by Edward Lee
Fuck that, Penelope decided. The only person she was going to help right now was herself—by getting out of this hellish place. But there was something about the voice. It was a woman’s, and it—
She looked into the narrow alley from which the plea had issued. A heavy-metal poster flapped on the brick wall: THE BURNING BABIES, ONE SHOW ONLY! LIVE AT THE BLOOD-SUCKERS BALLROOM. Across from it, someone had scrawled in chalk: GOD, PLEASE TAKE ME BACK, then someone else had written: DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH!
The alley, like everything else, stank. Even in her horror, Penelope felt compelled to stop.
Was there something familiar about the voice?
“Help me,” the voice repeated. “I was raped and beaten by a Grand Duke.”
Penelope took one step into the alley. Yes, the voice was familiar. A naked woman sat huddled in the corner, reaching out.
“Who are you?” Penelope asked, voice quavering. “Are you one of the other guards?”
A giggle—a familiar giggle—and then the woman lurched up and grabbed Penelope, and all at once she realized just how familiar the voice really was.
It was her own voice that had been speaking to her.
And Penelope was now being attacked ... by herself.
The naked woman that looked exactly like Penelope grinned. Well, she didn’t look exactly like Penelope, because Penelope didn’t have fangs, nor were the whites of Penelope’s eyes bright crimson with white irises. Penelope didn’t have four joints per finger, either, and she didn’t have talons in place of fingernails. There was one other thing Penelope didn’t have that this evil replica did: a penis.
Penelope screamed as she was dragged down. Perfect facsimiles of her own breasts swayed before her dread-distorted face, and her imposter’s penis—more demonic than human in that it was gray as birch bark, with the same texture, and had an inverted glans, more like a plunger-head than a dome—throbbed against her stomach as she was molested. “I’m gonna stick it in hard, sweetie,” the clone assured her in her own voice. “Say hello to my Mr. Bumpy.”
The clone’s hips shimmied between Penelope’s legs. Penelope just kicked and screamed some more—useless reactions. Then hook-nailed hands began to pull at her pants ...
SLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL-UCK!
Penelope had closed her eyes against the horror but opened them again when her attacker seemed to fall limp. Another Tentaculus was leaning over the scene on its long, wormlike legs, having forced the end of its trunk into the clone’s mouth. Penelope was able to crawl away as the creature’s digestive process began to suck, the extended trunk pulsating. It made Penelope think of a vacuum-cleaner hose, only this vacuum wasn’t sucking up dust, it was sucking out her macabre replica’s internal organs, or so Penelope would’ve thought until the creature stalled, then retracted its trunk. The sound it made—clearly a sound of objection—pierced her ears like the whine of a dentist’s drill. What Penelope couldn’t have understood was that the Hex-Clone of herself didn’t possess internal organs, just rotten reanimated goulash and vexed blood—not the meal that the Tentaculus expected. The creature jerked back, raised its trunk as an elephant would, and quickly expelled everything it had just ingested, spewing it all out in a shower of grue.
Penelope resumed her terror-tear down the alley. The sight of the moon—her moon, not a moon from another world—beckoned her. Finally she was there, and nearly collapsed when she took in her first breath of clean night air. She could hear crickets chirping, could see the plush, green grass sloping down the hill that the map library had been built on. All there was left to do now was keep running, just keep running away and get as far away from this place, or this nightmare, as possible.
“Adieu, Penelope,” a voice reverberated in her ears, that voice she’d heard from the man in the basement—the voice that was more like light. “Relish your life while you have it, because you’ve just borne witness to the home of your hereafter...”
Penelope stopped and turned. She couldn’t help it.
She looked back into the alley.
It was the man, the magnificent man named Zeihl, standing at the front steps of the Halman Map Library amid all of the evil buildings that seemed to have grown around it. Zeihl’s halo coruscated, and so did his quiet smile. Then came the sound:
Ssssssssssssssss-ONK!
