Cassie couldn’t imagine. Even the undersides of Angelese’s breasts were wounded, almost as though she were wearing a bra of scars. “It only happens when you say something you’re not allowed to say?”
“Yeah,” Angelese replied. “Or do something I’m not allowed to do.”
Cassie recalled that in the Mephistopolis, Fallen Angels were immortal. “Can you die?”
“Not in Heaven, and not in Hell. But here?” Angelese smiled coyly. “Yeah, I can die. When angels kick the bucket in the Living World, they go out with a bang. And that’s what I need to tell you about.”
When she said that, something happened. Cassie wasn’t sure, but the pressure in the room seemed to change. Even though she was wet from the shower, tiny hairs seemed to stand up on her neck. Then she noticed the shadow at Angelese’s feet.
It was elongating, unfolding on the floor like black ink being spilled.
“Here it comes,” Angelese calmly said. “It already knows what I’m going to say.”
Now the shadow was rising. It looked like a craggy black figure standing up.
The angel began: “Remember what we heard on the news?”
“The fires in downtown Dannelleton?” Cassie referenced.
“I’ll tell you about that too but I mean the other thing—”
“The explosion they blamed on a gas line rupture,” Cassie said. “Some library or something, in Maryland.”
“It was no explosion, it was Lucifer’s best friend, a Fallen Angel named Zeihl—”
The room darkened as the shadow—this Umbra-Specter—grew larger. It was a solid black mass with no details save for its shape, and now its hands were opening, revealing awl-sharp claws that were each inches long. The darkest, guttural sound could be heard, barely audible, but a sound nonetheless. Cassie knew what it was: it was the thing chuckling.
“Don’t say anything else,” Cassie warned.
“I have to.”
“That thing’ll torture you. Don’t do it.”
“I have to,” Angelese repeated. “That’s what I’m here for,” and then she continued, speaking in panicked bursts of words: “Zeihl, the Fallen Angel, he incarnated himself and then committed suicide, that’s what the explosion was, an angel killing himself, sacrificing himself because if an angel sacrifices himself, material things can be exchanged, the place wasn’t really a library, Lucifer wanted something there so Zeihl sacrificed himself in order to get it, and they succeeded by performing a Spatial Merge, it’s an occult technology that Satan had never perfected until now but it’s a way of bringing a small part of Hell to earth for a short period of time, just a couple of blocks but a couple of blocks is enough, because during the Merge that little part of Hell will share the same space with a little part of the Living World simultaneously, so that’s what happened, they Merged with that library to steal something and whatever it was they stole, they took it back to Hell, I know this is what happened because that’s the only reason Zeihl would’ve committed suicide, it’s one of the Rules, the only way you can take something out of the Living World and bring it to Hell is through a Power Exchange, and an angelic sacrifice would’ve generated that kind of power—”
But by then it was too late. The Umbra-Specter had fully solidified, its black form real as flesh, and now it had pressed Angelese against the tiled shower wall, and it slowly was dragging its claws up her thighs. Angelese was shuddering, still speaking through the catastrophic pain, her big beige-and-violet eyes even bigger now as they widened in horror. “—so that’s what they did, that’s the only thing it could’ve been, a Power Exchange during a Spatial Merge, when an angel dies in the Living World it’s almost like a nuke going off—”
“Stop!” Cassie shouted, watching helpless as the shadow freely indulged in its torture. “Don’t say anything else! Don’t tell me any more!”
Angelese told her more, shrieking now through her unearthly pain, desperate to get it all out as quickly as possible: “—and that other story we heard on the news, the stuff about fires and screaming in downtown Dannelleton, that was a Merge too. It was a practice run, and I know what they’re practicing for—”
All at once, the angel’s shriek amplified tenfold; Cassie had to cover her ears for a moment. The Umbra-Specter was shivving Angelese, slowly drawing its claws in and out of her ribs. Blood poured from the wounds, luminous, like liquid red neon light, swirling down the shower drain.
