by Edward Lee
BAM!
Gotcha! Krilid rejoiced after the rifle’s delayed discharge. The horrific head of an Usher in the center of the field erupted like a large, ripe fruit. Consternation ensued after that first shot, Conscripts coming to alert in the towers, Torture Attendants being called back to barracks—
BAM!
The head of a Captain of the Guard burst next. Krilid chuckled as he reloaded. Now alarm sirens were sounding. When an Air Viceroy took off on a saddled Gryphon—
BAM!
—Krilid waited till the winged beast had ascended to a sufficient height before he shot its beaked head off. Spiny feathers dispersed, and the Viceroy fell straight down and landed in one of the sulphur beds.
Yeah!
Krilid knew his time was short. Now that the Torturary was under attack, an Archlock would be summoned to determine Krilid’s position. If detected fast enough, Krilid could be blinded or paralyzed via the Psychic Sorcerer’s telepathy, but—
I’ve never killed an Archlock before, he realized.
It was a foolhardy chance he was taking but Krilid felt lucky today. He squinted from the Nectoport’s egress. An Archlock wouldn’t expose himself on the open field but he would have to make a visual assessment of the scenario . . .
Windows, Krilid thought. No Archlock could psychically scan the sky without at least looking out a window.
And Archlocks all gave off auras . . .
Don’t dillydally, Krilid ordered himself, his shooting eye wide open behind the sight.
It was in one of the tiny tower windows that Krilid thought he spotted the tiniest flash of liquid-black light, like a wavering luminous vapor. It was a long shot, but he aimed, squeezed the weapon’s rickety trigger, then bucked backward when the sizable projectile rocketed out of the rifle barrel.
Krilid kept his gnarled fingers crossed. Then—
You gotta be kidding me!
—the prison tower exploded as if demolitioned, not from the impact of the bullet, of course, but from the spontaneous release of cabalistic energy caused by the bullet’s entrance into the Archlock’s skull. Bricks, Conscripts, Ushers, blood, guts, and limbs all flew violently into the air, then rained back down. Bolts of black light like stygian lightning cracked in the wake of the Archlock’s assassination.
Krilid chuckled when he zoomed the Nectoport out of the vicinity. I guess that’s what you call a hole in one.
But his amusement and satisfaction didn’t last long. True, he’d done a good job, but it was only target practice. Very soon, he would be faced with the Real McCoy—and have to score a similar head-shot on Master Builder Joseph Curwen . . .
(III)
Howard turns around, with you on the stick. Suddenly you’re facing all sixty-six of your personal concubines, standing beautiful and nude, in formation, the six Pamela Andersons right up front.
My God, you think. I can’t believe what I’m about to do . . .
“Well, Mr. Hudson?” Howard asks.
You don’t even hesitate now. “I accept the Senary.”
Howard’s pale face seems to flush with relief. “Great Pegana! For a while I truly feared you would turn it down.”
So did I . . . You sigh. “So what happens now?”
“Well, I hope you’ll pardon the cliché, keeping in mind, however, that clichés are actually quite powerful Totems of classicism here.”
“Cliché?”
Howard nods. “You’ll have to sign a formal contract.”
“In blood, I suppose.”
“Yes. Your own.”
Then it strikes you: “I can’t sign a contract! I’m a pumpkin! I’ve got no hands!”
“Not here, Mr. Hudson. Remember, right now you are still in fact an inhabitant of the Living World. Once I displace you back to the Larken House, the Senarial Messenger will have your contract prepared.”
The deaconess, you remember. “So then what? I sign and then kill myself?”
“Goodness no! You still have the rest of your life to enjoy, and you will be able to do so in grand style.”
“I don’t get it,” you tell him.
“Upon putting your commitment into writing, Lucifer will grant a so-called ‘signing bonus,’ in the sum of six million dollars—”
“Six million! In cash?”
“Cash money, sir, this for you to suitably finance yourself until your physical life does, in fact, end. You will die painlessly in your sleep, Mr. Hudson, six days after your sixty-sixth birthday.”
