Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey

by Forrest Aguirre

  “Vizzitōrzz,” the devil-fly said with something between a wheeze and a buzz. “Or new arrivalzz?” it asked. It walked around the pair, bobbing up and down as it examined the strangers.

  Pomp discovered that her invisibility didn’t work here. She was unable to hide from the devil, so she settled down on Heraclix’s shoulder, which increased her sense of security. For a moment.

  Another nose peeked around the corner and sniffed. A second devil-fly stepped out from behind the corner, this one a foot taller than the other and significantly more corpulent than its companion.

  “Estok, where have you gone? It’z almost time for our whipping, and you know how duh tormentorzz get when we’re late for our”—the bigger one spotted the strangers—“oh!”

  “Juzt found these two zzniveling around, Salamon,” the smaller one wheezed.

  “Should we report dem?” Salamon asked.

  “Nah! We’d juzt get an extra whipping for not reporting them sooner. Besidez, we don’t want to be late for our whippingz. Juzt azz well to keep ‘em around. They might be useful to uzz.”

  A great gong sounded from the other side of the wall.

  “C’mon Estok, we gotta go!” Salamon said.

  “You stay here, yezz?” Estok said to Heraclix and Pomp. “We’ll be back for ya later!”

  The pair of devils disappeared around the corner. The pair of non-devils, of course, peeped around the wall to see what was happening.

  The wall curved some two hundred feet away from their present location, forming a semicircular arena of sorts. Atop the wall stood a variety of devils, a circus of grotesquery. A dozen of them lined the wall, like the antithesis of the saintly statues adorning Prague’s stone bridge. Yet these were not statues. They were very much alive, or at least animated. One had the body of an infant and the wings and head of a dove with plucked-out eyes that shed great gouts of bloody tears. Another looked like a woman who had been skinned, save for her scalp, from which a knee-length mass of barbed wire grew. The wire’s barbs continually lashed her exposed muscles and nerves, causing her to convulse maniacally. A third looked like a stout, pot-bellied human whose arms, legs, nose, mouth, and eyes grew from all the wrong places. There was no hint of gender, though Heraclix thought of it as a man. The other nine were equally bizarre, sporting a variety of strange forms.

  Each of these held an instrument of torture in its hands, claws, tentacles, or whatever it happened to be equipped with. Several held bone-studded scourges, one a pitchfork, one a giant set of pincers, one a pair of red-hot pokers, one a maul, and so forth.

  In the arena itself a rack had been constructed from large bones and sinew. Beneath it were gossamer bits of wing, an insectile arm, and a shattered eye. Surrounding the rack were a hundred or so of the devil-flies, most intact, though some were missing limbs or a wing or an eye. None of them claimed the pieces on the ground, however. A few of the devil-flies were adorned with headgear that differentiated them from the others: a battered crown, a soldier’s helmet, a priest’s mitre.

  As the pair watched, a devil-fly wearing a bronze laurel, which Heraclix took to be some representation of past authority from the condemned’s mortal sojourn, approached the rack where he was tied down by his companions. The surrounding flies pushed and shoved each other in their eagerness to torture the bound fly, who, as his limbs were stretched, shouted out, “My name izz Ernezt Federici. I am guilty of crimezz against my family and myself, having extorted my father’zz fortune from my widowed mother and squandering it on cheap whorezz and wine. My punishment izz just!” Whereupon one of the quorum of twelve demons descended off the wall, falling, flying, or flopping to the ground. It then approached the one on the rack. After ensuring that the victim got a good, long look at the device with which it was to be tortured, the torturer fell upon the confessor with such vengeance, lust, and brutality that Heraclix had to admit that he had never seen anything so violent, so ruthless. The other devil-flies mocked worship of the tortured, kneeling and bowing, praising the victim as it screamed and whimpered in the midst of its torment. After a time, the devil-fly was unstrapped from the rack, the torturer returned to the wall, and the cycle started over again with the next volunteer.

  When the ritual ended, the swarm of devil-flies fell upon each other, kicking, biting, rending. Heraclix and Pomp headed off in a different direction, away from the orgy of rancor. The sounds of suffering were, however, present no matter how far away they walked.

  They occasionally saw groups of Hellish inhabitants marching in chained-together lines or gathered in tortured groups, mostly of the devil-fly variety, though the number of mutations, maimings and surgical perversions seemed infinite. The imagination boggled not at the possibilities but at the reality of a cosmic punishment so excruciating yet so infinitely just, based on the confessions that continually filled the air.

  So, this is eternal torment, Heraclix thought. If mankind were given a glimpse of what awaited the wicked, would they cease to cause suffering to one another in mortality, or would they simply despair and surrender to all animal instincts, knowing that they would eventually have to suffer in the afterlife for their sins anyway?

  He wasn’t sure of the answer, nor did he really want to know, fearing, most of all, the answer he himself might give to such a question. For he had come to doubt his own judgment and his own motives, good or bad. The more he learned, the more he worried that he was on the verge of learning many things about himself that he would rather not have known or have known by others.