Cassie wasn’t sure but she thought she heard the shadow-thing say: “Please keep talking, keep betraying your oath. I love torturing you,” in the most corroded voice.
Angelese panted out more words through the agony. “They know I’m trying to get you to the other Deadpass, they don’t want you in Hell on your own because they know you’re too powerful, that’s why they’re doing these Merges—”
“I don’t understand,” Cassie sobbed.
“They want to Merge with this clinic, if they can successfully do that, they can capture you. Lucifer wants to abduct you and use your Ethereal Powers for something that’s more diabolical than anything that’s ever been done before, so that’s why I have to get you out of here. That’s what all of this is about, Cassie—it’s you! They’re coming for youl”
The Umbra-Specter reveled in its task, flaying Angelese with its claws. Cassie didn’t know what to do, she could only think impulsively. Without light, could the shadow retain its form? She ran naked to the other end of the room, leaving glowing red footprints.
Light switch! Where’s
the light
switch?
but she couldn’t find it. Angelese was still screaming, unable to speak at all anymore as the claws gleefully molested her. Cassie grabbed a mop out of the closet, ran back, and then began to break all the fluorescent tubes with the handle. In blocks, the room fell into darkness. The shadow howled, glaring at her over its ebon shoulder. When Cassie shattered the last overhead tube, the thing began to dissipate.
So did the bleeding squirming image of Angelese.
Chapter Six
(I)
Why would Walter dream such a thing, such an
awful
thing?
He was standing on a street corner in a city, but it was unlike any city he could have ever imagined. The midnight sky was ruby-red, the low sickle moon was black. He could only see these features, though, by looking straight up because the buildings lining the street must’ve been hundreds and hundreds of floors high, skyscrapers unlike any he’d seen. He got dizzy just looking up.
Do they even make buildings that high?
he questioned himself.
“They do here,” a little girl said.
She was skipping down the street, smiling at him. Walter almost fell over. Her pigtails flipped as she skipped. She wore black-strapped shoes and little white socks, a bright red-and-white checkered dress. Deep lines ran down her gray, wizened face—the girl was mummified.
She was playing hop-scotch but the squares weren’t formed by chalk, they were formed by long, odd bones. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. “You’re in the Mephistopolis, you’re in Hell,” she told him. “This is Pogrom Park, and you’re having a dream.”
Dream, he thought. Somehow, the information comforted him. It told him that this weird place didn’t really exist. Overhead, something flew by. A city pigeon was his first guess but then he looked closer at it and saw that it was some kind of a winged rodent. Was that a severed human i penis it clasped between its teeth as it flew away?
The little mummy girl skipped along, the hop-scotch squares extending all the way down the street. “Bye, Walter. Your destiny awaits.”
The comment pricked his distraction. “What?” he called after her. “What did you say?”
“Embrace your destiny...” She skipped away and disappeared around the corner.
He saw a sign, letters on smudgy glass: NEWCOMERS’ INFORMATION POINT. WELCOME TO THE POGROM PARK DISTRICT GALLERY. Walter meandered in—what else did he have to do? The long empty room walled by glossy photo-murals reminded him of a tourist center, displaying pictures of local attractions. Frame by frame, then, he looked at photographs of Hell’s greatest landmarks.
The Industrial Zone and its hundred-foot walls of iron girders. Inside this vast complex lay the city’s Central Power Plant, the Foundry and Slag Furnace, the Flesh-Processors and Bone-Grinding Stations. One shot showed thousands of destitute workers cutting the flesh off of corpses. Endless conveyor belts then delivered the cuttings to the Pulping Plants, for further food processing; more conveyors delivered the bones to be ground up for bricks and concrete. In the Fuel Depot, wheeled hoppers delivered large chunks of raw sulphur by the tons, to be manually chopped into smaller chunks by stooped laborers—the city’s endless fuel supply.
De Rais University extended over countless acres and appeared almost campus-like in its layout. Here, the finest Warlocks in the land taught their pupils in the blackest arts: divination, psychic torture, spatial transposition, and the latest in vexation.