Your demonic eyes bloom. And I’m still young! I’ve still got more than HALF MY LIFE left to live! And with six million bucks to boot!
“There’s only one point I need to make, though, Mr. Hudson, and I cannot overemphasize its pertinency.” Howard looks at you quite seriously. “Once you’ve signed the contract, no amount of repentance can reverse its terms. Once you’ve signed the contract . . . you’ve abandoned God forever.”
The words sink deep.
Howard shrugs. “But with all you’ll be given here, in a lock-solid guarantee? What real man would ever want to repent?”
As you stare once more at all those beautiful women and demons, you can think of nothing—absolutely nothing—to counter what he’s just said. I’ve believed in God my whole life. I’ve done everything in my power for as long as I can remember to SERVE GOD. My faith was so strong that I was going to become a PRIEST. But-but—
“You’ve got a deal, Howard,” you say.
“And so do you, Mr. Hudson. You have Lucifer’s untold gratitude for the victory you’re allowing him to score over God.” Howard takes your Snot-Gourd off the stick. “We’ll all be waiting for you. And I look forward to an eternity of friendship with you.”
“Ditto,” you say.
“And now? Until that wondrous time . . .” Howard removes the pulpy plug in the back of the gourd, and the gas of your Ethereal Spirit slips out like air from a popped balloon . . .
PART FOUR
MACHINATION
CHAPTER ELEVEN
(I)
When Favius’s muscle-girded body dove into the pit, he felt as though he’d landed in a morass of scarlet sewage. He’d done this, though, with no hesitation. The Grand Sergeant may well have already sunk to the bottom, or been consumed by some atrocious seaborne monstrosity that the Pipe-way had transferred to the Reservoir, but—
It is my duty to Lucifer to try to save him.
At once the appallingly thick currents turned him this way and that. The chunky Bloodwater remained turbulent from the winds of the passing storm; alternate currents tugged him farther from the force of still more Bloodwater surging through the sub-inlets. His inhumanly strong arms and legs stroked in the hot red slop. Small things nudged at him, scenting his presence and also his fear, but then some larger things nudged him, too, Divell-Eels, probably, and Gut-Fish. Favius thrashed them away, knowing all the while that much bigger creatures would be scenting him as well, things that could swallow him whole. He knew he had precious little time to find the Grand Sergeant and drag him out.
Holding his breath, he thrust himself down . . .
At the time of the Grand Sergeant’s fall, he’d not yet redonned his plate-mail armor—a good thing, for he’d be easier to drag up. But the bad thing was that Favius still wore his armor, and in spite of his superiority of musculature, he needed twice as much strength to navigate in this living stew. During his desperate motions, he managed to slide off his helmet, and unsnap his breast plate, and this helped minutely. Then his hands groped out as he plunged deeper, feeling for anything that might be his commander, but he knew that his energy would dwindle in moments.
Satan, help me, I beg you . . .
It wasn’t death he feared—as one of the Human Damned, he, like the Grand Sergeant, could not die—but to be swallowed by a Gorge-Worm, for instance, or to have a Gigapede slip instantly down his throat and begin to feed would be far worse than even the grisliest physical destruction. Blind in the Bloodwater, Favius howled bubbles when
a Spirochete-Fluke wrapped about his face. He tore it off with one hand, then shredded it with several maniacal swipes of his sword.
A lost cause, he knew as his energy waned. His hand kept lashing out, hoping to grab something that might be the Grand Sergeant but all he came up with were fistfuls of waste, rotten flesh scraps, or body parts.
One last plunge downward, then—
—and he grabbed an arm still connected to a body. The arm moved . . .
The prospect of hope doubled Favius’s strength. Yes, a living arm was now in his grasp, and then his columnlike legs kicked, and he was propelled upward—
splash!
Favius broke the surface, hauling in breaths; and moaning in his grasp was Grand Sergeant Buyoux.
May the Prince of Darkness be praised!
The Grand Sergeant was still conscious. He heaved in vile breaths after hacking up much Bloodwater.
