by Edward Lee
“I have to,” Angelese repeated. “That’s what I’m here for,” and then she continued, speaking in panicked bursts of words: “Zeihl, the Fallen Angel, he incarnated himself and then committed suicide, that’s what the explosion was, an angel killing himself, sacrificing himself because if an angel sacrifices himself, material things can be exchanged, the place wasn’t really a library, Lucifer wanted something there so Zeihl sacrificed himself in order to get it, and they succeeded by performing a Spatial Merge, it’s an occult technology that Satan had never perfected until now but it’s a way of bringing a small part of Hell to earth for a short period of time, just a couple of blocks but a couple of blocks is enough, because during the Merge that little part of Hell will share the same space with a little part of the Living World simultaneously, so that’s what happened, they Merged with that library to steal something and whatever it was they stole, they took it back to Hell, I know this is what happened because that’s the only reason Zeihl would’ve committed suicide, it’s one of the Rules, the only way you can take something out of the Living World and bring it to Hell is through a Power Exchange, and an angelic sacrifice would’ve generated that kind of power—”
But by then it was too late. The Umbra-Specter had fully solidified, its black form real as flesh, and now it had pressed Angelese against the tiled shower wall, and it slowly was dragging its claws up her thighs. Angelese was shuddering, still speaking through the catastrophic pain, her big beige-and-violet eyes even bigger now as they widened in horror. “—so that’s what they did, that’s the only thing it could’ve been, a Power Exchange during a Spatial Merge, when an angel dies in the Living World it’s almost like a nuke going off—”
“Stop!” Cassie shouted, watching helpless as the shadow freely indulged in its torture. “Don’t say anything else! Don’t tell me any more!”
Angelese told her more, shrieking now through her unearthly pain, desperate to get it all out as quickly as possible: “—and that other story we heard on the news, the stuff about fires and screaming in downtown Dannelleton, that was a Merge too. It was a practice run, and I know what they’re practicing for—”
All at once, the angel’s shriek amplified tenfold; Cassie had to cover her ears for a moment. The Umbra-Specter was shivving Angelese, slowly drawing its claws in and out of her ribs. Blood poured from the wounds, luminous, like liquid red neon light, swirling down the shower drain.
Cassie wasn’t sure but she thought she heard the shadow-thing say: “Please keep talking, keep betraying your oath. I love torturing you,” in the most corroded voice.
Angelese panted out more words through the agony. “They know I’m trying to get you to the other Deadpass, they don’t want you in Hell on your own because they know you’re too powerful, that’s why they’re doing these Merges—”
“I don’t understand,” Cassie sobbed.
“They want to Merge with this clinic, if they can successfully do that, they can capture you. Lucifer wants to abduct you and use your Ethereal Powers for something that’s more diabolical than anything that’s ever been done before, so that’s why I have to get you out of here. That’s what all of this is about, Cassie—it’s you! They’re coming for youl”
The Umbra-Specter reveled in its task, flaying Angelese with its claws. Cassie didn’t know what to do, she could only think impulsively. Without light, could the shadow retain its form? She ran naked to the other end of the room, leaving glowing red footprints. Light switch! Where’s the light switch? but she couldn’t find it. Angelese was still screaming, unable to speak at all anymore as the claws gleefully molested her. Cassie grabbed a mop out of the closet, ran back, and then began to break all the fluorescent tubes with the handle. In blocks, the room fell into darkness. The shadow howled, glaring at her over its ebon shoulder. When Cassie shattered the last overhead tube, the thing began to dissipate.
So did the bleeding squirming image of Angelese.
Chapter Six
(I)
Why would Walter dream such a thing, such an awful thing?
He was standing on a street corner in a city, but it was unlike any city he could have ever imagined. The midnight sky was ruby-red, the low sickle moon was black. He could only see these features, though, by looking straight up because the buildings lining the street must’ve been hundreds and hundreds of floors high, skyscrapers unlike any he’d seen. He got dizzy just looking up. Do they even make buildings that high? he questioned himself.
“They do here,” a little girl said.
