King of Hell (The Shadow Saga)

by Christopher Golden

  Yet she sensed some other purpose beneath that. This malevolence served another, and they sought mediums only for their ability to act as conduits. They were coming to this world with vengeance in mind, hunting one specific individual, one man. Annelise could almost read his name in the demon's thoughts.

  "Well, well," it said, speaking with her lips, every word a cancer on her tongue. "What have we here?"

  Leave me, filth, she thought. Get out.

  "I don't think so," the demon replied.

  Inside, where voices and mouths were unnecessary, it whispered to her heart.

  Instead, I think I'll tear you apart.

  Hell

  Squire knelt in the shadows on a rocky outcropping overlooking the Pit and wanted to run as far and as fast as he could. If he'd had a tail, he figured it'd have been tucked between his legs. Hobgoblins didn't scare easy, but he didn't fancy the idea of dying, either, and after being down in Hell this long he had come to regret offering Octavian his help.

  "I might puke," he whispered, and glanced up at his friend — this mage who used to be a vampire.

  "Do it quietly," Octavian replied. He lay flat on his stomach on the rocks, observing the activity down in the Pit like a general planning his strategy..

  Octavian had always had the kind of rugged quality that most women found attractive, but now that he was human again, he'd begun to go a little gray and had a sadness in his eyes that made him even more handsome. Squire considered him a friend — it would've been hard to find a nobler companion — but he would've liked him better if he hadn't been so good looking and if he hadn't decided going to Hell would be a good way for an aging hobgoblin to pay off his debts.

  "Wish I'd brought my golf bag," Squire said.

  Octavian shifted, turning to stare at him. "What about this situation makes you feel like playing a round of golf?"

  Squire laughed softly. "Never mind."

  No point in explaining that he often carried around many of the weapons he'd made in a golf bag. The image it summoned even in his own mind seemed silly, but it worked like a charm when Mr. Doyle and his Menagerie were in the midst of a battle and he had to get weapons to them quickly.

  Had worked, he reminded himself. The Menagerie had scattered far and wide — at least those who were still alive.

  "You recognize anyone down there?" he asked.

  Octavian slid forward a bit, trying to get a better look into the Pit. Ironic, considering that Squire wanted to look anywhere else. He had imagined that it would be another of Hell's canyons, but the Pit was a broad crater, maybe two hundred yards in diameter. Compared to the scale of some of the other spots they'd visited on their scenic tour of the netherworld, it didn't seem that vast, but the sight of it turned his stomach.

  The base of the Pit seemed to be composed of a damp, living tissue, a grayish pink layer of slick flesh that gave off a stench that made Squire's stomach roil in protest. Fissures split the spongy surface of the Pit, belching black smoke and fire that burned a deeper red than any he had ever seen. Figures writhed in the fleshy floor, stuck as if in some grasping quagmire, and if they managed to pull themselves out far enough that they might have a hope of freedom, gray tendrils formed on the ground, stretching out to wrap around the Suffering and drag them down again to suffocate in the malleable flesh of the Pit. Squire saw no angels — no wings, at least, and he expected wings on angels — but there were several figures trapped there which did not look human, and one huge, roaring thing that could only have been some kind of troll or bogeyman.

  Demons roamed amongst them, nine-foot sentries who acted as jailers. Of all the evil things Squire had seen in Hell, these looked the most like the kinds of devils he associated with this place. No gasping mouths in their chests or wormlike slithering or flesh split with a hundred vaginas. They had horns and hooves and thin, powerful bodies, the perfect image of a demon of legend except that their entire bodies seemed composed of yellowed bone and their faces were nothing more than skulls with a bit of muscle to move the jaws and hold the eyes in place.

  The sentries carried pikes made of sharpened bone no different from that which seemed to comprise their bodies, and bone phalluses hung between their legs, equally as sharp as the pikes. As Squire and Octavian watched, they worked their way through the Pit, smashing their hooves down on the heads and arms and backs of the damned, sometimes stabbing them with their pikes until their blood pooled into the flesh of the pit. When the damned would scream, the sentries' phalluses would grow with arousal.

