by Guy Adams
Then, one wise old demon who had an eye for earning a buck but a lousy right hook had swapped the onerous business of wielding whip or branding iron for a seat in a ticket booth. For a small fee, visitors could take a tour around the site, watch the bloodletting, hear the sordid crimes the penitents had committed during their mortal spans; even take a go on the instruments of instruction, turn a wheel here, yank a chain there. Why tire yourself out when people would pay for the pleasure?
Eventually, like all entertainments, it was superseded by something more innovative, more fashionable. In truth, the customers had always complained about the need to hike up the long mountain trail, more often than not far too tired to do more than take a couple of swings at the guilty. It had been a success while it lasted.
Once the tourists dwindled, it was back to paying for the flagellation. Mortal lives being the butterfly things they are, there were only so many memories to go around and soon, even that revenue stream dried up.
Eventually, bewildered and confused, minds barely strung together after years of spending their contents so freely, even most of the penitents stopped attending the Plain of Salt. Perhaps they simply forgot why they used to attend. There were certainly many mortals, their sense of self so whittled away, wandering the Dominion of Circles with no clear purpose. All that was left were the handful of die-hards, the souls who had made their own way onto the hot coals or broken glass, maintaining just enough of their faculties to keep up the daily grind of self-abjection.
That day there were but three. Their names were lost to them, replaced with more prosaic titles.
Pole, as always, was the last to make it to the top, forced to drag all ten feet of his namesake behind him, its metal surface heavily corroded from the regular application of bodily fluids. By the time he took up his position against a small cluster of rocks, Coals was already lighting her fire.
“You should just leave it up here,” she told him. “I couldn’t be doing with dragging this lot around all the time.” She gestured to her equipment, a ten-foot tall metal frame, pile of chains, hooks and the provisions for making her fire. “A small bag of coal,” she said, “that’s all I have to worry about, and coal weighs nothing.”
“It’s part of the punishment,” Pole explained, wedging the end of his pole between the rocks, pushing it in deep enough that it stood firm, running parallel a foot or so from the ground.
“Let him struggle,” said Nest, the third of the group, as he kicked at the base of the termite mound to get its residents thoroughly riled up. “Some people just can’t help making things difficult for themselves.”
Coals shrugged and began to sling her chains through the straps at the apex of the metal frame.
“Just because you’re happy to take the easy route,” said Pole, offering Nest a look of utter disgust. “Some of us will have completed their period of penitence a little sooner than others, that’s all.”
“You think this is easy?” Nest asked, unscrewing the jar on his pot of honey.
“By comparison,” said Pole, squatting down in front of the metal rod and backing himself onto it. “Of course it bloody is.”
“Maybe you’d like to swap one day?” Nest replied, angry at having his work denigrated. He began to slather the honey on his genitals, making sure he didn’t work himself up into a state of erection as he often did. Pole would only use the sight of a boner to fuel the fire of his contempt.
“Personally,” said Coals, satisfied that her fire had caught, “I’m not convinced either of you are really putting the effort in.” She fixed the rusty hooks to the end of the chains and set to forcing the blunt points through the flesh of her nipples.
“This isn’t about creativity,” said Pole, forcing himself backwards so that the first few inches of metal were now lodged in his anus. “It’s about punishment.”
He gave a sigh and began the slow business of gradual self-impalement.
“Of course it’s creative,” said Nest, squatting over the termite nest and poking his genitals into the hole at its crown. “Suffering should be inventive.” He gave a grunt as he felt the first wave of insects exploring the sweetness he offered.
Coals had climbed up her frame now, cinched the chains and, with a roar of satisfaction, set herself to swing above the glowing coals of her fire. “It should be transcendental,” she said, teeth gritted so the words were little more than spit and percussion.
It was Coals who saw the procession first, thanks to her vantage point on the frame. “Someone’s coming.”
Nest, who just had—more food for the insects—thought for a moment she was referring to him, then he saw the trail of people entering the plain.
