Текст книги "Infernus"

Автор книги: Mike Jones

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“THE HALL OF TABLEAUS”

“My son,” shrieked the demon, “you must listen to the power of my words and understand my love for you.” He pulled the vampire satyr to his massive chest and entered him from below. “I must pull you apart, my son, and lay you upon hot stones to broil for thousands of lifetimes.”

And he did so. Dutifully, it must be said, Red watched o’er his son, after he had torn him asunder, and wept the entire time. And the blood tears fell upon the son’s parts and baked the flesh hotter.

* * *

After thousands of lifetimes, the demon glued the son together with his spittle. And the son cracked open his eyeless sockets and stared with (no) love and (no) pity at the father.

And such black horror was witnessed in Hell by crimson-jeweled lightning that hissed across the skies for thirteen nights.

In the blackest night, a constellation appeared to commemorate this initial tableau.

Then the demon spoke the ultimate blasphemy.

* * *

[The following has been edited, by the insistence of the Sire demonologist, who has said, “No one must know such secrets. The complete text, including the second half, will remain buried in a desert (or mountain) somewhere on Earth. One day, the sayings will adorn many crowns, but not until The Day! These sayings will never be auditioned for a single person.”]

[This then, is the first half of what is considered (by many scholars) to be “The Most Unholy Single Thing.”]

The demon grinned and the look was one that no human eyes could see and live. “Did you know that only so-called ‘heteros’ inhabit my kingdom, my son?”

The satyr sang the truth directly into the demon’s mind and there was… hemorrhage!

“Then you know why, also, my beloved! Yes, you are right. A ‘hetero’s’ worst fear is being forcibly raped over and over.” Both laughed over this for a while. Red gazed over a part of his park, and then said to his son, “This would not be torture for ‘homos.’”

“That means—” began the son.

“No, you could not imagine the ‘homo’ section of Infernus. No one can.” The demon grinned again, and black clots fled out of his mouth for a day’s time. “The second thing, my son, is that there is a truth here that there never was another king other than our king.”

“Oh, Father,” bled the son’s face, “can it be true?”

“It can, and is! Do you want to know who wrote their holy books – all of them? I’ll tell you…”

[The following filth was ripped up by the woman Jane Millyberg, a fellow archaeologist of Anthony Begels’. In the next life, she will turn on a spit to be plucked and pulled by all who pass by her in Infernus for her rash foolishness. The narrative continues below.]

“And yes, my son, I will reward your attentive ways of late by showing you your crowning creation in all Helldom. The delicious descriptions the Children of Hell use, when they speak of it, would fill ten volumes of fresh obscenities.

“Look here and I will show you what you do to the one who sexually tortured you and oh so willingly sent you to me, perhaps a little before your time was up. This will occur on the very last day I train you. Look here. What do you see?”

The vampiric satyr scanned the demon ruler’s urine stream. He was bathing his son with the hot liquid as he was often wont to do. It flowed constantly down through his leg pelt, and it was here that he searched for clues.

“My lord, I do see something.” And it was true. “I see me, as an impossibly massive muscular machine, glittering golden, speckled scaled flesh as hard as diamond, rising up through exploding floorboards, and concrete and tile. I throw something through the floor that has no significance whatsoever, before I turn to the other. My log-like biceps are already grasping him and turning him around so I can painfully rip into him and permanently join my member to his intestinal walls. I rip through the weak mortal flesh with no resistance.”

He had to stop for a few minutes as the father and son laughed until red tears flowed freely down their cheeks. “Oh, my lord, as I am mounting him from behind, the goodly doctor is looking back over his shoulder. His scream would shatter a mortal’s eardrum, but I drive him deeper, popping and snapping ligaments and tendons in my terror-drive! Then, oh my, I tell him, ‘I will always be with you and I will never stop pounding you, so get used to it. I will pound you into billions of infinite Earths.’ We will go deeper forever, for this is my exquisite revenge upon the one who sent me to Infernus.

“Then I see, Father, I furiously pound the man, now dead and then quite alive again. He then suffers the final change in our eternal coupling. Oh, my father, must I say this?”

“You must, my son. I pray, don’t make me tell you again.”

“I open my mouth wider and wider, and as I do, my teeth grow longer.”

