Authors: Edward Lee
More teetering buildings and gas-gushing smokestacks. Bizarre creatures darted quickly up and down decrepit skyscrapers. Anywhere he might look, some figure was seen jumping out of a high window. Gerold gaped closer at the streets themselves. Sewer grates belched flames; masses of figures—Human and otherwise—clogged trash-strewn and blood-splattered avenues. Long, clattering cars putted about as well as carriages drawn by fanged, malformed creatures that sufficed for horses. Clay men loomed on every corner, sentinel-like as they scanned the masses. Any and all free space between buildings were stakes on which severed heads had been planted. There were thousands of them,
tens
of thousands. Additionally, piles of dead bodies lay everywhere, while squads of forced laborers trudged to the task of flinging the bodies into carts and wheeling them away. Gerold was too nauseated to ask . . .
“We’re getting close,” Krilid said. He handed Gerold the Monocular. “There’s the security perimeter . . .”
Gerold gulped with a dry throat when he elbowed up and looked through the glass. A heavily walled clearing existed amid the center of the District, the size of a football field. In each corner, Mongrel Demons and Human Damned were being tortured on racks or boiled in oil vats, and the resultant screams rose and fell like some mad, dissonant background music.
It was not the walled perimeter itself that stole Gerold’s breath and constricted his stomach, it was the perimeter’s most salient feature.
The fucking thing is HUGE
, Gerold thought.
A hulking statue over 500 feet high spired from the
middle of the perimeter. Muck-black like tar mixed with excrement mixed with mud. Its contours had been meticulously shaped to heighten its overall hideousness; Gerold thought of King Kong dunked with pitch. But the face . . .
The face—
Gerold threw up over the side when he zoomed the Monocular in on its face.
“Yeah, don’t look at it too long,” said Krilid. “I’ve heaved a couple times myself, thinking about that face. They put an Unutterability Hex on it—what you see is a cross between the most horrifying faces in Hell all wrapped up in one . . .”
“What
is
it?” Gerold gagged, noting that all those delicious crayfish he’d eaten earlier were now raining down.
“It’s called a Demonculus,” the Troll told him. “The most powerful weapon to ever be invented here.”
Gerold blundered with the word. “A Demonc . . .”
“It’s like a 666-foot voodoo doll that they’re going to bring to life with their round-the-clock sacrifices and spook-show sorcery.”
“Bring . . . to
life?
” Gerold gasped. “That-that . . .
thing?
”
Smirking, Krilid nodded. “See all that mist all over the place down there, that looks like it’s glowing?”
“Yuh-yeah . . .” The mist sparkled like sheets of fireflies.
“That’s the Hell-Flux. It’s air that’s charged with occult energy, and those transformer-looking things with the coils sticking up are Electrocity Generators. Those are the things that convert horror, pain, and agony into a tangible
force
. The sacrifices maintain that force, but a little while ago, sixty-six million people were all slaughtered at once all over the city by Mutilation Battalions. A lot of that power was used for the Spatial Merge that brought you and all that lake water to the Reservoir, but the overflow was diverted here, to dump into
that
.” Krilid pointed to the immobile Demonculus.
Gerold stuttered. “Wuh-wuh-when will they bring it to life?”
Krilid raised the antique rifle. “Now.”
The rifle was fitted with its own Monocular, in the fashion of a sniper sight. “But one more thing has to happen before they can activate the Demonculus. It needs a
heart
. Only then can it come to life to do Lucifer’s bidding.” The Troll sighted the rifle. “Look down at the thing’s chest now.”
Hands trembling, Gerold did so. A strange fenced platform was hovering near the immense creature’s chest, a platform held aloft by hot-air balloons of some sort. Gerold noticed that a hole seemed to have been bored into the dead thing’s chest. Several unspeakably ugly demons busied themselves on the platform, one unsheathing a knife, another lifting up a pair of bolt cutters. But there was another figure there, a
human
, with bottomless eyes and a beard. He was taking off a jacket that shined like polished chrome.
“That’s the mission target. His name is Master Builder Curwen—he’s an Archlock of the highest conditioning—Lucifer’s smartest Sorcerer, and it’s
his
heart that will give the Demonculus life.”