It popped in the air. Penelope felt her ears pop too, like an airplane descending, and next came a flash of throbbing green light. The flash seemed to grow into a stagnant, shuddering blob a few yards from the library’s front doors. The blob grew, painting everything on the infernal street an cerie luminescent green.
What—what IS that? Penelope wondered.
The Warlock in the white cloak and hood drifted out of the library, with something like a small suitcase under his arm. And the green blob, by now, had throbbed and shivered like living neon until it had changed into a shape that resembled an open aperture, a rimmed hole in the air but a hole made of the green light. A hole, yes, or a doorway ...
The white-garbed figure drifted past Zeihl without a word or a gesture ... and then stepped into that doorway.
The doorway began to shrink.
Zeihl cast Penelope a final smile. He knelt down and kissed the ground, and as he did so, Penelope noticed the charred arrangement of bones that seemed folded up into the middle of his back.
Wings, Penelope realized.
“Run, Penelope,” the voice shined. “You will see this place again, but this is the last time you’ll see me ...”
The earth began to tremble. All the strange buildings and spiring black skyscrapers around the library began to fade, and the bizarre green doorway vanished.
Zeihl stood back up.
Now, in his hand, he held a knife with a long curved silver blade and he looked up with that beautiful smile, closed his eyes, and slit his own throat.
The blood that flowed from the wound glowed bright as magma. Penelope was helpless to do anything but look on.
The Fallen Angel had told her to relish her life, but what he hadn’t told her was that her life would end a second later—
—when Zeihl’s body exploded into a mushroom cloud of blinding white light that vaulted a hundred feet into the air, incinerating everything in a quarter-mile radius.
Including Penelope.
Chapter Five
(I)
Cassie slept fitfully, sweating through nightmares of the Mephistopolis, of Dentata-Peds and Tentaculi, of Nectoports and City Mutilation Squads. She dreamed of taking the train from Tiberius Depot into Pogrom Park where destitute amputee demons bummed change and outdoor fountains gushed blood. She dreamed of the immense J.P. Kennedy Ghettoblocks—a slum district the size of the entire state of Texas. She dreamed of the Mephisto Building—666 floors high—and the one time she’d actually seen Lucifer looking out of one of its narrow windows.
At least her nightmares had changed. In the past, she’d always been tormented by nightmares of her sister’s suicide. Now she was merely tormented by nightmares of Hell.
But she’d had one more dream, too, hadn’t she?
Angelese, she recalled, sitting up now in the ward bed. She rubbed sleep from her eyes and chuckled to herself. The girl with snow-white hair. An angel. But why would Cassie dream of something so strange? And had it really been a dream? I’m from an Order of the Seraphim, the image in the water had told her, a very special order. Those from my order willingly descend from the Rapture.
With all that had happened to her over the last year, Cassie had long-since stopped fretting over which impressions in her life were real and which were dreams. She couldn’t trust her senses anymore. Since learning she was an Etheress? Since visiting Hell? She wished it could all be a dream but she knew it wasn’t.
She wished she really was insane—as the people in this clinic thought. At least then she wouldn’t have to worry about anything.
I should have asked her, though, she thought now, dream or not. I should have asked Angelese why any angel
would willingly leave heaven.
“Because it’s our job,” a voice replied from no particular place in the room. “It’s our duty.”
Cassie rubbed her face. Here we go again. “Your duty to what?”
“Our duty to God. We’re his spies.” A chuckle. “We’re, like, his commandos.”
Cassie got up off the bed. She generally only slept in bra and panties, and she immodestly slipped them off and put them in the small laundry hamper they’d given her.
“Nice tattoo,” the voice said.
Cassie frowned at the inanity of the situation. A disembodied voice just told me I have a nice tattoo. She looked down at it, as if she even doubted the tattoo’s existence. It was a tiny half-rainbow that encircled her navel. She’d gotten it at a Goth parlor in D.C. with Lissa; they’d agreed to both get tattoos the same day.
“My sister has one too,” Cassie responded. “It’s—
“A garland of barbed wire around her navel,” Angelese answered. “You should see my tattoos.”
