Текст книги "Infernus"

Автор книги: Mike Jones

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CHAPTER TWENTY

“THE FINAL HIDE”

“Now, my son, I have one final thing to show you to complete your education. You have become the grandest, most powerful demon in all the kingdoms. I have convinced you that you, because you created all this in your imagination, are the most hateful and cruelest creature that ever existed. After all, it is merely the truth. You have fully become the vampiric satyr son, with long, glorious gray wings that can split rocks with their force and strength. The only thing left for you to do is to link eternally with the one who abused you, and sent you here – in your dream. You will link with him and become the thing known in Infernal Furnaceas ‘The Scream!’ I am now going to give you the necessary push in that direction.

“You will never see my face again. In fact, your joy will be so complete, and you will be so busy, you will never wishto see me again, I assure you. As I told you before, and as you have seen in your vision, you will break through the floor of the hospital where he resides, mount him from behind with no lack of speed, because of your large member, bite through his head with your long fangs, feast on his cooking brain, and then you will ravage him over billions of miles, on many earths, throughout all eternity; your anger will never lessen in intensity, never!”

“Oh, Father, if that were only true!”

“Well, then let me show you what awaits you at the wall that no creature can pass; even I! You see, my son, on the other side of this obstruction, in all appearances a wall, there is another vast park governed by a ruling chief much like me. There are, of course, millions of such parks.”

“This brilliant podium – no, a sundial – is this what you want me to see, Father?”

In the distance, there shone, shimmering in the intense heat, a sundial. Beyond it was a wall of flame that none could breach. The image kept flowing in and out of focus in the brilliant, truly yellow flame. Even if the former man had not become a golden demon, he would have appeared thus here. Everything glowed the bright corn-yellow that burned nearly as bright as the sun. The topaz blazed against their skin harshly.

“Yessss,” he said, speaking as if the son were not standing next to him. “ Itstands before the wall that no creature can penetrate. There is one before every impenetrable wall. It is known as the final truth – the only truth, which I cannot express. It will cause all of your resistance to the thresholds of pain to burst at once and for all your blood to spoil. Prepare yourself to see the most hideous thing in all your life, my son. Your world will surely never be the same!”

The son approached the golden sundial.

“My father, the sundial—”

“Yes, my son, the sundial,” said the father. If he had any eyes, they would have flashed wetly and sparkled in the bright red flash emitting forth. “For this is the beginningof the truth of it!”

“The sundial is covered over with – oh, my – living letters. Letters that live! I have ne’er seen anything such as this!”

“And ne’er shall ye e’er again, my son, after you have seen these. There will not only never be a reason to read anything else again, because of the hideousness of its messages, it is the sum total of all knowledge. It will have spent the last of your patience in these things. Just think, after you have ingested this, how many times I have been reminded of it being here. Vibrating, always vibrating. What little hope you may have had will permanently rot, when you see this, you poor tool.”

There were larger letters at the top. They shivered because they lived; there were no other words that lived but these two alone:

JESUS CHRIST

“What is this, Father? I thought you said that this was Untruth!”

“I could not have told you all of this, or any of this. This is the last betrayal. You now see, at last, the absolute lack of hope, of love, certainly. Now, if you see this, you know I have neverhad any love for such a one that I could have led thus far.”

The father fell to the baking plate of infernal earth and began to leak laughing tears to the floor. Even though he had brought countless sons here, it never pleased him less. The immense painful joy it brought him to play along and pretend to adore his sons, each of whom he had assured was his onlyson.

“The rest of the message, Father, oh, my brain is boiling. I cannot read it aloud! Hatred – ahhhhhh!” The son looked up to the vast height of the blood-encrusted ceiling and shouted, “Where are you, Doctor?” His steaming sockets searched the ceiling of Infernus.

Red reached up, roughly grabbing and turning the jaw of the massive golden demon’s head here and there, back and forth. “Look for him. Seek him out.”

“There!” the golden demon cried. “He’s there… where I was.”

“Go to him,” hissed the father.

With a hideous strength the son bellowed, “Oh, Doctor – mortal man who sent me here – I am coming for you now! Our wedding begins this very moment!”

And with a great beating of wind and heat and wings, and the strength and muscular beauty of twelve men, he launched himself into the air and crashed through the roof above.

