by Nazri Noor
If all this wasn’t proof enough of the fact that Belphegor was a gigantic asshole, I don’t know what else possibly qualifies.
When my eyes flew open, I sat bolt upright, gasping for air, clutching at my chest for the hole that I’d cut into myself, the gash directly over my heart. But there was nothing there.
My clothes were still drenched in my own blood, though. Next to me, Florian was coughing, sputtering, choking as he spat out great mouthfuls of blood that he’d swallowed from the wound that was no longer in my chest. The mattress underneath us both was soaked through with sticky, warm blood that I was no longer so sure even belonged to me.
You know who would have had fun with all this? Sterling. For sure.
I squeezed my fingers, testing to see if the dagger was still there, but it had returned itself to the Vestments in the brief seconds that I’d passed out and away from the real world. I blinked, rubbing my eyes blearily with hands already crusting over with drying blood, then looked around.
Oh. Oh wow. This wasn’t the real world. Not anymore.
“Bloody hell,” Florian muttered, flecks of blood-laced spittle dribbling down his chin.
Bloody hell was right. We weren’t in the Beauregard suite anymore, the bed having transported both us and itself into some kind of huge, sprawling garden – only none of it was green. Where you would have expected great, curving leaves that gleamed like wet emeralds in Paradise or the botanical gardens of the Nicola Arboretum, here, everything was blood red, as if the plants themselves were made out of flesh, or grown and fed on blood instead of water. Even the stone fixtures nearby, the statues and fountains, all gushed out copious quantities of blood. Whether the blood itself was human, animal, or even demonic in origin, I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.
Wait. I looked down at myself, at the generous coating of blood left all over the mattress, my clothes, even my duffle bag. So, this was the offering Belphegor demanded. Everyone who entered the domicile needed to donate a portion of blood to these horrible, gory gardens.
Something shifted near my pants leg, and I kicked out and yelped. What I at first assumed to be a red snake turned out to be some kind of tendril with an opening at its end, and it was lapping at the little puddles of blood formed by my life force spilling from the bed onto the bright red grass.
“Aww,” I said, grimacing. “Gross. This is all super gross.”
Florian spat one more time, then pressed a finger down over his left nostril, blowing a bloody snot rocket out of the right. “Listen, buddy. You’re not the one who had to swallow a whole bucket of blood. You’re fine.”
I examined myself again, tugging my shirt aside to check and running my fingers over unbroken skin. “I guess. But I’m still not sure how the hell all this happened. I mean, you’re drenched. So is the bed.” I smacked the sentient tendril away when it tried to probe at my wrist. It wriggled off, emitting a noise very much like a kicked puppy. “Of all the communions we’ve ever been on, this has to be the very worst.”
“Flatterer,” said a voice that came from somewhere behind a red topiary.
I lifted my duffle bag up to my chest, then stood up, trying to infuse myself with some dignity despite being slathered in gallons of my own bodily fluids. Florian slipped a couple of times across the slick sheets as I helped him up, but we managed in the end. There we stood, sullied, bloodied, but for the moment, very much unharmed.
I angled my head around the topiary, trying to spot Belphegor among the foliage. “It’s never easy with you, is it? Bunch of riddles, you show up whenever you like, and instead of talking out a contractual agreement, you try to soft-boil our brains from the inside.”
Belphegor chuckled hoarsely, issuing puffs of bluish smoke as he coughed in between peals of laughter. He was back in his skater boy skin, the same form he used when he went to visit Beatrice Rex to drop off the instructions. More of the same bluish smoke curled from the joint pinched between his thumb and forefinger, the unnaturally crimson ember at its end burning the same color as his eyes.
“It’s nice to see you too, boys. I trust the trip over wasn’t too much of an inconvenience?”
I lifted one finger up at him, pointing at the dead center of his chest and not his face, because while I was pissed, I wasn’t quite pissed and irresponsible enough to goad Belphegor into turning the inside of my head into a barbecue pit again.
“First of all, the knife thing was a major psych out. It hurt like hell, and I swear I could feel myself actually dying.”
