by Edward Lee
What she knew she wouldn’t enjoy, though, was their next endeavor.
“Look, your mother wasn’t lying.” Angelese lowered her Ophitte Viewer and pointed out the Egress, toward the Panzuzu District. Cassie could see the Atrocidome unaided. The huge Killing Plate that hovered over the dome suddenly dropped.
“Jesus,” Cassie muttered.
“They’re doing Spatial Merges constantly now, destroying every known Deadpass.”
“So I can’t get out of Hell.”
“Um-hmm.”
Cassie stepped back from the Egress. “And now we’re going to the Mephisto Building? I still think you’re out of your mind,” she said.
“Of course I’m out of my mind,” Angelese replied too easily. She was on her knees, peering down over the rim of the Port with the Ophitte Viewer. “I’m a Caliginaut, we’re not a stable bunch.”
“You don’t know how secure that makes me feel.” Butterflies fluttered in her belly when she looked down again. Through a break in the soiled clouds she could see the top of the Mephisto Building. Gargoyles lurked about its ledges, while horned sentries prowled the roof. The building’s iron antenna mast swayed, draped by living bodies dangling on gibbets.
She wants to go inside, Cassie realized. She IS crazy. Getting in was impossible, everyone knew that. She squinted, barely able to see the intestine-like coils that snaked around the building’s first level. The Flesh Warrens, she remembered. It was the Mephisto Building’s security barrier. The only way in was through the Warrens, but if anyone entered, and immune-response was triggered, the Warren’s antibodies would attack at once. “It’s impossible so I don’t know why you’re even thinking about it. The Flesh Warrens are impenetrable.”
“Not if you have the vaccine,” the angel informed. “How do you think the other Fallen Angels and other authorized personnel get in?”
“A serum?” Cassie questioned.
“Sure, it’s like an inoculation. It’s very short-term, but if you’ve been injected with the vaccine, the Flesh Warren’s immune system won’t attack you.”
This was an explosive revelation. “And you’ve got the vaccine!” Cassie nearly rejoiced.
“Well, no.”
So much for explosive revelations. Cassie smirked at the outrageous let-down. “Then what are we doing here? We’re wasting our time.”
“You’re wrong about that.”
“Angelese! Read my lips. We CAN’T get in!”
The angel focused the strange binoculars. “At least not physically.”
“And we can’t Trance-Channel, either. The walls are all hexed, they’re protected by every spell in the abyss.”
“That’s true, and you’re right. We can’t get in, but there’s a way we can use somebody who’s had access.” The angel leaned back into the Nectoport and looked at the Ophitte Viewer and its living demonic eyes for lenses. Every time the eyes blinked, Cassie was unnerved.
“It’s kind of a coincidence,” Angelese said, looking at the viewer.
“What?”
“Eyes,” the angel said.
“Eyes?”
“Seeing.”
Cassie opened and closed her fists in sheer frustration. “Eyes? Seeing? As usual, I don’t know what you’re friggin’ talking about.”
She handed the viewer to Cassie. “See the guy hanging from the highest crossbeam of the antenna?”
Still unnerved, Cassie looked in the viewer, aimed down. A naked figure hung by the neck from the top of the mast. Naked, shuddering, wrists cuffed behind his back. Gross, Cassie thought. The figure’s skin was blue-white, with dark-red veins showing through. He was bald, hornless, his face pinched in torment. “What kind of demon is that?”
“It’s a Kathari-grade Diviner, the highest class of satanic visionary. Lucifer is very big on Diviners, and that one there has had access to Lucifer’s Scarlet Hall.”
“Why’s he hanging by the neck? Is he being punished?”
“No, he hangs himself there willingly, as part of his Loyalty Gesticulation. Like monks who flagellate themselves as a gesture to God. That one down there hangs there whenever Lucifer isn’t using him. Notice anything fucked up about his face?”
