by Scott Reeves
Just as his lungs were about to burst, the passage turned upward again, and seconds later, he surfaced. Paula and Siri grabbed hold of his shoulders, pulled him out of the water. Then he turned around, reached into the lava and pulled out the man he’d rescued.
The man was still. Had he drowned on the trip here? But no, he was still breathing, his heart still beat.
They laid him out, flicking away the smoldering lava encrusting his naked skin. Mike slapped at the man’s face, hoping to rouse him. As he did so, he looked around, noting that Nigel had not yet returned with Stacy. His spirits sagged.
After a few minutes of slapping at the man, he came to. His eyes were wide and he looked around wildly, like a trapped animal. Sanity gradually returned to his eyes. He blinked around at the three of them, hovering over him expectantly.
“What are you doing?” he roared. “Why am I out of the lake?”
He batted at them, shoving them away as he scrambled to his feet.
Mike was nonplussed. This certainly wasn’t the reaction he had expected. Where was the gratitude, the relief at being out of the lava?
The man looked around, surveying the cavern in a quick glance. “Where is this place? Where’s the lake? I’ve got to get back into the lake.”
Mike advanced toward the man with an outstretched arm. “Easy, guy. You’re safe. You’re among friends. The pain is gone, and if we have anything to say about it, it won’t ever come back.”
The man threw his arms to either side of his head and clenched his eyes shut. “I can feel the sin coming back in! Oh, God! Put me back in the lake! Now!”
Mike looked at Paula.
“Don’t look at me,” she said. “I have no idea why anyone would react like this.”
Siri stepped forward. “I do,” she said. “Not everyone will want to be rescued. I am an exception. You probably won’t find many like me.” She laid a comforting hand on the man’s shoulder.
He flinched at her touch. “Get your hands off me, unclean woman!” he shouted at her.
She pulled back. “Please, calm down,” she told him. “We’ll take you back.”
“We will?” Mike asked.
“Yes, we will,” Siri told him. “We will find someone who wants to be rescued. Someone like me. They’re out there. We’ll just have to look.”
“Why?” Paula asked her. “Why doesn’t he want to be rescued?”
“He believes that pain will keep his mind pure until Christ returns,” Siri said.
Mike barked a laugh, walked up to the man and gave him a powerful right hook across the jaw that knocked the man cold to the ground. In addition to a star football player, Mike was also a star boxer.
He glared at Siri and Paula, who were both gaping at him. “What? I’m not taking this crazy nut back. I had a hard enough time bringing him here. He doesn’t want to be rescued? Too bad. The fisherman decides whether to toss the fish back. Not the fish.”
Before either Siri or Paula could comment, lava splattered everywhere as Nigel erupted from the pool. Paula and Siri danced to avoid the flying gobs of lava, but Mike didn’t make any attempt to avoid them. He’d be back out in it soon enough; might as well get used to it. So he simply winced as the drops splattered against his skin, hissing and smoking as they cooled and solidified.
He moved forward to help Nigel, pulling the Englishman from the pool. Nigel pulled Stacy along behind him, so they helped her, too. As Nigel rolled aside, Mike and Paula ministered to their friend, smiling as they scraped the lava away, happy to see her again. She took a few moments to come around, but after long moments of utter bewilderment as her mind cleared of pain, she returned their smiles. “Thanks for rescuing me,” she said effusively. “Though I never doubted that you would.”
Mike shook his head. “We didn’t rescue you.”
“Not that Mike didn’t try,” Paula put in.
“Then who did?”
Mike pointed over at Nigel, who was lying a few feet away, being tended to by Siri.
Stacy winked over at him. “You I’ll thank later, in private,” she told him slyly.
Paula threw up her arms, muttering as she stalked away. “You never quit, do you, girl?”
As though suddenly cognizant of what she’d said, Stacy looked around quickly, searching. “Where’s Jason?” she asked, voice fraught with concern.
Mike shook his head. “We don’t know. Out in the lava, maybe. We all went in before he did.”
