by Edward Lee
“After I die, at age sixty-six. That’s what I was told.”
The robust woman handed Hudson a towel. He felt winded yet also content when he dried the sweat off his body and put his clothes back on. “I was also told something about six million dollars in cash . . .”
The deaconess grinned. “Such greed! How wonderful! But . . . first things first.” She handed him a piece of paper . . . and an ice pick.
“I guess this is self-explanatory,” Hudson commented. He didn’t like pain but considering . . .
MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT, read the contract, along with a simplification of everything he’d been promised. And all I have to trade for it is my soul . . .
He winced as he punctured his forearm with the awl, saw blood well up; then he ran the point along the blood.
Signing his name was harder than he thought.
“There.”
The deaconess looked awed at the sheet of paper. “You’re so, so privileged . . .” Suddenly she fell to her knees, hugging Hudson’s hips. “Please, I beg you. In my own Damnation, recruit me into your harem! I would be so honored to serve a Privilato! Please!”
“Sure,” Hudson agreed, “but . . . where’s that six million?”
Her smile seemed drunken now from what he’d just granted her. She kissed his crotch, and pointed behind him.
Two Samsonite suitcases sat on the other side of the room. This can’t be possible, he thought, but when he opened them, all he could do was stare for full minutes. Each hefty suitcase had been filled with banded one-hundred-dollar bills.
“There are six hundred bands, ten thousand dollars per band,” the deaconess told him.
Hudson grunted when he hefted each case. “It’s a good thing these suitcases have wheels.” But then another thought came to him. “Wait a minute. I can’t roll two big-ass suitcases to a bus stop in a ghetto, at night. I’d get mugged in two seconds.”
The deaconess’s bare skin glittered in the candlelight. “Lucifer guarantees your safety, not just in Hell but here also. From this point on, nothing can ever hurt you.”
“Really,” Hudson replied, not terribly confident.
“Oh, yes. In fact, you’ll be protected by not one but two Warding Incantations, which are quite similar to the occult bridle which protects Manse Lucifer from any anti-Satanic endeavor.”
“That’s hard-core . . .”
“I’ll demonstrate.” The deaconess wielded the ice pick.
Hudson’s heart skipped a beat.
“Any object turned on you as a weapon will be repulsed—” The deaconess threw the ice pick hard as she could right at Hudson—
“Shit!”
—but as it flew directly for his face, it veered harmlessly off and stuck in the bare-wood wall.
“Wow!”
“And any person who might attempt to assault you with his bare hands”—the nude woman smiled more mischievously—“will instantly have his blood removed from his body.”
Hudson recalled the bold but luckless insurgents’ attempt to bomb the Manse, and how their blood had been magically sucked out of every orifice.
He looked at her, at the contract in her hand, then at the suitcases. “I guess . . . all there is for me to do now is—”
“Go home, and enjoy the rest of your life here with your riches, knowing that many more riches await when you die and rise to the glory of Lucifer.”
So. That’s it, I guess. Hudson scratched his head. “What are your plans?”
“I will rise to that glory now, Mr. Hudson,” she said. “As your Senarial Messenger, I have but one more duty to perform: the execution of your contract.”
Contract in hand, the deaconess walked demurely to the chair, then stood on it.
“Hey! You’re not going to—”
“But I must, Mr. Hudson.” From a rafter she pulled down a previously prepared noose and calmly put it around her neck. “I’ll see you at your castle in the future.”
Hudson froze.
The deaconess rolled the contract into a ball, put it in her mouth, and stepped off the chair
THUNK . . .
Jesus, Hudson thought. He watched her hang there, the nude body agleam, swaying ever so gently. The rope creaked several times, then tightened to silence.
(II)
“The lake,” Dorris muttered, “is empty.” How sane she was at this time could hardly be estimated. She’d been standing there on the pier for several minutes—six minutes, to be precise—when, sane or not, some modicum of reason began to wriggle back into her consciousness . . .
What happened to my beautiful lake?
