by Matt Wallace
“I see you,” Boosha pronounces.
Lena frowns. “You see me? You see me doing what?”
“Standing.”
“Standing? What do you mean?”
“You are standing,” Boosha confirms. “You are only one who is.”
Lena’s eyes darken. “Who . . . isn’t standing, Boosha?”
The ancient woman shakes her head sadly.
“Cannot see,” she declares.
Lena stares down into the pot, watching jade-tinted bubbles form and burst atop the hissing liquid.
“I never liked soup,” she quietly confesses. “It’s like food but not food. And that comforting feeling you get in your stomach doesn’t last.”
DEMON IN A BOX
The Demon Lord Astaroth, Third of the Fallen, Tempter of Saints, who tasted the flesh of Archangel Michael in the final battle for Heaven, is taking a shit in the corner of a converted fruit cellar in a cabin in upstate New York.
“Oh, that is rank, dude!” Moon retches, turning away and closing his eyes.
None of them is certain which is more off-putting, the sight or the noises the decrepit demon is making.
Marcus uses the hand supporting his shotgun’s slide to cover his mouth and nose. “Man, we saw some fucked-up shit in the jungle, but this just colonized all that fucked-up shit and built a fucked-up empire on top of it.”
“I am certain to you I smell like death dragging week-old entrails over brimstone,” the elder demon says. “I assure you, however, your ripe flesh smells even worse to me!”
“I’mma have to call bullshit on that,” Cindy practically moans.
“I will assume this is not a rescue,” Astaroth muses. “I would ask what you are doing here, but I am beyond taking even the slightest interest in human affairs.”
“We were told you died,” Ritter says calmly, apparently the only one able to block out the total sensory assault.
Astaroth snorts his derision. “So even my own clansdemons believed. In my captivity here, I have struggled to accept such ancient creatures could be so foolish! Our Desolate Master Himself has forgotten me, it seems.”
This final admission appears to be a particular misery for the shriveled hellion, as if he’s speaking of a father who never truly gave him the attention he so desperately craved.
“Even on this mortal plane, demons are made of tougher stuff, you pink, pulpy rodent.”
“Then how in the hell did you end up here?” Cindy asks.
“Allensworth knew abducting me would bring the eyes and wrath of the Oexial clan and the Dark Lord Himself to his machinations. If I appeared to succumb at my age to mortal danger, however . . .”
Ritter squints in the dim light, examining the sagging, leathery folds of the elder demon’s lumpy, misshapen form. Even amidst the many lines of age and millennia-old battle scars, he can make out fresh wounds.
Ritter frowns. “He’s been torturing you, hasn’t he? Allensworth?”
“How can you tell?” Marcus asks.
Astaroth snorts again. “‘Torture.’ What humans call torture, demons know as pleasure.”
“Like in Hellraiser?” Moon asks.
Even Astaroth ignores that question
“What did he want to know?” Ritter asks.
“All the secrets of Hell.”
The foursome waits to hear more.
“ . . . Can you be a little more specific?” Marcus presses when no more information is offered.
“He wanted intel on the Oexial clan,” Ritter says, the situation beginning to uncloud for him. “He wanted to know where Hell is vulnerable, in our world and theirs. He’s setting your clan up for the Vig’nerash, isn’t he? He’s helping them take over.”
Astaroth stares at him through the bars, the surprise in his reaction more evident in his silence than the demon’s puckered face.
“That’s what Gluttony Bay was all about,” Ritter continues, and it’s clear he’s working it out for himself as much as the rest of them. “It’s why it was filled with Vig’nerash demons. He’s been sucking up to them for decades. They’re trading coups, aren’t they? Allensworth is helping the Vig’nerash unseat the Oexial and take over Hell so they’ll back him taking over the Sceadu and everything that’s left on Earth. He wants to run it all.”
Even Moon, never the most introspective or self-aware among them, is livid. “Jesus, that’s some Bond villain–type shit.”