Stacy’s lower lip began quivering, and her eyes teared up. “We’ve got to go get him. We can’t leave my sweet baby out there in that... that horrible place.”
“We won’t,” Mike assured her.
Paula had gone over to Nigel. “What took you so long?” she asked. “We were worried sick.”
Nigel grinned sheepishly. “Apologies all around, miss. It took me a while to find her. In addition, the guards—those flying beasties—were unusually active, flying in circles over my general location, seeming to follow me wherever I moved. Almost as if they knew I was nearby but couldn’t quite find me. So I had to move carefully.”
Before he could say more, a thick, blubbery tentacle erupted from the lava pool and began reaching unerringly toward Nigel. At the same moment, a veritable army of the winged creatures skittered into the cavern, pouring forth like a tide of cockroaches from the narrow crevice that let into the cavern.
The tentacle reached Nigel and coiled around his chest and stomach. He struggled against it as it dragged him back toward the pool. Mike leapt forward to help, scrabbling at the pale slippery hide of the appendage, unable to get any sort of a useful grip on it.
He changed tactics, grabbing hold of Nigel and pulling in the opposite direction, but to no avail. Stacy even added her own meager power. But the strength of whatever was at the other end of the tentacle was immense. Even as they scrambled and strained against it, it dragged them all three inexorably toward the pool.
This struggle had occupied mere seconds. In that time, the winged, stinging beasts had advanced halfway across the cavern. Paula and Siri defiantly faced the approaching things, rocks in hand, preparing for a fight.
Mike looked between Nigel and Paula, torn. Finally, he let go of Nigel and leapt to his lover’s side, moving in front of her to shield her from the approaching creatures. Stacy, for her part, maintained a death grip on Nigel, dragged across the cavern floor with him.
Behind Mike, the tentacle dragged Nigel into the water and Stacy with him, both of them disappearing from view beneath the roiling lava.
The creatures skittered nearer, encircling Paula, Siri and Mike. Mike’s every instinct was to fight to the death. But he knew they didn’t have a prayer.
So he threw down his rock and surrendered. Paula and Siri did likewise. But apparently these beasts didn’t know the meaning of surrender, because they kept coming, washing over the three, who were buried beneath a tide of glistening chitinous skin and dripping stingers.
AFTER THE CREATURES had receded from the cavern, taking Mike, Paula and Siri with them, hoisted aloft like crumbs being carried along by a horde of ants at a picnic, the man Mike had rescued stirred.
The man got up, rushed to the lava pool and threw himself in. He sighed momentarily, an ecstatic smile on his face as the pain began to eat away at his sinful mind. Then he began screaming, twisting in agony. But the smile never left his face.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN – Escape Attempt
THE DARKNESS BEGAN to recede, and with it, vision returned. Jason sank back into his own mind. His sense of his own identity came back as his consciousness extricated itself from the mind of the Beast.
He got to his hands and feet and knelt there panting, his head hanging low as gobs of drool leaked from the corner of his mouth, dripping onto the floor of the ledge and turning the soil to a dark red. His mind was sluggish, but his thoughts clarified with each passing second.
Something had happened, something that had so excited the Beast that it had released him back into himself.
Nigel had been found. That knowledge was a remnant from his merging with the Beast’s mind. He remembered a great deal about the merging that he wished to holy fuck that he didn’t. No, that he, an atheist, wished to God that he didn’t remember.
For example, those piles of skin there to the right, that had been shed by the Beast. At regular intervals, those gossamer thin sheets were torn to bite-sized bits and sprinkled across the lava cavern, where the people consumed them as food. Even the damned needed to eat, it seemed. And the sloughed off skin of the Beast had just about every nutrient a human body needed. How convenient, and how disgusting. Jason retched at the thought of eating the stuff.
Then, too, he remembered what he had seen down in the lava. There was no solid floor beneath the Beast, underneath the lava. The huge squidish monstrosity was basically treading water or, in this case, lava. It was poised at the top of a hole that plunged miles and miles down into the bowels of the Earth, perhaps into the mantle itself. He’d glimpsed things down there, swimming around, swimming upward.