After many millennia, the father was able to stop laughing long enough to approach the podium and read aloud the final message that had so enraged the worm. He could not circumvent the significance; neither could he get his mind around it. Apparently mortals, or formermortals, could comprehend it on some level, which he never ceased to find a constant source of humor. He was tempted to gaze longingly at it when he wanted his torture to be most keen.

“There is no other name under heaven

Given to men by which we mustbe saved.”

Acts 4:12

* * *

In his white clinical office, the small pock-faced doctor took in the News, leaned back in his vastly oversized chair and sighed. “You’re sure, he, uh, Dr. Mountfountain is dead, Carl?”

“Yes, sir, multiple shock treatments are much too stressful on any system for such a long time, Doctor, I am afraid.”

“Afraid?” the other replied, looking out a window wistfully, hopelessly. Now, everything is ruined, he thought. “I’m not afraidof anything. Not really. Well, I suppose we’ll need to put him with the others.”

Carl’s eyes narrowed. “Dump him in the caverns? When is this going to stop?”

“Don’t reproach me, my friend. I am – no, we are – conducting valuable research.”

“We weredoing valuable research, Doctor. You had a very personal thing with this ‘patient.’ It repulsed me – it’s still repulsive. And at what cost are we doing this?” He looked at the little dark man and hated him, a new fleshly hatred.

“All of this will cost me nothing but dollars, Carl. He has no family; I know, okay? Nothing but dollars.” He stood up. “Where is he, the body, I mean? Take me to him.”

* * *

The lab was cold and lit in a vibrating cool blue. In the center of the room, where many stainless steel tables stood, there was one distinctive surface. It is to this table that they shuffled their feet forward. A white sheet covered the still form of a person.

The little doctor pulled back the slippery, clean shroud to stare into the eternally expressionless face. Here was a simple nobility; a handsomeness that cannot be bought, only envied; a quiet dignity the little man could never achieve in his frantic existence and, he now at last knew, was neither able to remove from Mountfountain or take it for himself.

“His character,” he said before he could stop himself, then blushing, noticing Carl gazing at him out of the corner of his eye.

“Pardon me?” Carl asked, puzzled. It struck him what the little doctor meant. He smiled wryly, pitifully, and then shook his head. “Be honest, Doctor. Off the record. What was it you were hoping he could tell you?”

“I wish I knew, Carl. I wish I knew. At this moment, I am perhaps more confused than I’ve ever been in my whole life.” He began to unbuckle his belt. “Carl, I wish you to witness my farewell to the good doctor here. Would you please do me the honor of doing just that?”

His pants slid to the floor. He slowly, ritualistically removed his lab coat.

Carl pursed his lips, slowly shook his head, clasped his hands behind his back until his knuckles grew white and his fingers grew numb, and spread his stance wide. “As you wish, Doctor.”

“What was that?” the small doctor asked, his hand on the covered crotch of the dead man. “I heard a noise.”

They both listened with focused hearing and thought they heard, faintly, a low rumbling.

“Listen there, it sounds like metal bands, or something, snapping.” The little man bent to pull his pants up from around his ankles.

“No, Doctor!” Carl was becoming agitated quickly. It now dawned on him what it was. “It sounds like an earthquake!”

He made a move for the swinging double-doors. The floor in front of them heaved instantly upward and belched forth rock and mud, and the foulest single odor Carl could ever recall smelling. The room filled with shrapnel that looked like lightning.

What flashed upward through it in a blur was impossible! In the last few seconds of his life, Carl saw a golden beast, completely covered with jet-black wiry hair. The creature had the most piercing, yellowed tiger-eyes he had ever seen; they were filled with intelligence and, especially, malice. As the beast burst through the hole, it unfurled its large gray wings, and smashed their dark gray knuckles at the ceiling like monstrous fists ( BOOM!), pulverizing the ceiling tiles (Carl felt the thunder all the way down into his feet), then settled them down behind him in a matter of seconds. A long, thick member swung freely, unashamedly, between its legs. Great tiger fangs yellowed, flashed in his sore-filled, bleeding mouth. Splats of emerald and crimson chunks fled to the floor all around its massive, scaled hooves. Carl’s pants instantly filled with warm feces. The beast threw a great fist filled with razor talons at Carl’s head. He thought —

– Crack!

