Infernal Angel

by Edward Lee

  “Oh, gimme a break,” Angelese muttered.

  At the end of the hall stood a black-garbed Grand Duke, oxen-headed, eight feet tall, overly muscled shoulders spanning a meter at least. Its eyes smoldered, and the horns jutting from its rippled forehead were longer and sharper than those of a mature bull.

  Behind the monster stood a platoon of slavering Ushers, some armed with bloody halberds, some with broadswords, some with spiked cudgels, yet all with newly honed talons, mouths full of teeth like long shards of glass.

  The voice resonated. “Etheress. I am Grand Duke Lescoriere of the First Infernal Brigade. I am charged with the duty of escorting you to the Mephisto Building. The property owner would be honored to receive you as his welcome guest. He has much to discuss with you, and much to share. He has blessings of wonder to bestow—good things, all. And on my immortal soul, I guarantee your safety.”

  “Sit on your horns, dickhead,” Angelese said

  “If you come of your own accord—you, Etheress, and your confidante—you will be rewarded beyond all imagination.”

  Cassie grinned. “I’ll go with you on one condition.”

  “Speak it, Etheress, and it will be done.”

  “Cut your head off,” Cassie said.

  The Grand Duke, unblinking, took a broadsword from one of the Ushers, held it straight out by the haft, and flicked his corded wrist. The blade blurred backward and popped the Grand Duke’s head off his shoulders like a disconnected jack-in-the-box.

  “You gotta be shitting me,” Angelese whispered.

  Cassie’s jaw dropped. Man, these guys are HARDCORE. The Grand Duke’s monstrous body remained standing, fully poised. An Usher picked up the head and held it out by the horns.

  “I’ve done as you have bid, Etheress,” said the Grand Duke’s head.

  “I hate to tell you this,” Cassie said, “but I was just kidding.”

  “As I’ve said, your humble host awaits you, and someone else too, someone who loves you and yearns to see you—”

  “Yeah, I know, my sister. But I don’t believe what devils say. I’m not that stupid, so why don’t you do us all a favor? Why don’t you and your goon squad hit the road?”

  “Come with us of your own free will, or we will take you,” the Grand Duke said, and behind him, several of his beasts were unfolding a barbed net.

  “You can’t take doodly-squat,” Cassie began, and then she shouted, “because you’re all BONELESS!”

  The Grand Duke’s head went limp as a rubber sack, dangling. His erect body collapsed on itself, then every Usher in the hall seemed to deflate as all their bones disappeared from within their flesh. In the time it had taken Cassie to merely say the word, the Grand Duke and his platoon were transformed into a quivering mass of flesh.

  “That’s so cool!” Angelese exclaimed.

  But Cassie began to go weak-kneed. “God, I can barely move, I’m so tired all of a sudden.”

  “Every time you use your powers, you drain your physical vitality, and you’ve used a lot today. But we’ve still got to get out of here. The Merge is wearing off, but I don’t know for sure how long it’ll take to end completely.”

  Yes, Cassie thought, light-headed and squinting ahead. Let’s just leave. She looked at the cinderblock hallway, and thought: Fall down ...

  The corridor toppled like something made of a child’s blocks suddenly swept by an irate hand. Air gusted in their faces, dust billowed outward in waves, and where the walls had been was now just open night. The perimeter of the confines of the Merge dwindled before their eyes, hellish structures, streets, and features dissipating. Cassie had collapsed in psychic exhaustion. Angelese put her over her shoulder and began to run.

  Part III

  Fall

  Chapter Eleven

  (I)

  Walter felt woozy, tunnel-visioned, as though he’d just stepped off a particularly vigorous roller coaster. I’m in a city, came the clipped thought. He tried to blink away some vertigo. Just a big city, a run-down district, like southeast D.C. or maybe Detroit. These thoughts were reactive, against the extreme disorientation. It would occur to him in a few moments, though, that neither southeast D.C. nor Detroit possessed a perpetual twilight of dark scarlet. The moon that overlooked D.C. and Detroit was not black, nor were the stars jaundice-yellow.

