Then screamed.
A green-faced demon-boy sat on the first landing; he grinned down at her through decayed fangs, quivering as he inserted a long hypodermic needle into a nostril. He was a Zap addict, Hell’s version of a junkie. Once he’d worked the needle up into his brain, he depressed the plunger, sighed, and collapsed in bliss. Zap was the drug of choice in the Mephistopolis, an occult heroin made from infernal herbs boiled in Grand Duke urine, after which it was cooked down to paste at the Distillation Vats.
Her gut clenching, Penelope stepped over the boy, was about to dash up the rest of the steps, but screamed at the top of her lungs when she saw what was coming down the stairwell. The Fecaman was aptly named; it was a man-shaped creature composed of bewitched demonic waste. Two lidless eyes were set in the mush-brown face; two shit hands groped forward. Clumsy as it appeared, it grabbed her with surprising spryness, embracing her at once and pulling its face of excrement to hers. “Kiss-kiss,” it gurgled at her, “Kiss-kiss...” She didn’t have time to throw up before the thing’s hole for a mouth opened over hers. Convulsing, she seamed her lips but that didn’t matter. The tongue—a tumid turd—worked its way into her mouth, wriggling. Penelope gagged, almost mindless in her revulsion. The basest instinct caused her to clack her teeth shut, severing the fecal tongue, whereupon she spat it out and bellowed another scream. The Fecaman screamed along with her, bug-eyed, and she skirted around the abomination, and flew the rest of the way up the steps.
Upstairs, she fell into the lobby. There was much less smoke up here, and she could see more evidence of the impossible change that had occurred, the lobby’s familiar appearance mutated into something else. Strange walls seemed blended with the lobby’s normal walls. Segments of the polished tile floor had been overrun by something that almost looked like a street gutter, only the gutter was befouled with body parts and nameless waste. She even noticed a storm drain in this otherworldly gutter; sulphurous flames licked out between the grates, and ... did she see a face down there, agonized and peering out? Heart racing, she turned toward the front glass doors, but they were all blown out. She dashed through them, out into the night, expecting to see the library’s parking lot, and the long grassy hill which extended down from it, but that’s not quite what she saw. She saw the parking lot, all right, and her little GMC Metro parked in her usual spot, but the parking lot was
upheaved,
as if some seismic plate had thrust up through the asphalt. Other things had thrust up, too—impossible things: huge brick and iron buildings, oddly windowed skyscrapers that spired so high she couldn’t see their end. Living gargoyles traversed the overhead ledges, looking down. A city street surrounded the library, but it was a street from another world. She even saw a street sign leaning over at one corner. The sign read DAHMER BLVD.
Her feet carried her mindlessly down the street. She saw her manic reflection in the various shop windows as she ran. MEATS one window read. SPECIALS TODAY: GHOUL, TROLL. The word HUMAN was also there but it had an X through it. Fried demon heads hung upside-down from hooks in the window. Inside, a man with one half of his face sliced off calmly cranked a sausage grinder, his butcher’s apron soiled by off-colored blood. The next window read RAPE CLINIC, which Penelope assumed was some sort of crisis center; the assumption only lasted for a moment after she looked in and spied demons in nice suits standing in line as a chained She-Imp was raped
en masse
on the floor by an array of slavering, hunch-backed creatures. More signs could be seen along the smoking block, the windows lit with the strangest lights: HEX-CLONES, LICENSED ALOMANCER SERVICES, BLOOD ALCHEMIST. The last window on the corner read SKIN-CUTTERS but Penelope didn’t look in.
She still didn’t know where she was running to but she ran just the same. Her mind didn’t ever bother trying to calculate what had squashed this evil place into the same space that the map library occupied. Yet the question kept occurring to her:
Where does it end?
When she turned the next corner, her answer awaited.
Another smoking city street stretched forward but only for half a block. Then it ended very abruptly. Past its limits she could see the quiet moonlit hill that descended away from the library. She was about to run out but—
“Help me,” a voice beseeched her. “Please ...”
Fuck that,
Penelope decided. The only person she was going to help right now was herself—by getting out of this hellish place. But there was something about the voice. It was a woman’s, and it—
She looked into the narrow alley from which the plea had issued. A heavy-metal poster flapped on the brick wall: THE BURNING BABIES, ONE SHOW ONLY! LIVE AT THE BLOOD-SUCKERS BALLROOM. Across from it, someone had scrawled in chalk: GOD, PLEASE TAKE ME BACK, then someone else had written: DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH!
The alley, like everything else, stank. Even in her horror, Penelope felt compelled to stop.
Was there something familiar about the voice?
“Help me,” the voice repeated. “I was raped and beaten by a Grand Duke.”
Penelope took one step into the alley. Yes, the voice
was
familiar. A naked woman sat huddled in the corner, reaching out.
“Who are you?” Penelope asked, voice quavering. “Are you one of the other guards?”
A giggle—a
familiar
giggle—and then the woman lurched up and grabbed Penelope, and all at once she realized just how familiar the voice really was.
It was her own voice that had been speaking to her.
And Penelope was now being attacked ... by herself.
The naked woman that looked exactly like Penelope grinned. Well, she didn’t look
exactly
like Penelope, because Penelope didn’t have fangs, nor were the whites of Penelope’s eyes bright crimson with white irises. Penelope didn’t have four joints per finger, either, and she didn’t have talons in place of fingernails. There was one other thing Penelope didn’t have that this evil replica did: a penis.
Penelope screamed as she was dragged down. Perfect facsimiles of her own breasts swayed before her dread-distorted face, and her imposter’s penis—more demonic than human in that it was gray as birch bark, with the same texture, and had an inverted glans, more like a plunger-head than a dome—throbbed against her stomach as she was molested. “I’m gonna stick it in hard, sweetie,” the clone assured her in her own voice. “Say hello to
my
Mr. Bumpy.”