“Your destiny, my beloved!” the demon bellowed, and his face burst into yellow flame.

“My teeth grow longer and thicker. I easily sink them into the top and base of his baking skull. I ride the wretch this way for all time. He never stops screaming; thus we become what is known in legend as ‘The Scream.’”

“There is now a room I must show you, my son.” The father led him into an illusion of a green forest where searing winds blew gracefully through the tops of the trees.

The Legend was mischievous and brutal about it. It is something his later students would come to expect, taking nothing he said for granted. It was now, he decided, time to tease them in this fashion for the first time.

“Students, I am now going to share with you a glorious story about a very singular tableau. It is in the beginning of The Hall of Tableaus, because it is beautiful and morosely innocent.”

A student expressed his doubts. “I don’t believe you.”

“I have fashioned this creature I merely call ‘The Tree’ after J.R.R. Tolkien’s magnificent creation ‘Treebeard.’ You will all love him very much.”

The class was really in for it now. The Legend loved doing this sort of thing, with no apologies whatsoever. He quoted, from memory, this entire story of untold beauty.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“A SINGULAR TABLEAU”

“My son, let me show you something so fierce that it is considered beautiful in my park of Infernus. The other ruling demons envy my collection of tableaus. I was blessed, because I rule well. Have I told you what the laws are that govern a few of the other parks?”

“No, and I was afraid to ask.”

“As well you should be. I provide (for you alone) all you need.”

“How much do you know?”

“As if you expected me to reply with any answer other than, ‘Everything.’ Now be silent while I entertain you. There is a silver demon that rules a park not many light years hence. Its roiling hideousness does not suit your training, so you were sent here. Souls there just roll around in a darkness that can be felt. They bite each other and scream and slice one another endlessly with their claws.

“Another ruling demon – his demonstrative, withering look would permanently liquefy you – is the black prince of The Kingdom of Burning Winds. His domain abuts mine on the eastern side.

“There are a million others to cover the more than ten billion hopeless souls inhabiting Infernus.”

“My father,” the son whimpered, “this knowledge boils my head further.”

“As was its purpose!” The demon laughed. “Are you ready to witness this fierce tableau that many envy? It will burn away more of what is left of your tiny soul.”

“Yes, my father.”

The son’s mouth was white with cancerous sores; pus freely flowed past his sizzling lips onto the frying stones at their feet.

“You have become quite the liar, my son.”

“Yes,” the son stated simply.

“We will pretend, for a moment, that the dream world was more than just that. As you can tell, we have entered the facsimile of a rich green forest. But only by the wildest stretch of the imagination could you believe it is a cool fall day, for we are toasting at a goodly rate. Now watch helplessly as the tableau plays out. You may laugh maniacally, but you can’t help them or interfere or join in to torment them further because it is in the past.”

“And nor would I wantto interfere or help anyone, my father.”

“You are learning, son. Now hold tight and observe.”

Two teenage boys enter the emerald glade. A big boy, quickly packing muscle onto his yet childlike body, carried an axe; the other one looked frail and carried a pick. The grass splattered the boys’ boots with dew as they fearlessly walked into a clearing. The yellow shafts of sunlight glittered among the garden.

The skinny boy, dressed in simple peasant greens (that matched the other boy’s only in color) spoke up. His voice carried over the light breezes that played in the swaying tops of the trees. “I thought this was the place guarded by a hideous tree-demon. You told me-”

“Shut up!” the big boy said. “The witch said there was a living heart in the tree. If we could chop out the heart, we will have all the treasures hidden within it.”

“If that were true, then why hasn’t shedone it?”

The big boy’s cheeks flushed with impatience. “She said the tree magically prevents her from approaching this area. She guaranteed me (using her mortality as her pledge) that if she came here, the tree would crush her heart without remorse.”

“Which tree do you think it is?”

* * *

Red said, “My son, this is the part I love watching o’er and o’er!”

“I can’t wait to rejoice with you, Father!”

* * *

“Look!” the big boy said, pointing. “I’ll bet this is it.”