“Been a while since we had spectators,” he said, shifting his position to work away at the itching in his balls.
“They don’t look like tourists,” said Pole, forcing himself back another half an inch.
“Friends,” said the man at the head of the procession, “we bring excellent news.”
“Christ,” said Coals, parting her legs as she swung so as to give her groin a roasting. “That would make a change.”
“My name is Arno,” the man said, pointing to his female companion, “and this is Veronica. We have travelled all the way from the Dominion of Clouds to tell you that you don’t need to suffer any longer.”
“There’s only one person I’ll believe on that score,” said Nest, “and unless He’s amongst your number you’re wasting our time.”
“I assure you,” Arno insisted, “this is completely unnecessary. Your sins have been forgiven, in truth they always were. We’re spreading the word so that people like yourselves can return with us to the Dominion of Clouds and experience its beauty and comfort.”
“Don’t deserve comfort,” said Pole, who was finding it almost impossible to speak now as the pipe had worked its way up towards the back of his throat.
“You deserve whatever you let yourselves have,” said Arno. “See all the others we’ve rescued? They’ve put their pain and misery behind them. They’ve suffered enough. God doesn’t want your blood and tears.”
“Well, tough,” said Coals, bouncing up and down on her chains so that the hooks tore even deeper into the flesh of her breasts, rivulets of blood trickling down into the fire where it hissed and smoked. “Because He’s going to get them.”
Pole barked an agreement but it was unintelligible, his mouth now full of steel, blood and shit.
“Just mind your own fucking business,” said Nest, removing his bloated and inflamed genitals from the nest to add more honey. “We’re busy.”
Arno opened his mouth to say more but Veronica tugged at his arm and shook her head. “There’s no point,” she told him, “they don’t want to know.”
After a moment he nodded and the procession about-turned and began its slow descent.
“Some people,” moaned Coals, the sweat of exertion and heat stinging her eyes. “As if we’d be doing this if we didn’t have to. I mean, it’s not for pleasure, is it?”
“Of course not,” said Nest, reinserting his genitals into the termite mound and grinding his hips against the dirt to force his swollen dick into it as deeply as he could.
2.
THAT NIGHT, ARNO’S people camped out in a clearing in the Forest of Lies. The whispered untruths from the leaves were quiet and easily ignored after you’d got used to them, certainly they were worth putting up with as a trade-off against the shelter the trees offered.
They had gathered a considerable number of souls in their travels through the Dominion. The first few had been the hardest, but now, with the weight of numbers behind them, people were coming over to the cause in droves. Alive or dead, humans would always be inclined to follow a crowd. Still, Arno dwelt on the souls they had not convinced, rather than the ones they had.
“It’s just so ridiculous,” he said, thinking of the trio on the Plain of Salt. “You’d think they wanted to be there.”
“Some do,” admitted a
woman called Marrousia. “For all their pretence at penitence they just like the pain. Maybe that wasn’t always the case but, over the years, they’ve developed a taste for it.”
Arno shrugged. “I can live with that, I guess. I can’t begin to understand it but if they’re happy doing what they’re doing...”
“Some also feel stupid,” said Veronica. “It’s not easy to admit that you’re only here because you thought that’s what you deserved.”
“I blame the preachers,” said Marrousia, “the people who spend their whole time telling you how deep you are in sin.”
“And the parents,” said Josiah, a boy who looked no more than thirteen years old but had endured the Dominion of Circles for decades. “They beat me every day for one thing or another.”
They had found Josiah tied to a large rock several days ago. His stomach was missing, pecked out by birds. Veronica had tried to drape a poncho over him to obscure the sight of his innards but the boy had refused it. “I like the way the wind feels,” he had explained, “it tickles.”
Marrousia had been hanging from a tree to the side of the road, thin wire cutting into her ankles, her head a shining, swollen damson of gathered blood. When asked how long she had been hanging there she was honest with them: “After the first two years I began to lose count.”
