by Edward Lee
There’d been an horrendous cracking noise, then a boom.
And now he was here.
Madness, he thought now. He was still in the boat, and when he looked over the side he saw that he was still on the lake, only the lake . . .
Madness, madness, madness . . .
The lake was somewhere else now.
One moment he’d been looking at the glittering twilight over Lake Misquamicus, but now he was looking at a sky the color of deoxygenated blood. And the sickle moon was now radiant black, not radiant white.
Screaming never occurred to him when he squinted out in every direction. The water in which the rowboat floated was surrounded by endless black walls pocked with towers like castle ramparts, and along those ramparts men, or things like men, prowled about. Men—soldiers—in strange, horned helmets, wielding pikes and swords. Larger figures could be seen interspersed, plodding, drab things with barely any faces . . .
What the fuck is this?
All at once, the horned soldiers on the ramparts began to cheer. Several more were lowering a boat into the water.
Gerold could do little more than stare out.
A drone invaded his ears; then he saw a line of liquid green light hovering toward him—
Sssssssssssssssss-ONK!
Now Gerold did scream.
The line of green light dilated to a wavering circle—a hole in the sky—and from that hole two hands that were clearly not human reached out, grabbed his arms, and pulled him in.
He was dropped into something like a black cave; then he sensed that the cave was moving off very quickly, soaring up into the alien air. In moments, all he could see was the bloodred sky.
“Don’t panic,” said a figure with its back to him. Gerold crawled forward, dragging his dead legs behind. He wasn’t sure what his impulse was. To see? To confront the figure that had pulled him out of the boat and into this . . . this place?
Or to jump back out?
“I can’t believe it,” the figure said. “The coordinates were right—we made it!” And then the figure turned to face Gerold.
Gerold screamed again, loud and hard. “You’re a monster!”
The figure let out a snide chuckle. “Actually, I’m a Troll, thank you very much.” His voice sounded like any normal man’s, but everything else?
Gerold screamed a third time.
This . . . Troll stood hunched over, shirtless, with greenish brown skin stretched over hillocks of muscles. He wore pants that looked like burlap and boots that were stitched up the middle. Each wide hand possessed only three fingers and a thumb and had nails like a bear’s. And his head . . .
“Man, your head’s all fucked up!” Gerold bellowed in ceaseless horror. “It looks squashed.”
“That’s ’cos when I was in jail, they put me in a Head-Bender. Don’t worry about it.” Now the figure took a candle off the side of the interior wall and touched it to each fingertip of a severed hand. “Hand of Glory,” the Troll informed. “Got no time to explain, just that it keeps the outer Observation Egress of the Nectoport invisible.”
Gerold shuddered where he sat.
“Yeah”—the Troll glanced out the large circle before him in which the red sky soared—“we’re safe now, er, at least for the time being.”
“WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING!” Gerold shouted.
The Troll sat down on an outcropping in the wall. “Look, man, I know you’re confused and scared and a million other things. My name’s Krilid, and yours is Gerold, right?”
Gerold nodded, teeth chattering. Suddenly he was aware of stifling heat.
“You’re in Hell,” Krilid said.
Gerold gaped.
“I don’t have time to answer all your questions—we gotta be somewhere else, like, real soon. But I’ll give you the short version—”
“I’m in HHHHHHH—Hell?” Gerold managed.
“Only Hell’s probably not what you imagined.” Krilid picked Gerold up by his armpits, and held him up to the circular opening so he could look down.
Gerold screamed yet again.
“Hell’s a big city, the biggest in history. It’s bigger than all the cities in the Living World all put together.”
Gerold felt frozen as he looked down out of the opening. There was a city down there, all right—a leaning, shrieking, smoke-gusting city without end—
“It’s called the Mephistopolis, and this thing you’re in is called a Nectoport, the most sophisticated mode of transportation in the Abyss. We bootlegged the technology. It can travel great distances in seconds by using occult mathematics to collapse values of space.”
“I-I-I-I . . . WHAT?” Gerold blabbered.