Jason shivered at the memories. He had to get out of this place!
Diabolus, who had been standing nearby as Jason communed with the Beast, hurried over to the opening to the left at the far end of the ledge. The opening led into the lava cavern. Jason figured the devilish man wanted to be on hand for Nigel’s arrival. Nigel had been captured. That’s what had gotten the Beast so excited that it had let go of Jason.
Nigel was the Beast’s key to getting out. Jason knew that now, in a way that he hadn’t before his merging with the Beast.
The men who had been peeling the dead skin from the Beast and piling it up also hurried over to the opening and passed through, also eager to witness Nigel’s arrival.
Jason looked around. He was alone on the ledge. Even the Beast was elsewhere. Mentally, at least. That great unblinking eye was closed, blind to Jason. The mind of the Beast was fully merged with Diabolus. Jason knew this with certainty. How he knew it frightened and repelled him.
He wanted to get out of this place and put as much distance between it and him as he possibly could. He wanted that more than he’d ever wanted anything. More, even, than he’d ever wanted Stacy. First, he would get himself out. Then he would send help for his friends.
He looked over at the piles of skin. There was only one way out at the moment, and he had to act quickly, while all attention was on Nigel.
He climbed to his feet. He swayed dizzily for a moment, his mind still thick and woozy from being subsumed into the Beast. But he pushed himself forward toward the piles of skin. Time was of the essence; he couldn’t afford to waste it by waiting until his mind was back to its full brilliance.
He staggered among the piles, searching. He had to choose carefully. In this case, size mattered. Finding a suitably large section of skin, he pulled it from the top of a pile and dragged it to the opening on the far side of the ledge.
He passed through a short tunnel, about ten feet long. He paused at the other end and cautiously peered into the lava cavern beyond. The opening let onto a ledge that circled the cavern about fifty feet above the surface of the boiling lake of lava. When they had first been brought here, they had glimpsed Diabolus standing upon this very ledge, surveying the lake of fire like some demonic overlord.
A quarter of the way around the cavern, Diabolus stood on the ledge with his back to Jason, peering down at the rocky shelf that circled the lake. Mike, Paula and a woman he didn’t recognize were down there, kneeling on the ground, surrounding by winged guards. Diabolus was saying something, but at this distance Jason couldn’t hear more than unintelligible snatches. The red-skinned man punctuated his speech with grand gestures, as if he were delivering some sort of sermon.
A huge tentacle poked forth from the lava and reared above them all, coiled around a struggling Nigel. Stacy, tenuously gripping his ankle, dangled beneath him. Even as Jason watched, she lost her grip and plunged screaming nearly sixty feet, striking the boiling lava with a horrifying slap that echoed through the cavern. She sank almost instantly from view. Jason couldn’t tell if she was still conscious as she sank.
It was all he could do to resist crying out her name. But he bit down on the scream of concern. The best thing he could do for all of them right now was to escape and bring help. He imagined himself returning at the head of a platoon of crack commandos, fighting their way down to rescue everyone who needed rescuing.
No, he choked back his scream. Screaming would only alert Diabolus and the guards to his impending escape. They would be aware of it soon anyway, but by then he hoped it would be too late to stop him.
Jason grabbed the four corners of the sheet of skin, clutching them in his joined fists. There was enough of an opening that the hot air began to collect under the skin. It began inflating, the trapped air expanding.
The sheet quickly inflated, becoming a rippling quasi-sphere. It tugged at him, the trapped heat trying to lift him into the air.
All eyes were still on Diabolus and the immense tentacle that gripped Nigel.
Jason, struggling against the force of the balloon of skin, ran forward the few feet to the edge of the ledge and leapt out. The momentum of the leap carried him forward, and the makeshift balloon yanked him upward. Combined, the two forces put him on an upward trajectory toward one of the chimney vents in the cavern ceiling. He swung wildly as he was carried away, the world reeling madly around him.