  Walter staggered down the stinking alley. His head hurt, and with each throb of pain another dollop of memory returned. He put his hand to his head, felt the wrap of bandages, then remembered still more.

  He’d tried to kill himself, but he’d failed. Colin, instead, had been the one to successfully complete the act.

  He chuckled. So ... I’m an Etherean. Either that or this is a really bad dream.

  A cone of light from a leaning streetlamp bathed the end of the alley. There stood a pile of rubbish, as might be found in any city: an old metal barrel stuffed with junk. Amid empty cans and splintered furniture legs sat an oblong mirror webbed with cracks. Walter stared down at his image, watched himself unwrap the bandage from his head. His shoulders slumped at the geek reflection and the ludicrous wound. A shaved line of stitches parted his hair right down the middle. Colin was right, I DO look like Moe in the episode about the organ grinder’s monkey ... What difference did it make, though? If this wasn’t a dream, then he was in Hell now, a Hell that had evolved over thousands of years into this endless metropolis full of skyscrapers. And he was unique in this place. In the Living World he’d been a nobody.

  Here, he’d been informed, he had great power.

  But where was the evidence of such power? He hadn’t transformed. He didn’t radiate blazing light from his eyes. He was the same Walter, just standing in a different place.

  A different world, he reminded himself.

  Back at Colin’s penthouse, he’d read all of the pages that had been transcribed by the prostitutes, and if there was one thing about Walter it was that his genius I.Q. accommodated quite a capacity for reading as well as data retention. He’d read the entirety of the Evocations of Lucifuge, the first book to ever be published in Hell. He’d scrutinized the crucial chapters: “The Unsacred Edicts of Hellspace,” and “Etheresses and Ethereans.”

  He knew everything now. He knew all the Rules.

  But there was no description whatsoever of the actual powers of an Etherean. How did they manifest themselves? If he was so powerful—the first Etherean in all of history—why wasn’t anyone here to greet him? He expected to be carried off on a throne. Why weren’t the minions of the underworld bowing at his feet?

  Graffiti loomed on the urine-streaked alley wall: I WANNA FUCK SHIT UP! and HELL SUCKS. In the darkness, barely seen shapes that could only be rats chittered by, and drug vials cracked under his sneakers. Walter shook his head. “Maybe this is Detroit,” he muttered. “I guess Lucifer’s not into urban renewal.” Then Walter peered at more graffiti—FREE MEATBALLS AND BLOODY FACES!—and shook his head again. A final scrawl stared back at him: CANDICE LOVES WALTER.

  Morose, he walked off.

  The city’s true nature began to reveal itself. Out of the alley, he could indeed see the sky, like dark blood, and the black sickle moon that looked several times larger than the moon that orbited the Living World. Fires crackled beneath sewer grates, and strange faces clearly not human peered at him from dim windows. But Walter wasn’t afraid. Why should he be?

  I’m an Etherean.

  The details of getting here began to resurface. That place in south St. Pete, The Mound, it was called, some local landmark. The prostitute at Colin’s had given Walter the slip of paper with directions.

  It was a Deadpass, and now that he’d read the transcriptions, he knew what that meant. He’d merely walked across The Mound. Everything went black for a moment, and he felt a queer pressure pushing, but after only a few steps, he was here.

  Walking through the Deadpass had brought him from one world to another, and here he was. In the city. In the Mephistopolis.

  In his pants pock
et he kept the polished onyx stone, one of his dead brother’s final instructions. It would debilitate his visible life force. He felt it growing warm in his beige Dockers, and though he didn’t quite understand, he thought it best to do as he was told. He was here for a reason: to see Candice. He couldn’t have her in the Living World, but as an Etherean he would have her here. They would spend eternity with each other, in love.

  CANDICE LOVES WALTER ...

  Poor Walter ...

  Bizarre street signs wavered overhead: CRANIOPAGI AVENUE, HEMIHYPERTROBE ROAD, CHAN-CROID BLVD. What? No Primrose Lane? Out on the sidewalk now, the sulphurish streetlamps tinted the asphalt like yellow frost. He was passing another alley when he heard the faint but definite sound ...

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  Walter stopped, peeked into the alley.