She couldn’t walk but weighed so little the others didn’t mind taking it in turns to carry her.
“There’s a lot of people in the mortal world who deserve this more than we do,” said Kane, an ex-soldier who carried his bitterness with him along with a stomach distended by years of being force-fed grubs and weevils at the tables of the Bastard’s Banquet. However much he ate he could never sate his hunger. His guts, unnaturally resilient to the physical exertions of overeating, simply grew to accommodate and now hung around him like a wobbling skirt of fat. “I can’t tell you what I’d give to go back there knowing what I know now.”
“Once you’ve spent some time in the Dominion of Clouds,” Arno assured him, “you’ll learn to let go.”
“I’m not sure I want to,” Kane admitted. “I’m a soldier, all I know how to do is fight and there are plenty I’d like to take my bayonet to.”
“He’ll get over it,” Veronica assured Arno that night, as they curled up in their makeshift tent. “Some people just take a long time to let go. A couple of days dreaming in the Junction and he’ll have forgotten all his grudges.”
“I hope so,” said Arno.
3.
WHEN ARNO FINALLY slipped into uneasy sleep, other parts of the camp were not so quiet. The trees weren’t the only ones doing the whispering and shadows flitted, carefully negotiating the sleeping bodies of their compatriots and making their way deeper into the forest.
The gathering was small, no more than thirty, but they made their way a short distance from the camp, coming to rest around the massive trunk of a large tree. Kane took his place at their centre, manoeuvring his unwieldy gut as he paced around the trunk. Every now and then he would see movement in its bark, insects and lizards that lived in the branches. He would pluck the creature from the wood and pop it in his mouth, more stuffing for the goose.
“You’ve all heard the stories,” he said, “and I’m not talking about Arno and his passage to paradise. They say that the way is open between here and the mortal world too. God is dead and all the barriers have fallen.”
“You think it’s true?” asked a voice from the crowd. Kane looked down to see Rachel Watson, who held her eyes in the palm of her hand. They had been plucked, she said, by a snake. Sucked out of their sockets and spat into the dust by her feet. They still worked, severed as they were, though sometimes she had to wash them in her spit as they grew dry and itched.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, “but I can’t ignore the possibility, can any of us?”
There was a slight murmur from the crowd.
“How wonderful would it be to go home?” he asked them. “To find our families? To walk the streets where we used to live? Isn’t that an idea worth taking a gamble on?”
Another murmur, this one growing in enthusiasm.
It wasn’t nostalgia that would draw Kane back to the world he had left the day he had lain on his back in the smoke of cannon-fire, his body full of lead and his boots full of blood. It was something far stronger. He had died for a cause, and that cause had gone to the wall along with him; the war had been lost, the lives wasted. While he and men like him had rotted in the fields and rivers, those in power had talked their talk and made their compromises, uncaring of the blood that had been spilled under their orders. He didn’t know how many of them were still living, the generals and the politicians, but he had years of Hell to show them if they still had breath to lose.
“How would we find the way?” asked another voice, this one belonging to George Oskirk, a man that Kane did not much like.
Oskirk had been part of a group they had found in the Draining Desert where bodies sank into the cold, clammy sand, choking on its grit until eventually they fell through only to re-emerge in the sky above and start all over again. Their skins were pale from years out of the sun, worn smooth by the movement of the sand. They had rescued them by throwing ropes over the sand’s surface, fishing people out during the scant few minutes they were on the surface at the turning point of the cycle. Most of the group had been silent for many days after, the sand they had swallowed filling their bodies and clogging their throats. It had taken a lot of drinking and vomiting before they could work their lungs and their voice boxes. Not so Oskirk. He had been wearing a leather mask that had protected him from the worst of it. That mask, Kane had noticed before Oskirk had thrown it away, had possessed freckles. Kane had no doubt that Oskirk had taken advantage of another body that had come within his reach in the shifting sands. He had known his fair share of selfish soldiers during the war, men who only looked out for themselves, and he liked it no more now than he had then.