Ritter shakes his head, lost in his own dark self-realization. “Allensworth. He planned the whole fucking thing,” he says bitterly, sounding angrier at himself than Allensworth. “Even before Consoné, he set us up. The angel, the demon clan banquet, Wrinkles in the cell here choking to death in front of everyone so Allensworth could hijack him without anyone knowing—”
“I will vomit in your soul, human,” Astaroth spits at him.
“—it was all smoke. We’ve always been his weapons. I’ve always been his weapon.”
“Not the time or place to get all in your feelings, my dude,” Cindy says.
Marcus nods. “Soul-search later, bro. We’re on the clock.”
“This is what we needed,” Cindy reminds him. “This is what Bronko sent us here to get. This is our proof. We take Cobra Commander here’s ass to the Sceadu, he spills the ugly beans, and they take out Allensworth before he launches his endgame. Mission accomplished.”
Astaroth laughs. It’s a shrill and awful rasping that would be a death spasm coming from a human being.
“What’s so funny, Pappy O’Lumps?” Cindy asks the demon.
“The human you know as ‘Allensworth’ is only one of many who have borne the name. I knew the first of them as Ahns’w’rk not long after you muck-dwelling vermin finally mastered fire. It is a mantle taken on by those of your kind who walk between worlds, bridging the unearthly and earthly planes, brokering life and death between humans and the higher creatures of existence. The title attracts the most craven among you, those who above all else yearn for power beyond paltry wealth or empty political authority. This Allensworth, however, is the most virulently ambitious yet. He is willing to upset the balance of Hell to rule on your Earth. Your tiny, insignificant rabble has no hope of unseating his plans.”
Cindy’s eyes narrow in cold resolution. “We’ll see about that shit. Help me get these bars open and let’s bounce.”
She reaches down to unlatch her tactical tomahawk.
“Well played,” Luciana congratulates them. “You have achieved your apparent objective.”
The spirit has reappeared. She’s standing serenely behind the assemblage in the cellar, spectral hands delicately folded in front of her spectral body, unaffected smile ever present.
They all turn to face her.
“I guess that Polaroid juju wore off,” Marcus says to Ritter.
“Eat me,” he quietly and passively rejoins.
“Unfortunately,” Luciana adds, ignoring their banter, “you are all going to be flayed alive.”
The pounding of several dozen heavy boots on the cabin floor begins to thump directly over the foursome’s heads. Most of them look up to watch the plaster being shaken loose by the quaking.
Ritter’s gaze, however, remains affixed on Luciana.
“It’s amazing how far behind current events you can fall, being out of action just a few minutes,” he says to the spirit.
Her smile falters, and Luciana cocks her head just so, her eyes asking the human what he knows that she doesn’t.
They can all hear those heavy boots surrounding the desk in Allensworth’s private office.
“Hit the deck!” Cindy hollers, dropping to the cellar floor and covering her head with her arms.
Ritter, Marcus, and Moon heed her warning, their bodies flattening to the floor as if gravity in the confined space has quadrupled.
Even Astaroth shrinks into the foul, shit-smelling recesses of his cell.
Luciana stares up at the outline in the ceiling of the hidden desk lift, the beginnings of re
alization touching the edges of her eyes.
In the next moment, they widen behind her oversized glasses.
They hear the sound of the secret elevator being activated. The ceiling at first muffles the report of the explosion that follows, then a balcony-sized section collapses into the cellar, tearing the lift frame from its moorings. Allensworth’s massive onyx slab desk crashes through the sudden hole and pulverizes the concrete floor of the cellar, raising a cloud of dusk that conceals the flying shrapnel. The desk’s wooden frame has been reduced to charred splinters.
A severed human arm wearing a tactical glove and the sleeve of a flak jacket is still attached to the onyx desktop.
Luciana sighs in irritation, physically unaffected by the blast and its aftermath in every way.
Ritter and the others are temporarily choking on the dust and shaking shrapnel from their hair and clothes. Their eardrums would be blown out right now if it weren’t for their sacred wax plugs. As it is, every human head in the cellar is buzzing and filled with throbbing pain. Ritter is the first to make it back to his feet, followed by Cindy, who hauls Moon off the floor none too gently while Ritter offers his brother a hand.