The clone’s hips shimmied between Penelope’s legs. Penelope just kicked and screamed some more—useless reactions. Then hook-nailed hands began to pull at her pants ...
SLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL-UCK!
Penelope had closed her eyes against the horror but opened them again when her attacker seemed to fall limp. Another Tentaculus was leaning over the scene on its long, wormlike legs, having forced the end of its trunk into the clone’s mouth. Penelope was able to crawl away as the creature’s digestive process began to suck, the extended trunk pulsating. It made Penelope think of a vacuum-cleaner hose, only this vacuum wasn’t sucking up dust, it was sucking out her macabre replica’s internal organs, or so Penelope would’ve thought until the creature stalled, then retracted its trunk. The sound it made—clearly a sound of objection—pierced her ears like the whine of a dentist’s drill. What Penelope couldn’t have understood was that the Hex-Clone of herself didn’t possess internal organs, just rotten reanimated goulash and vexed blood—not the meal that the Tentaculus expected. The creature jerked back, raised its trunk as an elephant would, and quickly expelled everything it had just ingested, spewing it all out in a shower of grue.
Penelope resumed her terror-tear down the alley. The sight of the moon—her moon, not a moon from another world—beckoned her. Finally she was there, and nearly collapsed when she took in her first breath of clean night air. She could hear crickets chirping, could see the plush, green grass sloping down the hill that the map library had been built on. All there was left to do now was keep running, just keep running away and get as far away from this place, or this nightmare, as possible.
“Adieu, Penelope,” a voice reverberated in her ears, that voice she’d heard from the man in the basement—the voice that was more like light. “Relish your life while you have it, because you’ve just borne witness to the home of your hereafter...”
Penelope stopped and turned. She couldn’t help it.
She looked back into the alley.
It was the man, the magnificent man named Zeihl, standing at the front steps of the Halman Map Library amid all of the evil buildings that seemed to have grown around it. Zeihl’s halo coruscated, and so did his quiet smile. Then came the sound:
Ssssssssssssssss-ONK!
It popped in the air. Penelope felt her ears pop too, like an airplane descending, and next came a flash of throbbing green light. The flash seemed to grow into a stagnant, shuddering blob a few yards from the library’s front doors. The blob grew, painting everything on the infernal street an cerie luminescent green.
What—what IS that?
Penelope wondered.
The Warlock in the white cloak and hood drifted out of the library, with something like a small suitcase under his arm. And the green blob, by now, had throbbed and shivered like living neon until it had changed into a shape that resembled an open aperture, a rimmed hole in the air but a hole made of the green light. A hole, yes, or a doorway ...
The white-garbed figure drifted past Zeihl without a word or a gesture ... and then stepped into that doorway.
The doorway began to shrink.
Zeihl cast Penelope a final smile. He knelt down and kissed the ground, and as he did so, Penelope noticed the charred arrangement of bones that seemed folded up into the middle of his back.
Wings,
Penelope realized.
“Run, Penelope,” the voice shined. “You will see this place again, but this is the last time you’ll see me ...”
The earth began to tremble. All the strange buildings and spiring black skyscrapers around the library began to fade, and the bizarre green doorway vanished.
Zeihl stood back up.
Now, in his hand, he held a knife with a long curved silver blade and he looked up with that beautiful smile, closed his eyes, and slit his own throat.
The blood that flowed from the wound glowed bright as magma. Penelope was helpless to do anything but look on.
The Fallen Angel had told her to relish her life, but what he hadn’t told her was that her life would end a second later—
—when Zeihl’s body exploded into a mushroom cloud of blinding white light that vaulted a hundred feet into the air, incinerating everything in a quarter-mile radius.
Including Penelope.
Chapter Five
(I)
Cassie slept fitfully, sweating through nightmares of the Mephistopolis, of Dentata-Peds and Tentaculi, of Nectoports and City Mutilation Squads. She dreamed of taking the train from Tiberius Depot into Pogrom Park where destitute amputee demons bummed change and outdoor fountains gushed blood. She dreamed of the immense J.P. Kennedy Ghettoblocks—a slum district the size of the entire state of Texas. She dreamed of the Mephisto Building—666 floors high—and the one time she’d actually seen Lucifer looking out of one of its narrow windows.
At least her nightmares had changed. In the past, she’d always been tormented by nightmares of her sister’s suicide. Now she was merely tormented by nightmares of Hell.
But she’d had one more dream, too, hadn’t she?
Angelese,
she recalled, sitting up now in the ward bed. She rubbed sleep from her eyes and chuckled to herself.
The girl with snow-white hair.
An angel. But why would Cassie dream of something so strange? And had it really been a dream?
I’m from an Order of the Seraphim,
the image in the water had told her,
a very special order. Those from my order willingly descend from the Rapture.
With all that had happened to her over the last year, Cassie had long-since stopped fretting over which impressions in her life were real and which were dreams. She couldn’t trust her senses anymore. Since learning she was an Etheress? Since visiting Hell? She wished it could all be a dream but she knew it wasn’t.
She wished she really was insane—as the people in this clinic thought. At least then she wouldn’t have to worry about anything.
I should have asked her, though, she thought now, dream or not. I should have asked Angelese why any angel would willingly leave heaven.
“Because it’s our job,” a voice replied from no particular place in the room. “It’s our duty.”
Cassie rubbed her face.
Here we go again.
“Your duty to what?”
“Our duty to God. We’re his spies.” A chuckle. “We’re, like, his commandos.”
Cassie got up off the bed. She generally only slept in bra and panties, and she immodestly slipped them off and put them in the small laundry hamper they’d given her.
“Nice tattoo,” the voice said.