  "Pete?" Squire asked.

  "I'm looking."

  Even as they spoke — careful to whisper — two sentries reached into the pink muck and dragged a bloody figure up and out, tearing her away from the grasping tendrils. Their hollow laughter could be heard echoing around the walls of the Pit as they carried her, kicking and screaming, toward one of the fire-belching fissures. One sentry slammed her to the ground and then trapped her there with one hoof while he thrust his pike through her back, pinning her. A torrent of hellfire roared from the ground and ignited her face and hair.

  Amidst the screams and laughter that followed, the other sentry handed off his pike and approached the young woman, whose clothes were ragged tatters. Squire could make out very little detail, except that she had red hair.

  "I can't watch this," he said. "I know these are the Suffering, but I can't just sit here while —"

  "You're going to do just that."

  Squire bristled. "Are you serious? I know this is Hell and shit like this happens all the time, but you're going to let them rape —"

  Octavian snapped his head around to stare at him. "How many of those sentries do you count? Fifty? Sixty?"

  "Still —"

  The mage shook his head, and Squire saw a fury in his eyes that canceled out his rugged looks. In that moment Octavian was not handsome at all — he was terrifying.

  "The girl's name is Charlotte," he said. "She trusted me, and she ended up here. My friend Kazimir is down there, too. You've proven a fiercer warrior than I'd expected, Squire, but you're staying right here so I don't have to worry about you, too."

  Down in the Pit, the sentry with the raging hard-on dropped to his knees above Charlotte, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and forced her legs apart. The fire engulfing her head diminished for a moment and she planted her feet and pistoned herself forward, taking with her the pike buried in her back and knocking over the sentry who'd been about to violate her.

  Snarling, charred skin hanging in flaps from her face, she leaped to her feet and turned on them.

  "Why doesn't she shapeshift?" Squire demanded.

  "Confusion. Something about the Pit keeps them disoriented; that's why they're here."

  The two sentries attacked Charlotte and began to beat her, drove her to the ground and kicked her with their hooves.

  Octavian rose, but Squire grabbed his arm. "It's like fifty to one, Pete. What are you going to —"

  The mage grimaced and held out both hands. Blue light erupted around them, crackling like fire, and mist began to seep from his eyes. The sheer power emanating from him made Squire flinch and the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

  "Well, yeah," said the hobgoblin. "There's that."

  So much for keeping a low profile, Squire thought. Octavian thought that using magic like this in Hell would be like sending up a flare announcing their presence. Squire hoped he was wrong.

  "Don't go anywhere," Octavian said, and he launched himself over the edge of the Pit, suddenly engulfed in a sphere of that blue light, which rocketed him toward the sentries brutalizing his friend.

  "Where the —" Squire said, before he realized that Octavian, in the midst of it all, had made a joke.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Phoenix's World

  Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York, USA

  Getting into the hospital turned out to be simple enough. The wooded hill behind the facility led up to within thirty feet of the loading dock, where the exodu
s of employees trying to survive had left the doors wide open. In the dark, Phoenix and Ronni slipped across the pavement and climbed onto the dock and then they were inside, simple as that. The hospital's fire alarms were ringing, the noise like a dentist's drill to the brain, but Phoenix welcomed the cover the sound would give their sneaking and shuffling.

  On the way up the hill, the weight of the gas can had gone from a burden to a struggle. Her shoulder ached with the pull of it. Ronni seemed to be in better shape, but still it couldn't be easy on her, and by now they were both lugging their respective cans rather than just carrying them. Halfway up the hill they had debated leaving one behind and taking turns with the remaining gas, but Phoenix liked the idea of a second can. A backup. They weren't going to get a second chance at this.

  Phoenix glanced around the loading area, where the most recent deliveries for the hospital were still stacked, waiting to be added to the inventory. She had no idea what might be in those boxes — maybe bedpans and surgical gowns — but it wouldn't be pharmaceuticals or syringes or anything else the government regulated.

