“I would hate Him less if there were a Satan to blame for this.” He swept his arm around him again. “But Satan is the only Demon that was created by Man. The rest are His.”
“Enough, Michael, please.”
He whirled to glare at her, his goateed chin thrust forward. “I believed in Him! I worshipped Him! I was devout! And here is my son, only eight years old, in fucking Hell! They’d better find him, these monsters. They better bring me to him soon or they’ll see some real wrath.”
“I feel sorry for our parents,” Dawn said, letting her head sag. “They don’t know our souls live on. They might think we’re gone forever. My poor Mom and Dad. I’m so glad they’re baptized...church-goers. My brother, too.” She wagged her head. “They must be so heart-broken. Now they have to live the rest of their lives thinking about how young I was when I died. The horrible way that I died. It will haunt them, every Christmas, every time my birthday comes along.” She moaned. “Why did he have to fool around with matches...why?”
“You blame him,” Michael stated. She lifted her head. His sudden calm tone frightened her more than his furious rants. “You blame him for us being killed.”
“Michael, I’m only saying...”
“He’s a child. I played with fire, too, when I was a kid. Burning my toy soldiers, watching their faces melt. Seeing how paper burned, Styrofoam. Who left those matches out, by the way?”
“You always liked the candles I burned. Their smell,” Dawn managed weakly, close to tears again. “I thought you liked them...”
“You left the matches out.”
“So now it’s my fault? You say I hate Mark for doing this to us, but I don’t! I’ve gone to Paradise; I’m not the unlucky one, he is. But don’t you think that tortures me, too? I loved him! You might not believe that, but I loved him like he was my own son. It isn’t that I blame Mark...the thing is, you blame me! You blame me, for what happened to us. And for him being here.”
Michael came over to her, spreading his arms open, looking appropriately angelic in his white robes. With his slicked-back, short dark hair and neat goatee, she thought he resembled a modernized Jesus. He put his arms around her and she began sobbing, again, against his chest.
“I don’t blame you, baby. I don’t.” He rubbed her back in circles. “We didn’t make this place, did we? We didn’t make these rules. Look...there’s nothing you can really do here. There’s no sense in your staying. I’ll take you back.”
“But I wanted to be with you,” Dawn whimpered, clutching him. “And I wanted to see Mark. Really.”
“When I find him, I’ll come get you again.”
“But how long do you think you’ll be here, honey?”
“As long as it takes.”
“Well, if you find him, what then? We can’t take him back with us...”
“I don’t know, what then. All I know is I want to see my boy. I want to be sure he’s not in pain. I can’t bear it, Dawn...I can’t bear the thought of my boy suffering...”
* * *
The Demon seated importantly behind a desk of black marble resembled Iblis Al-Qadim and his underlings in that he appeared like an unwrapped and reanimated mummy, his jointed body vaguely insectoid, but above his skull-like face his head ballooned into a huge translucent sphere, almost like a boneless fluid-filled sack that Michael was surprised the thing’s neck could support. The governor and this Demon had exchanged a few guttural gurgles in an alien tongue, and now the globe-headed entity turned the fiery pinpricks of his eyes to Michael, staring at him intensely. It’s probing me telepathically, he thought, using me to get Mark’s scent. He could almost feel the Demon’s bony digits unraveling the knotted convolutions of his brain and fingering them like the beads of a rosary.
Seated opposite the creature, Michael fidgeted in his chair, vaguely nervous, as if he were a young man applying for his first job. But it had been a long time since Michael had squirmed before a superior. He had died a career military man, an officer, a decorated veteran of the Gulf War. A man on the ground, not on a plane, not directing rockets through windows as if playing a video game. He had two confirmed kills; two faces he had looked into before he had extinguished the life behind them. And were his victims in Hell with him, even now? He had heard that in Hades, infinite as it was, the Damned were prevented somehow from encountering their relatives or spouses, even their friends from life. Would that mean that when his first wife died, she would not be permitted to join her son? It must mean exactly that. He wished he could warn her, like Marley visiting Scrooge, to change her destiny. Despite how disillusioned he had become with his faith, Michael prayed that his former wife would change her mind about religion and become baptized at last, so that she could move about freely between Heaven and Hell as he did. So she could see her son again...if Mark truly could be located.
The globe-headed Demon broke their gaze, and Michael went a little limp in his chair. Had he merely been tensed, or had the thing’s brain been holding him transfixed? The Demon looked up at Iblis Al-Qadim and gave a gravelly hiss.
“You are in luck, sir,” the governor announced. “We have found him. It was helpful that he has not strayed considerably from his original point of entry. He is in a city called Apollyon – not far at all from this palace.”
“Take me there,” Michael said.
“As you wish, sir.”
Michael rose from his seat, and nodded at the telepathic Demon in a kind of gruff thanks. But he could feel no real gratitude. The Demons did not sympathize with his plight, were merely being courteous because he was an Angel. These were the things that inflicted misery upon the Damned...and who could tell what this being’s brothers might be doing to his child even now.