Behind the iron bars of his cage, Astaroth is cursing them all out in his shrill demon-speak.
“That bought us some time!” Cindy shouts at Ritter through bouts of hacking coughs. “We need to get Uncle Happy out of this cage and to Consoné and the Sceadu!”
Luciana makes a tsk-tsk sound with her tongue, shaking her head sorrowfully.
“I’m afraid we can’t have that,” she says.
The shotgun in Marcus’s hand swings away from his body, pulling itself free of his grip, hovering several feet from the cellar floor.
“What the fuck?” he yells in surprise.
Before any of them can react further, the muzzle angles between the bars of Astaroth’s cell and an invisible finger squeezes the trigger.
The burst-fruit sound of his withered, scaly skull exploding is lost beneath the thunder of the shotgun’s report.
“Fuck!” Ritter shouts in an uncharacteristic display of emotion, particularly anger.
The shotgun spins in place, stopping when its wide bore is level with Ritter’s neck. Its heavy slide ratchets back, discharging the spent shell that just decapitated Astaroth to make room for a fresh round of mayhem.
Cindy’s eyes widen and she screams, “No!”
The trigger of the shotgun pulls back.
Ritter closes his eyes.
A hollow metallic snap echoes throughout the cellar.
The rest is silence that lasts several excruciating moments. Ritter’s eyes open and he stares into the darkness of the shotgun barrel, his expression still utterly blank.
The weapon is empty.
“Holy shit, dude,” Moon mutters amidst his entire body exhaling in relief.
Luciana’s smile contorts into the thinnest frown.
“Well,” she says stiffly. “That is a shame.”
As they all look on, the animating force controlling the shotgun releases its hold and the weapon falls to the cellar floor, clattering loudly before collapsing onto its side.
“You fake-ass phantasmal bitch!” Cindy curses her, enraged, turning on the meticulously groomed specter.
Before Luciana can summon a saccharine and vitriolic retort, Ritter palms a simple boot flask and spins the cap loose with the edge of his thumb. He flicks it at the specter like a sanctifying priest. The strip of water that sails through her illusory form leaves behind a slash of white light across her canary-yellow suit jacket. That light quickly begins spreading through the rest of the apparition’s torso.
Luciana looks down at the infectious radiance, then at Ritter. She frowns as it begins seeping up her neck and engulfing her face.
“That was very rude,” she chastises him just before her entire form is swallowed and dispersed by white light that fades just as quickly.
Cindy watches Luciana disappear with murder in her eyes. She turns around and takes hold of Ritter’s wrist, raising the flask in his hand to her face and sniffing the rim.
“That ain’t holy water,” she says.
Ritter shrugs. “Whiskey barreled by monks. Sacramental by default. It works in a pinch.”
Marcus snatches up his shotgun. “We still need to get out of here and we can’t go back the way they came. That blast won’t have taken them all out.”
“I got this,” Moon says, apparently trying to sound like an action star in a big-budget summer blockbuster.
Cindy side-eyes him. “What do you mean, you ‘got this?’”
Without answering her, Moon reaches down the collar of the Schlock Mercenary T-shirt he’s wearing beneath his jacket and pulls out a chartreuse gemstone set inside obsidian jaws and hung from a thick gold chain. He paces quickly to the far wall of the cellar. Each concrete block mortared there is almost the size of Moon’s torso, and twice as thick.
Cindy watches him dubiously, looking over at Ritter with the same emotion plastered all over her face.
Ritter only shrugs, seeming more curious that concerned.
“Whatever you’re gonna do, do it now, Dazed and Confused!” Marcus shouts after Moon, racking his shotgun and pointing it at the still-smoking hole in the ceiling.
“Fuck, you’re old,” Moon fires back at him.
He presses the gemstone against the center of the cellar wall. It scrapes there, gently, like glass upon broken teeth. Moon brings his wrist to his mouth and uses his teeth to peel back the sleeve of his jacket. Scrawled messily along the inside of his forearm is what appears to the rest of them to be words in some arcane language spelled out phonetically and utilizing an obscene amount of hyphens.