She was skipping down the street, smiling at him. Walter almost fell over. Her pigtails flipped as she skipped. She wore black-strapped shoes and little white socks, a bright red-and-white checkered dress. Deep lines ran down her gray, wizened face—the girl was mummified.
She was playing hop-scotch but the squares weren’t formed by chalk, they were formed by long, odd bones. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. “You’re in the Mephistopolis, you’re in Hell,” she told him. “This is Pogrom Park, and you’re having a dream.”
Dream, he thought. Somehow, the information comforted him. It told him that this weird place didn’t really exist. Overhead, something flew by. A city pigeon was his first guess but then he looked closer at it and saw that it was some kind of a winged rodent. Was that a severed human i penis it clasped between its teeth as it flew away?
The little mummy girl skipped along, the hop-scotch squares extending all the way down the street. “Bye, Walter. Your destiny awaits.”
The comment pricked his distraction. “What?” he called after her. “What did you say?”
“Embrace your destiny...” She skipped away and disappeared around the corner.
He saw a sign, letters on smudgy glass: NEWCOMERS’ INFORMATION POINT. WELCOME TO THE POGROM PARK DISTRICT GALLERY. Walter meandered in—what else did he have to do? The long empty room walled by glossy photo-murals reminded him of a tourist center, displaying pictures of local attractions. Frame by frame, then, he looked at photographs of Hell’s greatest landmarks.
The Industrial Zone and its hundred-foot walls of iron girders. Inside this vast complex lay the city’s Central Power Plant, the Foundry and Slag Furnace, the Flesh-Processors and Bone-Grinding Stations. One shot showed thousands of destitute workers cutting the flesh off of corpses. Endless conveyor belts then delivered the cuttings to the Pulping Plants, for further food processing; more conveyors delivered the bones to be ground up for bricks and concrete. In the Fuel Depot, wheeled hoppers delivered large chunks of raw sulphur by the tons, to be manually chopped into smaller chunks by stooped laborers—the city’s endless fuel supply.
De Rais University extended over countless acres and appeared almost campus-like in its layout. Here, the finest Warlocks in the land taught their pupils in the blackest arts: divination, psychic torture, spatial transposition, and the latest in vexation.
The Rockefeller Mint provided the city with all its currency: brass and tin coinage featuring the embossed faces of all the Anti-Popes, and Hellnotes printed on processed demon skin.
Osiris Heights stood proud and posh, the residential district for upper-Hierarchals who lived an eternity of privilege in pristine highrises. A typical suite boasted the latest conveniences: harlot cages, skull-presses, iron-maidens, and neat personal-sized crematoriums. Television, too, powered not by electricity but by psychical theta-waves, offered up all the best torture channels.
Boniface Square encompassed whole city blocks in its leisure services. From the finest restaurants specializing in the best demonian cuisine to the most common street vendors pushing carts of flame-broiled meat skewers. Opulent night-clubs to rowdy hole-in-the-wall bars. From strip joints, bordellos, and peepshow parlors to the opulent Frederick the Great Opera House, all manner of abyssal entertainment could be found in the Square.
The J. Edgar Hoover Building existed in the Living World as well as in Lucifer’s; here, though, the immense Gothic edifice housed the million-occupant Ce
ntral Jail, the Drug Perpetuation Agency, the Commandant of the Mancer Divisions (headed by an articulate gentleman named U. S. Grant), the Tamerlane Emergency Response Battalion, and, of course, Satan’s official police department—the Agency of the Constabulary.
Other landmarks included Tojo Memorial Hospital, the John Dee Library and Infernal Archives, St. Iscariot Abbey, and the infamous Office of Transfiguration and Teratologic Research.
And wealthier Hierarchals who enjoyed beach-combing could always open their cabanas along the beautiful blood-filled Sea of Cagliostro.
“Terrific place, huh?” said a man with horns all over his face. He had three eyes, each the size of an apple, and he stood inside a little info booth.
“Yes, uh,” Walter stammered. “Terrific. So this really is Hell?”