4: The Skull
As Roger and Mark wound their way through the twisty, narrow streets of Apollyon, returning home from the print shop, they passed a pair of emaciated, child-like Kilcrops, but the Demons only giggled at them horribly as they turned the corner. Glancing back at the creatures, Roger couldn’t help but wonder if either or both of them had been grown inside his lover’s body.
“One thing I like about Hell,” Mark resumed saying, now that the Demons were out of view, “is there’s no school here.”
“Now, now,” Roger scolded. “I should school you myself, just for saying that. You’re a smart boy...you shouldn’t be thinking that way.”
“But why should I learn things I’ll need when I grow up, if I’m never going to grow up?”
“Maybe that’s another good thing about Hell,” he muttered to himself. Never having to become an adult, that most awful of creatures excepting, perhaps, Demons. “It’s always important to learn and learn, as much as you can, and never ever stop learning. And there are cities and towns that have schools, you know – I’ve seen them.”
“I’d rather just work with you, instead. Because...” he produced a few coins from his pocket “...you don’t get paid for going to school.”
“Terrible. Why are you so terrible this evening?”
Mark laughed, but then stopped and said, “Wow...Rog...what is that thing?”
Still smiling, Roger turned his head to look at where the boy was pointing.
A moon appeared to hover above the roofs and chimneys, huge in the bluish sky of flame, but even as Roger watched the great sphere was floating closer, in their direction. The sphere was the color of bone, and skull-like sutures squiggled across its surface, and this was why the Damned had come to call the thing the Skull, though there were no other features. Roger had seen it before. Once, here in Apollyon, and in other colonies of the Damned as well. It migrated, wandered, seemingly at random. He was reminded of the Black Cathedral, on its networks of train tracks, and other such roving structures that one hoped never to see enter one’s town.
“Hurry up, Mark,” he said, reaching for the boy’s hand. He quickened his pace.
“What is it, Rog?”
“The Skull...”
“What does it do?”
“It’s a torture factory,” he told him.
Roger began to look about him for a shop that might be open, into which they might duck if need be. A stranger might even let them into their house, out of sympathy. Then again, they might not want to get involved, for fear of being gathered up by the crew of the Skull themselves.
“It’s getting close,” Mark said, sounding worried.
“I know. Here. Under here.” Roger broke into a little run, dragging Mark beneath a crumbling aqueduct. They pressed themselves against the damp bricks, and saw the great orb’s shadow as it slithered across the street, darkening it in a brief eclipse as the Skull passed directly overhead, before it moved on and the street glowed blue again. At no point did they hear any sound from the titanic craft.
“It’s gone,” Mark whispered.
“We’ll go tell Davina. We won’t step outside for a few days. These things usually only stay in one place several days at a time.”
“Okay,” Mark said meekly.
They ventured out again, kept holding hands. As they walked, Roger explained, “They collect people sometimes because they see us making cities, communities, creating jobs for ourselves, families. They let it go on for so long. And then one day, they want to shake you, shake you badly, to remind you where you are. They allow the other because it makes you almost comfortable. You can’t feel discomfort without comfort. You can’t know pain without pleasure. If they skinned us alive day after day, sooner or later your mind would shut off. You would become a robot, adapt to the pain and endure it. But this way...this way is worse, in the end.”
“You are like my teacher,” Mark teased him, trying to make a joke of it.
“Someone has to be, and keep a rascal like you in check.”
Roger had taken them through a few alleys as shortcuts, and the one they currently squeezed through was barely wide enough to admit him, even having turned his body sideways. The slime on its bricks helped lubricate his passage somewhat. Mark, of course, had an easier time. He had slipped into the alley ahead of him.
A chittering sound behind Roger made him glance back nervously. He saw a silhouette flicker briefly past the mouth of the alley, where they had entered. He hadn’t seen the figure clearly, but it hadn’t struck him as human in outline.
He looked forward again, and saw that Mark had reached the end of the alley. “Wait for me,” he hissed, his palms slapping across the sludge-coated bricks as he advanced. “Mark!”
The boy cleared the alley and entered a bright street ahead. He turned to look back into the passageway. “Come on,” he whispered, extending his hand.
And then, jarringly, as if Mark had dropped through a trapdoor, he was gone. For just the briefest moment Roger thought he saw the boy’s fingers rake across the bricks.
“Mark!” he called more loudly, fighting to shuffle along a little faster. He reached one arm out, clawed at the alley’s entrance, caught it edge and tugged himself clear.
It was a wide street, paved in flagstones, almost a plaza. Sometimes, the Damned even held festivals here, as on the day they judged to be Christmas (though Roger himself would no longer celebrate the birth of the Creator’s son). The Skull hovered there, above the street, one of its unevenly-shaped plates having opened along its sutures and lowered to the flagstones like a hatch or drawbridge. He heard screaming. He saw men and women being dragged up onto the hatch. Into the bone-colored globe.
And he saw Mark. Because he was only a child of eight, it took just one of the greenish tick Demons, scurrying on its hind legs, to restrain him and pull him along. Roger saw ribbons of blood twined around the child’s arms, from where the thing’s sharp pincers bit into him.