The Rockefeller Mint provided the city with all its currency: brass and tin coinage featuring the embossed faces of all the Anti-Popes, and Hellnotes printed on processed demon skin.
Osiris Heights stood proud and posh, the residential district for upper-Hierarchals who lived an eternity of privilege in pristine highrises. A typical suite boasted the latest conveniences: harlot cages, skull-presses, iron-maidens, and neat personal-sized crematoriums. Television, too, powered not by electricity but by psychical theta-waves, offered up all the best torture channels.
Boniface Square encompassed whole city blocks in its leisure services. From the finest restaurants specializing in the best demonian cuisine to the most common street vendors pushing carts of flame-broiled meat skewers. Opulent night-clubs to rowdy hole-in-the-wall bars. From strip joints, bordellos, and peepshow parlors to the opulent Frederick the Great Opera House, all manner of abyssal entertainment could be found in the Square.
The J. Edgar Hoover Building existed in the Living World as well as in Lucifer’s; here, though, the immense Gothic edifice housed the million-occupant Central Jail, the Drug Perpetuation Agency, the Commandant of the Mancer Divisions (headed by an articulate gentleman named U. S. Grant), the Tamerlane Emergency Response Battalion, and, of course, Satan’s official police department—the Agency of the Constabulary.
Other landmarks included Tojo Memorial Hospital, the John Dee Library and Infernal Archives, St. Iscariot Abbey, and the infamous Office of Transfiguration and Teratologic Research.
And wealthier Hierarchals who enjoyed beach-combing could always open their cabanas along the beautiful blood-filled Sea of Cagliostro.
“Terrific place, huh?” said a man with horns all over his face. He had three eyes, each the size of an apple, and he stood inside a little info booth.
“Yes, uh,” Walter stammered. “Terrific. So this really is Hell?”
“You bet’cha.”
“I don’t even know if I believe in this place.”
“Believe it.” All three eyes scrutinized Walter. “You’re not a Resident, are you? You don’t have the look.”
“What’s the look?”
“Damned.”
“I feel damned,” Walter said. He walked back out to the street.
The air smelled like smoke, a bitter eggy smoke like burning sulphur, he could even see the smoke sifting up through cracks in the street. Suddenly bells clanged, and a siren sounded.
A fire,
Walter guessed, but it was the strangest fire truck that appeared moments later. It looked more like a flat-bed truck from the 1920s, spoked wheels, open cab, but there was a boiler where the engine should be and a smokestack gusted steam. A riveted water tank occupied the back deck.
“Out of the way, buddy!” the helmeted driver shouted at Walter. “We’ve got a fire!” The driver was a demon with pitted yellow skin and red eyes. Walter stepped back onto the sidewalk, thinking
Fire? I don’t see anything on fire.
Did he mean the smoke coming out from the cracks in the street?
The fire truck clattered to a stop, and out jumped several more helmeted, raincoated demons, unreeling a long hose. They hurriedly approached the front of one of the buildings where a transom read TROLL MIDDLE SCHOOL. Through the window, Walter could see all the little misshapen demon children sitting at desks in a classroom. The firemen barged in with their hose, the nozzle was opened, and then the screams poured forth amid the instant crackling. It wasn’t water that sprayed from the nozzle, it was flame. The middle school was engulfed. Walter ran away, trying to out-distance the shrieks of the burning demon children.
“You can’t outrun the future,” someone else said when he huffed around the corner. In the middle of the street, two Griffins the size of Dobermans greedily picked scraps of flesh off a corpse. The corpse was still moving.
“And it won’t die, not really,” he was told. “That’s a Human. A human’s Spirit Body only dies when it’s completely destroyed. Then his Soul will transfer to something else, a demon, a bug, a worm.”
Who was telling him this? Walter looked around in utter confusion, then noticed the stunning woman standing in the little brick cubby between two buildings. “Who are you?” he asked but then the importance of the question faded as he looked more closely at her.