Cassie slumped against the inner wall of the port, her heart slowing. “I tried to stop it with a projection but I was too afraid. It happened so fast, I couldn’t control my fear.”
“You’re going to
have
to control your fear,” the angel said, settling down herself. She was peering down. “You’re going to have throw it aside. We won’t last long if you don’t.”
Cassie simmered now. “What about you? You’re an angel. You’re telling me you don’t have
any
powers yourself?”
“In Heaven, I have great power, but in Hell? Just basic sorcery. Witch-stuff. I’m outclassed here. In the Mephistopolis, my only useful power is in the secrets I know.”
“Oh, that’s useful. Secrets you can’t reveal without getting torn up by that shadow thingie.”
“Umbra-Specter,” the angel corrected. “But there are a lot of secrets I
don’t
know, and we’re going to start off by getting to the bottom of some things.”
Cassie’s hair blew around in a tumult from the wind blowing into the Nectoport. She looked over and saw Angelese peering out with the pair of Ophitte Viewers; the bloodshot eyes for its lenses blinked. “They’re filling the Atrocidome again. I don’t get it.”
“I guess they’re going to do another Merge,” Cassie said.
“Yeah, but why? We know the Etherean’s already here, and the Merge they initiated to try and capture you at the clinic failed. There’s no reason for them to do another Merge, at least none that I can think of.”
But Cassie’s own thoughts began to interfere with the matters at hand. She couldn’t stop thinking about Lissa.
Where
is
she now? What are they doing to her?
Was she still at the Mephisto Building? Did they put her back in that pit in the zoo? Guilt piled up upon guilt.
“We’ll find her,” Angelese assured. “They’ll make it easy for us. Remember, she’s the bait they’re going to use to try and catch you.”
This didn’t comfort Cassie.
“But we’ve got a few other things to do first,” Angelese added.
The Nectoport was descending again. “Step back. We’re going inside.”
Cassie didn’t know what was happening. The orifice-like oval of the Nectoport began to suck shut, like a camera aperture. When it was shut completely Cassie could only see the angel in lines of dim green light. She sensed the port’s variable solidity passing though objects, walls perhaps, as its occult technology impossibly shortened the distance between two points.
But where was their current point?
Sssssssssssssssss-ONK!
The aperture snapped open, hovering.
Good Lord,
Cassie thought, peering out past the gelatinous green light. They weren’t in a building, they were in some sort of subterranean cavern.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“The Mater Sequestrum ...” Angelese climbed out of the port, then helped Cassie down.
“The what?”
“It’s a special place where the mothers of great people spend their eternal damnation.”
“Great people?”
“Great in the sense of historical importance. They can be evil people or very benevolent people—it doesn’t matter. Hitler’s mother is here, for instance, and so is Herod’s. This place is sort of like a trophy house for Lucifer.”
Cassie followed her escort down a trail carved out of black pumice. It was hot and lined with torches set into crude sconces to either side. Occasionally she’d see a head pilloried in the rock, then she looked up and gasped. The cavern’s ceiling seemed a hundred feet high and suspended overhead were more Human women in iron cages. “This part of the Sequestrum is kind of dull,” Angelese was explaining. She was holding a shiny stone in her right hand, rubbing her thumb over it as she talked. “The very special mothers get very special treatment.”
Cassie scuffed onward through the foul air. “But whose mother are we here to see?”
“Yours.”
The response bolted Cassie. She and Lissa had never been very close to their mother, who’d divorced her father for another man a long time ago.
I’m the great person?
she wondered. It seemed inconceivable. But something much more obvious popped into her awareness.
If my mother’s here, then she must’ve died and gone to Hell.
“How did she die?” she asked, her flip-flops smacking on the rough stone.
“Well, as I understand it, the guy she left your father for caught her with yet another man. So he shot her, shot the guy, and shot himself. You can’t feel bad about every tragedy, Cassie, just because of a blood-bond. You want the truth, most people in the Living World aren’t very cool. They’re selfish and dishonest. You mother was just a gold-digger. She got what she had coming.”
Cassie couldn’t relate to that. A gnarled black tree twisted over their heads, and from a stout branch hung another woman by a noose around her neck. Her bare legs kicked in the air while her hands fisted around the noose.
Eternity,
Cassie realized.
She’ll be like that for eternity ...
Did this woman get “what she had coming?” What could she have done to deserve this? What could
anybody
do?
Then a hitch caught in her chest and she nearly screamed. Elevated slightly before them, on a rock ledge, stood a rhinoceros-sized beast with multiple cyeclusters and a great depending belly the size of a small sports car. The belly squirmed from something alive inside, and Cassie grimly suspected that there were actually several Humans in the beast’s gut. From its slavering, toothy maw a woman hung, her legs swallowed to the waist, but her arms, head, and bosom exposed. Her drool-slimed head hung upside-down as they passed, and she looked right at Cassie and said, “I hope you’re sorry for your sins ...”
Then the woman was gnawed some more, her screams firing like rifle shots throughout the cavern.
“You can’t help her, it’s not allowed,” Angelese urged and pulled her along.
“How can God let this happen to people?”
“He doesn’t. It’s the people themselves that do. And remember what she said.”
I hope you’re sorry for your sins,
Cassie reflected. This cavern dizzied her, and she suspected far worse things to come. They must be going to the place Angelese just referred to, the place for
very special
treatment.
Some women stood waist-deep in little pools of lava, so used to eternal agony they didn’t even bother screaming any more. Others were pitoned naked to the rock walls as Griffins and other, worse vulture-like birds picked at them with their beaks.
Angelese kept rubbing the small stone in her hand, seeming annoyed.
