Demon Gate: Beyond the 9th Circle: The Rapture Was Just The Beginning.

by Heath, Joel

  “Vince, you must be out of your damn mind.” Jessie scolded, “We don’t even know what’s in there.”

  Vince marched up to the front porch, the boards on the first step creaked as he shifted his weight on to the first step. The planks were wobbly and Vince nearly fell over. Vince reached for the railing on the side of the three steps that led up to the porch, the railing gave out under the strain and Vince tumbled to the ground.

  Jessie reached out her hand and helped him back to his feet.

  “Why are you going up there?” Jessie demanded.

  “I don’t know.” Vince admitted, “I just think we should.”

  Jessie closed her eyes as she started to raise a closed fist, she wanted to hit Vince but managed to resist.

  Vince climbed onto the porch and walked to a window beside the door, Jessie climbed onto the porch as Vince peered into the window.

  “What are you looking for?” Jessie asked. Vince withheld a response as he started to visually scan the interior of the house.

  “I just want to…” Vince paused as he noticed the face of an old man with long thin hair with a grey to platinum white color appeared in the window. Vince quickly backed away form the window and just about tumbled over the porch railing, all the while screaming in a manner that could make a girly-girl proud.

  “What?” Jessie asked with a mildly panicked voice. “What did you see?”

  Vince’s hand was shaking as he pointed at the window and he was practically stuttering in shock, he managed to control the stutter and glanced at the window, the face was gone.

  “I saw someone inside.” Vince replied.

  Vince walked back to the door and looked around to see if anybody was there, then he checked the door knob to see that the door was not locked. Jessie had seen enough.

  “Vince, no, let’s just get out of here.” Jessie urged, but Vince ignored her and pushed the door open, the door creaked open revealing the interior was in better shape than the front porch, but not by much. Vince pressed inside.

  Directly ahead was a staircase to the left was a drawing room with a fireplace and a chair meant to allow a brooding person to sit alone and stare at the fire. To the right there was a room that was devoid of any furniture, with the exception of a pipe organ along the wall to the left, several tarnished pipes extended from the main body of the musical instrument up toward the ceiling.

  Several heavy footsteps echoed down from the second floor, Vince and Jessie shared a worried look which grew to terror as the front door slammed shut. With the outside light cut off, the entire interior turned grey and gloomy.

  Jessie ran to the door and tried to open it, but the door wouldn’t budge.

  “Damn it, the door is stuck.” Jessie mourned. She continued trying to pry the door open, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

  Vince heard the sound of a chair scraping against an old wood floor, and several pots banging together.

  “I’ll check it out.” Vince said and started to walk away.

  “WAIT.” Jessie pled, “Don’t leave me alone.”

  Jessie followed after Vince as they headed for a doorway just past the stairs where the kitchen sat.

  Entering the kitchen a black shape raced into the sitting room through another doorway.

  “Jessie, go after it, I’ll circle back and trap it.” Vince said, then turned and backtracked to the sitting room to find Jessie emerge from the kitchen, but nothing else, and nobody else.

  “Where did it go?” Vince asked.

  “I don’t know.” Jessie said, flustered, “I followed it out the door and only found you running in.”

  The sound of footsteps resumed, but they were heading up the stairs. Vince and Jessie charged out of the sitting room to the stairs just in time to see something vanish around the corner at the top of the stairs.

  Vince charged up the stairs, and took a sharp left around the corner.

  “Vince, where are you going?” Jessie called.

  When Vince didn’t reply Jessie went up the stairs after Vince and found him standing in a long hallway covered with aged white walls and green carpet, the hall had six doors along its length.

  Vince was closing the first door.

  “What are you doing?” Jessie demanded, wanting nothing more than to focus on getting out of the house and getting away from it.

  “What ever that thing is, I don’t think it wants to hurt us.” Vince guessed.

  “What makes you say that?” Jessie asked.

  “It would have done it already.” Vince replied.

  “And you came to this conclusion, how?” Jessie asked.

  “Every demon or creature Lucifer has sent our way has tried to kill us, and this thing keeps moving away from us.” Vince explained. “Maybe it’s trying to tell us something.”

  Vince proceeded to the next door and opened it inside was the same as the previous, a bedroom. The bed had a dirty white mattress with blue pinstripes on a metal frame, a dresser with a mirror and the same green carpet covering the floor, however, there were no windows.

  Vince and Jessie checked each of the remaining doors, each one was the same, except for the last room, the layout was different, and Vince knew it. Vince closed the door and noticed the hallway turned to the right, there was no window, the hall just ended.

  “There’s nothing here, Vince.” Jessie said.

  Several boards overhead creaked causing Vince to raise his chin forty-five degrees to see a pull down attic ladder, there was no cord to pull the ladder down, but there was a handle that was secured by a large padlock. The lock looked to be more than a hundred and fifty years old,

  “Great,” Vince said. “How are we going to get up there?”

  “Maybe there was a key.” Jessie suggested.

  “Do you want to search the entire house? Be my guest.” Vince offered.

  Jessie thought for a moment.

  “Maybe we don’t have to search the entire house.” Jessie said.

