With a pulsing sound that could have been a choking scream or a long laugh, Succuba fell to the black floor, knocking October out of her way, but landing on her feet like a gymnast. At first glance, he thought her arms ended in bloody wrists, as if the hands had finally been pulled from their sockets. When he looked again, however, her hands were whole, free, and as fiery as ever.
Plucking the weights from her legs, she looked around at them and laughed again. “They fell for it! Oh, Majesty, they fell for it! All of them! Our turn now!”
She sprang at Rodney, seizing the cross he still held outstretched, slapping at his face with her scorching palms. Fighting back, he seemed to be matching her muscle for muscle. And where she could burn him with every touch of hand or foot or neck—he tried to throttle her but jerked his hands away at once from her burning throat—he had the cross to strike her with whenever he managed to wrest it from her grasp.
Though how he could keep his grip on metal that she had held…did the holy symbol reject the heat from her hand?
Caught in fluctuating waves as the crucifix rose and fell, went out of sight and appeared again, the vampire could do very little. He managed, in the intervals, to reach a pile of boxes and pull himself to his feet, but there he stood, trying to figure out whether he should stay and try to help ... which one? Or try to clear out and leave them both. Aurea stood as if equally baffled, looking from October to the combatants. It was obvious by now that the inquisitor was going to attack the vampire at every opportunity, but Succuba seemed to have made it plain that she was geared to doublecross all of them.
“Stop.” That one word, uttered in a contralto voice rich as any opera singer’s, seemed to come from everywhere at once. Trapped in its echo, they froze, Rodney holding his cross in midair, Succuba straddling his chest.
From somewhere—October never saw exactly where—Cassandra The Pascal stepped into the space between the boxes. The black outline of her cape made her seem to float, while the black curlicues on her crimson leotard looked like pieces of the black chamber showing in vaguely flamelike shapes right through her body.
Pointing one forefinger, she spoke like a judge. “Rodney Vasco Paynter. The time has come for you to confess your own sin.”
Her calm, the quietly falling periods that clearly ended her sentences, gave her commands an almost hypnotizing force. October would have re-confessed—thought he would have confessed to sabotaging the Titanic if she had ordered him in that tone of voice.
But Rodney lay frowning sullenly. “Satan! Do you dare to threaten a servant of God and His Holy Church?”
“Let me!” Succuba trilled, seizing his little finger and starting to bend it back. “Majesty, let me!”
“No. This one will not respond to mere physical suffering.”
“But for my pleasure,” Succuba crooned, bending Rodney’s finger until he grimaced fiercely. “Not for him, Majesty, for me! Please?”
“Take yourself below and seek out a work detail. There are plenty of them who would welcome your talents. Try to avoid flittering like a butterfly from delight to delight: make your choice and see it through.”
Succuba gazed longingly at the victim in hand, but another smile was already twisting her face.
“Go,” said Cassandra.
Leaving Rodney, Succuba bowed writhingly at her ruler’s feet, kissed her toe, breathed, “Majesty!” and left.
The minute she was off him, Rodney started getting to his feet. By the time Succuba vanished into the labyrinth of packing boxes, he stood holding his crucifix up at Her Satanic Majesty.
The Pascal did not laugh. She smiled. “Do you think to hold me at bay with that, man? My minions invented it!” For the first time her voice rose in exclamation. “As they invented thousands of other pretty toys like it. That one particular Man consecrated one particular cross in no way obligates me to cringe from all its semi-accurate representations.”
“You lie!” cried Rodney. “Mother of lies! Deny the power of the Cross over him!” He shook it at October, hitting him with a shock that threw him back to the floor.
“Poor, pitiable little fool.” She shook her head. “That vampire is not my minion, and even if he were, it is centuries of superstition—the power of the collective unconscious focusing through your toy—that cripples him, rather than the cross itself.
“But you, little churchman,” she went on, advancing leisurely on the inquisitor, “you, who call yourself God’s servant, and never consider how thoroughly you are steeped in my service ... For you has been reserved a worse torture than any other’s, save one.”
