Текст книги "Infernus"

Автор книги: Mike Jones

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The father watched with unguarded glee and pride as the son tried to break the bones or the chains with his powerful muscles and practiced zeal. It was a furious attempt and he didn’t fail for want of trying or desire.

They approached another sand pit.

“This being,” said the father, “thought he had a program where he sat on the world’s thrones and pontificated on the causes of the world’s demises. The beings he blamed for its problems were people that were (as you might have guessed) unlike him.” He laughed. “Look at what happens to him always.”

The televangelist was repeatedly being struck in the back of the head with an axe by a roasted, blackened man. He was fixed where he could not look left or right, only straight ahead to a bleeding wall where this was inscribed in light:

’The heart is deceitful above all things, and beyond cure. Who can understand it?’

The man was trying to reason with his abuser. “Oh my – ahhhh! It was others! It wasn’t me. I didhave a right to speak for the creator and say who caused the world’s downfall! I did have the right!”

The man paused his axing, and said between laughing, “You are living proof of the veracity of this poem. And you still do not understand its meaning. Ahh, you are to be pitied more than the fools that die in the streets. At least they know they are dead, or wrong, or poor. You seem to know naught.” And he heartily began axing the man with even more vigor than before.

The red demon turned to his son and said, “In the other world, he fell well.”

And the son laughed quietly to himself.

* * *

“My son, look at this pathetic wench.”

They had entered a small cave.

“What appears to be happening, Father, is that three faceless toddlers are endlessly torturing an adult-type person with breasts. There’s much more to it, though. Let’s take in what we are seeing.”

The first thing the son observed was a child-like thing holding a raging torch of fire and oily black smoke under the chin of a quivering adult that sat on the baking floor, unable anymore to even pretend to escape. Large breasts trembled. A solid flame engulfed the adult’s head and sought to consume it entirely, but could not. The child-like thing with a skinless face turned toward the two visitors, giggling softly, and showed them the tableau for their approval. The father and son nodded. It, in turn, was pleased.

“If it runs,” said the skeletal child, “we continue unabated. It just gave up many [days] times ago.”

Another toddler, its epidermis also vacant, had long brown hair that seemed to have a life of its own in the heated air. It [she] was plunging a long carving knife into the back of the hopeless adult. This little girl-thing seemed to grin at them with her lipless mouth, and the visitors nodded their approval of her. [It] she was pleased.

The third toddler never seemed to notice the visitors, continually bringing a baby-sized hammer down on the unresponsive adult’s knees.

“This foolish woman creature, in her belief that the dream world was real, murdered these three children there. She beat one to death (so she thought) with a ball peen hammer, killed another with a huge butcher knife, and baked the other one alive in the oven. She tried to kill them there to avenge herself here – give this existence meaning. As if it hadany meaning. She stripped all their faces off and thought she was done with it. She only feared her reality. It will never stop. Death is too good to her.”

They both laughed as loud as they could over their own screams.

* * *

In their wandering, they came upon a lake of diamond, one flat solid body made of a precious jewel. It was absolutely clear. As they stood on its surface, they could easily see the bottom miles below.

“This is the lake of the seven thousand, my son. Notice how you can see bodies below these bodies near the surface? And bodies below them all the way to the bottom?”

“My father, are they dead?” he asked, hypnotically staring at the wide-eyed bodies of all the people stacked, seemingly, one on top of the other, all the way to the bottom.

“Look at me, son. Think about what you asked, ‘Are they dead?’”

“Oh,” he said, humiliated.

“The lie of death is one of the most cleverly guarded secrets until now. Since all are here now, and hope alone has died, there is little reason to support the lie. So what is the reality, my son?”

“There is no such thing as ‘Death’?”

“Yes, good. Now look at these. They are frozen in the diamond lake. But they are all mortal. How can this be? Those that drown state that right before death swallows you, there is a moment of panic that takes you that is so profound, so horrid. It occurs right before the surrender that everyone experiences where ‘going over’ is pleasant. If that were to happen here, Infernus would be a joy. No, these all experience that profound, soul-stripping panic I was just telling you about. All of them. Yet, they cannot go on; they must endure the most hideous pain for billions of infinities [one billionth of an endless microsecond].

“Now, if we were to jump on the absolutely balanced surface of this solid lake, it would quake the bones of every occupant. At least that would be a different set of circumstances for them to deal with.”

“Let’s, Father!”

“But all the bones would break simultaneously.”

“And, your point being?”

So they proceeded to do that for many millennia with much glee.

* * *

“That is sohorrible, and tasteless,” one student offered. “Why would you wantto produce a book like that?”