  She rushed across the open space with a glance out the wide open door, making sure that none of the demons had spotted them from outside. Ronni padded across the concrete floor to an open door whose small inset window had been smeared with blood. Phoenix forced herself not to linger on that crimson streak and instead pushed herself against the wall beside Ronni.

  "Tell me you know your way around down here," she said, right up close to Ronni's ear so that she could be heard over the alarms.

  Why the fire alarms? she wondered. They hadn't seen any smoke and couldn't smell it now that they were inside. Maybe the whole place is just going batshit crazy.

  Ronni nodded, then gestured for her to follow as she ducked through the open door and down a long concrete corridor. There were signs on the walls, but most of them were just numbers and letters, codes that must have meant something to those who worked down in this sub-basement but which she could not decipher. They came to a pair of double doors and took up position on either side, wary of the rectangular inset windows.

  Phoenix edged forward and glanced through the glass. Beyond the criss-cross wire mesh embedded in the window, she could see a pair of bodies on the ground. At least she thought there were only two of them, though it was hard to tell with all of the blood spattered on the walls and the way the hospital employees had been torn apart. She stared for a second, unable to breathe, and the gas can seemed to become too heavy to hold.

  Ronni shuffled forward to glance through the other little window and that shook Phoenix from her momentary paralysis. They scanned the corridor on the other side of the door for half a minute, waiting to see if whatever had killed these people would show itself. Was it even still down there? The demons might have left the hospital, spreading out to continue their slaughter, but they couldn't be sure.

  Taking a deep breath, Phoenix tried the door and found it locked. "Shit."

  Ronni reached into her top and tugged out an ID card that hung from a lanyard around her neck. Immediately, Phoenix understood that this was not just her ID, but a key card. For just a second, she wanted to turn and run. The possibility that they would not be able to get any further into the hospital, that they might be thwarted, had sparked a selfish hope inside her. But then she thought of her father and how the demon had defiled him, and the hundreds they had likely already murdered in the hospital — and the untold numbers that might die if those demons weren't cut off from Hell — and felt ashamed.

  A simple pass of the card in front of a pad by the door, and the lock disengaged long enough for Ronni to open it. Phoenix pushed through first but she paused just inside the door. The copper stink of blood filled her nostrils and her thoughts were flooded with memories of the Uprising. The bodies on the floor weren't going to get up and attack her, especially not with how badly they had been savaged, but the dull, staring eyes of the dead had haunted her sleep for over a decade and just a glimpse of these corpses took her breath away.

  A wave of hatred rocked her.

  Phoenix had smelled blood before, seen slaughter before, confronted horror before. But the malevolence behind the Uprising had been unknown until it was nearly over; they hadn't even known there was an enemy other than the cruel, risen dead. This was different. She had seen the demon that had torn its way out of her father's cadaver, had heard its voice. The spirits that had spoken through Annelise claimed that her father had been used as a kind of gateway, and Phoenix figured this demon must be the gatekeeper — the one who had made her father's flesh into an abomination. She pictured the demon with its crown of bone shards and those spider-eyes, saw its crimson-black flesh and the grin that split its face all the way up to its ears, and that was enough.

  Phoenix walked through the blood, careful not to slip, and paid no attention to the scarlet footprints she left behind. Ronni seemed less sure, but after a moment she followed suit. There was no path forward that would have allowed them to avoid the blood.

  Soon, they came to another junction and she let Ronni take the lead again. There were more signs, but these were more direct, indicating which corridor would take them to the morgue or the laundry or the cafeteria. Suddenly Phoenix realized just how completely lost she would have been if she had managed to convince Ronni not to come, and the thought made her stomach lurch.