At first he tried to stand his ground, but as she came closer, he quailed and began to retreat, step by backward step, his obvious attempt to stare her down melting into a gaze of riveted horror. He got out, “God’s ... God’s truth is my shield—”
“God’s truth? The truth is your destruction, little man. The truth you have buried for all these years from yourself and the world. The truth that renders your puny soul ‘holy’ only in the sense that it is riddled with holes.”
“No!” he protested, as she backed him against the boxes. “No! You cannot accuse me of—it was for his own good!”
She fixed him with a look of disgusted melancholy. “Oh, poor little man! I could almost kill you at once in pure pity. This much is true: you honestly believe, with all the feeble might of your surface mind, that it is God Whom you serve. More of my work in the world is done by fools who trick themselves into believing that—even by some who believe it with souls stronger and less tainted than yours—than is done by all the little caesars and false satanists ever decried in the popular press.
“And I am denied the savor of even this small triumph!” Her voice actually rose to a wail. “For the tragedy is, that you do act with the power of the Divine! You, and all the others like you—every human soul, as truly every other unit of creation, lives and draws its power—yes, even when it corrupts that power totally to evil—from God! You, malicious, hypocritical worm, and all others like you, all your fellows in shame and guilt, degradation and human suffering—through it all, you live in God! Whether you merit it or not, whether you deny it or not, by whatever wickedness you strive, consciously or unconsciously, to forfeit it before your time, the Divine is with you in every particle of your puny existences! It is I—I alone of all creation—I, the one able to see it for all that it is—who must exist outside of God, bereft of God!” She screamed: “What torment is there like my torment?”
Her voice turned calm again. “You see, then ... or you will see…how the worst torture that can be applied to any creature, the torture to which all other tortures are unworthy of the name, is a share in my torture.”
She touched the hollow of his throat with the tip of her finger. His eyes bulged—he collapsed shrieking. She bent with him, gracefully as the gymnast she had been twenty years ago, keeping her finger on his throat. He thrashed and scrabbled, trying to get away. Smoothly and effortlessly, she maintained her touch throughout.
He seemed to make some effort to shape his cries into words, but without success. Or maybe his throat and mouth were just trying to find new ways to screech an overload of pain and horror.
Aurea cringed back across the floor to October. He managed to sit leaning on the boxes. Even though the cross came into sight only at fitful intervals, he could get no further. It was as if something—the emotional charge in the room, the energy drain he had passed through already—held him an unwilling witness. Aurea put her head against him. He hugged it without thinking.
Cassandra and Rodney settled at last, he sprawled against the boxes on the other side of the open space, she squatting—far too clumsy a word for the elegance of her pose—before him with her forefinger still in place below his Adam’s apple. October could see both their faces in profile. The inquisitor’s eyes looked almost as empty as the Devil’s: hers a total black void touche
d only by the hint of a sheen on the outward curve, his a black void with the startling blue lens of the iris floating at the front.
“No,” Cassandra whispered, “I have not taken it all from you. If I did, your very being, soul as well as body, would wither away to nothingness and vanish on the spot. No creature in the entire universe save myself alone can remain in existence without the permeating touch of God. But you, poor slug, at this moment you are clinging to the Divine by the metaphysical equivalent of one fingernail. Shall I give you a second fingernail? Will you be able to speak then?”
Several paces distant though they were from them, their faces filled October’s vision until the background was a glaring black blur. Every detail seemed clear—the stony calm of Pascal’s forehead, cheekbones, chin…the abject horror of Rodney’s. The vampire closed his eyes to shut out the ghastly vision, so that Rodney’s confession, when it came, hit his ears word by word like pebbles falling out of a long, unseen sound chamber.