  Pomp stays on Heraclix’s shoulder, mostly. Except when she’s flying up to look over the walls, like now. The cavern is as large as a world, though this world has a black sky, a red earth, and no sun or stars—only fire and the occasional shining of some fallen angel wailing its way over the maze of walls in which they travel. She is careful not to attract their attention. There are many other things flying around here. She has seen bat-winged black mares snorting gusts of fire; great bird-winged amorphous blobs that drip acid behind them; fallen angels who shine with a bright light but whose faces look like those of hideous, pestilence-stricken old women; a floating pair of crowned babies tethered together by one umbilical cord between them; dog-sized mosquito-like things with tattered reptilian wings; and clouds of red-eyed golden flies equipped with pincers large enough to take a ten-kreuzer-sized disk of flesh out of a man or devil or anything else it might encounter. She keeps her eye on the sky, Pomp does, or else!

  She stands atop a wall, next to, but above Heraclix, scanning the twists and turns of the way ahead. A skyward cry grabs her attention, and she looks up to see, in the distance, a gigantic serpent with a fanged head at either end, attempting to entwine itself around a gigantic blue gorilla. About the gorilla’s neck is a necklace of skulls. The combating pair plummets toward the ground at breakneck speed. Pomp follows the fall downward, entranced. At the very moment the snake and ape disappear behind a volcano, Pomp sees teeth, then shadow, then nothing as she is enveloped from beneath by the mixed odor of bad breath and rotting meat.

  CHAPTER 11

  Heraclix looked up just in time to see Estok swallow Pomp whole. The devil-fly’s momentum carried its hook of a nose over the top of the wall, enough that Heraclix could jump up and grab the great snout, hauling the creature up and over by the proboscis, breaking it in the process.

  “Gnnaah!” Estok exclaimed. “You should have stayed where I said! Than thizz wouldn’t have happened! Ah, my poor, beautifully nozze.”

  Heraclix hadn’t let go. He jerked his hand this way and that, snapping the nose twice more.

  “Stop! You broke it thrice!”

  “Let her out, or your neck is next! I’ll rip her out of you if I have to!”

  The devil-fly belched up Pomp, who flew up to the area between Estok’s eyes and plucked out a pair of black hairs.

  “Ai, ai! Ztop it!” it said.

  Heraclix let go the shattered remains of its nose. It flopped down like a certain unmentionable
which, Heraclix noted, Estok did not possess.

  It continued to cough and gag. “She scraped my tonzilzz!” Estok complained.

  “I’ll do more than that if you don’t give us the help we need,” Heraclix said after puzzling out what the creature had said.

  “Oh will you, now?” Estok said, suddenly full of bravado now that Heraclix had let go of its nose.

  The golem reached out and tore one of the devil’s arms off.

  “Yes I will!” Heraclix said.

  “I zee,” the now-humbled devil replied. “Ungh,” he rubbed his new stump with one of his three remaining arms. “What can I do for you?”

  “We are looking for a ghost. One that came here shortly before we did.”

  “Oh, that is unfortunate,” the devil said.

  “What is unfortunate?” Heraclix demanded, taking a step forward as if he were going to tear another arm off the devil-fly.

  “I can find this ghost! I can!” Estok cried.

  “Take me to him,” Heraclix said.

  “I was hoping you’d tear another arm off,” Pomp said.

  “Not just yet,” Heraclix replied.

  “Come with me,” the devil-fly motioned for them to follow with his three remaining arms.

  They walked up out of the sharp-ridged maze that they had been in since their introduction to Hell, up a smoldering mountainside, black with ash and white with smoke. An occasional burnt skeletal hand emerged, groped around, then disappeared again beneath the ash. Bones crunched under Heraclix’s feet. The summit flattened out into a desolate plain, littered with sharp shards of obsidian. Scattered across the plain were gaping sinkholes that occasionally spouted flame. Estok wove a curious course among the pond-sized sinkholes, assessing each one in turn, carefully looking for some feature or criteria, the nature of which Heraclix couldn’t divine.

  After passing a dozen or more of the holes, Estok finally stopped at one that seemed to meet its approval. Something in the eyes above its broken nose hinted at glee as it knelt down at the edge of the flaming orifice. It reached in, heedless of the flames that burned the hairs from its arm, and tried to pick up a writhing something. It was difficult to catch, and Estok had to plunge his other two arms in to successfully retrieve the thing from the hole.

  Heraclix was shocked at the sight of the wriggling grub in Estok’s hand. It looked just like the creature embossed on the back of the book The Worm, which Pomp had found at Mowler’s burned-out apartment. Heraclix took the book from his back waistband, where he had carried it, and unwrapped it from the cloth he used to protect it. The worm on the cover was pictured with a human face and a large stinger coming out of the other end. The squirming thing that Estok held was like the representation of those abominations in every way, save one: the worm’s face was clearly that of the old man whose spirit had fled, leading them on the Hellish chase that ended here at this pit.

  “Qurzzikacpzz!” the old man said as Estok held the worm by its stinger, dangling it in the air.

  “Excuse me?” Heraclix said.