“Shit,” Moon mutters as his eyes quickly scan the words. “Wrong one.”
He quickly shakes his sleeve back down his arm and uses that hand to pull up his right pant leg almost to the knee. More phonetic crib notes are jotted in red Sharpie down his calf.
“Ah-hah!” he proclaims triumphantly.
Moon lifts and bends his knee, angling the bottom of his right leg awkwardly and crooking his neck at the same time to clearly see the words.
He begins reciting the inscription under his breath. It sounds like unintelligible muttering to the rest of them, but as he does, the edges of the gemstone pressed against the wall begin to emit an eerie green light. Ritter and the others squint as they all question perceiving what appears to be a slight, shimmering wave ripple through the seemingly solid face of the wall.
When Moon pushes his free hand against the wall, his fingers disappear through it as if the concrete were mud, eventually immersing his arm to the elbow.
“Nuh-uh,” Cindy half-marvels, half-outright doubts. “I am not believing this.”
She jogs over to the wall and swipes a finger at what is now an incredibly malleable surface, coming away with a clumpy smear of some creamy substance. She sniffs at it experimentally with her brow furrowed and finally tastes the miraculously transformed emulsion with the barest tip of her tongue.
Cindy’s eyes widen. “Is this shit . . . meringue?”
Moon nods. “Raspberry, should be.”
“I hear shuffling!” Marcus warns the rest of them. “They’re recovering up there!”
“What about the subterranean soil, Moon?” Ritter asks.
Moon stares at him blankly. “Huh?”
“The dirt on the other side of the wall, boy!” Cindy shouts impatiently and loud enough in his ear to make Moon jump.
“Oh! Yeah, right, no, it . . . should go all the way to the top, and it’s thick enough we can, like, burrow through it. Y’know, like moles or whatever.”
Ritter doesn’t quite frown, but his always-serious expression darkens just a bit.
“Even if it does go all the way up,” Cindy says, “how do we breathe whilst we burrow?”
A shotgun blast answers her, Marcus racking the slide and discharging the hollowed shell as he backpedals toward the wall of
raspberry meringue.
“I am legendary for how long I can hold my breath,” he informs her as he brushes past Cindy, flashing a grin at her.
Marcus briefly tests the viscosity of the wall with the butt of his shotgun. Satisfied, he glances back at Cindy and yells before diving headfirst into the meringue, “Legendary!”
Moon looks at Ritter. “That was a joke about going down on her, right?”
“Yes, dammit, of course it was!” Cindy angrily shouts at him, shoving Moon aside.
She inhales deeply and holds it, dislodging a giant glob of raspberry meringue and splattering the cellar floor with it as she pulls herself into the wall.
The sound of heavy boots and smoke-strangled voices shouting begins to surround the hole in the cellar roof.
“I did good, right?” Moon hurriedly asks Ritter as he shrugs off his cream-stained coat.
“Moon, if we’re all still alive in five minutes? Then you did good.”
With that, Ritter takes one handful of Moon’s comic-strip T-shirt and another handful of his belt and hurls him like a hay bale into the raspberry meringue.
HEADS, YOU LOSE
Bronko hasn’t been home to his Manhattan brownstone in almost two weeks. It’s easy enough living out of Sin du Jour, considering the size of the compound-like series of brick buildings and their seemingly endless facilities; it’s certainly not a place you’d ever go hungry. But lacking fresh clothing, not to mention a moment alone, Bronko decides it’s time to pay a quick visit and at least read his mail.
His cell phone rings as he sits in the back of an honest-to-goodness taxicab (Bronko does not hold with the Ubers and Lyfts of modern society). He answers it and his blood runs cold as he listens to Ritter explain what happened in Allensworth’s cabin, every gory, unfulfilled detail. For Bronko, it’s not unlike having a loved one on their deathbed and finally receiving the terrible news you’ve been expecting yet not wanting to hear.
“There’s nothin’ to be done, then,” he finally says when Ritter has finished spinning the tale. “I’m glad y’all are whole. We’ll take comfort in that, if nothin’ else. Hightail it back home now.”