“How do we find it?” Kane repeated. “They talk about a town called Wormwood, a place that lies on the frontier between the Dominion of Circles and the world we left behind. If we can find that then we’re free.”
“You think Arno will let us?” asked someone else.
“He’s not our keeper,” Kane said. “We’re grateful to him of course, but there’s only one who could tell us what to do and if He is dead then I say we do whatever feels right.”
Kane thought about that. Could God be dead? It seemed unlikely. Whether He still existed or not, He had not played a significant role in Kane’s life. There had been no sign of His mercy or kindness on the fields of battle. He couldn’t have been ignorant, didn’t they say He heard everything? And His name had been called so many times by the dying. Hadn’t Kane even uttered it himself as the bullet holes let his blood run out into the grass beneath him? Yes, he had. And if God hadn’t cared to involve Himself then, Kane wasn’t inclined to allow him a say now.
“And if He’s not dead,” Kane continued, “and the doorway to the mortal world does lie open, it can only be His doing. In which case He wants us to walk through it.”
“Maybe it’s all been part of His plan?” asked another voice. Kane didn’t recognise the speaker; it was one of the many whose heads had been worn down to the bone, interchangeable off-white faces with unnaturally voracious smiles.
“Isn’t everything?” he replied, not believing a word of it but only too happy to peddle such thoughts if it got the crowd on his side.
The murmurs turned into full conversation now as they all began to talk amongst themselves. He had set a fire burning here, he realised, and all it had taken was a few words.
“Be still,” he said, waving his hands for quiet. “We don’t want to wake the others.”
“But surely we should all discuss this?” That was Rachel Watson again.
“Of course,” Kane replied, “but there is something else to consider. You notice how they all talk as if the...” he left a pause here, for maximum effect, th
ough in truth he had his audience well and truly under his control, “things that live here, the demons... don’t wish us harm? That we were trapped here by our own guilt, or confusion?”
There was a mumble at this. Even though they had all taken the opportunity to leave once offered, the issue of culpability was still uncomfortable.
“Well,” Kane continued, tugging at his belly, “I sure as Hell know I didn’t do this to myself.”
There was a mixture of agreement and humour at this.
“How about you, Rachel?” he asked, addressing her directly, “you pluck your own eyes out? Or you, George Oskirk, you try and suffocate yourself in that sand pit? All of you, look to your wounds, your pain, you do all that to yourselves?”
Again, a murmur of consideration. For most of them, they had fallen victim to cursed landscapes, wild animals or the traps they had subconsciously wished into existence. Certainly though, some had fallen foul of the demon castes. While they had not been charged with the heavenly role of chastisers, there was no question that some played merry with the mortal souls that cluttered up the Dominion with their wailing and begging. Some had done it to line their pockets, some simply because they could. Looking around, staring at each other’s wounds, at the haunted look in their neighbours’ eyes, Kane’s words had weight amongst the crowd.
“Has it occurred to anyone that all of this... the offer of freedom, of paradise, might just be a trick? A way of torturing us some more? Building us up to knock us back down?”
“I don’t believe that,” came a voice. “Arno’s a good man, he wouldn’t play us false.”
“Who says he knows?” Kane replied. “He might be being played for a sucker the same as the rest of us.” He shrugged, his dangling fat quivering as it was hoisted up to reveal his feet. “All I know is that I don’t trust anybody anymore, not completely. The first opportunity I get I’m going to make a break for the world I left, the world I know... I hope that many of you would want to join me. But I’m not about to make such thoughts public in front of all of them,” he gestured towards the camp, “not until I know who’s who and what’s what. Who’s my enemy and who’s my friend. When we know who we have on our side we can either make a stand or a break for freedom. Until then, we play it clever, we talk amongst ourselves, we deal with only those we know we can trust. There could be demons hiding amongst us even now! Waiting for the chance to drag us all back to the pain and misery we’ve only just put behind us.”