by Edward Lee
"Piece of cake."
"Thanks-and do me another favor, will you? Have your guys go over Freddie's pad with a fine-tooth comb. Look for anything out of place."
"More out of place than forty grand in cash?"
„Anything ...occult," Bens clarified.
"Sure. But what was that business about the blood?"
"When we found the bodies of the nun and the church custodian, they were drained of blood. I think what Freddie's promising to tell me-if I keep my end of the bargain-is the blow-by-blow."
"Dead bodies with no blood means they were killed in another location," Lee said.
"Yeah, and maybe it means more than that."
"Something occult ... ?"
Berns shrugged. "There's a lot of delusional people in the world. They believe in fucked-up things because-"
"Because they're fucked up." Lee was pouring more coffee. "You want my gut feeling?"
Berns sat down, suddenly exhausted. "Your gut feeling is probably the same as mine. Freddie's not lying about committing the Wammsport murders, but he is lying about his accomplices."
"That's the read I got too. Which means his accomplices are still in your jurisdiction." Lee smirked after the next sip of coffee. "Happy trails, Captain. It looks like you've got a real murder investigation on your hands..."
Chapter Two
m
When Ruth awoke, she was drowning in blood. She gagged, mindless, her arms and legs churning in the hot coppery brew. But could it really be blood? All of this?
She couldn't think. She didn't even know who she was yet. Only instinct fired her nerves-the will to survive.
It didn't occur to her just yet that she was already dead.
Her thoughts screamed. Where am I? What is this? Somebody help me!
She desperately breaststoked, but more madness shrieked through her psyche when glimpses upward showed her a sky that was as red as the blood she was swimming in, and smudged clouds idling across a black moon shaped like a sickle.
I'm having a nightmare! she managed to think. I'm seeing things. The sky isn't fucking red, and the moon isn't black, and it's fucking impossible for me to be swimming in a lake of blood!
She tried to stabilize herself: dog paddling now, then floating on her back, etc. Her thoughts spun like a whirl pool. Every time her head pitched above the surface, her eyes strained but could see nothing, nothing but the tossing, endless expanse of scarlet.
Just keep moving. Eventually the nightmare will end....
Hours later she was still paddling ... and wearing out.
Then ...
Did she hear a voice? Was someone calling her name?
Something white bobbed on the low surf, fifty yards ahead.
A boat!
It looked like a canoe or lifeboat, but that didn't matter. It was something that could get her out of all this blood. And, though she wasn't sure, she thought she could feel things swimming below her.
Fifteen more minutes of alternating breaststrokes and dog paddles got her to the little white boat. Stenciled letters on the bow read PROPERTY OF S.S. NEFARIOUS.
Ruth had no idea that the S.S. stood for "Satanic Ship."
When she finally hauled herself up onto the tiny skiff, she looked once-
And screamed so loud she thought her throat might explode.
Collapsed at the end of the boat were two corpses half-bloated by decomposition. Flies that were red and the size of bumblebees buzzed in abundance. Ruth stared frozen at the two congealed masses. Of course their skin would be discolored-the effect of decaybut...
Each corpse seemed to have a pair of horns on their heads.
"Help me! For God's sake, I'm over here!"
Ruth sat hunched at the bow, mortified. I did hear a voice.... All that she'd seen so far, in her first twenty minutes of Damnation, had reduced her sense of reason to something as thin as tracing paper, and through that metaphorical paper, she could glimpse nothing but a raging madness.
"Ruth Bridges! In the name of God, would you please just look over here!"
"My name," " she gasped to herself.
She looked off the port-quarter and indeed saw a head bobbing in the bubbling red surf.
There's a man out there....
She was trying to pry the oars from their paste of dead blood and heat-baked bilge, but they were stuck to the floor as if glued. The current suddenly changed, and now...
The man tossing in the water began to drift toward Ruth rather quickly.
"Grab me!" he bellowed. "And pull me in!"
Ruth had no desire to do anything of the sort but-
Who is he? How does he know my name?