“It’s the most honest way I could convey these concepts,” the naked model simply replied. “I am powerless to do it any other way. I commit my crimes on paper, some people inflict them on the world, and shatter the societal order. How self-destructive.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“THE IMBECILES”

The two entered one of Infernus’ many caves. To the son, it seemed that the father would be more at home with a crown of victor’s leaves perched smartly on his head. The father adjusted the crown, that had slipped slightly to the right and down. A rich purple robe was wrapped carelessly about his muscular body; his hand was around his throat to hold it closed. His downcast eyes surveyed the hideous death sprawled before him; the scars and scores of battle (or so it seemed). One arm swept the room in a grand, all-encompassing gesture.

“Look, behold these wretches that you see stretched upon the floor, my son. Their intelligence is so low that they cannot even stand. Look upon them and be glad that your dream of the dream world did not make you religious. It is this world that these fools dreamt to get out of their eternity. First look upon the wall and see what it says there written in the blood of one of them. Read it now to me and express your loathing of their low estate.”

The son could barely tear his eyes away from the imbeciles long enough to see the legend written on the wall in blood. It read, ‘You have the mind of the creator, so act like it!’

“What does this enigmatic sign mean, Father?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. One thing I do know, though, is that they thought they could dream that they were religious geniuses and torment others and lord it over them. Look, for their dreams play like out-of-focus dramas in and out of the flesh along the walls. See? And there.”

“Where do these pieces of words and phrases come from, my father?”

“I do not know; they seem to be from an ancient book of oriental wisdom, but I cannot think where its origin is right now. Maybe I’ll remember it later. Watch these walls, son.”

What the son saw were pieces of pictures, unfinished dreams, parts of stories. In one, he saw a puppet-looking person forcing a young woman to have sex with him. He heard in his gangrened brain the puppet-looking man say to the woman, “When you serve the flock, you serve the main shepherd, my dear.”

Another showed a group of old men beating some children and relieving them of the books in their hands. “We are the only ones who can understand and interpret these sacred books, children of filth. We will tell you what they mean.”

In another dream, in what seemed to be ancient Rome, it showed some slaves getting drunk and beating their fellow counterparts mercilessly. They were saying, “We will criticize you until you realize we are the holy ones. We will wield weapons for all time and oppose you and let you know that you must be like us if you want to win the creator’s approval.”

“I do not understand all this, Father.”

“I suspected as much. You belong in here with these idiots.”

The father noticed that the son must be aware of the gray wings he had sprouted, for they were long enough to drape halfway down his massive, hairy back. They had to itch, growing at this rapid rate.

“Were all these idiots capable of dreaming these religious dreams up, my father?”

“It doesn’t take much intelligenceto merely follow orders, my son. They created a religious world where the only way to excel was to become like themselves in their group. All sorts of these religions sprung up because of this – you must realize that these imbeciles were incapable of anything in their dream world except protecting their own paranoid egocentric system; for it is all a moron knows. Because they really are morons, they were incapable of creating anything that smacked of unity or creativity. They merely (poorly, I might add) copied what others had done. They couldn’t lead, for what they really wanted was to be petty tyrants, so they weakly imitated every fad or fashion of their day. They were followers of the Chief Demon, but didn’t know it. If they had calculated the nature of the creator they were really following (someone fostering intolerance and hatred and division) they would have realized where they were all the time – here! Anything that came along that they did not agree with, they cast out or made that other moron feel so uncomfortable that they had to leave. Does that sound very intelligent or creative to you?”

“It’s something only a moron could dream up, I suppose.”

“But, odd as it sounds, their dream world consisted of ‘geniuses’ who knew better. As the mythos goes, others before them had created a foundation of love, and they tortured it completely to death. And each other. It is probably the most mysterious thing in Infernus. Something so totally self-defeating; so backwards. A topsy-turvy existence.”

“But, Father, it does make sense that if these beings (you can hardly call them human; just brain-dead morons) really were morons, that this mess is exactly what they would make of a world if they dreamed of one.”

“Yes, it is,” the father said, smiling.

“But we should participate in this little tableau. Let’s torture them for many lifetimes, shall we?”

The son was already eagerly popping eyeballs out of a smallish shark-faced man. It kept idiotically murmuring, “I am a tin god, you cannot hurt me. I am an elder, a semi-apostle.”

“Infernus is too good to them, Father. I wish it was possible to throw them into other dimensions that they had no threshold of pain for.”

“It is done,” said the father simply.

And it was so. The room was suddenly empty, save the two spelunkers. “If you could only hear their shrieking, as only I can feast upon,” the father said, closing his black sockets so he could concentrate on their terror more acutely.