  Some sort of humanoid mongrel, with horns surrounding his head like a crown, and a face stretched out round and tight as a black balloon, stood in the alley with his rotten trousers down. He was snipping warts off his elephantine penis with a pair of toenail clippers.

  “Get out of here!” the thing grumbled. “Can’t you see I’m busy!”

  Walter got out of there and fast. Around the next corner he stumbled onto a street that seemed to be paved in cobblestones. At first it looked pretty, but when he examined the stones more closely he noticed that they were clear, like transparent bricks, each containing a demonic fetus. Up ahead, a Lycanymph leaned against a mailbox. The drop-door on the mailbox wouldn’t close due to overfilling with body parts. But Walter had read about the Lycanymphs: sultry tramp werewolves that prostituted themselves. She was picking her vulpine nose, pulling out worms.

  Man, this place is A LOT grosser than Detroit! Walter thought, aghast.

  The streets seemed strangely devoid of activity, though. “Where is everybody?” he mumbled to himself. A city in Hell? It should be sprawling with damned souls and demons.

  “Mutilation Squad came through a few hours ago,” the pretty werewolf told him. Now she was extracting a worm at least a foot long from her nostril. “They hit us twice this week. That’s never happened before.”

  Walter averted his eyes from her current activities when he asked, “What’s a Mutilation Squad?”

  “Usually a regiment of Ushers and Conscripts. They come in by surprise in Nectoports, kill everything on the street. Funny this time, though.”

  “Whuh-what?”

  “The last two times they didn’t kill anyone, just carried them all off in nets. Mancer Squads have been doing it too, and the Constabularies. Rumor is they’re taking everyone in alive to use them in the Atrocidome. Some new hocus-pocus going on’s what I heard from a trick a couple days ago. And it really pisses me off ’cos it’s wiping out my business. I lost some of my best johns in their last grab.” She winked at him with a long-lashed agate-like eye. “You wanna date, cutie?”

  “Uh-uh, no thank you,” Walter stammered. “I don’t have any money.”

  She hissed, showing yellowed fangs. “Then get off my street, you useless dork!”

  Walter didn’t care for the comment. “You shouldn’t talk to me like that,” he suggested. “If I weren’t a nice guy, I’d use my powers on you.”

  “Powers? What powers?”

  “I’m an Etherean,” he told her.

  The Lycanymph’s eight pert fur-covered breasts jiggled as she laughed. “There’s no such thing as an Etherean, asshole. It’s a fable. It’s like Santa Claus. And even if the Etherean legend is true, it could never be you.”

  “Why not?” Walter challenged.

  “You’re a dweeb, not a hero.”

  Walter rushed away, crushed. What she’d said couldn’t be true, though, could it? He knew that he was alive, yet in Hell. Only Ethereans could do that. It was the only way a member of the Living World could enter this place.

  He turned the next corner—

  “Man-Burgers?” a Troll asked. He stood bloody-aproned and stout at his wheeled vending stand. His face could’ve been meatloaf. He skillfully spun a spatula over pallid meat patties cooking on the grill. “Or how about some of these?” he pitched, pointing to three sizzling things that looked like white bratwursts.

  “What are those?” Walter inquired. “Sausages?”

  “It’s ghalestro pajata, grilled baby ghoul intestines, still filled with the mother’s milk. It’s great, tastes like salty pudding.”

  Walter’s stomach clenched.

  Next the vendor opened a metal box beside the grill; steam floated out. “This is even better, and it’s only two Eichmann Quarters per order.” Walter saw the ramekinlike containers, crusted around the rims and bubbling with something that could’ve been melted Muenster cheese. “This is Baked Meconium Imperial, my own mama’s recipe.”

  Walter was choking but his curiosity wouldn’t let up. “What—what’s meconium—”

  “Fetal bowel contents. In this case, a third-trimester Cacodemon fetus. Dee-lish!”

  Walter staggered off and threw up on the sidewalk. His vomit glowed as if he’d thrown up on the lens of a flood-lamp. The vendor was laughing, and he heard a scurrying. He leaned against a steam-car parked at the curb, catching his breath, but the scurrying got louder, and now he heard murmuring too.