They both, attracted to its differentnessfrom the other trees, approached it deliberately, slowly. They tried to take in the foaming evil rolling out of its gray heart, tasting it in the crisp air. The bark jutted out from some of the gray branches; some limbs were starkly white, but large strips of cracked ancient bark were hanging loosely there as well. Many of its branches and smaller capillaries were littered around its trunk and base. Thick, green/gray veins of roots broke the ground, and a few looped back into the loam, anchoring the imprisoned tree to the earth.

“Let’s chop it!” the big boy said, leading them to stand directly beneath its mighty swaying branches.

“It almost seems like… ” The skinny boy chuckled anxiously. “… like it has a face.”

The big one shouldered his axe and prepared to swing at the base with all his might. He grunted with the effort.

Then everything changed.

A great roaring tumult of snapping branches and twigs arose to splatter the boys’ four eardrums. They both covered their ears – too little, too late. Blood trickled thinly between their fingers. The pain was mighty. Their ears rang.

When they looked up, they saw Doom staring in their faces; they shrieked while their sanity fled and hid. They stained the front of their pantaloons brown.

A stretched, splintered face hung above them. It quivered with unhinged evil and seared them with its gaze. What they now saw in its “eyes” was wrath, contempt, such unmitigated, shrieking, blood-soaked murder!

Its jaws, teeth and the wooden sinews of its visage cracked and threw splinters into their faces as it spoke. The voice thundered through the boys’ bodies like hot shockwaves in solid bass notes. They desperately tried to shriek until their brains exploded.

“We can’t have all this screaming,” said the tree. “You’ll bring the rest of those rat-bag villagers before I need them.”

Its groping branches shattered their teeth as it searched for something within their mouths. Both tongues were ripped out while they stood quivering in place.

A great branch in the form of a “Y” came coolly snaking from behind its trunk and lifted the skinny boy into the air. Cradled by his neck, he hung to the side of the tree.

It creaked its trunk to look at the skinny boy, but spoke to the fat one. “You will not believe the ease with which I shall dispose of your companion, fat boy. Know two things: one, the death of the skinny boy will only be sudden for my immediate pleasure and your amazement; two, the length of time I will torture your baby fat body will be legendary, even by my standards. When the villagers find what profanity I have accomplished – of course finding drying strips of you in my branches won’t hurt, either – they will run from this glade, filling their pantaloons, and will be too afraid to ever come here again.”

The tree spoke softly, almost maternally. “You have been told about the living heart that lives within me. The witch who told you this is my slave. She no doubt told you some nonsense about riches untold that I’m supposed to have somewhere here. It is herheart that I have imprisoned inside that keeps me alive, boys. To kill me would free her to die in an instant. She has lived many hundreds of years now, and that’s a long time, even for a witch. She’s tired and wants to rest.”

The tree turned its face to the big boy who still stood on the ground, quite insane. Within seconds, the tree had separated every part of the skinny boy from the rest. As the creaking and snapping subsided, little thumps could be heard when the parts thudded to the ground like soft drumbeats.

“Now,” the tree said, with an expression that resembled unbridled affection (but wasn’t quite), “do you have any idea what I am going to do with you, boy?” The tree lowered its face until it touched noses with him. The boy felt a gnarled branch scrape the seat of his pants. “Gasp! Right below your – Yes, boy! I’m going to do things to you that I have only seen in mynightmares. You, young foolish boy that once was, cannot imagine what those things might be!”

The tree shivered again with unbridled delight and began to drool sap as it slowly, slowly, oh, so slowly, went about his work.

* * *

What the father and son savored in their viewing made them heave bile onto the forest floor for [days] segments of time.

As they walked out of the dream and back into the heated plains of Infernus, the son asked the father, “Can I come here often, beloved?”

“Not only can you, but each time you enter this blessed tableau, you will see a different rendering. Through the eons, there were only 1,176 of them. Shame, really.”

“But, were they delicious, Father?”

“They were, indeed. The old ladies who foolishly stumbled into the clearing can be savored for [many times]. They were all uniquely dispatched and consumed, but the only singular one was-” [here Dr. Anthony Begels thought it best to edit out what your imagination has certainly already supplied]. “Of course, what we saw was the last one. The villagers had evolved to the point where their wrath was greater than their fear.”

“Is that recorded in the tableau, Father?”

“Yes, but, wait… are you saying you would liketo see that which would rip out your heart with sorrow and sadness?”

The son was drooling with anticipation.