Cassie winced at the angelic expletive. She focused the viewer a few more notches. The Diviner’s face was hideous as the rest of his body, the veins showing through livid skin. But then she saw what Angelese meant. Oh, jeez ...
The Diviner only had one eye, large as a peach and centered in the middle of his face. It was squeezed shut now against the excruciation of being hanged.
Cassie’s hair jumped up as the Nectoport suddenly lowered at an extreme velocity. It reminded her of a roller coaster dropping from its highest inclination.
Cassie didn’t like roller coasters.
“What are we doing?”
“You’ll see,” Angelese answered. “Pun intended.”
“What? You’re going to go talk to that thing on the antenna?”
“We’re not really going to talk to him ...”
In a matter of seconds, the Nectoport had stopped and was hovering right in front of the hideous, naked Diviner.
“Hey!” Angelese shouted out. “Handsome!”
The single eye opened and looked at them. Black teeth showed through the gnash of agony; Cassie could see the noose digging into the thing’s neck as it shuddered.
“Satan, save me,” it croaked. “A Caliginaut.” Then the huge eye shot to Cassie. “The ... Etheress ... Do what you will. I live to honor and serve the Son of the Morning.” Then it squeezed the revolting eye shut again, in expectation.
“Don’t worry,” Angelese told him. “We’re not going to kill you. Cassie, make him open his eye.”
Cassie didn’t get it but by now she’d learned the futility of asking too many questions. “Eye open,” she uttered.
The eye snapped open again like a shutter. It was clear the Diviner was trying to keep it closed but was helpless to do so. Meanwhile, Angelese brandished what appeared to be a fork.
Cassie looked agape. “What’s that?”
“A fork,” the angel answered. “What’s it look like?”
And that’s what it was. Just a regular, everyday dinner fork. “What are you doing!” Cassie shrieked a second later.
The Diviner twitched vigorously on the end of the rope as Angelese calmly leaned forward and stuck the fork’s tines into the massive eye. She turned it around a few times and eventually unseated the eye from its socket. All the while, the Diviner howled. “See ya!” Angelese said, and then took the Nectoport back up to the clouds.
“What did you do that for?” Cassie asked, aghast.
“We need it.”
“His eyeball?”
“Yes. You’ll see—er, sorry. Another pun.”
When they were back hovering amid the soiled clouds, Angelese looked at Cassie forlornly. “Sorry, but your mental powers are greater than mine. So you’re gonna have to be the one.”
Cassie was horrified looking at the glistening eyeball on the end of the fork. An optic nerve hung off it like a tail. “Be the one what?”
Now Angelese smiled, quite wickedly. “The one who eats it.”
“Oh, sure! That’ll be happening!”
“Cassie, you have to. If someone with Etheric propensities consumes the eye of a visionary, she will see everything he has seen. We have to find out what’s going on in that building. If we don’t, we lose and Lucifer wins.” She offered her the fork. “This is the only way.”
“I’M NOT EATING A DEMON’S EYEBALL!”
The angel’s voice was calm but stern. “You have to. Everything depends on it. If you don’t, then everything we’ve been through is a waste.”
“YOU NEVER SAID ANYTHING ABOUT EATING AN EYEBALL!”
Angelese smirked. “It’s not that big a deal.”
“THEN YOU EAT IT!”
“The effect will be better if you do it. You’re an Etheress. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we’ll
be able to focus on finding your sister.”
More blackmail. Cassie thought she could throw up just looking at the veiny eyeball.
“Do you have any idea what kind of pain I subjected myself to when I told you those secrets?” Angelese asked next. “Do you have any idea what it feels like to be sliced up by an Umbra-Specter?”
Now guilt shrouded Cassie’s rage and disgust. Maybe she was being selfish. And there was Lissa to consider. “But, but—” she began.
“Cassie, just shut up and eat the damn eye.”
Cassie took the fork. Oh, man. What am I doing? So this was her Ethereal duty? Good God... All right. Just pretend it’s something else, she told herself. Yeah, yeah, a big candy apple on a stick.
She took a bite.