Belphegor shrugged, blowing gently on the end of his joint, dislodging a gnarled twist of ash from the tip. “That’s just how stuff works here. It hurts a little at first.”
“A lot,” I grumbled, grimacing.
“Sure, whatever. But the actual gesture is more symbolic than anything. The extraction of blood, though, that part is very real. I structured the ritual very specifically, but long story short, it kind of gets teleported out of your body.”
Florian spread his arms out, demonstrating for Belphegor’s benefit. “It’s like a bottle of ketchup jizzed all over me. I feel like a crime scene.”
I nodded. “They could study him for spatter patterns, honestly.” I nudged Florian with my elbow, then mumbled softly. “Sorry again for spraying all over you, man.”
Florian grunted, then nodded back to accept my apology. “Point is, Belphegor, we haven’t even started the workday yet and we already need showers.” Florian sniffed at himself. “Three showers. Each.”
Belphegor groaned. “Ugh. The two of you are such whiners. I know that humans complain a lot, but you’re supposed to be hybrids. Mongrels. Shouldn’t you be better about handling this sort of thing? Babies.”
He blew out a stream of blue smoke, then snapped his fingers.
Something – something shifted in the air just then. It felt like a hot breeze was blowing through the gardens, specifically towards us, and my clothes were shifting in the wind. Wait. That wasn’t because of the wind.
Florian and I stared at ourselves in horror as my blood removed itself from our clothes and bodies, wriggling down in tiny, microscopic beads, as if every cell had gained sentience. I felt every droplet of blood as it swam over my skin, moved through the hairs on my arms, slipped from my body and dripped into the grass to feed Belphegor’s garden of horrors.
My skin crawled, goosebumps forming under every hair as the last of my blood leapt from my body and landed somewhere in the soil. I shivered, then rubbed my forearms with both hands, thoroughly heebied and jeebied. Florian stamped his feet on the ground, less audibly bothered, but still clearly grossed out as he shook off his hands and fingers.
Belphegor rolled his eyes and sighed. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I give the two of you the royal dry cleaning treatment and do I get a word of thanks? Not even close.” He took one last impossibly long puff of his joint before tossing it in the grass, where it hissed as it made contact with the blood. He stubbed out the ember with his shoe for good measure. “Come. I’ll give you babies the grand tour. We’ll come back to the Crimson Gardens later.”
Said tour led us through more of the carnage gardens, clearly Belphegor’s pride and joy, before we actually arrived at the back entrance to an enormous mansion. It was, I suppose, about what I expected a demon prince’s home to look like: sumptuous, luxurious, where every hard surface was either marble or onyx, and every soft one was either crushed velvet or silk.
My relative poverty felt more and more pronounced, despite the fact that I was still in possession of a very decent sum of cash left over between Loki’s prize and Beatrice’s price. Belphegor prattled on as we walked, pointing out his favorite couches and divans as we passed them.
We came to a marble balcony, a semicircular platform so huge that it felt more like an extension of the mansion than a place to hang out on for afternoon cocktails. I followed in Belphegor’s footsteps, admiring the fact that the sky seemed to be permanently reddish orange, like a sunset.
“You know,” I said, “this place really isn’t all that bad, for one of the prime hells. I guess I thought it’d be a lot worse. And a lot bigger.”
“Oh,” Belphegor said, matter of factly. “That’s because you haven’t looked at the fields.”
He clapped me on the shoulder as I walked past him, as he ushered me out to the edge of the balcony. My stomach swooped as I looked far below us, at the acres upon acres of dead red earth.
And planted there, in the thousands, like crops sorted into equidistant plots and rows, were the corpses.
10
I couldn’t even hold myself back at that point. The words were bubbling out of my throat. My hands reached for the balcony railings, like my body was trying to steady itself.
“What the fuck?” I turned to Florian, then Belphegor. “Seriously. What the fuck?”
Belphegor smiled at me, then brushed his bangs aside, his horrible third eye pulsing red as he cast his gaze across his fields of butchery. “Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s an elegant solution, really. I hardly have to do any of the work myself. The system is self-sustaining, for the most part.”