Overhead, the white moon sliver beamed. Stars sparkled in gorgeous, deep twilight, and the cricket sounds that had abated so abruptly earlier began to resume. All that she perceived would’ve been normal again, save for one irrevocable fact:
The lake was empty.
She remained there, cockeyed, limp armed, and slump shouldered, her eyes holding fast to the vast black depression that had once held six billion gallons of water.
It’s gone. It’s . . . all gone . . .
A fleeting thought returned again to the young man. Still, his wheelchair remained at the end of the pier, and when Dorris was cognizant enough to look back out with her binoculars, there was no sign of him or the boat.
A crisp static sound made her flinch, like a radio with bad reception. Then: The walkie-talkie!
It, too, remained at the end of the pier. Her lithe legs took her desperately to the small device. She snapped it up—
“Hon?” she shrieked when she jammed in the talk button. “That you? Where are ya?”
The walkie-talkie crackled back, and within the burst of static she felt sure she heard someone speaking.
“The lake!” she blurted. “Somethin’-somethin’ happened, and the lake ain’t here no more.” She didn’t know what she was trying to say. “But wherever it went . . . I guess you must’a went with it!”
More static after she released the button to listen. But—yes!—a voice was responding, however weakly, through the shifting white noise. It said this:
“All hail Lucifer the Morning Star. We bow down and sing praises to his unholy name—”
Dorris stared at the walkie-talkie. There could be no mistake; she had heard the voice, and the voice had not been that of the young handicapped man. The voice sounded deep, wet, and rotten.
It continued, “It worked! In the name off all things offensive to God—it worked!” And there followed a guttering round of the blackest laughter.
Dorris dropped the walkie-talkie, not only from the shock of the hellish voice but from a sudden return of the massive crackling sound she’d heard earlier. Again, her shiny white hair began to stand on end, and then—
BOOM!
Just like before, Dorris was thrown all the way back to the dock entrance, to land hard on her back. It was that same bomb-blast sound, and the concussion that followed in its wake. Half-unconscious, she tossed and turned on the old wood planks, and after many feeble moments of this, she managed to crawl up another mooring post. She took one deep breath—
OH MY GOD!
—and fell back to her knees to violently vomit.
It was not the earthy, low-tide smell that so effectively sickened her, it was something else, an odor so obscene it nearly shut down her senses. Her stomach kept heaving, and when it was emptied, it heaved more. Her eyes stung and her head pounded from what was not only the worst stench she could ever imagine but actually the worst stench to ever exist on the planet Earth.
Bile hanging in strings off her lips, she then dared to look back out . . .
With that second incomprehensible boom, Lake Misquamicus had been refilled, but not with lake water.
With blood.
With blood, and body parts, and debris, and sewage, and nameless and unnameable creatures, and myriad else not of this earth.
Dorris’s screams flew out of her mouth like tossed ribbons. Fish with vaguely human fac
es broke the bloody surface to snap at her with doglike teeth. Skeletons, severed limbs, and even some severed heads floated by, some of which moved with impossible life. A shadow beneath the red water wove under the dock, sidewinding and clearly a hundred yards long. Dorris staggered backward, unable to close her eyes, fearing—and even hoping—that the evil stench would kill her in her tracks. Several dented kegs floated by, like oversize beer kegs. From within one of them, she heard a rapid beating sound as of frantic fists, and a shrill female shriek: “Would somebody PLEASE let me out!”
The lake teemed with sounds now, sounds Dorris had never heard and would never be able to describe. When she managed to backtrack off the pier, another trickle of reason returned in spite of the madness she’d born witness to, and from a tiny pocket in her shorts, she unconsciously withdrew her car keys—
Got to get to the car! Got to get out of here!
But just as she would turn to do so, she froze at another sound.
Footsteps?
Yes, a procession of wet, slopping footsteps, like someone in hip waders marching out of a shallow tidal pool.
And then, in the silverish moonlight, she saw that someone with her own eyes, the figure of a man—a very large man—marching out of the noxious water and onto the shore.
First one, then two, then three such men.