“Oh, angels have tattoos?”
“Sure, but mine are special. They’re devotional.”
Cassie smirked. Angelese never seemed to speak in anything but puzzles. “How did you know that my sister has a barbed wire tattoo around her navel?” she asked next.
“I’ve seen her a few times.”
The comment locked Cassie in place, unmindful of her nakedness. “You’ve seen my sister?”
“Um-hmm.”
“Where is she?”
“You know where she is. She’s in the Mephistopolis.”
Cassie was trembling. “Yes, but where in the Mephistopolis?”
“I’m not sure right now.”
“But you just said you saw her!”
“I saw her a few times, but I don’t know exactly where she was. We’re waiting for more intelligence reports about her. I trance-channel into Hell all the time, all the Caliginauts do.”
“What? You trance—”
“Think of it as an out-of-body experience, that sort of thing. Some humans can do it, and the same goes for angels. That’s one of the first things they teach us how to do when we’re inducted into the Order. We channel our spirits out of our physical bodies, can go anywhere, including Hell.”
“Why?” Cassie demanded. “Why would angels go to Hell?”
“Scouting missions,” she was simply answered.
Cassie pulled on her robe, knowing that someone would be by soon to escort her to the showers. Now she was intrigued in spite of her aggravation. “Your spirit has been to Hell?”
“My soul, yes.”
“But not your body?”
“No.”
“Why not? Why doesn’t God just send all his angels down there and depose Lucifer?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Cassie looked around the room, trying to decide where the voice had come from. This is probably all bullshit. There’s probably a little speaker hidden in the room, and some prick’s having a real laugh right now.
But if that were the case, what had she seen last night? If someone was trying to trick her, or make her think she was insane, how could they have made her see the reflection last night in the water in her hands?
“You know I’m not a dream, Cassie, and you know I’m not a trick,” Angelese’s faceless voice said next. “You know that, right? You know that you really are an Etheress, right?”
“Yes,” Cassie finally had to admit.
“Good, ’cos if you didn’t know that, then we’d have a long road ahead of us, and there isn’t time.”
“Time for what—” Cassie shook her head in an abrupt frustration. “Look, this is really freaking me out. It just bugs me.”
“What?”
“What? Talking to a disembodied voice, that’s what. Maybe I’m weird but when I’m talking to someone, I’m kind of used to seeing that person’s face along with the conversation. Can we do that thing we did last night? What did you call it?”
“A Transference Charm,” Angelese reminded her. “Let’s just wait a minute and we’ll be able to do a better one.”
“Where?”
“In the shower. He’s coming now.”
More frustration. “How do you know—”
Three solid raps sounded on the door. “Hey, Cassie, it’s me, R.J. Lemme know when it’s okay to come in.”
Cassie’s brow creased; she sashed her robe. “You can come in now.”
The lock rattled as the door was unlocked. R.J. entered, smiling, his Notre Dame hat pushed up on his head. “Time for the good ole Personal Hygiene block.”
“Yeah, I know, and then Sustenance Block, right?” Cassie asked a bit sarcastically. “Why can’t you psych guys just call it breakfast?”
“Because Sustenance Block sounds much more therapeutic on the billing invoices.”
Cassie followed him out, her flip-flops flopping. One of her dead father’s life-insurance policies covered the bills here, overseen by his executors—a bunch of attorneys back in D.C.
“How are you feeling?” R.J. asked. He was tall, broad shouldered, and his shadow seemed massive as she walked behind him.
“How do I feel?” Cassie replied. More sarcasm was in order. “Like a perfectly sane girl being kept against her will in a private psychiatric clinic only because the bills are paid on time.”
“That’s the spirit,” R.J. chuckled. “Did you get a good night’s sleep?”
“No.”
“More nightmares?”
“Yeah.”
“Of your sister’s suicide?”
“Nope.”
The amiable psych tech looked over his shoulder. “You know, I am a qualified psychologist.”
“Really? Not just a Notre Dame fan?”