“You bet’cha.”
“I don’t even know if I believe in this place.”
“Believe it.” All three eyes scrutinized Walter. “You’re not a Resident, are you? You don’t have the look.”
“What’s the look?”
“Damned.”
“I feel damned,” Walter said. He walked back out to the street.
The air smelled like smoke, a bitter eggy smoke like burning sulphur, he could even see the smoke sifting up through cracks in the street. Suddenly bells clanged, and a siren sounded. A fire, Walter guessed, but it was the strangest fire truck that appeared moments later. It looked more like a flat-bed truck from the 1920s, spoked wheels, open cab, but there was a boiler where the engine should be and a smokestack gusted steam. A riveted water tank occupied the back deck.
“Out of the way, buddy!” the helmeted driver shouted at Walter. “We’ve got a fire!” The driver was a demon with pitted yellow skin and red eyes. Walter stepped back onto the sidewalk, thinking Fire? I don’t see anything on fire. Did he mean the smoke coming out from the cracks in the street?
The fire truck clattered to a stop, and out jumped several more helmeted, raincoated demons, unreeling a long hose. They hurriedly approached the front of one of the buildings where a transom read TROLL MIDDLE SCHOOL. Through the window, Walter could see all the little misshapen demon children sitting at desks in a classroom. The firemen barged in with their hose, the nozzle was opened, and then the screams poured forth amid the instant crackling. It wasn’t water that sprayed from the nozzle, it was flame. The middle school was engulfed. Walter ran away, trying to out-distance the shrieks of the burning demon children.
“You can’t outrun the future,” someone else said when he huffed around the corner. In the middle of the street, two Griffins the size of Dobermans greedily picked scraps of flesh off a corpse. The corpse was still moving.
“And it won’t die, not really,” he was told. “That’s a Human. A human’s Spirit Body only dies when it’s completely destroyed. Then his Soul will transfer to something else, a demon, a bug, a worm.”
Who was telling him this? Walter looked around in utter confusion, then noticed the stunning woman standing in the little brick cubby between two buildings. “Who are you?” he asked but then the importance of the question faded as he looked more closely at her.
The glossy blue-vinyl overcoat made her look like some kind of pop baroness. A black velvet choker girded her throat. Her hair hung perfectly cropped in a straight line, cut at the same level as the choker; it was lank and shiny as black silk. The burning phosphorus of a street light diced her face into a puzzle of hard, pretty angles. Her eyes were so big and bright they dominated her face almost surrealistically.
“I’m No-name,” she said.
“No-name?” Walter almost laughed. “That’s some name.”
“I’m not allowed to say a name, Walter.”
“How do you know my name?”
“Because I’m a soothsayer.” She seemed to hug back into the shadows of the cubby. Her arms pressed together at her sides made her breasts push out. God, she’s pretty, Walter took time to think.
“I was a Dactyl-class sorceress for the court of King Mursil the First,” she continued, whispering. “I was executed for heresy—I deliberately spoke a false prophecy to the king—so I went to Hell. I’ve been here for a long time.” Another nudge back into the shadows.
This only distracted Walter more. “What are you—Are you hiding in there? You seem—”
“Yes, I’m hiding. I’m only safe in the Netherspheres. When I sneak into the Mephistopolis, I’m considered a fugitive.”
“Why?”
“Because I refuse to work for Lucifer’s Diviners. I’m considered an offense against public law. The Golems are looking for me, probably as we speak.”
Golems? Walter wondered. “Well, why come here? Why not stay where it’s safe?”
“Because it’s not in my future. You are.”
“Huh?”
“This is a dream, Walter.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“I’m a presage...”
Walter frowned. “If you can tell the future, tell me mine.”
“The future isn’t mutable, Walter. If it was, then I could change it, couldn’t I? I could change it by giving you options. But that’s not possible, so what point is there in telling you?”
Even as smart as Walter was, that one went right over his head. A distracted glance into the street showed him that the Griffins had gone, leaving the corpse stripped to the bone. Then the bones got up and falteringly walked away.