“Grand Sergeant! Hold on to me!” Favius yelled over the churning din. “I’m losing my strength—”
Even in his terrified stupor, Buyoux looked astonished at the man who’d saved him. “In the name of all things unholy, Favius! You hurled yourself into the maw of almost certain destruction only in the tiniest chance of saving me—”
Favius’s muscles raged in pain from the exertion of breast-stroking through the thick liquid horror. “Try to kick with me, sir! My strength is ebbing from this current . . .”
They managed to splash a sluggish course back to the wall of the rampart, where a rope ladder awaited them.
“We made it!” Buyoux shouted.
Not quite yet, Favius realized. While they remained in the Bloodwater, they were still easy prey; and what might’ve been worse was the fact that the back current at the wall kept forcing them off. Conscripts above dropped more rope ladders; Flavius lunged—
Got it!
—and grabbed one.
What little strength remained was used to shove Grand Sergeant Buyoux up.
“Grab the rung!”
Buyoux’s enfeebled hands barely managed to do so. “It should be you on this ladder, not I—”
“Climb, Grand Sergeant!”
Favius used his own weight at the bottom to steady the ladder. It was the back current along the wall that made it almost impossible. Meanwhile, one rung at a time, Buyoux clawed his way up—
“You’re the bravest man in Hell, Favius—”
“Climb!”
Feet from the top, several Conscripts grabbed Buyoux and pulled him safely over the wall. The troops cheered—
Favius’s muscles spasmed as he doggedly began to climb the ladder.
“Get him up!” Buyoux bellowed.
Another rung, then another. Then—
snap!
The rung broke. Favius fell back into the Bloodwater.
He began to drift backward in the current.
“No!” Buyoux screamed above.
I’m not going to make it, Favius knew. His strength was gone now—he was helpless to fight his way back against the current, but then—
Silence slammed down over the entire Reservoir. The roar of the Main Sub-Inlets . . . ceased.
And the current died.
“Favius! Swim!”
It must have been by the grace of Satan that Favius was able to find more strength and stroke his way back toward the wall where a dozen rope ladders waited for him.
But even in his terror, he didn’t understand. What’s happening?
“Faster!” Buyoux shouted. “The pumps have been turned off, which can only mean the Reservoir is filled!”
Filled? Favius continued de-energized strokes toward the ladder. The silence stifled him, but now he thought he smelled something very sudden and not characteristic of the heinous Reservoir and its six billion gallons of Bloodwater; and when, on his next stroke forward, he happened to glance up—
Several unhelmed Conscripts seemed . . . out of sorts.
Their hair was standing on end.
“For Satan’s sake, Favius! Swim faster! The Merge is about to take place, and if you’re in the water when that happens—”
Favius didn’t hear the rest. Just as his hand would grab hold of a ladder rung—
The ladder disappeared, and so did the retaining wall and the ramparts and the bloodred sky and the black sickle moon and everything else in the rest of Hell.
(II)
Dorris felt dizzy; she felt terrified. What was happening? When she’d first looked at herself in the bait-house mirror, her blazing white hair—feet long—stood on end and stuck out like an aura. Initially she’d thought she was being electrocuted but her rubber flip-flops stood on a perfectly dry wood-plank floor.
When she’d rushed outside, the dizziness—and her terror—quadrupled. That smell! Like an electric motor overrunning, and then the simple feel of the lake and its surroundings. Nothing looked wrong, but it all felt wrong. It reminded her of a bad trip way back in her acid days.
Oh, my God almighty, she groaned to herself. Her slim legs propelled her quickly to the end of the dock. A crisp, cloudless twilight pressed down, a slice of moon radiating. The immense lake sat still, rippleless—surreal in some distinctly unpleasant way. The sudden silence, too, struck her as unpleasant. Summer evenings on the lake brought an absolute ruckus of cricket choruses and night bird songs, but now?
Nothing but proverbial pin-drop silence.
Impossible, Dorris knew.