The vampire satyr threw Carl through the space in the floor with such force, by the cracked top of his head, that when he struck the rocks below, the body evaporated in a shower of sparkling red spray.

Carl would never know (until his training below was wellunderway), that the dried, shriveled rope hanging from a massively muscled bicep was a piece of roasted entrail. Later, he stayed inside a blood-bricked wall in a forgotten corridor. What appeared to be clenched between his teeth, sending sparks inside his brain, was a live wire. He was having some fun now!

After a few moments, the demon lost interest in the red-wine spray. It (he) had stopped chuckling and rumbling. It stood up to its full height and allowed all of itself that was to fall upon the little doctor’s soul. It threw out its chest, and in doing so, perhaps accidentally, the wings flew back and shattered an entire wall of glass and metal cabinets. The wingspan was nearly sixteen feet. The thunderous sound made the little doctor cower, and expect. Expect and shiver and wait.

Its hatred, a living and dripping pre-ejaculate, spattered green on the floor, made the demon shiver at last with the excitement that would drive it for all eternity.

“BLACKEN! Blacken all hope and free your teeny soul, you futile mortal! Never has such hatred possessed and roiled me! Ne’er have ye seen such a visage as loathsome as mine!”

As if to emphasize its point, the wings, seeming to have a mind of their own, knuckled the roof above the ceiling and threatened to cave it in on top of them. Boom!was the sound. Crack!was the ceiling’s answer.

The little doctor unloaded a great bowel movement into his falling trousers. Urine stained his front.

Great drops of flowing red rained from the demon’s eyes, and splattered and hissed on its feet. It sobbed openly, its broad golden shoulders shaking with the effort. The little doctor, seeing this and not comprehending it, soiled himself anew.

“Know this, and despair, you self-destructive little morsel! We are wedded for three trillion infinities. Ye will know what it is like to be with your beloved now and forever – to be one with him, intimately!”

Boom!The wings jutted above them again and slammed into the failing ceiling.

The demon’s expansive chest rose and fell. No one spoke. The silence began circling the room. In the distant hall, the little doctor hoped that he heard the footsteps of help thundering and clacking this way. Then he realized that they would only be killed; he somehow instinctively knew no one could halt the purpose of this thing. The little man could not believe what he was seeing.

It spread its massive arms to invite the little man into its embrace. The great gray wings swept from behind, teasing. It smiled and opened its mouth. “Is thiswhat you were hoping I would tell you, little man?”

The small, dark one looked at the body of his beloved covered with the shroud; thought he had heard those words ringing in his head recently; realized it was impossible, then shook his head and frowned at the thing. But it was suddenly standing directly in front of the man, having moved inaudibly. The little doctor jumped back, and the wall he collided with briefly knocked the air out of him.

The yellow tiger-eyes raked across the wall with immense heat, to follow the man as he sought along for the door he knew must surely be near, without taking his eyes from the demon, using only his hands. Gold’s face was frozen into an impossibly wide grin. The wall’s melting surface rippled, no match for the demon’s searing vision, and cracked with the high-pitched whine of a gun as holes popped into the plaster, and intermittent gray puffs of smoke escaped from the ever-widening seam.

“Where’s the damneddoor?” he pleaded, whined. Desperation leaking out of his sweaty brow, the little doctor heard something sizzling, smelling it before he heard it, perhaps.

When the hot eyes rested on the little man, he peeped briefly. His head was instantly engulfed in flames and he instinctively held his hands to his temples, and theycaught fire.

“Flame on, my little Scream.”

Gold belched ashes. He burped a low laugh at the futile flagellations of the little doctor. Having failed to put out his hands and head by feeding oxygen to the flames, he was now trying to knock himself unconscious against a wall. Repeatedly.

Gold grabbed his inhumanly large organ, and shook it, spitting a sloppy yellow goop at the good doctor. “Or was more of thiswhat you were looking for?”

Gold began again, watching the doctor’s head cook. “I will be the part of you that rules you for all time, little man. I will mount you and never stop ramming you through all the collected earths themselves. I have been told, by those in authority, that I must mount you through billions of earths. And the only thing you will be able to do is scream. You will do it for me so that I never have to scream again. It is your gift to me.”

