound of her approach, but because she dreaded what she would find down there and was in no hurry to subject herself to it.
As they reached the halfway point of the stairway, they could see the bottom. The floors were red dirt and there was very poor lighting.
The smell at this stage was gag-inducing.
She started moving faster now, taking the last few steps two at a time.
And then she saw the truth, and she stood there, frozen in place by the sheer horror of it.
3 - The Fix
The room before her was full of filthy cages—there were six altogether, made of thick wooden beams with sharp thorns sticking out of them.
There were children in the cages, all ages, wearing grubby clothes, faces dirty from crying and rolling around in the mud. These were children who had cried till there was no more crying left in them, and now they were just empty shells, numb and vacant.
In the center of each cell were two buckets, one for shit, the other for piss. And there were wet spots around some of the children, those who didn't care enough to bother anymore with the buckets.
There were three priests down there, all wearing robes and hats made from shiny silver fabric. Two were going about the task of feeding the children. One carried a bucket full of slimy green gook, while the other carried a wicker basket filled with small bowls. The wet sounds she'd heard on the steps had come from the slimy stuff landing in the bowls.
The third priest stood apart from the other two. He was an older man, and taller with an obvious air of authority. He was ushering children over to the bars, whispering some phrase in German repeatedly in a ritualistic way, and then pouring some sort of liquid on their heads from a container that looked like it was made for watering flowers.
For a long moment, she and Damien just stood there, watching, and the priests were too busy to notice their presence.
Then a single act of cruelty suddenly set everything in motion.
It started when Simone’s eyes were drawn to a little girl, no more than three years old, standing in a row with the others in her cage, waiting to be fed. She had blond hair and rosy cheeks, streaked with dirt.
Apparently the girl was very, very hungry because she reached between the bars and grabbed the robe of the man with the bucket full of green stuff, tugging at it desperately.
Without even uttering a word or hesitating for the slightest moment, the man raised his ladle, which was made from gleaming steel, and brought it down hard on her little hand.
The sound when it hit was loud. In Simone's ears it was deafening—a vicious slap mixed with a high-pitched metallic ping. The girl screamed and fell back, rolling in the filth, crying, gripping her injured hand with the other.
He broke it, thought Simone. He broke that little girl's hand.
The fury that came over her then was beyond anything she'd ever experienced. It was like she'd been reborn as a thing of molten fire.
She started walking towards the man, vaguely aware that her venom sacks were bulging in her throat.
On a very deep level, there was a moment where she realized she could set the man aflame if she wanted, and then dismissed the idea. Not because she didn't want to kill him, but because she wanted to get up close and do it with her bare hands.
She wanted to break him, not burn him.
The man, apparently sensing her approach, turned just as she was about to reach for him. She grabbed his robe with one hand, his face with the other, her fingers gripping him underneath his lower jaw.
She began to squeeze.
His eyes bulged with shock and he let out a terrible scream as the bones in his face started to crack.
He spat out teeth and blood with the screams, which struck Simone in the face.
He kicked wildly and brought up the ladle to strike her.
She let go of his face and caught the ladle on its way down, then stripped it from his hand, and delivered a series of quick blows across the side of his head with it, bending the thing in two.
After the third blow, he went limp all over, and dropped the bucket of goo, which landed rather neatly in the floor and didn't even spill.
His face was ruined—his jaw misshapen, his head slightly warped, as if his skull had been broken badly beneath the flesh. But he was still breathing.
She let go of him, and he fell.
Most likely he won't live, she thought. But he might.
The little girl in the cage was still screaming, still gripping her injured hand.
Simone kicked the unconscious man as hard as she could. Ribs cracked and his breathing changed abruptly, became ragged.
She kicked him again, felt his spine snap in two, and his body started to convulse.
She kicked a third time. And a fourth.
And now he was bent funny, like he didn't have bones in his torso anymore; like a doll that had been dropped in the floor and had landed funny. She listened very close, and couldn't hear any breathing, nor a heartbeat coming from him.
Which was good.
The other two priests stared at her in stunned silence.
Damien walked over to stand beside her, and he looked...
Delighted?
Yes, she thought. He wanted that to happen. That’s just what he wanted.
And could she blame him? No. Because she was even more delighted. She hadn't felt this much pure joy in ages. The euphoria in her heart right now was absolutely delicious.
A new addiction, she thought. Why not?
“Tell them who I am,” she said to Damien.
“I think they already know.”
“Tell them anyway. Then tell them exactly what I want them to do, and tell them if they don’t do everything I say, just the way I want it done, I’ll fix them just like I fixed their buddy.”