“I understand. Just listen, though, and make of it what you will, okay? Clairvoyants in Heaven foresaw your coming here; that’s how I was able to pick you up. I’m a Troll in Hell but I work for God, and a Fallen Angel named—well, forget all that, no time. I pulled you out of your boat for a reason . . .”
“A reason,” Gerold droned.
“I’m on a mission, and I’m hoping you’ll go along with it.”
Gerold’s head spun and spun. This couldn’t be happening. It had to be a nightmare but then he somehow knew it wasn’t. Whatever this thing, this Troll, this . . . guy named Krilid meant, Gerold found incontemplatable.
The opening continued to soar through the scarlet sky.
“You were gonna kill yourself, right?” Krilid asked, keeping one eye out the opening. “ ’Cos you can’t walk?”
“How do you know that?” Gerold snapped.
“Same way I knew you’d be in the Reservoir. It was foreseen. And let me tell you, it’s a good thing you didn’t kill yourself ’cos if you had, you’d be here.”
Gerold stared agog. “I already AM here!”
“Yeah, but not as a member of the Human Damned. You’re still alive, man. You’re a member of the Living World, but you’re in Hell. Why? Because of a fluke.”
Gerold pushed his hair out of his face. “Yeah, I’ll say.”
“If you had really killed yourself, you’d be damned here for all eternity. Period. No exceptions.”
“Then how did I get here?” Gerold finally regained enough of his senses to ask.
“I told you, a fluke, an accident, but we foresaw that accident and used it to our advantage,” the Troll said. Now he picked up a long musket-style rifle and began swabbing the barrel out. He chuckled. “You happened to be on that lake at the same exact moment that Lucifer’s smartest occultists pulled a Spatial Merge—”
Gerold winced. “A what?”
“It’s pretty cool,” Krilid said. “There’s no fresh water in Hell, so Satan figured he’d steal some—six billion gallons’ worth—from the Living World.”
Six billion gallons, came the grim thought. “That’s how much water was in Lake Misquamicus . . .”
“Um-hmm. And now all that water is here, in the Vandermast Reservoir. It was built especially for this operation. Satan wants to build an oasis or some shit, so he activated a massive Spatial Merge to bring all that water here—”
“All that water,” Gerold croaked, “and me with it.”
“Yep, and, depending on your frame of mind”—Krilid raised a scarlike brow—“you can look at your situation as a bad thing . . . or a good thing.”
Even in the midst of all this impossibility and all this horror, Gerold laughed. “How can being in Hell be a good thing?”
Krilid raised a Monocular with a bloodshot eyeball where the lens should be. “Just . . . be patient, and you’ll see.”
Gerold was about to crawl forward again, to look back out, but suddenly, the Nectoport’s oval opening flashed blinding white, and inertia shoved him back. Immediately there came the sense of bending, of his body somehow elongating; the strange walls of the compartment he sat in elongated as well.
Krilid tremored slightly, like one sitting on a trolley over bad tracks. He said, “We’re going to the Pol Pot District now, collapsing space.” An
d, next, the white flash ceased, to be replaced again by more bloodred sky. “Take a look now.”
Gerold dragged himself forward and looked out.
They hovered maybe a half a mile up, through wisps of soot-colored clouds. The clouds stunk, and when he craned his neck over the Egress’s rim, the entire city below stunk as well.
More teetering buildings and gas-gushing smokestacks. Bizarre creatures darted quickly up and down decrepit skyscrapers. Anywhere he might look, some figure was seen jumping out of a high window. Gerold gaped closer at the streets themselves. Sewer grates belched flames; masses of figures—Human and otherwise—clogged trash-strewn and blood-splattered avenues. Long, clattering cars putted about as well as carriages drawn by fanged, malformed creatures that sufficed for horses. Clay men loomed on every corner, sentinel-like as they scanned the masses. Any and all free space between buildings were stakes on which severed heads had been planted. There were thousands of them, tens of thousands. Additionally, piles of dead bodies lay everywhere, while squads of forced laborers trudged to the task of flinging the bodies into carts and wheeling them away. Gerold was too nauseated to ask . . .