Doris continued to stare dizzily at the spectacle. Most of her sanity, by now, of course, had been corrupted by what she was beholding. As the shlucking footfalls drew closer, she saw that they weren’t really men at all but hideous facsimiles: great glistening slablike figures almost ten feet tall. Details of the physical bodies seemed half formed as though they were but massive clay dolls bestowed with only the merest humanity. Their faces barely existed, just slits for eyes, slits for mouths . . .
Dorris couldn’t move as the three things approached. Her heart was trip-hammering; she could only pray that it would stop beating before they got to her.
But it didn’t.
A wide shadow cast by the tinseled moonlight crossed Dorris’s face. She stared and drooled. The things seemed to be staring, too, at her, but not with eyes for they had none, but with gashes where their eyes should be.
They looked at her a while, then turned, then moved hulkingly away to eventually stand up near the bait house. They stood perfectly still, in a perfectly straight line, almost as if . . . they were waiting for something.
SomeTHING? Dorris’s faltering brain managed. Or someONE?
Perhaps the horror had ravaged her consciousness so intricately that she’d been tainted with some psychic inclination, because when she looked dazedly back at the blood-filled and blight-infested lake, she did indeed see someone else coming out—but not another of these looming clay monstrosities.
It was a man.
(III)
Oh, wow, I don’t like this, Krilid thought after he’d debarked from the Nectoport and sent it back to Ezoriel’s headquarters. Suddenly his fear of heights returned, with no more Nectoport to shelter him. It’s just me and the Great Outdoors . . .
When he dared look down, his belly flip-flopped. Six hundred and sixty-six feet was a long way down . . .
It was on the left shoulder of the Demonculus that Krilid now sat, in a convenient little observation cupola.
When he’d slammed Gerold’s raw heart into the monster’s cardiac cavity, the Hell-Flux had audibly groaned down below, and its pallid luminescence had momentarily trebled. Meanwhile, the Anti-Light at the end of the cavity had sparked, signaling that the Animation Spells were properly engaged and conduction had been achieved. All the while, the Electrocity Generators down below kicked up into high rev from an occult detection sensor, to drain off all available Deathforce power . . .
These things meant that everything was working right. All systems go, Krilid had thought, a bit incredulous that nothing yet had gone wrong.
On the field at the Demonculus’s massive feet, throngs of Conscripts rallied, firing up curse-tipped arrows and sulphur guns, but the creature’s sheer size reduced their efforts to futility. Krilid chuckled. Like throwing pebbles . . . But Krilid’s chuckle ground down when he spotted several more Balloon Skiffs beginning to rise from their launch platforms. Not good, the Troll realized. We need to be far away by the time those balloons can reach this altitude. Archlocks and Bio-Wizards would undoubtedly be on the Skiffs, and would try all guises of Hexes and Cabalistic Viruses in hopes of disabling the Demonculus before it became ambulatory.
But . . . when would that be?
“Hey, Gerold!” Krilid yelled up from the cupola’s little side window. He was shouting toward the crude hole where the Demonculus’s ear should be. “Can you hear me yet?”
The giant muck-made head remained motionless.
Krilid began to feel sick.
Why wasn’t it working? He’d done everything as instructed. Had Lucifer’s Sorcerers planted countermeasure devices within the Demonculus? So much for Ezoriel’s fortune tellers, the Troll lamented.
A mile up ahead, an attack formation of Gryphons were beginning to swoop down . . .
Krilid got out of the cupola and ran to the base of the Demonculus’s neck. “Gerold! Come on! Make this thing work!”
No response. The Demonculus didn’t budge, nor could any sign of unlife be detected about the creature’s appalling face.
“Damn it!” Krilid kicked at a muscle strand in the Demonculus’s neck. “The friggin’ thing’s busted!”
Several flaming arrows zinged by. Below, the Balloon Skiffs had ascended several hundred feet already, and the Gryphon formation . . .
More arrows began to sail toward the monster.