“Is it truly horrid, my father?”

“It is so much so that even I cannot imagine the horror of what they feel. I can let you listen for only [one second] of times.”

And instantly, in the son’s brain, he felt the most heinous pounding, as the voices of many morons were tortured many millions of times, greater than anything they ever thought was possible. But, even though it only lasted a brief hour, the son’s brain felt like curdled oatmeal.

They laughed many a lifetime.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“COMING ALONG NICELY”

“My son, I must show you how all must enter my park – ah, actually, no. It is how all must awakenand rememberwhere they have lived all along. This is what some would consider the entrance to Infernus, although there is no such thing, for every sore is an entrance. It is all the same. Listen, I hear the wailing of the new arrivals now.”

“What does this mean, Father?” asked the son, his growing gray wings at last beginning to unfurl and glisten like oily leather.

“When a soul realizes that all its fears have been realized; all its dreams, all of its life of coming here were expressly fulfilled; when it realizes that all the nightmares of its life were its awakened realities; when it realizes that it was only a dream and that all souls were only dreaming their future; or only waiting to awaken and be here; when souls realize that the ‘earthly’ dream was an attempt of an insane mind to try to make sense of all of this; when they realize all this when they arrivehere, or, actually wake upto face what is really the rock-solid truth (that this is all there ever was), the mind bursts open and trickles its soul onto the boiling rocks. Many souls go through this process trillions of times. Look, here are two that must reawaken now!”

They watched as two human bodies (looking like corpses) were being dragged into this great cavern by two giant white demons. The demons threw the two bodies (one man, one woman) to the hard floor and walked to a wall where many large, blood-encrusted metal torture devices hung.

“The mind would stagger, Father, were it to contain all the knowledge of what these weapons could do.”

“Yes. And now you will see one of the weapons and its uses.”

The two demons approached the two corpses as they lay, aware on the floor, but not technically “alive” yet, as they would be soon in Infernus. Their dry, white eyes only looked where their bodies fell, gazing at what was only before them, which was the Baking-Roof. The demons flashed their great powder-white buttocks as they fell to their work. Each held up one of the corpses by their hair in its immensely strong arms and began plunging the great tongs into the spongy bodies, calling them to stop all of their nonsense and reawaken. The bent, unbreakable spikes tore the bodies as they were held; the flesh was pulled impossibly outward like rubber. The demons yanked and popped and pulled it, but it would not separate from the bodies entirely.

The bodies began to jerk mindlessly, then with more and more control, until finally they were doing everything they could to make the torture stop, pushing their feeble hands against the diamond hard shells of their tormentors.

“Come, my son, this will not end for many millennia and we have much more to see in your continuing education. Come, our time grows dim!”

* * *

“My father, are you telling me that the most hideous thing I will ever see lies in the park of ‘The Milling Murderers’?”

“It is a tableau, believe it or not, in the park. It represents the torture of The Unnamed One.”

“Who is she/he, Father?”

“If you had done any classical studying in your dream state, you will know who the Unnamed One is. Behold!”

They had entered a blackened cave. The walls were glowing numbingly red. The thick glaze that covered them like crimson glue shimmered in the internal haze of heat. The son ran a hand over one and knew it to be many hardened layers of blood, black, flecked in places, like scabs. That would also explain the smell of a slaughterhouse. All of them, he thought to himself with satisfaction, were wounds with black caps. He never thought to do this before, but he pushed a finger into the wall, and was immediately rewarded with a thick black ooze running down where the hole was.

A white light sprang up at his touch and showed more detail throughout the room. A shiver ran through the nerve of the wall and every surface cracked open. The growing light showed that embedded everywhere, gazing fixedly at the floor, were eyes, myriads of them.

The son gasped and backed up to bump into the father as he saw a quivering mass in the middle of the floor. Grub worms and maggots seeped under and over a rolling, churning mass. One moment you could see blood-clotted chains; then another you could see black-taloned fists; then a huge hairy foot, trying to break free of the worm bed, but to no purpose. The chain and the worm bound it fast.

“My son, the eyes have only one purpose – to forever witness the sores and smoke that forever roiled in thick clouds from the creature that boiled upon the floor.” The father did not laugh in this room. “It must be so for all eternity.

“The Unnamed One never gets to see beyond the worm; his eyes never see. Worms cover him and he lies on a bed of maggots. He can never feel less than the numb pain and floor that boils his blood. He can never stop smoking in his flesh. The smoke can never stop ascending up to the surfaces. He can never be named. The eyes can never stop beholding him. If you knew the history of the Unnamed One, and what he was, or thought he was, you would know why this torture was the most hideous one of all.”