  “You know where the key is?” Vince asked.

  “Maybe.” Jessie said before turning to go back to the last room.

  She started with the bed and then checked the dresser before checking for anyplace the carpet was loose, which was nowhere.

  “Maybe we will have to check

  everywhere.” Vince said heading for the door.

  “No way.” Jessie said, somehow she had missed a painting of several demons playing poker.

  “Just another knock off artist.” Vince said when he noticed the painting.

  Jessie pulled the painting down to reveal a wall safe with a key pad.

  “Three numbers.” Vince said after examining the safe. He knew the combination and entered a six into the keypad three times. The safe beeped and unlocked.

  Inside the safe was a single key. It was an old tarnished key covered in rust. Vince and Jessie left the room and went to the ladder to the attic to try and unlock the lock.

  Vince inserted the key and turned it, the lock snapped open. Vince removed the key and pulled the ladder down allowing them to climb into the attic.

  The floor of the attic was covered in random items stacked from floor to ceiling. Jessie reached over to the pile and pulled out a doll that resembled one that she wanted when she was younger.

  “I don’t believe it.” Jessie said.

  “What?” Vince asked.

  “It’s a Cabbage Patch doll.” Jessie replied, Vince looked over at the doll in Jessie’s trembling hands.

  “Isn’t that the doll that everyone was fighting over thirty years ago?” Vince asked.

  “Yeah,” Jessie tenderly chuckled as she tried to conceal the sting of regret, but finally a tear escaped her eye and trickled down her face. “I was five when they came out, I asked my mom for one for Christmas that year, when I didn’t get it I told her…” Jessie paused, trying to hold back a fit of tears, and a painful memory that she had tried to forget.

  “I told her I hated her.” Jessie said, tears flowed freely; she had gi
ven up, and had to release the guilt she had held onto for the last thirty years. “And she died later that day in a car wreck.”

  Vince took Jessie in his arms and tried to comfort her. The scope of Jessie’s pain came into focus. Vince was at a loss, what could he say?” After a couple of minutes Jessie managed to calm down.

  Vince took the doll and put it down before taking Jessie deeper into the piles of junk that littered the floor.

  The deeper they went the more Vince noticed the age of the items seemed to increase until there were no familiar toys, there was only a bare floor that surrounded a man with long, thin hair that hung down from his nearly bald scalp, the man faced a large round window that was segmented into quadrants.

  The man noticed Vince and Jessie.

  “What are you doing here?” the man demanded.

  Vince about choked, he had seen the man. It had been a brief and a vague glimpse but it was him. Vince wondered why it had nearly startled him into a panic.

  “How did you?” Vince started and then took a breath, “I saw you in the window from the porch.”

  The man face indicated he was pondering the question, then finally dignified Vince with an answer to his question.

  “Here in hell I have learned to project myself.” The man admitted.

  “Why didn’t you use your parlor trick to set yourself free?” Jessie asked.

  “While projecting myself I have no physical form, and so I could not engineer my own escape.” The man admitted.

  “Now what are you doing here?” the man asked. “You obviously don’t belong here. You lack the mark.”

  “We came for a soul, but one of our companions was lost.” Vince admitted.

  The man laughed as he climbed to his feet.

  “You came to get a soul back…from Satan?” the man said and laughed again. The man brought his laughter under control and stared directly into Vince’s eyes.

  “You’ll never win; go home while you can still get out.”

  “We will,” Vince said “When we find our friends soul, maybe you can help us.”

  The man widened his eyes, he was impressed.

  “You’ve got a lot of brass on you.”

  The man stepped away.

  “In order to get to Satan’s castle you need to first know where it is, then you need to know how to get inside.” The man said and then turned back to Vince. “That’s the tricky part, and it’s damn tricky, it is.”

  “Well, you seem to know a lot about hell.” Jessie noticed.

  “Which way do we go?” Vince asked.

  The man smirked.

  “Stay on this road for another six hours and you’ll come to the River of Anguish. Follow the river upstream and into the Mountain of Misery, you will find the castle deep inside an ancient volcano. To get in you will need to find the door by the river that flows from the top of the surrounding cliff face; it flows through Satan’s castle of pain before flowing

  downstream. If he expects you, then he will do everything in his power to stop you, which is why you must not try to get in through the front gate.” The man urged.

  Vince and Jessie thanked the man for the information before heading out of the attic and into the hallway; they descended the stairs and headed out of the house.

  After untying the horses, they mounted and headed down the road as fast as they could. After five hours hard ride Vince could see the mountain the man had been talking about. It was still three hours away, but it was close enough that they could both taste the coming fight. Vince and Jessie soon came to the River of Anguish which was a broad swath of blood red water that carved its way though the unforgiving landscape, a bridge crossed the river, but Vince and Jessie didn’t cross, instead they turned and followed the river. Soon they could hear screams of torment and moans of sorrow.

  They had finally made it to the heart of Lucifer’s territory. But were they too late? Was Spencer a lost cause? Was it too late to save Gretchen and her unborn child? They had no idea how long they had been trapped in their nightmares. The unborn child had only a short amount of time before it would pass away without its mother’s soul. Each kept to

  themselves the fear that even if they saved their friends, the baby would have died before they could get out of hell. IF they could get out.