Florian covered his mouth, a sound like restrained retching burbling in his chest. I raked the ends of my fingers along my scalp, staring at Belphegor in disbelief.
“Elegant? Self-sustaining? You have a garden with plants that feed on blood and entire fields filled with dead bodies. Just rows and rows of corpses planted in the ground.”
“Corpses?” All three of Belphegor’s eyes blinked at the same time as he stared at me in bemusement. “What makes you think that they’re dead?”
And right then, as if on cue, one of the bodies in the middle distance convulsed, reached red-stained hands up to a bloody sky, and screamed.
“Oh dear God.” Florian grabbed onto the railing. “They’re alive. They’re all alive.”
Belphegor tapped the point of his chin. “Well, for a given value of ‘alive,’ that is. This is one of the prime hells, after all. I shouldn’t have to explain this to you, but these aren’t actually bodies. They’re the souls of the dead who ended up in my realm.”
Thousands of them, I thought, as I looked out over the fields, my heart lurching when I realized that they stretched on forever, fading as their endless rows met the horizon. Where I couldn’t see, way into the distance, the souls potentially numbered in the millions. My head throbbed with the impossibility of it. Half angel or no, the human mind can’t possibly be equipped to grasp such enormity – so much, so very, very much – just laid out like that.
Imagine seeing all the stars in the universe, all of them, at once. Now imagine that each of them was a soul that once belonged to a living, breathing person, half planted in crimson earth.
Florian, bless him, tried to speak again, in between heaves and burbles. “So you’re saying – ugh, Christ – you’re saying that these people are all asleep and you’re just harvesting their dreams?”
Belphegor’s laughter tumbled out across his horrific plantation, the sound of it scraping the air. More of the bodies planted in the earth convulsed and screamed as his voice passed their plots, as if it had physically hurt them.
“None of them are asleep. Down here, they don’t have that privilege. They’ve been lazy all their lives, so now they get to undo all that and work for me. They can feel every little stimulus here, every grain of soil shifted by the wind, every insect’s legs as it perches on their foreheads, every last drop of their essence siphoned by my harvesters.”
“By your what?” I didn’t think it was possible for me to be even more disgusted, but there it was. “What do you mean by your ‘harvesters?’”
The prince’s eyes narrowed as he smiled at me, three irises burning with malevolent glee. “You mean you didn’t notice the tubes running out of their bodies?”
I was afraid to look. But the curiosity burned me, and my eyes went searching, finding the tubes Belphegor had described. They looked very much like that slender bloodsucking tendril I’d swatted away from my body back outside in the Crimson Gardens.
“You’re sucking the blood out of every one of them,” I breathed.
“Well, it’s not blood. Not exactly. Not anymore. The dead don’t bleed. It’s the essence of their suffering. The fate of those condemned to the hell of Sloth is to be stimulated forever, to make penance for their apathy and inertia in life. None of these people ever amounted to anything, even the wealthy ones, who only ever got that way from inheritance, from excess.” I recoiled when Belphegor’s hand pressed against mine, as he smiled into my face. “You’ve accomplished so much with your small, short life, Mason. It’s unfortunate, but you’ll never have to fear being condemned to this particular prime hell. More’s the pity.”
I retrieved my hand quickly, slipping it into my pocket, overcome with hatred and revulsion for this cruel, three-eyed thing and its terrible plantation of souls.
Belphegor raised an eyebrow. “You look at me as if I’m such a monster. This is the way of things, boys. This isn’t even the worst you’ll ever see among the prime hells. Gluttony, your good friend Beelzebub? He has punishments that would make even my skin crawl. You know that thing about Prometheus on the rock, how his liver keeps growing back even though vultures eat it every day? Worse. Way worse. And Wrath? Hah! Forget about it. You’d never sleep another wink.”
Florian gagged again, all six, almost seven feet of him doubled over and pale from queasiness.
“Besides,” Belphegor said, indicating lazily over the balcony with a wave of his hand. “These people have it easy. It’s the ones in the subterranean sector who really have all the fun.”