The balloon struck the ceiling of the cavern and jounced along.
Jason heard a cry below as a winged guard happened to glance upward and see him drifting along.
The balloon reached the chimney. No longer blocked from rising higher, it swooped into the narrow shaft and rose. Jason’s last glimpse of the cavern before the shaft swallowed him in darkness was of a group of the winged creatures leaping into the air, mounting a pursuit.
Hopefully he would reach the surface before those bastard beasties reached him. If not, the chimney was barely wide enough to accommodate the balloon. They would have a hard time attacking him en masse.
He rose for several thousand feet, the hot air rushing up from below and filling his balloon, driving him ever upward. It was utterly dark. He thought there should at least be a faint red glow from the cavern below, but there wasn’t. Perhaps his pursuers were blocking the light. He could hear their leathery wings flapping in the darkness below, drawing ever closer. Or perhaps that was just the snapping and rustling of the hot upward wind, the churning echo of the lava far below. He couldn’t tell which. Add to that the droning wail of the tormented souls below, and for all he knew the claws and stingers of the winged beasts were only inches from his dangling feet. The thought terrified him, and he willed the balloon to rise faster, faster.
After what he thought must be several thousand feet of upward motion, the balloon was nudged to a gentle halt as it struck a barrier.
“Go!” he hissed at the balloon, as if by sheer force of will he could break through the barrier. Nigel’s words echoed once again in his mind: “The seal must not be broken. What’s inside must not get out.” With the balloon of skin in the way, he couldn’t see what was blocking the chimney. But if he had to wager, he would have bet that nothing was blocking it. Nothing but some sort of blood magic worked by Nigel’s ancestor. The same magic that had prevented them from opening the rusted iron door at the very beginning of this whole mess. Obviously it let air and heat pass through unhindered, but blocked massive objects.
“Shit!” he shouted. He had failed to consider this possibility.
He hung there, swaying above a drop of thousands of feet, the hot rising air trying in vain to push him higher.
And then he definitely heard the sound of wings. A stinger lanced into his leg.
He began screaming and kicking, madly flailing his legs to fend off his attackers, still unseen in the darkness.
KNEELING ON THE GROUND next to Paula and Siri, Mike looked up at the tall red-skinned man on the ledge. He had forgotten
the man’s name. Diablo, or Diabolical or something weird like that.
The man was gesticulating like a preacher in the throes of a fiery sermon. Which he was. Going on and on about how the way to the surface world was about to open up, and how salvation was about to be delivered upon the masses of that God-forsaken world. He was so absorbed in his own rhetoric that Stacy’s untimely fall into the lava hadn’t fazed him in the slightest.
He was further unfazed when Jason, dangling from some sort of makeshift hot air balloon, bounced across the ceiling of the cavern.
Mike noticed immediately, but tried to pretend he hadn’t. He didn’t want to do anything to alert the guards to Jason’s escape attempt. So as Jason bounced along the rocky ceiling, headed toward one of the chimney vents, Mike silently willed him on while feigning to listen to the red-skinned man’s sermon.
Mike supposed that the intended audience was the people in the lake of fire. It couldn’t be for Mike and Paula, because they really had no idea what the madman was talking about. But the people in the lava weren’t listening; how could they? Their minds were lost in pain. So the sermon really served no purpose, other than to perhaps satisfy the man’s own ego.
Finally, the man finished up. Addressing himself to Nigel, clutched in the tentacle high above, he proclaimed, “Your blood in the wards is the circuit; your body and life are the battery. By killing you, I shut off the power and break the circuit.”
The man held out a fist and squeezed. As if in response, the tentacle coiling around Nigel constricted. With a disgustingly audible popping sound, Nigel exploded as the crushing tentacle cut him in two. Blood showered downward. His legs plummeted into the lava, and the bloody remains of his chest and head did as well. The head turned somersaults, locked into a rictus of screaming torment, the eyes unblinking. It splashed and sank into the lava.