One last Boom!The wing knuckles bashed the ceiling and receded within a second, and white powder fell on the flaming head of the little doctor.

Gold grabbed the man by one shoulder to turn him around and four razor talons easily punctured flesh, muscle and marrow, and welded there to become one bone and body. His head was still burning. The man began his endless scream. The demon, with absolutely no resistance, but with manifold purpose, punctured the other shoulder when he had turned him around. In one movement, instantly, with no shame or horror or regard, it ripped off all the man’s clothes, shearing great flaps of skin and muscle from his back in the process.

Its member throbbed and stood erect, large and long. The little man, in more pain than ever before, did the best he could to turn and look behind him. He saw the impossible thing again, and still could not believe it. His scream went on, unabated.

With the last vestiges of his conscience burned away, because of his father’s betrayal, the demon forced all of itself into the good doctor with a single thrust. There was no hesitation, no request, no pity, just solid activity.

The demon, by sheer will that was accomplished by a set purpose born in the eternities of Infernus’ blackest wisdom, opened its mouth wider and wider. And wider still. Its jaws shattered and found new form as it drew its face willfully to the back of the little man’s head. The vampire teeth ached for feeding, and bled furiously, freely. They sunk, like hot, razored knives in cold butter, without resistance, into the doctor’s brain. Oh, the warm, cooked brain!It felt so good that the demon groaned deeply. Its teeth met in the center of the cranium and shattered into one another, fusing, locked, eternal. It set its jaws and was done.

An elderly woman in a white lab coat burst into the room and tried to take into account what she was seeing. “Oh my God!”

“Guess again!” a voice burst inside her brain, instantly slamming her into a wall, unconscious before she fell heavily to the feces and blood-smeared floor. It kept laughing in her head, but she didn’t hear it, her brain having turned into something resembling soup. And would never hear anything again.

And they at last were one. The Scream. And the doctor’s brain (he knew this not when he saw it so many millions of millennia ago in the vision in Infernus) was his. The son had two brains and the doctor had none. Its brainless task was set to screaming, it was its only purpose.

As the little man began to cease to be human, he died, but never stopped screaming. For as he died and rose again, he never ceased becoming what he would be throughout all eternity – The Scream! No thoughts, no training, just dumb animal instinct. Being what he already was.

As The Scream exited through the hole in the floor, more girders were struck and shattered deliberately. Many of the staff had left the building minutes before, assuming an earthquake was tearing the confines apart. The entire structure, now stressed beyond its capacity to endure, fell inward to be swallowed by the great cavern below. It lay, sleeping, hiding its own mysteries in silence.

And when all the ruling demons in Infernus saw The Scream become a reality and coming their way, they rejoiced loudly, and hell burned much brighter for a while.

* * *

As our eyes sweep across the expanse that was a smoky pit that housed two sleeping, quavering bodies that could not awaken, now it was a part of a limitless ocean of burning sand. There were no bodies any longer quivering in their sleep. All had become one. There wasn’t even so much as a bump in the sands. All were one. All experienced all. Infernus was the flattest expanse where all were one. No more anything; only dreaming, unable to even shiver in their fright.

EPILOGUE

“What a freakin’ weird story that was,” said a thin young man with dyed white hair.

“I have others,” the old man said, putting his clothes on.

“I’m going to report you to the authorities for blasphemy,” said another student.

“Oh, goody,” was the nude man’s reply. “I could use the publicity. Maybe it will make me famous.”

“Could some of us -?” asked a woman with a blue shawl. “Could some of us hear more of your stories?”

“What a brave soul. Are there others in this room who would like to hear other demented stories of mine?”

“Yes,” said a few.

“The other stories are not like this one, I assure you. Another is a takeon a fantasy novel, like this one was a takeon a horror novel. An experiment, I assure you, nothing more.”

The class and professor were silent for a beat.

“I’ll tell you what. I’m editing some notes on a piece I’ve been writing for about seven years now. When I have collated them successfully, I could invite you up to my loft in the north for a reading and discussion time. Would you like that?”

Some said they would be open to that.

“Would you like me to tell you what the next short novel is called?”

“Yes,” said some enthusiastically.

“Well, I won’t tell you,” he laughed. “Maybe I will see you soon, and invite you all up for that. Adieu, my friends. It’s been fun.”