“Howie. Howie Meyers. Poor Howie. My disciple. My one disciple. We could’ve made it. Together, we could’ve made Jagism the next big school. He-lll! He could’ve done it without me! Better artist, more charisma, better ... He could’ve been one of the great ones. Once I showed him the way ... What he did already, just a frosh ... He could’ve ... But he had to be tougher! Dammit, he needed toughening! So his genius could really shine! You can’t be a true artist without—That was why I pulled away! That was why I never answered his calls that week! He needed his own strength! Needed to conquer life on his own—his girl, his grades, his artistic development ... Artistic development! He had it, all he needed ... His own strength ... That was why I wasn’t there for him that night! Not strong enough. Hell! He wasn’t strong enough—That’s why he jumped off Hiteman Tower! Not because of me! Not because I hung up on him! Because he had to find his own strength! And…he…didn’t! Didn’t have it in him, after all!”
Cassandra said, still whispering, “You disgust me.”
Her voice rose to something just above a murmur. “You envied your one and only ‘Jagist’ disciple. Seeing that his talent was finer than yours, you abandoned him when a kind word from you would have stopped him from suicide. You committed a murder so perfect that you yourself could forget it in false sentimentality, and then let hidden envy of your dead friend poison your entire subsequent life, never developing your own talent past mass-produced canvasses and private murals as part of home-painting packages. You have never loved, never in your adult life kept a home of your own, never done anything but feed your unrecognized envy. Even now, reft of all save the most tenuous spark of God, you refuse to acknowledge your sin even while confessing it!
“Listen.” Pascal’s voice sank until a gnat’s hum would have drowned it, but, in the dead silence, every word still carried clear. “Do you know what kindles the true fire of Hell? It is friction between the soul that struggles, for any reason, to reject God, and the Divine Omnipresence that cannot be rejected. This is the famous ‘sin against the Holy Spirit,’ the true and eternal damnation. All the rest of it is only games and toys for creatures like our shallow little ‘Succuba.’ Now, pitiable worm, make your choice.”
October opened his eyes in time to see Cassandra lift her finger from Rodney’s throat. For a moment he held it, gasping. Then he jerked upright and gave a strangled cry. Flames licked out from between his fingers. He snatched his hand away. The hollow of his throat showed scorched skin. The scorched area widened, dark spots appearing as if something singed the skin from within—and then the fire jumped through again, coming from inside Rodney’s throat—first one small flame, then several, then the several joined into a single large flame. It happened so fast that the fire was licking his chin before his reaction set in. He screamed, he leaped, he twisted, he hammered his fists on boxes and floor ... until his head rolled off, both stumps of the neck so neatly charred that there was no blood. His body stood propped on all fours another second or two before collapsing.
Cassandra turned to the stunned witnesses. “You. Not that your sins were any less deadly than those of the others, but you have transcended them more generously. I leave the pair of you to make your way out of this little bubble of Hell.”
October tried to stand, found himself too shaky. Trying to stall, he ventured, “But ... But I don’t ... How can you have become ... you weren’t, all along ...?”
“How is it possible for that vainglorious little atom of humanity called Cassandra Pascal to become Satan?” She smiled bitterly. “Is not the Infernal as omnipresent as the Divine? Though Satan only by God’s generous permission! But how would it be possible for any individual pinpoint of conscious existence to last forever in this role? Oh, no, Cassandra ‘The’ Pascal is far from the first Satan ever to rule this particular outpost of despair.
“But this time,” she exclaimed, turning to the chamber at large and spreading her arms wide, “this time you chose the wrong Devil costume! Do you hear me, you cowardly ex-Satan, wherever you are now? You who could think of no better way to make your own exit! Cassandra Pascal will not endure this as long and as tamely as you did, you and all your predecessors! No, not for so much as a single year! Not for one more hour!”
She struck the nearest box with her pitchfork. As she pulled it out, tongues of flame followed the tines, joined, and started licking their way along the black surface in all directions.
“Nor do I choose to shuffle it off upon another unsuspecting victim,” she went on with a twisted smile. “This Satan offers no fatted calf to the next avatar! I will not remain in rebellion against the Divine. Do You hear me, God? I sign my surrender by destroying this Hellish outpost!”