“You want to kill yourself, don’t you, Walter?”
The question shook him. He bowed his head. “Yes.”
“Because of a girl?”
“Yes.”
“You love her but she doesn’t love you?”
What could he say?
“Don’t despair,” No-name told him. “Rejoice in your life.”
Without Candice, I don’t have one. This was pathetic. I’M pathetic, he thought. He looked back at No-name. “Well? Tell me. What difference does it make? Will Candice ever love me?”
“That prospect is ... unlikely,” No-name said. Unlikely. A polite way of saying no. But he’d always known that, hadn’t he? He was only eighteen years old, had virtually no experience whatsoever with women, but he knew this, and even though he knew it, hearing it from No-name felt like a wall had fallen down on him. “Should I do it then?” he asked now. “Should I kill myself?”
“I can’t advise you.”
Was it a rumbling he heard? Some weird noise that seemed to be coming from behind No-name.
She spoke more heatedly now. “No, the future isn’t mutable, Walter. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to embrace your destiny.”
Embrace your destiny, he repeated the arcane words. Everyone was telling him that. But as far as he could reason, his destiny involved nothing more than blowing his head off in his dorm room tonight.
No-name’s eyes widened, and she smiled very brightly at him. “They got me.”
“What?”
“I’ll see you soon,” and then the old brown bricks of the cubby broke apart from behind; several of the bricks almost hit Walter in the head. He jumped back, his heart lurching. The wall had been broken apart from behind and now two very tall things had grabbed No-name. She didn’t scream; in fact, she barely reacted at all. The two man-shaped things that grabbed her looked almost ten feet tall, with just leaning lumps for heads and stout crudely featured hands, like dolls made of clay by a child. The closer Walter looked, however, the more he guessed that the things were made of clay. They were drab brownish-gray and smelled of a riverbed at low spate. One held No-name securely upright by wrapping its fat arms around her shoulders. The other one twisted her head round and round on her neck, until—crunch
—it came off.
The head was dropped into a garbage can, and No-name’s body was heaved into the middle of the street where it was descended upon at once by a gaggle of Griffins. The Griffins squawked merrily, and stripped No-name’s corpse clean in just moments.
The two Golems looked
at Walter with totally blank faces. Then they lumbered off.
I’ll see you soon, Walter remembered the girl’s last words to him. He looked at her bones in the street. “I don’t think so,” he muttered and jogged away. Only then did he fully see the crested street sign at the corner: CHYME RESERVOIR AVENUE.
(II)
Bordeaux, 1348 A.D.
He was called many things, and his name bore many contradictions. Lucifer, for instance, meant “The Light of the Morning”; hence, he was sometimes called the Morning Star. He was called Eosphoros, Iblis, the aduw Allah. But he was lately and more popularly referred to as Satan. Once, in eons past, he’d been the bringer of light. Now he was the bringer of darkness.
He very much liked the darkness.
“Good, good,” he whispered to himself. He was looking out at the village street, peeking from behind the teetering todesfall. From within the crude building’s plank-wood walls, he could hear moaning. They don’t even wait for them to die before throwing them in, the Light of the Morning thought. He relished the notion. Every village had many todesfalls—in these times? Sometimes they were simply pits, or fenced-in wastelands of death. The more sophisticated townships erected roofed buildings for the purpose, and Bordeaux, by now, had erected many such buildings. The stench wafting through the wood slats was beyond most human imagination, even in this filthy age. The bacillus pestis and pneumonitis had brought a beautiful black wave of death over Europe. He hoped the stench of rotting flesh would rise up high enough to offend God.
“Good, good,” he whispered again. He was looking out in glee, a child peeking around the stairs at the Christmas tree. Men in hoods and masks carted more bodies to the todesfall, where they flopped over like long white sacks.
The only sound was the incessant buzzing of flies amid their feast.
An Oni stood beside him, for protection, he presumed, not that the aduw Allah needed protection; his generals had insisted. “You could be blemished, my lord,” one, named Sherman, had told him. But Satan was immortal.