“You fucking bastards!” he roared, and began racing after the creature. He saw another one of them close to his right, and at his shout it turned and saw him, too. It whisked forward, chattering, and Roger knew it would catch up to him before he caught up to the one grasping Mark. He spun, ducked under the whooshing sickle of a praying mantis arm, came up and punched the thing in its bony face with its tiny bead-like eyes and blood-slickened mouthparts. He heard its chitin crack, or maybe that was the bones in his own hand, so hard did he strike the thing. It dropped onto its back, and he thought he could hear its feast of gore slosh in its expanded body. But from the ground, the Demon whipped its arms crazily, and Roger found himself dropping, the air going out of him.
Lying on his side, he looked down his body and saw that his right leg had been severed below the knee.
The fallen Demon scrambled to its feet, and used one of these to kick Roger in the arm and face, slashing him deeply across his jaw. It then ran to the aid of one of its fellows, who was having a difficult time hanging onto a large black man.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Roger was chanting, as he propped himself into a sitting position.
He saw Mark – almost at the hatch now – looking back at him as he struggled in his captor’s grip. There were many people wailing and sobbing in the courtyard, but Roger knew his boy’s voice. And he heard Mark call out to him, “Daaaaad!”
5: Apollyon
At first, Iblis Al-Qadim had offered Michael a ride from his palace to the city of Apollyon in a black metal carriage pulled by a team of unclad Damned, the connecting chains hooked right into their flesh, but the Angel had taken one look and refused. Now, instead they rode inside a carriage drawn by two shaggy, prehistoric-looking infernal animals of a type he had heard the Damned often killed and consumed for food.
Dotted across the landscape they traveled through, Michael saw another kind of animal, or was it an animal-like species of Demon? They reminded him of the elephants with impossibly long, thin, multi-jointed legs bearing obelisks on their backs in paintings by Salvador Dali, such as The Temptation of Saint Anthony, except that these would be headless elephants, and their backs were covered in squirming white objects like maggots, which Michael knew were naked human beings, apparently spiked directly to the thick hides of the slowly striding creatures. He could hear the wispy, faraway howling of hundreds of lamenting souls. Mostly the terrain here was barren, featureless, but presently the carriage rattled across a stone bridge spanning a wide river of blood. Distantly, one of the stilt-legged monstrosities waded like a stork through the sluggishly flowing gore to reach the opposite bank.
Were there children pinned to the tops of those behemoths, too?
As they rode on, Michael saw the Demon governor turn his head and gaze out his own window for a while. It gave Michael an opportunity to stare at the way the tentacles of the octopus were not only coiling around his neck, but now burrowing beneath his leathery skin. One tentacle had even snaked into a skull socket, putting out its bright little star of an eye. Michael had noted that the green flames erupting from the top of his head had diminished. He had also noticed that the black octopus Demon’s head had ballooned even more, a green glow showing through the stretched membrane. The miniature bat wings sprouting above its eyes fluttered uselessly.
“Not even human,” Michael heard Iblis Al-Qadim murmur. “Because I walk upright? Because I have two arms, two legs? Now I am just a human, too?”
“Pardon?” Michael spoke up.
Slowly, the terrible lipless visage cranked his way, the remaining eye seeming to have grown dim in its glow as well. The Demon appeared befuddled for a moment. And then, his voice grew strong and assured again, “Nothing, sir. We are nearly there...”
Apollyon’s jagged outlines reared from the bleak landscape. Michael regarded the way a bluish glow rose from the city into the air – its atmosphere of weak fire.
“Do we know where in that big city my son would be?”
“We will need to ask about, sir.”
“Ask? And how long will that take?”
The Demon didn’t answer him. He found this out of character, surprisingly rude, but he didn’t pursue it.
As they approached the fortress-like wall surrounding the city, Michael realized that it was studded with
countless human heads, the bodies they were attached to fossilized inside the wall’s concrete. There was scaffolding erected here and there, on which Demon overseers forced Damned laborers to chisel some prisoners free, and seal new prisoners up. Crows perched on a number of squalling heads, plucking at their hair to make their nests. Michael cursed under his breath. He felt strangely ashamed, should any of the heads peer into the carriage and see him there, an Angel resting in its plush interior.
Having passed through the wall’s main gate, the carriage soon came to a stop outside a building with statues of winged baboon-like beasts, in something of an Art Deco style, flanking its riveted iron front doors. They disembarked, Michael and the governor and two of his lesser Demons, and mounted the front steps.
Inside, they were met by a Baphomet, as they were called, another towering breed of high-ranking Demon but with a goat-like head enveloped in a veil of white fire. Iblis Al-Qadim and this thing faced each other, but neither uttered a sound. Michael realized their communication was telepathic, unless they were deciphering meaning in the lapping of their respective flames.
At last, the governor turned to look down at the Angel. “The child is known to be new to this city, and he is known to have been taken in by a printer who lives here.”
“A printer?”
“He and others produce reading materials, for the entertainment of their kind. The materials are potentially inflammatory, but they have been tolerated. For the time being.”
“Take me to him,” Michael said.
* * *
When Davina saw the imperial form of Iblis Al-Qadim soaring behind the white-robed Angel, she fell back with an audible gasp. They had come for her lover, she was sure of it – to punish him for smashing the face of that tick Demon...
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