“We’re getting close,” Krilid said. He handed Gerold the Monocular. “There’s the security perimeter . . .”
Gerold gulped with a dry throat when he elbowed up and looked through the glass. A heavily walled clearing existed amid the center of the District, the size of a football field. In each corner, Mongrel Demons and Human Damned were being tortured on racks or boiled in oil vats, and the resultant screams rose and fell like some mad, dissonant background music.
It was not the walled perimeter itself that stole Gerold’s breath and constricted his stomach, it was the perimeter’s most salient feature.
The fucking thing is HUGE, Gerold thought.
A hulking statue over 500 feet high spired from the middle of the perimeter. Muck-black like tar mixed with excrement mixed with mud. Its contours had been meticulously shaped to heighten its overall hideousness; Gerold thought of King Kong dunked with pitch. But the face . . .
The face—
Gerold threw up over the side when he zoomed the Monocular in on its face.
“Yeah, don’t look at it too long,” said Krilid. “I’ve heaved a couple times myself, thinking about that face. They put an Unutterability Hex on it—what you see is a cross between the most horrifying faces in Hell all wrapped up in one . . .”
“What is it?” Gerold gagged, noting that all those delicious crayfish he’d eaten earlier were now raining down.
“It’s called a Demonculus,” the Troll told him. “The most powerful weapon to ever be invented here.”
Gerold blundered with the word. “A Demonc . . .”
“It’s like a 666-foot voodoo doll that they’re going to bring to life with their round-the-clock sacrifices and spook-show sorcery.”
“Bring . . . to life?” Gerold gasped. “That-that . . . thing?”
Smirking, Krilid nodded. “See all that mist all over the place down there, that looks like it’s glowing?”
“Yuh-yeah . . .” The mist sparkled like sheets of fireflies.
“That’s the Hell-Flux. It’s air that’s charged with occult energy, and those transformer-looking things with the coils sticking up are Electrocity Generators. Those are the things that convert horror, pain, and agony into a tangible force. The sacrifices maintain that force, but a little while ago, sixty-six million people were all slaughtered at once all over the city by Mutilation Battalions. A lot of that power was used for the Spatial Merge that brought you and all that lake water to the Reservoir, but the overflow was diverted here, to dump into that.” Krilid pointed to the immobile Demonculus.
Gerold stuttered. “Wuh-wuh-when will they bring it to life?”
Krilid raised the antique rifle. “Now.”
The rifle was fitted with its own Monocular, in the fashion of a sniper sight. “But one more thing has to happen before they can activate the Demonculus. It needs a heart. Only then can it come to life to do Lucifer’s bidding.” The Troll sighted the rifle. “Look down at the thing’s chest now.”
Hands trembling, Gerold did so. A strange fenced platform was hovering near the immense creature’s chest, a platform held aloft by hot-air balloons of some sort. Gerold noticed that a hole seemed to have been bored into the dead thing’s chest. Several unspeakably ugly demons busied themselves on the platform, one unsheathing a knife, another lifting up a pair of bolt cutters. But there was another figure there, a human, with bottomless eyes and a beard. He was taking off a jacket that shined like polished chrome.
“That’s the mission target. His name is Master Builder Curwen—he’s an Archlock of the highest conditioning—Lucifer’s smartest Sorcerer, and it’s his heart that will give the Demonculus life.”
Gerold shot the Troll a funky look. “But how can—”
“They’re gonna cut out his heart and put it in the chest cavity,” Krilid said, sighting the rifle and cocking the hammer, “so I have to head-shot the guy before they can do that. Then . . .”
“Then what?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute . . .”
BAM!
Krilid bucked back when the rifle went off. A gust of black smoke spewed out of the muzzle. But when they both looked back through their Monoculars . . .
“Oh, shit!” Krilid yelled.
“You missed!”
Hundreds of feet below them, alarms began to sound.
The demons on the platform were frantic now, and so was the bearded man. The bolt cutters were brought to bear . . .