PART 9 - DEVIL INSIDE
1 - Reset
Kevin traveled for an unknowable length of time inside what seemed to be the birth canal of some monstrous mothering beast. It was a winding, twisting tunnel full of strange musky smells, and organic dampness, and slime. It was a warm and comforting sensation to have his whole body wrapped in a sheath of soft flesh. He felt safe. His awareness sank down to a deep level of his subconscious while his conscious mind mostly blanked out, with the only fully developed surface thoughts being mostly variations on incredulous surprise. And why not? Who would’ve thought, after all, that travel between worlds would work like this?
The journey didn’t happen quickly.
Or slowly.
He may have traveled for 100 years, or maybe just a minute or two. It didn’t matter because there was no awareness of time passing at all. It was as if he’d fallen into a field of pure, unfiltered stillness. Though his body was constantly in motion, and though he could sense himself crossing a considerable distance, it seemed that he was simultaneously frozen in place, like a sculpture, or a painting—a representation of a person rather than a living, breathing man.
- - -
His arrival on the other side was sudden and almost too easy.
The sensation was just like taking a step.
/> His foot came down, and he was standing on solid ground. No problem.
There was no wetness on his body, no slime. He was dry as a bone and clean. He felt well rested, and healthy. Right away he started to crave nicotine, which, while not exactly a good thing, was at least a very familiar craving to have.
So basically, everything was great.
And also…
Yes… There was something else…
Something very important had changed inside him, something that immediately started to prickle at the back of his mind…
But he couldn’t think about that just yet. Had to wait for a moment when he didn’t have so many other things to deal with.
He took a few seconds to examine the new location he’d just been ejected into.
First impressions: it was a dim place. The air was humid. It smelled like dirt.
He glanced down and saw that he was standing on a large, black metal platform, like a stage in an auditorium, with a ramp descending to a stone floor beneath. Myra was down there, looking back up at him, still holding Andy in one hand and a black suitcase in the other. April stood beside her.
There were four guards positioned a little further back, all dressed in uniforms that made him think of soldiers from the civil war era. They had huge pistols, and long curved swords sheathed at their hips.
He quickly scanned right and left to take in the larger space around him, and was surprised to find it wasn’t actually a room at all. They were inside a massive natural underground chamber—apparently part of a network of caves. The only sounds were the low electric hum of working machinery, and the distant sound of running water.
Lights on the ground lined the edges of a trail that ended at the circular opening to another cavern, and there were a few dim bulbs attached to the walls, marking the outer limits of the chamber, which gave a vague sense of the size and shape.
Huge stalagmites hung from the ceiling, and the low lighting made them seem like shadowy fangs waiting to chomp down at any moment.
He glanced behind himself and realized that the ramp he was standing on was actually part of another portal machine, a lot like the one at the church, but this one was about eight times larger. The machine was already turned off, so there was no fleshy opening visible. He tried to imagine what the meat-tunnel would look like inside of a ring this big, and his mind just boggled. He would actually prefer not to think on it very much at all.
A considerable area of the room was taken up by electronic gear, presumably to make the big machine work, and this stuff was far more advanced than anything at the church. Kevin spotted numerous modern (or semi-modern) desktop computers mixed into the array of equipment, along with various other impressive looking machines of unknown purpose that were entirely alien to him.
Overall it was a totally different kind of setup. There was no outdated, moldy-looking gear here. Everything was sleek, modern, top-of-the-line.
Myra beckoned him to come down the ramp. “You follow me, and the guards will follow you. Try to run, I’ll kill the boy, and the guards will shoot you down. Nothing good will come of it.”
“I’m not gonna run,” he said. “As long as you have the kid, you know you’ve got me whipped. No reason to rub it in.”
“Just making sure we’re still clear,” she replied, and then she started walking, leading the way down the lighted path and into the next chamber, which was narrow and ran for a fair distance alongside a small underground river.
As they walked, Kevin noticed again that something was different. Something inside him had changed during the trip here.
He defocused his eyes slightly, and sent his awareness inward as he slipped into a shallow trance-state, just barely deep enough to get a feeling for what was going on inside his body.
And it only took a few seconds to see; only a few seconds to fully understand…
A big smile broke out across his face.
Now that’s a nice surprise! he thought. Maybe I’m not so helpless anymore…
Just as an experiment, he quickly enhanced his eyesight to the maximum level.
Suddenly the cave was about 10 times brighter, and he could see fine details on distant objects that no human could ever make out.
Fully restored. How about that?