They passed on from there, the son confused. He was indeed aware of his long gray wings now, the father thought. He was able to flash them and wrap them about his body at will. They hung down to his muscular buttocks, and they were willful. He might be unaware that they were already a weapon, able to snatch life from a mortal in a single slash. He could sunder mere inches of flesh with the razor edge of the wing or slam through solid wall with the support of the steel-like bone that lay beneath.

* * *

“The unnamed one has had a few sons. This creature, beautiful as he was, was one of them. See if you can guess who this great lover of the Magick Arts was.”

The cave they entered was ablaze with the red/green light that two identical symbols on the wall gave off – long lightning bolts. Below the signs was a piteous sight.

“Oh, Father, was this my lord?”

“Since he is one of the few sons of the Unnamed One, I cannot say, for he must likewise remain Unnamed. Clever, manipulative, little boy!”

The hideous creature was lying on his back, gagging mightily. An olive tree was growing out of his throat. Its roots were spreading like oaken cords throughout his body, growing and protruding from every unsealed place, even as they watched. Cracking and snapping from the growing branches that continued to sprout through him. He could not even cry out, although groaning sounds came from him, or somewhere near him.

“This humorous tableau, you have noticed, my son, is likewise in a religious part of my domain. This creature thought he was a hammer of deity. He exterminated many millions of peoples in his dreams, and now they are his spine. He lies so very still because every nerve of his tormented body is on fire from the growth of the olive tree. Even the olive oil, this is the sap of his blood now, burns through his veins. Each growth causes pain of unknowable depths as it shatters his spine and splits his bones.”

They both laughed until bile flowed freely.

* * *

“You must tell us the identity of at least one of those creatures,” said student Gardner. “Yes, we know you are including political characters and rulers in there.”

“Alright, I will tell you who one of them is. Choose.”

“The one with the two lightning bolts above the tableau and the olive tree that became his skeleton.”

“Very well. Adolph Hitler. The two lightning bolts are the runic signs that were worn on the sleeves of the S.S. The olive tree is a religious symbol for Israel. His eternal punishment is that, the growing unvanquished Jewish nation is now his spine, and as it ever grows, it torments him with unspeakable pain.”

“What a bent mind,” said a student.

“Thank you,” was the old man’s reply.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“THE CORE”

“There is something you might want to see in this diverse vein in Infernus, my son. Come, veer off here, into this modest little cave occupied by one of the most powerful beings in all of Infernus. This monster cannot affect the park’s ruler, but no one else can resist.”

“Is it because you are the despot here and none can touch you?”

“No, putty-brain, it is because I am completely evil, and have no feelings for it or you or anyone else. It warrants no emotional response from me. I simply do not care. You, on the other hand, will want to become a slave to it instantly.”

“I can be a slave to it?”

“You willbe a slave to it. I will have to pull you free, break the spell it has over you or you would never leave. Now, step inside here.”

They entered the single room. It was filled with heavy smoke, incense that did not gag them. The son drew the aroma strongly into his lungs. He felt its cooling effect and power pierce his emotions.

“Your first mistake,” the father said, looking askance at him. “This, my son, is what is known as The Core of All of Infernus.”

“Is this possible?”

“It is. This will be very difficult (for the puddle that was once your brain to conceive), my son, but the lengthy definition of Infernus, its very nature, is explained here.”

Red led them to one wall where a cracked, bronze plaque was hanging from bleeding nails. Thin black lines running to the floor could be seen in the red glow that seemed to burn from deep within the leprous walls.

“I knew this was here, and that it is significant, which is why we have come here in the thick fog of pheromones right off. Read it aloud.”

“It says, ‘I am fearfully and wonderfully made.’ Father, is this an unspeakable hideous thing that ye have done to me?”

“Even I, even I, if I had any feelings for you, would gladly spare you this learning experience. But, in order to be fit for what I am training you to become, you must experience everything.

“The dark form that we can just see now floating through the fog seeks you. It has no conscience. What it is will be determined by your thoughts. Whatever you consider to be most precious, the most fragile thing in existence, is what it will be.”

The large mass minimized and assumed a feminine shape as it emerged from the perfume-soaked fog. It was wearing only a towel around its (her) waist. An aurora borealis seemed to shimmer dimly around its entire figure.

“Oh, how shocking of you,” the father began, “a woman, how original.”