“I’m a Cincinnati Reds fan too. But you should still want your father’s executors to get their money’s worth. I might be able to help you interpret your nightmares. Then you can reflect on those interpretations. It’s called psychotherapy.”
“You really want to know what my nightmares were about?”
“Sure.”
“I dreamed of the time I took the sulphur-powered train from the Outer Sector at Tiberius Station to Pogrom Park. It’s near the Riverwalk section of the Mephistopolis. On the train, I saw a girl give birth to a mongrel baby that had fangs and horns coming out of its head. When its head was all the way out, it looked at me and barked, like a dog. I ran back to my cabin when the baby came all the way out and started nursing.”
“And you believe that,” R.J. said, not asked.
“Yep. I was there. I saw it. There’s nothing to disbelieve.”
“You know, Cassie, I believe that you believe that.”
Cassie just nodded with the same derision she’d known since they’d brought her here. “Yeah, I know, Dr. Freud. You believe that I believe the delusion.”
R.J. stopped and turned, touched her arm to elicit her attention. “It’s not quite that at all, is it? Your case is much more complex.”
“Because I’m passing all your damn polygraphs, right?”
“That’s part of it but I’m sure there’s a lot more. We’re going to find out. We really do want to help you, you know.” Then he smiled again. “Oh, and I’m not a Freudian. Freud was an erotopathic coke-head who was totally full of shit.”
Cassie laughed. Thank God somebody in this joint’s got a sense of humor. She passed a couple of closed doors with stenciled letters on chicken-wire windows. NARCO-ANALYSIS, one read. OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY, DISPENSARY, SLEEP-DISORDER LAB, read some others. A last one read ECT. She saw Dr. Morse sitting at a desk beyond the glass.
“Hey, R.J.? What’s ECT?”
“Electro-Convulsant Therapy.”
“You mean shock treatment?”
“Um-hmm. It’s not like in the movies, Cassie. It’s painless, and it’s still very useful in treating serious depression.” He looked back at her again. “But you’re not depressed, so you don’t have to worry about it, right?”
“You say so. So what is my diagnosis, doc?”
“Clinically?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re messed up in the head, that’s all. Everybody is.”
Another laugh. Cassie liked R.J. Dr. Morse was another story. She couldn’t say that she disliked him, but he was definitely a stick in the mud. Aside from those two, though, she really hadn’t met anyone else. The med nurse, the “chaperon,” the janitor. They were just bodies here doing a job.
“R.J.’s got the hots for you,” Angelese’s voice suddenly resumed.
“He does not,” Cassie blurted.
R.J. turned back around, a cocked brow. “Who does not?”
Shitl Cassie thought.
“Be careful,” Angelese recommended. “You can hear me, he can’t.”
I wonder why, Cassie thought.
“Because you’re an Etheress,” Angelese reminded.
“Oh, yeah,” then Cassie bit her lip again. When R.J. looked back this time, Cassie just said, “Don’t ask.”
“Don’t worry, I talk to myself sometimes too. Everybody does.”
Yeah, but everybody does NOT talk to bodiless angels from the Order of the Caliginauts.
“You got that right,” Angelese said and laughed.
When they got to the small office closest to the showers, R.J. looked around and said, “Sadie must be at an examination. I’ve got an admissions interview right now, so I’ll see you at the chow hall when you’re done.”
“Chow hall?” Cassie tried to joke. “Don’t you mean Sustenance Facility?”
“You’ve had the food here. It’s chow. For what we charge per week for an in-patient, you’d think we’d have better food, huh?”
The food was pretty bad. “Then change to an obesity clinic.”
R.J. held a finger up. “Not a bad idea. See ya in a little while.”
Cassie was taken aback. “Hey. You mean you’re gonna leave me alone here? As in... by myself?”
“Sure.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll try to escape?”
“Nope. But, just so you know, we don’t call it ‘escape’ here. We call it ‘resident elopement.’ ” Then he pointed to a sign on the wall: DO NOT LEAVE ELOPEMENT RISKS UNATTENDED.