It did not taste like a candy apple on a stick.
When her teeth broke the leather-tough sclerotic wall, the eyeball’s vitreous humors filed her mouth like warm Spam jelly. With the wall so tough, she reasoned it best to suck all the humor out and then swallow the rest of the sclera whole, and this she did with an impressive resolve. Worse than all of that, though, was the optic nerve, which she sucked down like a noodle.
And collapsed, overwhelmed by nausea.
“Good girl!” Angelese celebrated. “What a trooper.”
Cassie began to crawl for the opening of the Nectoport. “I think I’m going to ...”
“Don’t throw up! If you throw up, we’ll have to find another eye!”
Not a chance. One demon eyeball a day is my limit. The very notion of having to do this again was motivation enough not to vomit.
“Just sit back, close your eyes,” the angel instructed. “It’ll start in a minute.”
It didn’t start in a minute, it started in a second. Suddenly the darkness behind Cassie’s closed eyes began to glow in a tint of slate-blue, and then she saw visions like a steadicam on a movie set soaring down strange empty hallways. It was that vast emptiness that astounded her—a reflection, perhaps, of the owner’s heart. She almost shrieked, then, when a figure breezed by, like a drifting chess piece. Within the figure’s white hood there was just skin, no face.
“What?” Angelese’s voice floated to her. “What are you seeing?”
“Empty halls. Some ... thing in a white robe, drifting. No face.”
“It’s a Levitator. It means you’re on the right floor—the penthouse. Look for a big red room with a high ceiling. The Scarlet Hall.”
Several more Levitators slid by, plus a Grand Duke and several well-armored Conscripts. Perhaps Cassie’s own thoughts were guiding her, for a moment later, the vision careened her into a room just like the one Angelese had described. High red walls, a floor of agate tile. The great room sparkled, and near an open veranda, she saw a throne of dark crystal. The throne was empty.
Cassie was an invisible eye in the air, seeing everything, her own personal volition somehow allowing her to turn about at will. She saw two more figures near the center of the hall. One, the tall one, stood with his back to her vision. The other, much shorter, in an odd, squirming cloak. His hood was down about the neck, and Cassie could see his facial features: skin as black as anthracite, pointed ears and curved horns, sunken eyes. At first she thought he was bald but then she noticed that he’d been scalped. He walked around the second figure as if in appraisement.
“I see two men. One’s got black skin, black as coal.”
“What’s he wearing?”
“A cloak that—” Cassie squinted through the visionary’s sight. Her stomach hitched when she noticed the true nature of the cloak. She noticed why it was squirming ...
“Cassie, is the guy’s cloak made of baby snakes?”
“Yes,” she nearly gagged.
“He’s a Hounganite, an upper-echelon Voudou Technician. It’s all true. Lucifer really did move the Hexology Institutes and the Re-Animation Department into the Mephisto Building. But you said there were two figures in the room. Describe the second figure. Is it a demon?”
“No, Human.” she could see from here. The man stood with his back to her. Tall, slim, naked, well-toned. Cassie wheeled the mystic vision around to see him from the front.
Long dark hair and beard. A face that seemed tranquilizing.
Cassie snapped out of the visionary trance, shuddering. “What? Can you describe the second figure?” the angel asked, leaning over.
Cassie just sat shuddering as if in the middle of a devastating chill. Eventually she looked up at Angelese and said, “It was Jesus. It was Jesus Christ...”
Chapter Fifteen
(I)
The light was impossible to describe. Darkness that somehow glowed? If despair had a color, that was the hue of what radiated above the edifice that loomed before Walter and No-name. It was a pyramid, larger than that of Cheops, but made entirely of black quartz.
“Why are we here?” Walter droned, staring up at the huge creation.
“I can’t answer your question.”
“Did fate bring me here?”
No-name smiled.