Every feature of this slight figure was flawlessly defined, like an alabaster sculpture. From the brilliant blue crystal-ice eyes, the thin nose, the full red lips just parting invitingly, the flowing crimson tresses that he longed to run his hands through (his former self’s hands, that is), and the exposed breasts that invited him. That longed for him.

Foolishly, the son breathed deeply of the intoxicating, enslaving fumes. In his mind, a tiny stream spoke chilly rain into his brain. “Never, never leave me. Love me forever. I am afraid.” The son looked to the father hopefully (forgetting the utter lack of hope of Infernus). There was an abundance of hopelessness in his soul.

He nodded to the father. “She is totally vulnerable. Absolutely harmless, physically.”

“Living proof of the completeness of your moronic mentality. Listen to her.”

“Just promise me that you will never send me away; that you’ll never make me go away.”

Her voice caressed the son’s mind like a wet whisper. He listened. She fell like scented feathers into his open arms, sighing, her body perfectly curving until it fit his massive, hard shell. For the first time since his awakening in Infernus, he felt afraid of fear. He looked up at the father with hissing water running from his eyes.

“Look at her now, my son.”

He did. Just in time to see a little runner sore streak across her breasts. She cried out weakly and covered her bosom. A sizzling sound. A weak ringlet of smoke escaped between her fingers. She upraised her palm to his face to show that it was white with an [infectious disease].

“My father, what is happening?”

“She is deteriorating, son. All that is beautiful mustdecay.”

They heard a sharp crack and saw that her head had opened, and became exposed. She lost weight so rapidly that she became a mere bag of quivering bones in his arms. Her eyes darkened and shrank and fell back into her dry sockets like raisins. She cried out as the shrinkage coursed through her tiny frame and caused unknowable pain. Her skin wrapped itself tighter and tighter around her body until the bones could be felt. Her visage changed as a fever attacked her brain and made her forget who she was, and who they were. She gurgled mindlessly and mewed and spit her teeth onto the dirt floor.

Her hips showed her bones jutting out angrily and her body began to contort as it wracked her violently with pain. Her fragile limbs were shrinking and snapping. Her hands became pencils clothed in flesh.

The son held a heaving bag of bones. She looked into his eyes, reached up with a white, thin hand and ran it over his stony face. She whispered into his shrieking brain, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I came into your life, and ruined it. Forgive me. I love you.” She then evaporated in a whirlwind of fleeing ash.

The son fell to his knees and screamed as loudly as he could, which meant that all of Infernus heard it. His pained low-pitch howls shook the walls. The fog magnified his grief and (lack of) love until it was beyond monstrous. The horror of seeing this great sorrow wrapped his heart with barbed wire.

He looked at Red. “How could you do this to me?”

“This is your dream, son, not mine. You are the cruelest bastard in all of Infernus for having thought of it at all in the first place!”

“I could neverhave devised anything so evil!”

“Certainly. However, you did. If it weren’t in a dream, you would not continue. What you are about to discover is so horrible, I assure you, if ye knew it beforehand, then you would not press forward. But since you shall press forward, it is living proof that it is yourdream. Proceed, then, to your horror. The horror that will make you more terrible than any other demon that Infernus has ever seen.”

* * *

Electricity buzzed like bright veins on the blood walls, and loudly crackled. The moving shadow of light revealed two ambling creatures with great flapping lips and tongues hanging out. The one in front had a black and red caked chain firmly gripped in a quivering hand. It was attached to a collar that was around the neck of the one shuffling behind, shaking, each individual step, in unspeakable agony.

Both shifted along, piteously, while strings of viscous fluid bubbled and burbled from their quavering lips.

The light winked out. And the dream? Continued.

* * *

“Here’s a clue,” said the old man. “In my lovely romance, I slam three doors in your face. This last paragraph is one of them.”

Student Amanda, dressed entirely in black, stood and asked. “Why would you do this?”

“Well, what’s the point of reading books that don’t have puzzles in them?”

“Well, rather a lot, really,” she replied, without smiling.

“Not for me. As I was saying, I slam three doors in your face in chapters nineteen and twenty. If I have done my job right, I will throw so much light on them all that you will not notice which one of them cannot be real.”

“Not fair!” cried another student. “You have given us no prior clues that would lead us to believe that. How poor.”

“Oh, really,” the old man said, laughing. “Do you remember the publisher telling the archaeologist that there was something about the Red Ants Escher graphic that wasn’t right? Not real? Part of it could notbe real?” [3]3
  See appendix, at the end of the book, for an explanation of this mystery.


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“Yes.”

“Well, there was your clue. One of these three endings cannot have been real. You figure it out by yourself. You’ll get no help from me. Now, here we go to the last chapter of Infernus. Ready?”