The wheelchair sitting at the dock-end reminded her of the day’s only rental customer. That young man who can’t walk . . . So she’d called him on the emergency walkie-talkie—she had to know if the lake’s abrupt strangeness was only in her mind—something she almost hoped was true—but his own observations confirmed her own.
What is going ON?
It had been over a half hour ago that she’d called him in. Had he had some medical problem? Surely his arms were strong enough to row the boat back in less time than that. She stood tense and straining on the dock, her eyes pressed into the binoculars, but even in the strong moonlight, she couldn’t see him.
Please, please, son! Get yer ass back here . . .
Was it the first true premonition of her life? As her stomach twitched, and that stiff, ozonelike smell sharpened, Dorris knew that something was going to happen.
When she scanned along the lake’s coast, she noticed that the usual folks that always fished at night were packing up and hightailing it out. Clearly, they sensed the same inexplicable thing that Dorris did, yet she couldn’t imagine what that thing was. Then—
There! she thought. Her implants jounced when she shot to her tiptoes; in the binoculars’ hourglass viewing field, she could make out the tiny form of the paralyzed man rowing through a pool of moonlight.
The loudest sound she’d ever heard erupted next, not an explosion, not the earsplitting sound that accompanied a massive lightning bolt, but something more like timber splitting or a colossal tree cracking as it was felled. The sound urged Dorris to scream louder than she ever had in her life but even that couldn’t be heard over the monstrous cracking . . .
Then came a single, concussive BOOM!
Had a bomb actually been dropped on the lake? The notion was absurd, but what else could it be? A terrorist attack? Here, of all places? Not that Dorris could think deductively at the moment; terror and confusion obfuscated all rational thought. In the vicious boom’s wake came some sort of displacement of air that slammed her in the stomach, lifted her out of her flip-flops, and flung her down the dock, screaming all the way. She landed hard on her back. All the wind blurted out of her lungs, and when the back of her head smacked the dock, she blacked out at once.
It must’ve been a dream—a nightmare—that dropped into her mind during the brief period of unconsciousness: a nightmare of sounds . . .
The sounds were screams, screams of human slaughter en masse—indeed, screams from another world. A deafening waterfall of relentless human and unhuman agony as though millions of people in a thous
and different cities were being butchered in place all at the same time, a sound, a living blare that raged and raged and raged through some incomprehensible rent in the sky . . .
Silence, then.
Though it seemed like hours, it was only a minute or two that passed before Dorris regained consciousness. Memories dripped slowly back into her awareness yet her daze kept them from making sense. She rolled over, tried to rise to hands and knees but then collapsed back down, heaving. She reeled as if seasick, and now, as she blinked back more and more consciousness, she noticed not only the dead-calm silence but also a deep earthy odor just short of a stench that now replaced the previous ozone smell. An odor like low, low tide . . .
Several more attempts proved to her that she couldn’t yet stand. But I can crawl, she thought, determined, and crawl she did, on her palms and knees, back down the dock.
That man, she kept thinking. The handicapped man. Was he still out on the lake when that awful sound had struck?
At the end of the dock, the wheelchair still sat, and so did the walkie-talkie. She reached for it, but then her hand fell away limp as she looked outward at the same time.
Dorris’s soul seemed to flatten like a ping-pong ball under a hammer blow . . .
She used a mooring post to steady herself as she slowly rose back to her feet. The low-tide odor hung everywhere, dense as steam. But that was not what made her eyes feel stripped of their lids. That was not what wiped her cognizance clean as chalk marks off slate.
It was the lake.
Dorris stood paralyzed, staring.
Lake Misquamicus was empty. What stretched all about her now was a shallow crater lined by glistening black silt, limp waterweeds, and scores of remnant fish flapping helpless in mud. Every single one of the lake’s six billion gallons was gone.
(III)
Gerold could not conceive of a way to assess what he’d experienced, save to say that it was not like waking up. He wasn’t even sure if he’d lost consciousness. I was in the boat, I was rowing back to the dock . . . Then—