Krilid ducked just in time to miss being hit in the head. His guts sunk when he noticed Conscripts riding the first waves of Gryphons, bearing buckets of pitch. The second wave was manned by Flamma-Troopers. These horned, armless Terrademons were Hexegenically bred to vomit fire . . .
The Conscripts will paste the Demonculus with pitch, and then the Flamma-Troopers will set it on fire . . .
Along with me.
Then—
ZZZZZZip!
—another arrow sailed by, this one nicking Krilid’s ear. Off balance he flinched, tried to stabilize his footing, but then tripped on a stray bone jutting up from the dead meat and filth that composed the Demonculus’s shoulder—
Oh my God, I’m gonna—
Krilid fell.
He fell fast. He didn’t scream, and he barely panicked. What he did mostly was frown at his clumsiness as he tumbled head over heels toward the hellish field below.
All that work, all that risk, all that planning . . . all for nothing . . .
Fifty feet. A hundred. He caught glimpses of the Demonculus’s nightmarish body as he continued to fall, picking up speed.
A hundred and fifty feet.
Two hundred.
What a way to go, Krilid thought, spinning.
WHAP!
With an unexpected jolt, Krilid landed in muck. The ground? But, no, he couldn’t have fallen that fast, could he? And if he’d hit the ground and somehow lived, Conscripts and Ushers would be dicing him to pieces. When his dizziness passed, he realized that he felt encased in more of the stinking muck.
Then he felt himself elevating, and whatever steam shovel–like thing it was that encased him . . . opened.
Hot wind blew into his face; Krilid was looking at the scarlet sky.
“Krilid, are you all right?” a voice seemed to crunch and echo at the same time. Not a human voice at all, yet there was something . . . familiar about its pitch.
Krilid realized then that he was standing in the opened palm of the Demonculus’s left hand, a fifty-foot-long hand.
“Gerold!” he shrieked when he got the gist.
The immense hand lifted Krilid until he was face level with the Demonculus.
“Thought I lost you there,” the monster’s voice crumbled out from impossible lips.
“Thanks for catching me,” Krilid s
aid, but then a surge in his heart reminded him that they still weren’t out of the woods. “Gerold, listen, we’re under attack right now—”
“Under attack by who?”
Krilid pointed like a shot. “Those Gryphon formations—”
The corroded, grotesque-beyond-words face seemed to smirk. “I’m real scared, see?” And then like a crane, the abomination’s 200-foot-long arm swept out in an arch and swatted all of the winged things out of the sky. Several of the Flamma-Troopers exploded, which ignited sundry pitch upended from a dozen buckets. Fire rained down on the heavily populated field.
“Great move!” Krilid yelled. He pointed down. “Now step on all those guys down there sticking swords in your feet.”
“Oh—” The Demonculus looked down at the field. “I thought I felt some itching.” And then—
THUD! THUD! THUD!
The entire District shook while Gerold stomped his feet on the droves of demonic soldiers below; in fact, several buildings actually collapsed. Screams rose upward like steam from boiling pots.
“And see those Balloon Skiffs?” Krilid asked. “They’re serious business so do us both a favor and make ’em go away.”
The Demonculus’s chest expanded as it inhaled an inconceivably large breath, then exhaled it downward at storm-force velocity. The Balloon Skiffs twirled end over end in midair, ejected demonic crew members, then slammed into the ground to explode.
“So much for them,” Gerold’s new voice remarked.
“And it couldn’t hurt to step on those Electrocity Generators while you’re at it,” Krilid added. “They’re real expensive and took eons to build. Lucifer’ll dump in his pants if you trashed those things.”
The Demonculus shrugged, and it was more than likely the most massive shrug ever made by anything. Horrendous, tractor-trailer-size feet easily flattened said generators. The presiding explosions threw nuke-style mushroom clouds on either side of the unalive occult creature. The clouds crackled in hues like fresh lava; in only moments, the mushroom clouds had risen thousands of feet.
“Jeez, I didn’t figure that would happen,” Krilid said. “Pretty impressive . . .”
The Demonculus’s head turned down to Krilid. “You know something? Destroying stuff’s a lot of fun!”