"For God's sake, you better get ready to grab me! I'm the only one who can help you!"
Help, her thoughts sputtered.
The current was bringing him closer, faster. "Your name is Ruth Bridges! You're from Collier County, Florida! And right now, you're terrified because you don't know where you are. I can tell you! I can tell you everything, but that ain't gonna happen unless your stick your hands down and grab me!"
Ruth figured the command made sense. She looked for his hands to grab but didn't see them under the rushing blood.
"Grab me! Grab me!" he gargled just as he would drift beneath the boat.
Ruth thrust her hands down, grabbed onto something that felt like it might be his collar, then she pulled.
She screamed again-louder than the first time-when she saw what she'd dragged aboard: a man in a black jacket ... with no arms or legs.
"Calm down, Ruth," the head on the torso said. The blood from the impossible sea ran down his face. He was wearing a Roman collar.
"You're a living torso!" she shrieked.
"I know. My name is Thomas Alexander. I'm a Catholic priest." At least the head on the torso was handsome, not like those horned things festering at the other end of the boat. Short dark hair with some gray, intense eyes, leaned-faced. But still ...
'"This is fucking impossible!" She desperately pointed out into the endless sea of blood. "That's impossible!" She pointed to the scarlet sky and black sickle moon. "That's impossible! And you're im-fucking-possible!"
The torso-priest slouched against the bow. "Unfortunately, Ruth, none of this is impossible. It's all very regrettably real. Right now we're both floating on the Sea of Cagliostro-a sea of blood. About an hour ago, you died, and now you're in Hell."
Ruth sat paralyzed in the bobbing boat as the priest talked.
"It's impossible to explain everything, so I'll just tell it as we go. It was foreseen that you'd be here. I've been waiting for you in the city for a while now. I'm supposed to hook up with you-I'm on a job, so to speak. There is a great power that needs your help, and mine."
v Ruth's eyes bugged, as if to pop out. "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about!"
The priest sighed. "Just listen. And believe. This isn't a nightmare that you're going to wake up from. This isn't a hallucination or some aspect of insanity. It's real. You're what's called a Newcomer. You're one of the Human Damned. You have a body identical to the one you had on earth-the Living World-but here that body is called a Spirit Body. The soul inside is immortal. In Hell, it's very difficult for your Spirit Body to die, but when that happens, your soul continues to live. It moves to the closest Hellborn life-form. Do you understand?"
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about!"
"Oh, man," Alexander muttered to himself. "This ain't gonna be easy." His gaze snapped back to her. "What's the last thing you remember before you found yourself here?"
"I-I-I ..." Her teeth chattered in spite of stifling heat. "I'm ... from Florida. I was ... helping two guys pick up some pot, but then-uh, shit, I can't remember!"
"You will. It takes awhile." The boat pitched slowly back and forth. The stumps of the priest's arms kept moving like he was one of those people who talked with their hands but he'd forgotten he didn't have any. "Here's the scoop. For your worldly sins and your rejection o
f God, you've been condemned to Hell. My story's a little bit different, though. I'm not like you, I'm not one of the Human Damned, but I didn't go to Heaven when I died either. I went to a place called Purgatory-it's a city in one of the Netherplanes. It's not as bad as Hell, but ... it ain't that great. And I have to be there for five thousand years before my sins are purified and my Spirit can transcend to Heaven."
"Five thousand years!" Ruth wailed. "How long do I have to wait before my sins are purified?"
Alexander didn't answer.
Ruth's face fell to her hands; she began to blubber like a baby.
"There is hope, and I'll tell you about it in time," Alexander added.
Ruth wasn't even listening now. She was-quite understandably-inconsolable.
"Ruth, listen. There's more-a lot more. I need you to get yourself together-"
v "How can I fucking get myself together? I'm sitting in a boat in a sea of blood listening to a priest who's a torso tell me I'm dead and in Hell!"
"One thing at a time!" the priest yelled. He was getting irate. "You and I have a job to do. But I need your help and you need mine."
Ruth paused at the words ... then her eyes bugged. "I need your help? How can you help me? You're a fucking torso!"