  The smell of pain filled the air as Vince and Jessie noticed a trail that passed under a drawbridge that lead up to the castle, the trail ran along the rivers bank around the left side of the castle. The trail was fifteen feet below the embankment they currently occupied, so Vince and Jessie dismounted and sent the horse running off before climbing down to the hidden trail.

  The trail led to a hidden door.

  “This is it.” Vince said before pushing the door open, inside there was no light.

  “I don’t like this.” Vince said, his instincts were to high tail it out of there, but he stepped in, knowing that he had to go forward, Jessie tried to stop him, but she too knew the time to turn back had passed.

  The door slammed shut and around the perimeter of the room, a dozen torches exploded to life, burning a faint red-orange glow, the walls were made of stone and covered in cobwebs filling the room were several demons, and Spencer.

  “Spencer?” Jessie asked when Spencer pointed at her and Vince.

  “Take them.” Spencer ordered.

  The demons swarmed in and bound Vince and Jessie’s hands and escorted them out of the room.

  What could be said? It was obvious that Spencer betrayed them. Was it to spare Gretchen and his child? It didn’t matter now, or did it? Spencer did not appear to have been transformed, could the transformation be ongoing? Could it be stopped or reversed?

  Spencer led the escort into a hall that boasted some intricate architecture; several stones that looked like they were cut in the likeness of human skulls randomly adorned the wall. Vince looked closely causing the

  procession to stop, and then he realized the stones were not stones, they actually were skulls; several other bones also adhered to the wall in a haphazard arrangement.

  In disgust, Vince backed away from the wall covered in human bones, not thinking about the opposite wall until a boney, completely decomposed hand landed on his shoulder. Vince almost didn’t react until the hand started to close as it tried to grab his shoulder, Vince moved from the wall to examine it, and found a half of a person being used as part of the wall, the body was built into the wall, and it was trying to get out and scramble to freedom, but ultimately falling short.

  Spencer struck the hands that tried to grab for Vince before resuming the escort to the main audience chamber. The chamber had a balcony that looked over a courtyard that allowed Lucifer to observe his troops as he prepared for his attack on Heaven.

  Lucifer caught the sound of footsteps entering the chamber and retreated from the balcony to greet the new guests.

  “These are the intruders, Master.” Spencer said.

  Lucifer approached Vince and Jessie.

  “Mr. Masters and Ms. Monroe,

  welcome.” Lucifer greeted them with a depth of charm that almost put them at ease. Vince glanced out through the archway that Lucifer had just come from and saw a tower in the distance; he glanced around and noticed a large black stone with a mirror-polished surface hovered above the stone floor. Outside the archway, there was a walkway that extended out over the ground below leaving two ramps. Vince assumed they were to allow Lucifer’s troops access to the castle. Was this room the launch point for Lucifer’s invasion?

  Jessie glared at Spencer.

  “I’m sorry it had to be this way.” Spencer apologized.

  “You sold us out.” Jessie spat.

  “I HAD TO DO SOMETHING TO SAVE MY SON.” Spencer yelled. “But you wouldn’t understand, you can’t understand.” Spencer finished.

  “You think I can’t understand having no other options?” Vince demanded, “What happened to the nightmare I know that we all had to suffer through before waking up here?” Vince chastise
d. “I know you must have seem some horrible things, I had to listen to the woman I love being tortured and all I could do was hear her screams, begging for help, and then being asked to end her suffering.” Vince finished, then glanced at Jessie to her smiling at him.

  “I was buried alive, and sentenced to die for a crime I didn’t know anything about, I can only imagine the hell that you were forced to suffer through.” Jessie added.

  “You.” Lucifer shouted interrupting the squabble directing an order to the demons holding the prisoners. “Take them to be

  converted.” Lucifer ordered and the demon nodded before it and several other demons forced Vince and Jessie from the room.

  Spencer turned to Lucifer who was standing by a glyph on the floor that glowed a bright, and otherworldly green color.

  “Master, I was given your word they would not be changed and that Gretchen would be restored.” Spencer reminded. “We had a deal.”

  “I changed the deal.” Lucifer said. “Your love will remain here, with you.”

  Spencer had known that Lucifer would pull something like this. He worked to keep any expression off his face.

  “As you command, my Master.” Spencer said before excusing himself.

  Vince and Jessie were taken out of the main chamber to an adjoining corridor. The architecture was starting to remind Vince of a nightmare about being forced to kill Jessie, his heart began to race; his breathing soon matched the chaotic rhythm of his heart. Vince and Jessie were forced into a room with a table that looked like it was meant for medical examinations, or something dark and sadistic. She was strapped to the table first while a brawny demon restrained Vince, and all remaining demons left the room, but Vince refused to give up his attempt to escape and save Jessie and Gretchen, despite the futility.

  “I’m going to kill Spencer when I get through with this.” Jessie seethed.

  The demon that restrained Vince chuckled.

  “I said the same thing before I was changed. Now I serve Lucifer.” The demon said as the second demons hand reached up to a large switch. “This will take a couple of hours.”