Gerold shot the Troll a funky look. “But how can—”
“They’re gonna cut out his heart and put it in the chest cavity,” Krilid said, sighting the rifle and cocking the hammer, “so I have to head-shot the guy before they can do that. Then . . .”
“Then
what?
”
“I’ll tell you in a minute . . .”
BAM!
Krilid bucked back when the rifle went off. A gust of black smoke spewed out of the muzzle. But when they both looked back through their Monoculars . . .
“Oh, shit!” Krilid yelled.
“You missed!”
Hundreds of feet below them, alarms began to sound.
The demons on the platform were frantic now, and so was the bearded man. The bolt cutters were brought to bear . . .
Krilid fumbled to reload, but Gerold saw another rifle leaning against the wall. He grabbed it.
“Let me do it, man. You can’t hit an elephant’s ass with a bass fiddle.”
“There’s no scope on that!” the Troll yelled.
Gerold elbowed up. “Hey! They already cut the guy’s heart out—”
“Then don’t shoot Curwen! Shoot the heart!”
Gerold frowned at the nearly impossible instruction. He lined the V-notch up to the breech post, cocked the hammer, then took a breath. Meanwhile, as Curwen’s body convulsed on the platform floor, his opened chest cavity welling blood, a dog-faced demon grabbed the severed heart and began to reach upward. He meant to put the still-beating heart into the hole in the giant thing’s chest.
“Hurry!” Krilid yelled, still fumbling with his powder.
Gerold let out half a breath—
BAM!
The rudely large bullet shot the demon’s hand off with Curwen’s heart still in it. Both hand and heart plunged to the ground.
“Great shot!” Krilid celebrated.
Gerold felt a twinkle of pride. “Yeah, not bad, but . . . now what?”
“Now what?” Krilid smiled. The Nectoport soared down, the force of its movement nudging the balloon platform away. “Now’s when you get to decide if you want to be a hero.”
“What?”
“Look, we’re banking on you saying yes—”
“Saying yes to
what?
” Gerold snapped, annoyed.
The Egress of the Nectoport sucked right up to and over the ragged hole in the Demonculus’s chest. “What do you want more than anything, Gerold?”
Gerold needed no time to reflect. “I want to walk.”
“Well, look, there’s no way we can send you back to the Living World, but you were going to kill yourself there anyway.”
“What are you
talking
about?”
“But we
can
make it so you can walk again . . . or I should say
you
can.”
Gerold was about to blurt out another objection but then—
He stared at the chest hole, then looked back to Krilid.
Krilid nodded. “I offered to do it right off the bat but it wouldn’t work. See, it has to be a
Human
heart.”
Gerold’s mind revved like gears in a machine. He took off his life preserver, then took off his shirt.
“Good man,” Krilid said, having already picked up a tool that looked like a branch cutter. “But . . . it’s gonna hurt.”
“I would never have guessed,” Gerold mocked. He lay down flat, hands fisted. He squeezed his eyes shut. “Just do it. I don’t care how much it hurts.”
“You got balls, Gerold.” The branch cutters keened when Krilid opened them . . .
First:
crack!
as the curved blade slunked into Gerold’s solar plexus and then the sternum was separated.
Gerold bellowed.
Then:
click, click, click, click, click
, as all the ribs on the left side were snapped.
Pain? Gerold could never have
conceived
of such pain, but,
What did I expect? He’s cutting my heart out!
he somehow was able to think even over the insurmountable agony. But just as that same agony reached a terrifying peak . . .
It ebbed away, to numbness, and then Gerold’s spirit felt like vapor spinning round in a blender on the highest speed.
Meanwhile, Krilid severed all the necessary arteries and removed Gerold’s heart.
And he put it, still beating, into the hole in the Demonculus’s chest . . .
Hudson’s eyes snapped open like someone who’d just wakened from a nightmare of falling. He remained sweat-drenched in the attic chair, stewing in the insufferable heat. The hole in the wall met his direct line of sight, and through it all he could see was the straggly backyard tinted by moonlight.
The candles guttered all around him.
“You’re back,” whispered the deaconess, “from a journey only eleven people in history have taken . . .”
Hudson nodded and drew in a long breath. “It wasn’t a dream, was it?”
“No. It was the greatest of all privileges.” She stepped from the dark corner, her nude body shellacked in sweat itself. The macabre crucible of the baby’s skullcap remained below the hole in the wall, but the Sterno had long gone out.