"Tell me about it," the priest lamented. "It only happened yesterday. Like I said, I knew you'd be arriving. I have an intelligence source, you might say. This current is going to take us to a port town-"
"A town?" Her lower lip quivered. "But you said we're in Hell. Hell doesn't have towns. It's like ... fire and brimstone and shit, right? It's caves and rocks and lava and flames and holes in the ground that devils come out of, right?"
"Not anymore, Ruth. Think about it. Ten thousand years ago, what did America look like?"
Ruth's not-terribly-powerful mind churned. "I don't know! Just woods, I guess!"
"Right. Just one great expanse of wilderness. Hell was the same way, just with different natural attributes. But ten thousand years later? America's the most industrialized nation on earth, and most of its population lives in big cities, and the same for lots of other countries on earth. It's because during that time the human race evolved, Ruth. Human beings learned things, then passed that knowledge on to the next generation. Over the ages people got smarter and smarter, and became more and more resourceful. They turned the wilderness into a mechanized, sophisticated society. Get it?"
Ruth stared at him. "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about!"
Alexander tried to rub his temples, then sighed when he remembered the reason he couldn't. "Ruth, the same thing happened in Hell. Just as the human race evolved on earth, the demonic race evolved in Hell. It's not a smoking sulphur pit anymore. It's a great big industrialized city. And that city is called the Mephistopolis."
Ruth sat and let the words sink in.
"Here, look for yourself. Take my Roman collar off and reach into my shirt."
Ruth raised a brow. "You putting moves on me?"
"Just do it!" Alexander yelled, his patience draining.
Ruth fumblingly did as she was told. "What are these?"
"They're several pendants around my neck. Pull them out.,,
Ruth yanked upward, and out came one pendant that was attached to some sort of horn, another with a little bag on it, and another with a small wooden box on it.
"Open the box and take out the Abyss-Eye."
"The what?" Ruth asked, her knees in some indescribable muck.
"You ever heard of a monocle, Ruth? You know, like Colonel Klink wears?"
"Hey, I remember him on TV!"
Alexander nodded, smirking. "Well this is the same thing, only it's-well, you can think of it as magic. You put it over your eye, just like Colonel Klink, then ... you look."
Ruth opened the box and howled. "You fucker! It's an eyeball! What kind of a sick fucker are you?"
The priest groaned. "It's a magic eyeball, Ruth. Okay? Things here are magic. In the Living World it's science. Here it's magic."
The object was indeed a raw eyeball, but smaller than human and with a vertical iris. It had been set in a brass ring the size of a silver dollar.
"Abyss-Eye," she said very slowly and turned it in her fingers. "So that's ... a demon's eyeball in it?"
"Not quite. It's the eye of an Dentata-Vulture. It's a Hellborn bird that's sort of Hell's equivalent to a bald eagle. They have extremely good vision."
She kept looking at it. At one point, the eye blinked and Ruth yelped, bobbling the Abyss-Eye in her hands.
"Be careful! That thing was very hard to get! It's irreplaceable!"
Ruth put a hand to the Yucx Foo T-shirt-plastered to her chest, letting her heart slow down. "Fuck ... So I'm supposed to-"
"Just put it to your eye, Ruth."
Her fingers faltered as she raised the bizarre device to her eye, and-
"Holy ever-loving si ..."
She was looking out past the bow, then-
She went rigid in a silence that lasted quite a while.
In the distance, there was a craggy line between where the scarlet sea and the bloodred sky came together. When she strained her own eye, the Abyss-Eye zoomed. That's when she saw the city...
Crooked skyscrapers shot up into the soot-tinged horizon, interspersed by lower, squat buildings whose chim neys gushed smoke of all colors. From some buildings she saw heads on spikes, and between others, from things like clotheslines, squirming bodies hung from nooses around their necks. Several of the lines were probably a mile long. One Gothic spire had a clock just below its oddly angled and skull-ornamented roof.
But the clock had no hands.