  “Xtzbshzz!” the worm exclaimed, then tried to curl up to bite Estok’s hand. Estok flicked its face with a finger, causing it to go limp. It peed on itself.

  “He can’t talk to you,” Estok said.

  “Well, of course not,” Pomp said indignantly, “you made him dead!”

  “Can’t,” Estok said, staring at the old man-worm with something like fondness, like a grandfather looking at his newborn grandson. “He’z already dead, izzn’t he?”

  “I . . . think . . . so,” Pomp said with a puzzled look.

  “He’z juzt a baby,” Estok said with reverence. “Can’t even talk yet, though he wantz to, wantz to say all kindz of nasty thingz to you.”

  “How long will it be before he can talk?” Heraclix asked, growing impatient.

  “Four, five hundred years . . . if he stayz on top of the heap.”

  It dropped the unconscious worm back into the sinkhole. “He won’t stay on top. Too much competition, and he’z only a newborn.” Estok shook its head. Its nose slapped from side to side.

  “This is hopeless,” Heraclix said.

  “Thizz izz Hell,” Estok said.

  After a short silence, Estok said, “So, I may go now?”

  “No,” Heraclix said. “I need you to find someone else.”

  Estok stomped its crow feet like a little child. “I need to get back! The demonz don’t like uzz missing confessionz.”

  Heraclix spoke calmly, but firmly, “I need to talk to someone from Prague, someone well-connected, who died there recently.”

  “Prague? That’zz easy! We have a special place in Hell for thoze that lived in Prague—Jew and Gentile alike.”

  “Then you must take us there. Then I will release you to go enjoy your . . .” Heraclix realized his mistake too late, “. . . erm, torture.”

  The devil glared at the golem.

  “You are truly an idiot,” Estok said with disgust. Then, walking off and looking back with disdain, it said “Are you going to come along or not?”

  Pomp flew in front of Estok, careful to keep out of the devil-fly’s striking distance.

  Estok spoke aloud, unabashed. “I have all eternity to find you again,” it said. “Your brutish friend can’t be with you forever. Next time, there will be too many pieces of you to rescue. Your big friend will have to sew you up like a little dolly, just like he iz all sewn up!”

  The thought made the devil smile, though it really couldn’t help it.

  They left the desert plateau, passing through a forest of dead, charred trees before spotting a color-bleached city that exactly mimicked the form of the earthly Prague. The city was painted weary and dreary. The inhabitants of this mock-Prague were mainly of the devil-fly sort. The occasional greater demon, like the ones Heraclix and Pomp had seen in the torture arena, could be seen strolling through a market place, plundering the unpaid merchants of their wares. The goods consisted of cast-off or involuntarily removed limbs, eyes, and other assorted parts, which customers sewed, tied, or stapled on to replace members lost at the rack.

  Estok led them, at Heraclix’s request, to the place where Caspar might have once dwelt on the earthly plane. It knocked softly, almost daintily. The devil-fly listened carefully at the door, but its attention was soon turned to the noise of a pair of out-of-tune trumpets coming down the cobblestone street.

  Estok darted behind Heraclix, where it cowered, whimpering in fear. Heraclix put his hands out to his side, trying to reassure Estok with his protection from whomever—or whatever—threatened it.

  Around the bend and down the sloping street walked another devil-fly. This one’s head was even larger than Estok’s. Atop the newcomer’s bulbous head was a floppy feathered hat, outdated by at least two centuries, with some sort of shiny coin attached to the front of it. The bigger devil was clad in a dark blue tailored coat that was so thickly studded with ribbons and medallions that it jangled as the wearer bobbed down the street. Two smaller devil-flies, dressed in black robes, walked behind him. Each one carried a beaten brass trumpet.

  “The mayor!” Estok cried.

  “Well, well!” the mayor exclaimed. “Estok, what have you brought uz here?”

  “He . . . he came here by himself!” Estok said in a quavering voice, coming out from behind Heraclix and pointing frantically at the golem.

  “Interesting,” the mayor said. “And you didn’t report this earlier?” It shot a glance at Estok, who shrank back again, cowering.

  “And what bringz you here, my fine fellow?” the mayor asked Heraclix.

  “I desire to speak with Caspar Melthazaar. Do you know where we might find him? He doesn’t seem to be at home.”

  “Oh,” the mayor shook its head and looked at the ground. “I’m afraid Caspar never made it here. We had planned on him coming here, but apparently hiz planz changed.”

  “Changed? You knew he was coming?”

  “Maybe not ‘knew,’ exactly. But we felt
he waz a strong candidate, from the incoming reportzz we received from newcomerzz. Apparently our informantz only looked at the man’z actionz and did not know hizz heart.”

  “Do you get reports of others who come here or who might be . . . heading this direction?”

  “Of course, it happens all the time.”

  “What then, of the sorcerer Mowler?”

  “Mowler?!” the mayor shouted the name aloud. “Mowler! I have no need of hearsay regarding that man . . .”

  “What do you mean?” Heraclix asked.

  “I mean that I know Mowler. Or I knew him. He wazz a contemporary of mine for a time while I served in Prague.”

  “Please tell me what you know. It is very important to me.”