The shapeshifting nanoparticles in his body—the very same ones that had completely stopped working several hours ago—were now suddenly farm-fresh and brimming with juice again, as if he’d just got through taking a big dose of vapor with The Mask.
For some reason, traveling through the fleshy tunnel had reset them.
Or something.
He spent a few moments trying to figure out how this could’ve happened, but it was way out of his depth. On the one hand, he didn’t really have any idea what the big meat-tunnel actually was, or how it could exist at all. And he also didn’t know very much about how The Mask worked. Lacking both sets of data, it was essentially impossible to determine with any certainty how one had influenced the other.
Looking back, the experience of going through the tunnel had been oddly refreshing. He’d felt like a new man from the moment he stepped out. And maybe in some ways he really was a new man. Maybe traveling through that thing had somehow reconstituted his body or something. And if so, maybe it reconstituted the nano-thingies from The Mask too.
Who knows? he thought. Sounds like a decent theory to me. At the end of the day, it didn’t really matter how it happened. At this point he would just be thankful that he was dangerous again, and not worry about explanations. The whole situation had changed for the better. He had options now.
At least a few, he thought.
Truth was, he still couldn’t just go crazy and start kicking butt or anything. Shape changer or no, Myra was still holding a little kid’s life hostage, and there were still a bunch of armed guards walking behind him, ready to shoot him down if he so much as twitched in the wrong direction.
Gotta wait for my moment. But now at least I won’t be a total chump when that moment comes.
Kevin tried to avoid smiling too much, or jumping for joy, as they continued their journey along the banks of the underground river. It took five full minutes before the corridor finally dead-ended in front of a set of stairs carved into the rock, leading up into the ceiling of the cave.
The stairway was well lighted, and it spiraled its way upward through solid stone. They climbed at least 50 or 60 feet, and then the stairs ended abruptly at an arched doorway, opening on a long hallway, with floors constructed from black stone blocks, and walls fashioned from stunning multicolored crystals.
Kevin had to admit, it was a pretty nice looking place.
“This is the royal palace,” said Myra. “Let’s keep our feet moving. Mother is waiting, and she despises tardiness.”
2 - Stress Point
The palace had obviously been designed with big open spaces in mind rather than lots of winding corridors or an overabundance of useless rooms.
They moved from one huge chamber to another, occasionally passing through a cavernous hall. Everywhere you looked, lights flashed off the colorful walls, creating beautiful rainbow patterns that almost seemed to project themselves into the air itself, like decorative holograms.
They saw grand indoor parks, stunning crystal statues, lavish fountains, and spiral stairways leading up to wondrous balconies.
The environment was outlandish, luxurious, breathtaking.
Kevin was definitely impressed.
The structural design almost made him feel like he was walking through a very exotic, and magical sort of shopping mall. The only thing that ruined the effect was the overall emptiness of the place—all this beautiful stuff, but nobody around to appreciate it…
The place felt kinda cold, and kinda spooky. Like a big department store after closing time.
In fact, the only people he saw during the walk were a handful of wandering guards and a few people wearing serving uniforms. All those people bowed deep when they saw Myra, but
she barely acknowledged them.
A couple of times they were near enough to a window for him to look out. He saw a city that was densely populated, and reminded him at first glance of the historic sections of certain old-world European cities, places like Rome or Vienna. The city was built on rolling terrain and the buildings were bunched up in certain places according to a pattern that seemed organic rather than symmetrical.
Kevin took advantage of the time spent walking to make several invisible, but pivotal, transformations to his body. He upped the efficiency of his muscles by several magnitudes. He improved his hearing, reflexes, sense of smell. He changed his gland system so that a quick release of various internal chemicals could enhance his abilities in numerous ways. He even hardened his skin slightly, and increased the speed at which his blood would coagulate. As a final touch, he added a special organ to his abdominal cavity, a recent addition to his basic package that he’d developed by experimenting with electric eel DNA. The organ gave him the ability to unleash a powerful electric shock through the surface of his skin. Not a deadly shock, but strong enough to put somebody down.
It was a brand new addition to his arsenal, and he had to make a dozen other small tweaks throughout his body so that he could use it without putting his own life in danger. This would be the first time he'd ever tried it in the field, but it had worked to an extent at home, and he figured he might as well bring it out. No reason to hold anything back at this point.
By the time he finished, Kevin was absolutely ready to rumble with just about anything in existence, but no one could've ever spotted anything different by looking at him.
Or that's what he thought, until Myra glanced back at him, narrowed her eyes, and said, "Something's different about you."
He tried to keep his face blank. "Nothing different. Just the same old me."
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