Lower, she saw churches, or things like churches, that seemed to shudder as if alive, with black steeples marked by inverted crosses and cryptic symbols. Things like bats plunged down from the soiled sky to pluck screaming figures from rooftops, and along the sides of the tallest skyscrapers, hairless gray-skinned creatures crawled up and down, fast as field mice defying gravity. A group of black-winged flying beasts were harnessed together to pull a carriage of some sort. Ruth almost threw up when she saw the faces of the things within the carriage. From high ledges, figures jumped, most to be captured in the claws or beaks of Griffins before they hit the ground, and from windows she thought she saw smaller figuresbabies? children?-being cast out to take a similar plunge.
And when she zoomed closer to a street
"My God ...
She saw the masses of the Damned.
Ruth collapsed against the boat's edge.
"See what I mean?" Alexander said. "Hell is a city now, Ruth. That's what it's evolved into since Lucifer was tossed out of Heaven. But it's a city that's as big as a continent. It's a city that never ends."
Ruth sat in glum shock. She looked over the bow and momentarily dipped her hand into the sea.
"This really is blood, isn't it?" her voice cracked.
Alexander nodded.
"And I really have been condemned to Hell, haven't I?"
"Yes."
She began to cry.
"You need to prepare yourself, Ruth," the priest said in a fragile tone. The wind sifted through his hair as the red sky continued to bristle. "Forget about logic, common sense, and every basic speck of knowledge you ever learned on earth. In Hell, two plus two doesn't equal four, it equals six. In the Living World, there's science. Here there's sorcery and black magic. A blessing is now a curse, love is now hate, and white is black."
Ruth listened, eyes wide, mouth open.
"Knowledge is disinformation. Democracy is Demonocracy, and death is life." He blinked. "Everything's opposite here."
Chapter Three
m
"You passed out, honey." A hand was patting her face, then a cool damp rag covered her brow.
Venetia's eyes opened and eventually the two blurred forms sharpened into the faces of her mother and father.
"There she is," Richard Barlow said, smiling.
A third face came into view, back a few
feet. It was the scroungy kid at the register. "Everything all right? Want me to call an ambulance?"
The question jerked Venetia out of her drowse. "No, no, I'm all right... .
"Are you positive?" her mother asked.
Her father: "And what happened?"
"Like I was saying before, I didn't get much sleep last night." She leaned up in the big SLN's backseat. "I probably haven't been eating enough either. Been studying a lot."
"Of course, dear." Maxine's voice offered motherly comfort. She turned to her husband. "Richard, where's that piece of paper with the map? I think Father Driscoll's cell phone number is on it. We'll have to call and tell him Venetia can't make it today."
More alarm. Venetia straightened herself. "I'm perfectly fine, Mom. I can't miss this opportunity at the prior house. It's a lot of extra credits."
Her mother looked hesitant. "Well, if you're sure."
"Oh, she's okay." Her father seemed convinced now. "Our daughter's got a lot of spunk. But let me ask you something, honey. I thought I heard talking in that bathroom. There wasn't someone else in there with you, was there?"
She didn't allow herself to reflect. "No, Dad, just me. I may have muttered something to myself when I started to feel dizzy...." A stab of guilt then, but only a tiny one. She didn't like to he to her parents, but what could she say?
"All right, then. It's off to the prior house. Buckle up!"
A minute later they were back on the road. Maxine handed Venetia a cup of sweet coffee, which perked her up after only a few sips. The rushing scenery of another winding road through forest-backed grasslands invited her to reflect.
What did happen in there?
The voice, of course. Grating, tinny, like someone talking over a very old radio. And she remembered what it had said: Everything's opposite here. But she had to wonder where. And: In the name of God on High, be careful at the-
Be careful at the what?
Why did she have the dreadful impression that the voice meant to say, Be careful at the prior house?
"It's just so wonderful that Father Driscoll is back," Maxine remarked. "He's so-"
"Handsome," Richard repeated. "And kind of dashing. You already told us, dear."
"I only meant that he's barely changed at all in the fifteen years that he's been away."