“Go by yourself, son. I will wait here for you.” The father soothed him. “It has now become that day, my child. Go look!”

The son returned to the tableau and looked, and felt himself falling into the illusion of it, disappearing and becoming the activity.

* * *

The place all around the tree was covered with men and women in simple green raiment, waving every kind of sharpened silver. A bearded oak of a man stood in the clearing, apart from the others, and made his solemn pronouncement. “You, spawn of Hell – go back to the pit in which you were born. You will never again kill, after the sun sets this very day!”

All the eager, pressing bodies fell upon the tree with shrieks.

The tree shot its cracking, splintering face to the heavens and unleashed a scream so immense that all the ears of the villagers broke simultaneously. Nothing could deter or slow them down. They blurred together as their silver hacked the ancient bark and meat of the tree. Some of them missed and slashed the appendages of their deaf neighbors.

The demon twisted and tormented its trunk, then attempted to elongate itself to escape the tools in their hands.

And the villagers’ shouts of hatred did not subside. Some wept in their single purpose. Before many hours had elapsed, they found a gray, beating heart, which they burned on the spot.

The tree became firewood. Then it became kindling. Then it became single chips before they stopped. And many [weeks] times after, when every root had been pulled up and burned in the clearing, the villagers salted the entire area and had their shaman pray a protective chant for their eternal protection. They were satisfied.

The son, filled with awe, returned to his father and wept as he said, “Was there ever a more completely delicious epic as that tome, my father?”

“Even if you could write it, my son, you could not do it justice. But you can come here as often as you like and saturate yourself with the beauty, wherewithal.”

* * *

Nothing of interest was said after this chapter, but the students glared at him, knowing they could never trust him again. And they always kept their guard up after this.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“ANOTHER EPISODE OF BANKRUPT BEHAVIOR”

“My son,” said the demon as he bent to his work with passion, “is this not a delicious treat, for we are working together, and being together. What do you think?”

The vampire satyr lay still, unable to speak.

“Look, my son, the meat hook rises and falls with the blurring speed of a hummingbird’s wing. Your eye socket, a mere ruin.”

Crack! Split!

Red was laughing so hard that he fell on the burning earth and rolled around hysterically for days. The son barely moved; his massive hairy chest rose and fell with shallow breathing.

Later, the son felt a membrane growing over each shattered eye socket and saw (dimly) many things he wished he hadn’t.

He saw a small red demon forcing a knobby blackened branch up the rectum of a young, surprised man.

He saw a squirming man who was trying to crawl away from a dwarf who had managed to imbed himself halfway up the man’s arse.

He saw eternally starved serpents silently slurping up slimy fetuses in a boiling lake. And he did confess that this scene was actually pleasing him.

“Look, my satyr son, behold this horror of religion. Merely seeing this tableau will burn parts of your soul away for all time. You must experience this to become all things.”

And this is what the son saw:

There were two diamond towers standing fast in the blackened earth; one would say that they appeared to be 110 feet high. No heat could affect them. They were elaborately carved with 3,000 human figures, jutting out at odd angles as if they were agonizing in the flames. A green demon, five times larger than any mortal, stood next to these glittering twin towers. He had a new arrival gripped around the waist with a massive fist. He was jerking the newcomer back and forth between the cruel towers so rapidly that he was no more than a blur, a confusion of arms in the painful rhythm of the nerves of the dead.

It made Red laugh so hard that many golden tears were falling from his sightless orbs. The large green demon’s laughter kept him from seeing what he was doing; it was all instinct. There was snickering as well.

Red turned to his son after their shared experience and said, “This is what all beings ever created refer to as, ‘The Single Most Holy Vision!’ Spread your legs wide, my son, I must become one with you.”

And it was so.

* * *

“Another tableau, my son?” the father asked after he had sexually abused him for a [century] passing of a small time.

“Oh, my father, please, please me!”

A blister bug fell from one of the son’s sockets. He picked it up and shoved it into his arse. He heard its shell crunch.

They stopped before a cave. The entrance was soaked in evil blackness that roiled out at them, inviting them to move closer with invisible tentacles. They obeyed its calling. Within, as a white light came up, a little drama was being played out.