Thanks to fear for himself, October had made it back to his feet by now, Aurea doing what she could to urge and help him.
Cassandra turned back to them. “I would suggest the corridor. You will find it three meters beyond the elevator in the other direction. Waste no time trying to save anyone you may fancy you see or hear in the lower rooms. Half of them are highly sophisticated waxworks, and the rest belong to me already. I tell you this not as the Parent of Lies, but as The Pascal, though speaking with Satan’s knowledge. When you reach the aboveground building, save as many as you can. Up there, they are the same mix of innocents and petty sinners as found everywhere in the world, even the employees: my upstairs employees are all, at this hour, costumed humans, none of whom knows more than his or her immediate assignment. Now, go!”
Guided first by her pointing arm and then by the outlines of their own earlier footprints, which had begun glowing pale orange on the floor, they raced their way back through the warehouse maze into the lightless tunnel, past the elevator, and found the solid black firedoor to the spiral corridor. The journey up became a confused nightmare every level of which was already melting to a blur in October’s mind by the time they reached the next open door on another shrieking waxworks exhibit. His only clear memory of the time between the black sub-subbasement full of glaring light and the top of the spiral was the method that came to them, as if in a flash, of getting past the “X’s” and “T’s”—he lying flat to let Aurea drag him over the floor to the “W” and “S” doors.
But if they had thought of it earlier, and reached ground level without having been in the lowest basement—if it was the lowest—how would they have known to shout “Fire!” and yank every fire alarm they spotted, once they reached the above-ground building?
Reaction to their appearance was easier to handle than October had feared. As a vampire, he himself obviously looked little different from a normal human. Very few people, once alerted to the fire danger, stopped to notice his lack of reflection—the few who did, apparently dismissed it as another of Hellmouth Park’s famous effects—and any pallor, redness of eyes, or so on could pass for good make-up. It seemed to be his torn and blood-crusted clothes that attracted most attention, and they gave added weight to the alarm he was raising. As for
the dragon, almost everybody seemed to accept it as an exceptionally good costume.
Not many park-goers were left by now, “now” being nearly dawn. But, dawn being Saturday, several kids were among the people still determinedly whooping it up—one family in the amusement-ride “braincase” had even brought along a baby in arms; October helped the frantic mother find the nursery, where a costumed, bleary-eyed attendant, already alarmed by the faint smell of smoke, was just plucking her from her rented cradle.
The outside elevators, the ones shaped like ears running up and down the sides of the Hellmouth head, still worked long enough to evacuate all the people October and Aurea could locate; but by the time they had finished a final, harried combing of the top floor and tried to dive into the elevator themselves—the “T” on the “Elevator” sign stopped October like a gale wind, and Aurea had to drag him again; happily, there was no sign inside the ear-car—it stuck midway down the cranium, far from any door to the interior.
“Can we…fly?” he asked. “Dragons are supposed to be able to fly…and vampires ...”
She whined, sounding as unsure as he felt.
The eastern sky was getting brighter, and they could hear the wail of fire trucks on the way. Should they wait in hopes a net would appear before the fire reached them, or ...
Aurea tugged the remains of his sleeve. He interpreted it as “Let’s go,” and jumped. He sensed her jumping after him, tried to flap his arms, or whatever vampires did to fly, and ...
Found himself coming to on the brown, grassy edge of the forest bordering the park. The sun was higher, the Hell-head visibly blazing, and Aurea sat over him, resting her hand…her hand!…anxiously on his head.
“It worked for me,” she said. “I don’t think it worked for you, but there was still night enough for you to heal, thank Heaven! I dragged you over here ...”
He rolled onto his side, found two twigs, and laid them on the ground in a cross. They threw nothing back at him. He put his hand down flat on top of them, felt nothing but a little harmless, natural pressure, lifted his palm and feasted his eyes on the absence of scorch-marks.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 114