“Is that another Obscurity Stone?” Cassie asked.
“It’s a Nephrilene. The best way to describe it to a Human is to say that it’s been magically encoded with a tincture of your mother’s spirit. It’s like a direction-finder. It should lead us to her.”
“It just did,” a soft voice flowed from the dark.
The voice paralyzed Cassie. She hadn’t heard it in so long but she recognized it at once. Angelese took down one of the torches and brought it around, for light. Its endless source of pitch-tar crackled and threw roving shapes of illumination forward.
A head looked at them, and at first, Cassie thought it was severed, but then she could see that her mother’s body seemed to be embedded, to the neck, between two smooth rocks pressed together, each rock tall and wide as a refrigerator.
“Hello, Cassie,” said the smiling face thrust up between the rocks. Short blondish hair with fashionable gray streaks, pearl-white teeth, bright aquamarine eyes. She was still pretty, even here.
“So, your father’s dead? Believe it or not, I’m sorry about that. And Lissa’s here, do you know that?” The woman’s smile brightened. “It’s your fault.”
Cassie wilted.
“Shut up!” Angelese said. “Don’t listen to her, Cassie.”
The eyes flicked to Angelese. “Ah, a little broken angel, scarred and torn. You seem a bit used, don’t you? Why didn’t they send someone important? I’ll tell you why. Because they already know in advance that you will fail, so they don’t want to risk losing someone valuable.”
“Fuck off,” Angelese said.
“Such eloquent words from a sister of God.” Now the eyes flicked back to Cassie. “I never loved you, and I never loved Lissa. I wanted to get an abortion but your father wouldn’t allow it. I didn’t want to rock the boat and risk being taken out of the will.”
“I don’t understand,” Cassie wept. “Why are you being like this?”
“Because I’m a horrible person.”
Angelese put her arm around Cassie. “You know the Rules. Any question I ask you in the presence of your daughter, you must answer.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah. Really. Like why is the Constabulary filling up the Atrocidome again?”
Cassie’s mother smiled. “I’m ... not going to tell you.”
The defiant smile seemed to float before them, but then it vanished. The woman’s face began to puff, as if great pressure were being exerted on her body between the rocks. Instantly she looked nauseated.
“Fine,” Angelese said, smiling cruelly. “Don’t answer the question.”
Cassie’s mother’s head drooped. “They’re going to keep doing Merges. They’re doing them non-stop.”
“Why? Cassie escaped and the Etherean is already in the Mephistopolis. It doesn’t make sense for them to keep doing Merges.”
“They’re going to Merge with every known Deadpass.”
“Why?”
“To destroy them.”
Angelese nodded as Cassie stared. “If they destroy every Deadpass,” the angel informed her, “then you’ll be trapped in the Mephistopolis. There’ll be no way for you to get out because all the Rives will be gone.” She turned her next question to the head between the rocks.
“Our intelligence has it that the Hexology Institutes, the Houngan Re-Animation Offices, and the entire Department of Voudou Research have all been moved out of the Industrial Sectors and relocated to the Mephisto Building. Is this true?”
“No,” Cassie’s mother defied.
“No?” Angelese turned the word.
More agony and nausea ballooned the woman’s face. “Yes, God damn you! Yes, it’s true!”
Cassie could scarcely watch any more of these ministrations. It didn’t matter that her mother had never loved her—she couldn’t stand witnessing this.
“One more question, then we’ll be out of this literal hell-hole,” the angel promised. “Several nights ago, there was a Merge in Maryland, some kind of a state document library. A Fallen Angel named Zeihl incarnated himself there, and then he committed suicide in order to effect a Power Exchange, so that a physical object in that library could be taken back to Hell. There’s no other reason why a Fallen Angel would do that.”
Lines of hatred drew deep into the woman’s face. She hissed at Angelese, displaying a long thin tongue like a snake’s. “I’ll never tell. I don’t care, but I’ll never tell.”
“Sure you won’t change your mind?”
The woman’s face was already going sick again. She began to gag. “Never. I’ll never tell.”
Angelese stepped back, urging Cassie with her. “So be it.”
Eyes squeezed shut, face swelling, turning yellow, Cassie’s mother violently whipped her head back and forth.
Then the pair of rocks she’d been embedded in ... began to rise.
What in God’s name?
Cassie thought.
“Don’t get too close,” the Angel warned. “It’s an Intestisaur ...”
Like I knom what that is,
Cassie thought.
She’d see exactly what it was, in a moment.
The two smooth rocks weren’t rocks. When they rose, they did so by two stout legs, each a dozen feet long, that had been folded beneath them. Cassie saw now that it was some demonic living thing that her mother was embedded in.
It stood up completely and turned around. It was massive, hairless, fleshy, with great slablike folds of skin hanging off its stunted physique. It had no arms, just the sumo-like legs it had been squatting on, a protuberant belly with multiple navels. No visible neck; instead the beachball-sized bald head grew out of its narrowed back, sitting on more folds, under which great flesh-satchels for breasts depended.
Cassie almost fell over when she looked up at its face in the firelight. Two inlets, like bolt-holes, for ears. No eyes, no nose. Just a big thick-lipped mouth. And now that it stood up, she discerned its true function. The two “rocks” from which her mother’s head jutted were actually the thing’s buttocks.
“It’s considered a supreme punishment,” Angelese said. “All the Intestisaur exists for is to eat. It’s a lower-grade species of Cacodemon. The Teratologists at the Office of Transfiguration surgically implanted your mother’s Spirit Body into its bowel. She is now
part
of its digestive system. Her mouth serves as its anus.”
Cassie couldn’t handle this, even with all she’d seen thus far during her ventures to the Mephistopolis.