  Ronni hesitated for a single, indecisive moment before choosing the corridor that led to the cafeteria. The plastic can thumped against Phoenix's thigh as she followed, sure that this approach must have been for employees only. Patients and visitors would not have been allowed to wander these faded, industrial halls. The entrance she remembered from her own visits to the cafeteria had potted plants in front and little signs up advertising the specials of the day. Nothing greeted them except the stink of whatever had been left to burn when the demons had rushed through the hospital. Down here, they would have emerged from the morgue, and not for the first time Phoenix wondered why they had seen so few corpses thus far.

  Over the aural assault of the alarm, they almost didn't hear the other noises at first. But as they paused outside a single door and Ronni shifted her gas can from one hand to another, ready to use her key card again, Phoenix frowned. Had she heard a clanging of metal, there in the valleys amidst the clamor of the alarms?

  She grabbed Ronni's wrist, stopped her from opening the door. Ronni glanced t her and Phoenix shook her head. Her heart thundered in her ears but she ignored it, listening carefully, trying to hear whatever noise might be beneath the klaxon.

  The clatter came again, the crash and clang of something in the kitchen. Something heavy that thrashed against the counters and ovens and knocked over cookware and plates. Phoenix realized they had not come to the back of the cafeteria, but the rear entrance into the kitchen. Food deliveries would have arrived this way, and perhaps employees entered here for their shifts.

  Phoenix shook her head again. They couldn't go in that way unless they had no other options. Ronni read the hesitation in her eyes and they stood there together, riveted, listening for demons. The reality of it struck Phoenix afresh and she held her breath. Discovery would mean more than mere failure. If they met demons now her father would never be purified and the portal that crowned demon had opened would never be closed, but more imminently, she and Ronni would die.

  Torn apart, like the orderlies whose blood she had tracked along the sub-basement halls.

  Something slammed into the door from the other side and they both jerked backward. Ronni clapped a hand to her mouth to keep from screaming, eyes wide with terror. Phoenix nearly dropped her gas can but managed to hang on to it, even as she raised a hand to stop Ronni from running. Ronni stared at her, terror plain on her face. It knows we're here, the nurse's eyes seemed to say. It's coming for us.

  Phoenix wasn't so sure. Trying to steady her hitching breath, she stared at the door. The demon had been crashing around the kitchen and she thought it might have struck the d
oor at random.

  She hoped.

  They stood and they breathed and tried not to make a sound, and then they heard another crash beyond the door, this one further away, and Phoenix exhaled. She glanced at Ronni, whose brow was knitted in thought for a second before she gestured to Phoenix and fled back the way they'd come, careful to go quietly.

  Don't think, Phoenix told herself. If you think, you'll scream. If you think, you'll go out of your mind.

  She tried her best. As she followed Ronni, she marveled at the other woman. Ronni had been so inspired by her courage, so impressed by Phoenix's actions during the Uprising, but she had begun to think the nurse far braver than she would ever be.

  When they reached the laundry room, Phoenix wanted to cry. Stacks of clean towels and sheets and pillow cases had been overturned and blood painted everything, spatters and pools and long stripes of it. There were three bodies she thought were mostly complete, two women and a man, but even with only a glance she could see there were too many arms in the main room. A cart full of dirty laundry had strings of gore dangling from it, and she thought a flap of skin draped over the edge of the cart might be a human face.

  But there were no demons there to stop them. No demons to kill them and spray their blood across immaculate white sheets or leave pieces of them hanging from the light fixtures overhead.

  Numb, they went on.

  Beyond the laundry room there was a service elevator, and just past that a fire door marked EMERGENCY EXIT — EMPLOYEES ONLY. They took the stairs, tracking more blood, and kept their hands off of the railings in order to avoid touching the bits and pieces and smears that had been left behind. As they passed the first floor landing, they could hear distant screams amidst the constant, maddening alarms, human voices filled with the kind of anguish that came from the soul. Hopeless voices. The screams of the dying. Ronni stopped to breathe and Phoenix thought she might vomit, but it seemed to pass and they started up the stairs, happy to have the screams behind them. Soon — startlingly soon, given the nightmare they'd just been through — they found themselves on the second floor.