The son observed a man, black as slate, standing within a room. He was nude, huge and burning. He stooped to walk under a stone arch into an adjoining cave.

A gorilla stood there staring at a statue that was baked red as clay in a kiln. Its right shoulder was low, for it was leaning on the burning floor with a sizzling fist. The gorilla, its coat shimmering cobalt blue, casually looked his way.

“Come here, my son,” it said to the man, its eyes observing him with intelligence.

The statue, animated, was pointing in the distance with its left arm and tirelessly plunging a knife into its own chest, over and over again.

“What is this?” the man asked.

The gorilla drew him to his side with a massive, leathery paw and nuzzled his neck. He barely whispered into one of the man’s ears. “See the plaque on the pedestal? What does it say?”

“It says, ‘Man’s Best.’ What does that mean? ‘Man’s Best… Friend’? What?”

“No,” the gorilla replied gently. “This is the best that man can possibly do.”

The statue opened its mouth and spoke. “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.”

It kept its left arm pointing in the distance, at an unseen enemy. It continuously plunged the knife into its chest with malicious intent. And glee.

“This is the bestthat man has to offer?” the black man asked.

“That’s right.” The gorilla laughed.

“We’re screwed.” The man sighed. “Poor statue, thanks for reminding us how doomed we are.”

“It’s not a statue,” the gorilla calmly replied, then laughed at the shock on his pupil’s tormented face.

The gorilla took the man there, coupling with him in a pitch-black corridor. The connecting cave drew dark, signaling that it had shown them all of its great and secret show.

“That tableau seemed vaguely familiar to me,” the son said, clearly confused.

“I don’t suppose I have ever seen the likes of thattableau before,” Red stated.

They moved on.

* * *

They approached a gray and brown cemetery with two small buildings in the middle of the entrance. A weak sun, unseen, flooded the area with an amber overcast.

A metal track suspended on waist-high wooden poles ran between the buildings and disappeared into large concrete arches on either end.

The father and son walked through the entrance and stood in front of the track.

“What is this, Father?”

Before he could answer, his attention was captured by five young blonde girls marching with rigid, militaristic steps toward the track. Their ages were mere years apart, and one looked identical to another. Each held a long, broad-bladed knife in their right hands.

A distant clacking began until a gray flat car – glowing bright red, as if heated – rolled into view from the building entrance on the right. (Its ride, therefore, was clockwise.)

A woman was securely lashed to the car with massive chains. She was dressed in a white linen dress trimmed with lace. Her hair was golden and fell about her shoulders in long curls. Her face was smeared with despair and resignation. She had to look over her shoulder at the young girls, for she was turned away from them. The chains pulled her down toward the car’s surface and left her back stretched tight and exposed.

Two things happened when the car clacked and clattered and reached the equidistant place between the buildings:

Flames roared from the building’s arch on the left, which sounded like an angry animal.

The young girls began penetrating her back with the blades. They ripped them backward and out, looping thin strings, slung here and there, and covered the five girls and woman with wet red. The woman’s only response was that she desperately tried to disappear into the metal car, though it burned bright crimson. There was no cry from her. The girls did not shriek with delight, but merely grunted with their efforts.

Before the car entered the flaming arch of the building on the left, two more things happened:

The girls stopped stabbing the miserable woman. They held the blades over their heads, shook them like savages, but made no victorious cry. Red strings were flinging all over and down on them.

Then the flames intercepted the woman. Her body instantly bloomed bright orange and she became a fat crackling jittering lump before she disappeared into the glowing hole.

“Father-”

“Aaaah, this is a beautiful scene,” said Red, ignoring the son as he was often wont to do. “Do you wish to pretend this has meaning?”

“Yes.”

“Very well.” He sighed. “She was asked, many, many years ago if she knew why she was here. Foolishly, she should have said that there was no good reason she was there/here.”

“No?”

“No. She believed she came from another place called ancient Greece, where she had been a queen. She said her name had been Gamoor, and she had, in a strange fit of maladies, drowned her five daughters in a large vat of boiling pig’s blood.”

“But, why this punishment, Father?” The son swept his arms toward the comedy playing out before them.

“This is the revenge that was set before her for believing such nonsense. No such thing ever happened. And there are no daughters. It was asked of five demons if they would pose as her daughters that she’d dreamt and torment her for all eternity. Naturally, they were only too happy to comply.”