Krilid fumbled to reload, but Gerold saw another rifle leaning against the wall. He grabbed it.
“Let me do it, man. You can’t hit an elephant’s ass with a bass fiddle.”
“There’s no scope on that!” the Troll yelled.
Gerold elbowed up. “Hey! They already cut the guy’s heart out—”
“Then don’t shoot Curwen! Shoot the heart!”
Gerold frowned at the nearly impossible instruction. He lined the V-notch up to the breech post, cocked the hammer, then took a breath. Meanwhile, as Curwen’s body convulsed on the platform floor, his opened chest cavity welling blood, a dog-faced demon grabbed the severed heart and began to reach upward. He meant to put the still-beating heart into the hole in the giant thing’s chest.
“Hurry!” Krilid yelled, still fumbling with his powder.
Gerold let out half a breath—
BAM!
The rudely large bullet shot the demon’s hand off with Curwen’s heart still in it. Both hand and heart plunged to the ground.
“Great shot!” Krilid celebrated.
Gerold felt a twinkle of pride. “Yeah, not bad, but . . . now what?”
“Now what?” Krilid smiled. The Nectoport soared down, the force of its movement nudging the balloon platform away. “Now’s when you get to decide if you want to be a hero.”
“What?”
“Look, we’re banking on you saying yes—”
“Saying yes to what?” Gerold snapped, annoyed.
The Egress of the Nectoport sucked right up to and over the ragged hole in the Demonculus’s chest. “What do you want more than anything, Gerold?”
Gerold needed no time to reflect. “I want to walk.”
“Well, look, there’s no way we can send you back to the Living World, but you were going to kill yourself there anyway.”
“What are you talking about?”
“But we can make it so you can walk again . . . or I should say you can.”
Gerold was about to blurt out another objection but then—
He stared at the chest hole, then looked back to Krilid.
Krilid nodded. “I offered to do it right off the bat but it wouldn’t work. See, it has to be a Human heart.”
Gerold’s mind revved like gears in a machine. He took off his life preserver, then took off his shirt.
“Good man,” Krilid said, having already picked up a
tool that looked like a branch cutter. “But . . . it’s gonna hurt.”
“I would never have guessed,” Gerold mocked. He lay down flat, hands fisted. He squeezed his eyes shut. “Just do it. I don’t care how much it hurts.”
“You got balls, Gerold.” The branch cutters keened when Krilid opened them . . .
First: crack! as the curved blade slunked into Gerold’s solar plexus and then the sternum was separated.
Gerold bellowed.
Then: click, click, click, click, click, as all the ribs on the left side were snapped.
Pain? Gerold could never have conceived of such pain, but, What did I expect? He’s cutting my heart out! he somehow was able to think even over the insurmountable agony. But just as that same agony reached a terrifying peak . . .
It ebbed away, to numbness, and then Gerold’s spirit felt like vapor spinning round in a blender on the highest speed.
Meanwhile, Krilid severed all the necessary arteries and removed Gerold’s heart.
And he put it, still beating, into the hole in the Demonculus’s chest . . .
CHAPTER TWELVE
(I)
Hudson’s eyes snapped open like someone who’d just wakened from a nightmare of falling. He remained sweat-drenched in the attic chair, stewing in the insufferable heat. The hole in the wall met his direct line of sight, and through it all he could see was the straggly backyard tinted by moonlight.
The candles guttered all around him.
“You’re back,” whispered the deaconess, “from a journey only eleven people in history have taken . . .”
Hudson nodded and drew in a long breath. “It wasn’t a dream, was it?”
“No. It was the greatest of all privileges.” She stepped from the dark corner, her nude body shellacked in sweat itself. The macabre crucible of the baby’s skullcap remained below the hole in the wall, but the Sterno had long gone out.
“I can tell by your aura,” said the deaconess. “You’ve accepted the Senary.”
“Yes.”
“Praise Lucifer,” she sighed. “You will one day be a Privilato, the greatest thing to be in Hell save for Lucifer himself.”