Walter could never imagine such a structure; it was fascinating yet depressing to look at. It projected a certain feel that reminded him how he felt on the night he tried to kill himself. He couldn’t escape his own immediate premonition: This is it. This is my destiny, this place. Walter’s destiny no longer awaited him. It was here, before him, now. All that remained was to embrace it.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the mass of black glass and its ghostly shroud of incalculable luminosity. “I don’t know how to explain it but it looks ... sad.”
“It should.”
“What is it? What is this place?”
“It’s the Bastille of Otherwise Souls, Walter. It’s a prison, for spirits. There are millions of souls held captive there.”
“Every damned soul in Hell?”
“Oh, no. There are billions of damned souls in Hell. This place is just for the special ones.”
“Special in what way?”
“Souls that really shouldn’t be here. Otherwire souls.”
Walter scratched his head in confusion, then winced at the pain from the pumpkin-ball stitches. “I don’t get it.”
“Think of it as a sepulcher, Walter. It contains the souls of people who otherwise would’ve gone to Heaven, had they not committed suicide.”
Walter’s eyes remained fixed on it.
“It’s another of Lucifer’s greatest achievements, his greatest slight to God. Being able to keep people here who really shouldn’t be here.”
“Then why am I here?”
No-name just smiled again. “I can’t tell you. You know that. But what have I been telling you all along? Use your head. Use the smarts that God gave you. Be deductive.”
Walter’s powers of deduction weren’t exactly feeling up to snuff tonight.
“You can go back to the living world if you like,” No-name continued. “But I can’t tell you if things will be any different or not.”
“They won’t be,” Walter asserted himself. “I know they won’t be. Maybe that’s my fate. I know that I will never be accepted. I know that people will never like me, some might pretend to but it’s all a veneer. Am I right?”
No-name just looked at him.
“If I go back to the Living World, I’m pretty sure I’d walk straight back to my dorm and blow my head off, only this time I’d do it right. And what happens then? My soul is damned for eternity and I get sent straight back here but this time with no powers. My soul would come to this place. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“So I could just stay here as an Etherean.”
“And remain an enemy of the state. You could do great damage, but you wouldn’t last.”
“Wouldn’t, or might not?”
“Might not.”
She just slipped, Walter thought.
“Damn it,” No-name muttered.
Walter smiled. “So it’s all up to me. I can stay or I can go.”
“Exactly. Bu
t you would never fit in here, Walter. You know why?”
“Because I’m a dork.”
“No, because you’re not evil. Even if you survived, you would never be content here. You’ve never been happy or content anywhere, in your life, have you?”
“No.”
“Because you’re not evil. Only the evil prosper here. Is that you? Could you change yourself that extensively, in your heart?”
Walter shook his head, listening but still staring up in miserable bliss.
“Of course you couldn’t. And, Walter ... you’re not a dork. You’re a pretty cool guy actually.”
Walter released the greatest sigh of relief in his life. “Thank you.”
“Now. You’re a physicist and a mathematician. Be deductive.”
Walter saw it at once. “Either way, I’m screwed.”
“It’s an abstrustion, but, yes, either way, you’re screwed. Some people are victims of circumstance. Like you. And like me. That’s just the way it is. It’s unfair but nobody ever said that life was supposed to be fair. We’re both screwed, Walter. I am. You are. You know what you can do, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Go out in style.”
Go out in style? Walter repeated in his mind.
“Think about it, Walter,” No-name bid. “But think quick. There isn’t much time left...”
(II)
Angelese looked stupefied as the Nectoport rose high into the air, seeking cover in the spoiled clouds. Cassie just sat there, numbed herself by what she’d seen. The thought kept replaying in her mind: It was Christ, it was Christ...
Angelese’s voice was a depressed rattle. “Now it all makes sense; it’s actually easy to see ...”
Cassie was too staggered to perceive the implications. “Lucifer’s plan ... is what?”
“They stole the real Shroud of Turin from the Living World, Cassie. They used it to make that Hex-Clone of Christ. They will send it back in time through an Astral Retrogation. Lucifer’s going to replace the real Christ with that thing.”