“How long has this been happening?”

“It cannot be expressed properly for you to comprehend, but it’s close to billions of infinities.”

“This cemetery is somber and beautiful, Father,” the son said as the woman came out of the building on the right once more, whole and ready to begin again.

Father and son watched, enchanted, with blood streaming from their sockets like warm tears.

* * *

Red light weakly flared up from within a cave. An eternal play continued inside, ceaseless.

“My son, this is a bit of drama from your dream world. From the past, we have an infinite number of these little plays. Only the sweetest ones play here. The daintiestmorsels are repeated!”

The son gazed at the scene until he perceived the point. He then laughed so hard that his pain threshold increased.

A little boy of four or five was dancing around a replica of an earth kitchen while his mother stood above him with a large carving knife. Down upon his weaving head and waving arms, always connecting with the child, never once missing. She didn’t laugh – she was much too busy.

* * *

“Look at this hideous tableau, my son. What do you see?”

“I see a dark room beginning to glow red. It throbs there, a bloody-looking room. There are two men in the middle, lying flat on their backs on the floor. Writhing, oh, my father, writhing like little babies; like spoiled babies… ”

The demon looked at the son and loved him. “Yes, they are burning, as we all are.”

“Two giant, blood-muscled canines break through the shattering door, and – oh, my father! – make me turn from this vision!”

“You may not!” screamed Red.

“Oh, the monster dogs shred the men and leap on them – their screams – they plunge their broad members into them, and frothingly rape them as they disembowel them! Oh, my sad, sick father, what have you done to me?”

“Shown you that the one thing mortals think they leave behind in death is their conscience – it is only amplified here.” The son could almostswear he heard a piano playing dramatically in the background. “We’ve-” the demon begins to weep piteously. “thought of-” sob “-everything!”

“Look! Another room, my father.” The son ignored Red’s emotion, for it seemed to him quite irrelevant. “It blazes up, glowing yellow. What is this?”

“Surely there is beauty here, also, Son. Let’s listen in, shall we? I think we are coming in the middle of a conversation. First, what do you actually see?”

“I see a dwarfish, bright blue demon, his limbs all cramped and crabbed to the point of being morosely disabled, standing hunched over before a woman burning like a torch. I can barely see her features as they are blurred beneath roaring flames.”

“That’s right. What she looks like is, of course, unimportant. Pointless. Now, listen to what he is saying to his disciple.”

“No,” the blue demon whispered, clearly near the edge of being overcome with laughter. “That’s the shame of it all.” His teeth glittered bloody in the flames. “That’s not even the worst of it.” He fell into a sizzling urine pool, uncontrollably laughing.

“Oh, really,” she said, watching the fire constantly engulf her naked body, her skin popping and sizzling. “Something worsethan dying, and leaving that drunk of a husband of mine, who beat me for ten years, to die and come here, or at least maybe dreamthis hell hole?”

“Yeah,” he said, his eyes literally bugging out of their leathery sockets, his idiot smile mindlessly agape, drooling. “Even worse than all of that. In fact, it’s soooo funny, my head might explode from the sheer hell of it.”

“Hit me, creature,” she said, baiting him to top her hideous reality.

“Are ya ready? Here goes. You’re so pathetic; you don’t even know that the other world isthe dream world. You were ruined when you woke up here. In other words-”

The dead woman looked to the son as if she might begin screaming now.

“-you’ve always been here! And, here’s the kicker, you are so stupid, you created that life with the abusive husband to forgetabout this place.” He began laughing until the top of his head actually did explode. He grinned from ear to ear. “I got one last bit of news for you, my little roast-pork suckling.”

“Worse than what you just told me?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, a lot worse!” His eyes were winking rubies. “Ready for a shot of love?”

“What could be worse than the knowledge that I’ve always been here and dreamed my former life? Hit me, creature!”

“You didn’t begin your life here as a woman.” He began tittering, searching her face for the reaction he knew would eventually come.

“You mean-”

He laughed in earnest now, fell to the burning floor, and rolled around hysterically.

She began an endless scream.

The father addressed the son. “That story always moves me to tears of joy.” He sighed, and moved the son to other tableaus of bliss and perverse beauty.