My stomach turned. How much worse could things possibly get? “Don’t even start. Don’t tell me anything. Florian and I can only take so much.”
“Suit yourselves. Ugh. Babies.” Belphegor stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets, leading the way back into the mansion, the fringe of hair on his forehead falling into place and hiding his awful third eye from view once more. “You won’t be tilling the fields, after all. Like I said, those are mostly self-sustaining. The hags have all that covered.”
Florian bent low to listen, a giant next to Belphegor, this strange contrast of size and power, an odd reminder of how bad things could also come in small packages. “Hags?” Florian looked around us, stopping in place, his muscles still. “There are hags, too?”
“Do I look like the type of person who wants to do any sort of manual labor? Ever?” Belphegor scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Yes, hags. I sourced demon witches who knew their way around plants and plant life. They’re the ones who engineered the field system I have out there. It’s all automated, for the most part.” He tugged at his jacket’s cords and thumbed at himself, grinning. “Prince of Sloth, as if you hadn’t heard.”
I glanced around the mansion, through the crystalline windows and out into the gardens as we passed, but saw no sign of his alleged employees. “This place is so empty. Where are all your servants? And where are these witches, exactly?”
“First of all, this is the Court of Sloth. No one does any work around here until I need them to.” Belphegor raised one finger. “And not witches. Hags. I said hags. Because who else is going to be as good at hagriculture, am I right?”
I knew very well that Belphegor was the class of demon who could probably melt my face off just by looking at me, give me a vasectomy by uttering a single word. But I still couldn’t bring myself to even pretend to laugh at his stupid jokes. Florian gave it the old college try, though, chuckling uneasily through a face creased with concern.
“Ugh, you guys are no fun.” Belphegor gestured vaguely in the direction of the Crimson Gardens, where he was leading us. “They move around a lot. Pretty swiftly and silently, too, just the way I like it. But their leaders like to hang out in the redhouse.”
As we discovered not twenty steps later, the redhouse was just the Crimson Garden’s version of a greenhouse, colored in the same bloody cast as the rest of the prince’s di
mension. It was almost beautiful, this enormous structure sculpted out of panes of scintillating ruby, all suspended like stained glass in a maniacal spiderweb of black steel. But all you had to do was take one look through the glass to be brought down to earth once more – or hell, in this case.
The shapes of three women moved around the inside of the redhouse, their spindly arms pushing and pulling at great, heaving masses that glistened with what could have been either dew or ichor. I hated that you couldn’t tell whether the huge, throbbing bulbs they were working on were plant or animal in origin. That didn’t really matter, though, because they made me sick to my stomach either way.
Belphegor was supposed to be taking us out into the grounds of the Crimson Gardens, towards what looked like a huge, grand gazebo, but the witches tittered and shrieked at the sight of him, rushing up to the redhouse’s entrance as we walked past.
Instinctively my mind reached out for a weapon from the Vestments. It didn’t materialize just yet, but I trusted my body to do the work of being vigilant enough for me. It was always good to be prepared. Florian, on the other hand, staggered shakily away from Belphegor, ending up standing slightly behind me, as if he was using my body for protection, or at least a bit of camouflage.
“Lord Belphegor,” the first hag screeched, long, white hair spilling down her shoulders, her entire body shrouded in coarse brown robes stained with the saps and juices of the redhouse’s specimens. “We’d hoped to see you today. We’ve made quite a few interesting strides with – with that thing you wanted us to do.”
That last bit was spoken hesitantly as the hag looked between me, Belphegor, and Florian. She gave me a jagged smile as she finished, one that was mirrored by her hag sisters. It was then that I noticed how the three witches looked very much alike, down to the deep red stains on their arms that colored their skin from the tips of their fingers all the way up to their forearms. Their teeth were as white as their hair and skin, and similarly tipped in that strange uniform red. There was an eeriness about the three women, the color blanched out of their skin like vegetables, utterly inhuman. Of course, there was no way I should have believed the hags were anything near human in the first place.