And with that, he left.

APPENDIX

[This chapter, originally the firstchapter of the book, has been placed at the end for the purpose of informing others of the origins of this terrible manuscript. It has little value beyond that. Many have chosen to scan it or skip it entirely. I will leave that up to you.]

“THE INTERVIEW”

Anthony Begels was a celebrated anthropologist. She wore her long brown hair in a ponytail and always sported safari clothing ordered from catalogs. She now sat stiffly in a chair, staring across the publisher’s polished mahogany desk. It would have been impossible for her to ignore a giant reproduction of a woodcut that stretched the entire length of the wall behind him – “Moebius Strip II.” Much red, black, and gray-green. Red ants crawling over a grid twisted into a figure eight, a google, or sign of infinity. Its inside and outside were equally twisting in and out of itself. Yet the ants seemed to be unaware of this; pacing, pacing, always tracking onward towards infinity… towards nothing. To her, it looked stereoscopic.

He caught her stare. “Gorgeous, isn’t it? Cost me a pretty penny, I’ll tell you. About a million and a half.”

“ Dollars?I think you got ripped off,” she said, frowning, and thought, A million and a half for a print?

He snickered. “Watch this,” he added, sounding pleased with himself.

His hands hovered over the desk for a moment, and then lightly placed an index finger on a specific spot in the middle of the desktop. He then steepled his fingers and stared into her face for a reaction. She tried to look over the surface of the desk, but she could not figure out what he was doing. Then something happened that made the whole room shift slightly. She felt her equilibrium momentarily shudder.

The grid on which the ants walked began slowly turning, in high definition, and the ants crept over it, inside and out, tirelessly. When it turned a certain way, a tiny spark of artificial sun beamed off an edge, giving it a definite metallic look, gleaming gray-green. The entire wall was a projected image, although no one ever guessed that at first glance. All were fooled, equally. And, she silently observed, it was not her imagination that it appeared stereoscopic; there was great depth in the graphic. She gasped and thought Escher would have been pleased with the wonders of modern technology as his print had, quite literally, sprang to life.

“Love Escher,” was her simple reply.

“I stare at it all the time. The entire wall is covered with a veryexpensive lenticular lens, so no 3-D glasses are needed. It couldn’t really exist, of course, because one of these realities simply isn’t there. Not real. Not ‘true’, is a better way of saying it. Maybe none of them are real.” He recollected the remarks he was going to make the moment she entered his office, and decided to start there. “Your appearance here, Dr. Begels, is surprising.” He laughed nervously. “I’m sure you’ve heard thata thousand times.” When he saw that she was not looking at him, but had continued to stare at the Escher display, he touched the surface of the desk again, and the walking ants and the revolving grid stopped, but did not seem flat like ordinary paintings. “Too distracting, you see.” And tittered, proud of this modern marvel.

She smiled/winced. “And the other one.”

“The ‘other one?’”

“’Your father must have wanted a boy.’ And before you ask, yes, it is my real name.” She brushed a long strand of hair back that had escaped her ponytail. And sighed.

“Ah,” he said, sizing her up. He tapped his fingers on the boxed manuscript that was positioned neatly on the right corner of his desk. Leaning forward, he asked suddenly, “Dr. Begels, do you understand the importance of this find, this manuscript? I really don’t know what to make of it, actually. Of course, it’s too controversial notto publish. You say you have submitted it to no one else?”

“That’s right,” she said, with a sly grin. “We agreed on a set price – rather steep – and that is all I ask. Well, actually, I shall expect my share of the royalties, should this hideous little tome become popular. I have my doubts, though. I have lived with this hellish book for more years than I care to think. I have fulfilled my part of the bargain. The rest is up to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have promised a certain group – who I will tell you more about later – to do my best to get it published. I have done my part. They believe that it is not important that the book becomes popular, but that it does exist as a serious reference for posterity, or something like that. They said something about the manuscript being an important key of some sort. I do not understand that – the thing about a ‘key’ – even though I translated the book. And I promise you, I won’t pursue trying to understand it either.” She brushed a trembling hand beneath an eye, and then put it stiffly in her lap with the other one.