“I can tell by your aura,” said the deaconess. “You’ve accepted the Senary.”
“Yes.”
“Praise Lucifer,” she sighed. “You will one day be a Privilato, the greatest thing to be in Hell save for Lucifer himself.”
“After I die, at age sixty-six. That’s what I was told.”
The robust woman handed Hudson a towel. He felt
winded yet also content when he dried the sweat off his body and put his clothes back on. “I was also told something about six million dollars in cash . . .”
The deaconess grinned. “Such greed! How wonderful! But . . . first things first.” She handed him a piece of paper . . . and an ice pick.
“I guess this is self-explanatory,” Hudson commented. He didn’t like pain but considering . . .
MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT
, read the contract, along with a simplification of everything he’d been promised.
And all I have to trade for it is my soul
. . .
He winced as he punctured his forearm with the awl, saw blood well up; then he ran the point along the blood.
Signing his name was harder than he thought.
“There.”
The deaconess looked awed at the sheet of paper. “You’re so, so privileged . . .” Suddenly she fell to her knees, hugging Hudson’s hips. “Please, I beg you. In my own Damnation, recruit
me
into your harem! I would be so honored to serve a Privilato! Please!”
“Sure,” Hudson agreed, “but . . . where’s that six million?”
Her smile seemed drunken now from what he’d just granted her. She kissed his crotch, and pointed behind him.
Two Samsonite suitcases sat on the other side of the room.
This can’t be possible
, he thought, but when he opened them, all he could do was stare for full minutes. Each hefty suitcase had been
filled
with banded one-hundred-dollar bills.
“There are six hundred bands, ten thousand dollars per band,” the deaconess told him.
Hudson grunted when he hefted each case. “It’s a good thing these suitcases have wheels.” But then another thought came to him. “Wait a minute. I can’t roll two big-ass suitcases
to a bus stop in a ghetto, at
night
. I’d get mugged in two seconds.”
The deaconess’s bare skin glittered in the candlelight. “Lucifer guarantees your safety, not just in Hell but here also. From this point on, nothing can ever hurt you.”
“Really,” Hudson replied, not terribly confident.
“Oh, yes. In fact, you’ll be protected by not one but two Warding Incantations, which are quite similar to the occult bridle which protects Manse Lucifer from any anti-Satanic endeavor.”
“That’s hard-core . . .”
“I’ll demonstrate.” The deaconess wielded the ice pick.
Hudson’s heart skipped a beat.
“Any object turned on you as a weapon will be repulsed—” The deaconess threw the ice pick hard as she could right at Hudson—
“Shit!”
—but as it flew directly for his face, it veered harmlessly off and stuck in the bare-wood wall.
“Wow!”
“And any
person
who might attempt to assault you with his bare hands”—the nude woman smiled more mischievously—“will instantly have his blood removed from his body.”
Hudson recalled the bold but luckless insurgents’ attempt to bomb the Manse, and how their blood had been magically sucked out of every orifice.
He looked at her, at the contract in her hand, then at the suitcases. “I guess . . . all there is for me to do now is—”
“Go home, and enjoy the rest of your life here with your riches, knowing that many more riches await when you die and rise to the glory of Lucifer.”
So. That’s it, I guess
. Hudson scratched his head. “What are your plans?”
“I will rise to that glory now, Mr. Hudson,” she said. “As
your Senarial Messenger, I have but one more duty to perform: the execution of your contract.”
Contract in hand, the deaconess walked demurely to the chair, then stood on it.
“Hey! You’re not going to—”
“But I must, Mr. Hudson.” From a rafter she pulled down a previously prepared noose and calmly put it around her neck. “I’ll see you at your castle in the future.”
Hudson froze.
The deaconess rolled the contract into a ball, put it in her mouth, and stepped off the chair
THUNK . . .
Jesus
, Hudson thought. He watched her hang there, the nude body agleam, swaying ever so gently. The rope creaked several times, then tightened to silence.
“The lake,” Dorris muttered, “is empty.” How sane she was at this time could hardly be estimated. She’d been standing there on the pier for several minutes—six minutes, to be precise—when, sane or not, some modicum of reason began to wriggle back into her consciousness . . .