  Stomach still flinching, Walter looked aside. Several young Broodcn—half-breed demon children—congregated with enthusiasm around, of all things, Walter’s vomit.

  Walter stared, revolted. What on earth—

  But this wasn’t earth, was it? The Brooden were all scooping up Walter’s luminous vomit and racing away with it in their cupped hands, their faces alight. Several got into a fight over the remaining smears.

  Then it made sense, and it was proof that he truly was an Etherean as the books had said. Any material object or substance from the Living World was of immense value in Hell. Including vomit. Especially an Etherean’s vomit. It was as good as cash here.

  You learn something new every day, he thought, dejected.

  “There he is!” piped a nasally voice. Weird bumpy little faces peered at him—the remaining Broodren.

  “Look!”

  “Yeah, right there!”

  “An ETHEREAN!”

  This was not the welcome Walter imagined. When they began to give chase, Walter ran off down another alley. The little buggers followed him intently as a pack of rabid terriers, chortling, and Walter knew they were much faster than he. What would they do when they caught him? It wasn’t hard to figure. If his vomit was worth money, wouldn’t his body parts be worth even more? Those little psychos’ll tear me apart!

  Some Etherean. What a joke. He had no power. He hadn’t even been in Hell ten minutes, and he was about to get killed.

  His heart almost stopped when he looked to the end of the alley.

  Something stood there still as a chess piece, in silhouette. Nine feet tall, wide-angled shoulders, and a head like a lump.

  A Golem.

  Walter had read about them, and all the inhabitants of this place. A Golem was akin to a brainless police officer. They were made of clay from the tidal beds of the River Styx, for the Agency of the Constabulary. They moved slowly but were nearly indestructible.

  If Walter turned and ran in the other direction, the chattering Broodren would get him. He could only suspect that this thing in front of him would be much more efficient.. Either way, Walter knew he would die, and it wasn’t that terrible a prospect since he was already a suicidal basketcase.

  His teeth chattered. “Please don’t make it hurt much,” he pleaded to the Golem.

  The thing approached clumsily but steadily. It did not raise a mitten-like hand to Walter but instead looked down at him with the featureless lump of its face. Walter squeezed his eyes shut and prepared to die.

  The thudding of its footsteps rumbled off. Then—Squealing, screams, howls of terror.

  Walter turned around and looked. Behind him the Golem was stomping the B
roodren, crushing them, pulling them apart.

  Walter ran.

  Why did it save me? It could’ve killed me in a second but it didn’t.

  Then he remembered a little more, some of the last things Colin had told him before he’d redecorated the ceiling of his penthouse with his brains. The Prince of Lies wants you, brother ... Walter had little confidence in the man’s title but still—There was the implication. The power circles in the Mephistopolis wanted Walter and that was difficult for him to dismiss since he’d essentially lived his entire life unwanted. There’d been promises of great things to come, of power like that of a king. That last straw-blond prostitute, too, had implied as much: that in Hell Walter would be something great, and would reclaim the woman he loved.

  So he dreamed on.

  He cleared his head and walked, found another smoking intersection. A steam-car, driven by an Imp in a Yankees cap, soared out of the low-hanging fog. A Griffin circled lazily overhead, appraising him, then was off. From distant, lit windows he heard laughter, moans, and shrieks.

  The next street sign snagged his attention: CHYME RESERVOIR AVENUE. It rang a bell, then more pieces of memory kindled. The dream, he recalled. But it was just a dream, wasn’t it? And he recalled the pretty girl in the punkish clothes who’d been beheaded by the Golems: No-name was her name. A Dactyl-class sorceress for the court of King Mursil the First, she’d told him, whatever that meant. And he remembered one more thing: in the dream, the Golems had thrown her head in a garbage can.

  A garbage can stood right in front of him.

  There better not be a severed head in this garbage can, Walter thought, looking in.

  There was a severed head in the garbage can.

  “Hello, Walter,” the head greeted, tilted in the trash. A flesh-colored bug crawled across her face as she aggravatedly twitched her nose to get it off.

  “No-name,” Walter whispered down.