“I see. In your” (slight, painful grimace, she noticed), “quite lengthy cover letter, Dr. Begels, you say that you personally unearthed seventeen bound leather volumes in, um, let me check some notes I made… in 1989. Is that right?”

“That’s right. Before we are permitted to dig in an area, we must show just cause. I went before my team and conducted a few preliminary digs.” She blinked several times. He nodded, believing it was a nervous twitch, or better yet, a mild form of Tourettes syndrome.

“Is that, uh, legal?”

“No, not at all, but I did it anyway. I had a funny feeling about this one. Anyway, when I found a few volumes, I begged my father to purchase the land so that the find could be mine alone.”

“Clever,” the publisher said. “I have a question about the person who received this uh, unedited manuscript in the form of, uh, apparently automatic writing, isn’t that right?”

“Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what would amount to concrete evidence. Everything I’m about to share with you, in one degree or another, is educated conjecture. Reliable guess-timates, you see? Whether it was male or female, there was simply no historical record. There was none with any of the bound manuscripts. I can only surmise – without data – that the person was driven quite insane. To have this hideous stuff just appear in your head… horrible! The compulsion to write it all down would have been maddening, I’m sure. The reason I think it was written in pretty much an automatic style, as do the others in the group, is because much of it is written in a rushed hand. The same rushed hand, the words jammed together – unbroken. It gave me the impression that great parts of it were written at once. Not thought over, not plotted, like a novel, but rushed. We thought it might hint at the fact that it was written as if dictated.

“And let me assure you, sir,” she said grinning wryly, “there are no more volumes, so please don’t think that if the book becomes popular, that a few million dollars might make me mysteriously ‘find’ some more that, whoops! we just overlooked the first time, thus creating sequels. The royalty checks, if there are any, can be sent to my attorney, who will forward them to me.

“But I will tell you what I think happened, if you like.” Her face lost its disinterested stare, he noted. This was obviously born of conviction.

“Uh, yes, I wish you would.”

“I think it was forced upon some young girl just blossoming into womanhood, or -”

“Or,” he interjected, “someone of a strict religious order.”

“You’ve thought of that one, too,” she said, smiling, then hurriedly chewed on a bit of fingernail.

“How cruel that – I’m just guessing on the method of transcribing, mind you – every time you sat down to write your lessons or perhaps to painstakingly write out a page of illuminated manuscript… and this came out!”

“But, in the unedited manuscript, which is impossible to imagine in print,” she added, “if this were the case, she either buried the manuscript herself, or kept it hidden from everyone. A woman writing this kind of literature up until modern times was considered unstable, at best, if they wrote this kind of thing. Worst-case scenario, she could have been burned at the stake or tortured, depending on what era she actually lived. If it were kept by a dark order, her identity could possibly have been kept secret.”

“You keep saying ‘she.’ Is that intentional?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute. Now, all of this is pure conjecture. It’s frustrating, because the mind naturally plows this ground, seeking answers. The person who received all of this, who was mentioned in the manuscript only briefly, is never referred to by name or sex.”

“In fact,” he said, excited, “the narrator seems genuinely surprised that there is a connection between himself and a stenographer at all. Isn’t that the impression you get?”

“Most definitely. To think that someone had to live with this for weeks… months. What if it came sporadically over the course of ten or twenty years?” She looked out the window to sigh and collect her thoughts for the next onslaught. “Imagine, if you will, but I suppose we will never possess what any of us could consider hard evidence. In fact, since the timeframe in which the manuscripts were carbon-dated; when they might have been written, and which years they speak of, which was all ‘future’ to the poor wretch – since all of that is impossible anyway, it’s unknowable with any degree of certainty, when it was written.

“The last hope I had, was to take the most innocent sample I could find from the first page to a handwriting analyst. All of the Koine-like Greek was printed, unfortunately for us, so I could not say clearly whether it was masculine or feminine.

“Given what we do know of handwriting is based on relatively modern samples. We can’t be sure they apply to someone living, say, a few thousand years ago.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Given it’s a safe bet to assume someone living a thousand years ago would be exposed to none of the modern conveniences we take for granted, male or female, their thought processes would be nothing like ours. They would be, for all intents and purposes, remarkably alien to us.” With some satisfaction she folded her hands in her lap, and smiled. Then brushed her pant leg. Again. For that invisible somethingshe seemed to never locate.