“Your mother’s a very strong woman. She’s going to take it rather than answer my question—it’s unbelievable.” Even Angelese was queasy in what she anticipated. “We’ll have to find out somewhere else. Let’s get out of here. You don’t want to see this ...”
No, Cassie did not, but she’d put two and two together and that was enough. She couldn’t even speak. Angelese led her back out of the heinous cavern as the Intestisaur, behind them, began to massively excrete. Even a hundred yards away, they could hear the vocal blasts of Cassie’s mother screaming intermittently between the monstrous voids of the demon’s bowel.
When they were back in the Nectoport, and sailing away, Cassie lay nearly paralyzed against the curved wall. The Port’s egress was crossed completely as they folded hellish space.
Angelese sat in contemplation. “It must have something to do with organic replication, or Hex-Clones.”
Cassie looked at her through slitted eyes. “What?”
“Your mother confirmed our intelligence reports, that the Hexology Institutes were all recently moved out of the Industrial Sectors and relocated to the Mephisto Building. You know about those places, right?”
“Not really,” Cassie answered, numbed. “I’ve heard of them, occult science stuff, I think.”
“It’s where they make Hex-Clones for the Constabulary. They’ve moved all those facilities to the Mephisto Building for a reason.”
“What do you think the reason is?”
“Security, is my guess. All we know is that Lucifer’s plan is something that, if it succeeds, could be the most devastating thing to happen to the Living World, but beyond that? We can only guess. He moved the Hex-Clone agencies to a place where they’d be safe from you, in the event that you weren’t successfully captured.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You’re an Etheress. In theory, you’re powerful enough to destroy those facilities.”
Was she? The prospect daunted her. But at least Cassie felt she had a purpose now—anything to get her mind off what she’d witnessed in the caverns. “So that’s why you want to get into the Mephisto Building? Well, I’m all for it. If I have the capability of destroying all the stuff—and wrecking his plan, whatever it is—then I’m game. But I don’t think there’s any way to get inside.”
“There is one way.”
Cassie perked up. “Really? What?”
“Trust me. But there’s more we have to do first anyway.” Angelese stood up and re-opened the Nectoport’s threshold. They were very high up now, frighteningly so. The black sickle moon in its perpetual phase was close enough to reveal surface details. The clouds up here looked like billows of mold.
“What do we have to do first?” Cassie asked, looking grimly out onto the scape of the city.
“We have to find out what your mother refused to tell us. We’ll have a better idea exactly what Lucifer plans to do once we find out what was taken out of that library in Maryland.”
“How do we find that out?”
“Hell is full of secrets, Cassie,” the angel explained, her pure-white hair dancing in the wind. “But all those secrets must be written down—Satanic Public Law, Number One—and those secrets are kept in the most secret place in the Mephistopolis. It’s a library, too, of sorts. The Infernal Archives.”
“Hell’s library,” Cassie responded. Then she tried to joke, “I don’t have a card.”
Angelese didn’t laugh. She seemed focused, preoccupied—and worried.
“So you know how to get to this place?” Cassie asked.
“Yeah.”
“But you just got done telling me that it’s the most secret place in the Mephistopolis. If its location is such a big secret, how can you possibly know where it is?”
“God told me,” Angelese said.
Chapter Twelve
(I)
The purple neon sign out front read: KEDESHAH’S HOUSE OF SIN. This could’ve been Bourbon Street in New Orleans, but it was actually the Annwyn Avenue in Boniface Square, the city’s entertainment hub. Saloons, live sex shows, massage parlors, and gambling joints.
And bordellos. Like this one.
“It’s the biggest whorehouse in Hell,” No-name said. “It’s named after the first whore of the earth, who was actually a subcarnate fertility goddess.”
Walter looked up at the enormous aircraft-carrier-sized building. Lights blinked hypnotically; neon burned. Walter, without knowing why, walked toward the closest entrance—a pillar-sided, jewel-studded door, guarded by spike-fisted Licentogres, heavily muscled hybrid sentries each with a line of black stitches where their genitals used to be.
“Why are we here?” Walter asked in a death-like drone. “Please don’t tell me that Candice works in there.”
“She doesn’t,” No-name began—
Relief overwhelmed him.
“Not inside,” she continued. “Candice is just starting out, so she’s working the streets, you know. A streetwalker.”
Walter’s relief died, as phony as just about everything else that had been told to him in his life. “So we’re not going inside, I take it,” he murmured.
“No. We’ll just walk around the tenderloin until we find her. Just keep walking.”
She’s getting a little bossy,
Walter reflected. Oh, well. A change of subject seemed in welcome order. “Tell me more about the Plan A, Plan B thing.”
“Plan A failed,” No-name repeated. “You’re Plan B. It’s something I’m surprised you’re not thinking about.”
“I just asked you about it!” Walter raised his voice, a rarity for him. “I must be thinking about it if I asked you about it.”
“Calm down. I mean, you don’t appear to be thinking about it in a transitive manner. Be deductive.”
Women,
Walter thought.
They’re all nuts.
“The Etheress was Plan A. Lucifer wanted her but he failed to get her—”
“Yes.”
“And she’s here now, in Hell.”
“Yes. On her own conditions, and I can tell you that Satan and his agents aren’t pleased about it.”
“But I’m the male equivalent of her, and I’m here under my own conditions.”
“Are you?”
“I don’t know. I think so. I want to meet the Etheress. Can I?”
“I can’t divulge that.”
Walter frowned, something he’d been doing a lot lately. “Where is she?”
“I can’t say.”
“Is she alone?”
“No, that I can tell you because it doesn’t involve a inference to the future. She’s with an angel, a mid-order Seraphim. You can think of her as a tainted angel. She’s a Caliginaut. They’re all whacked out of their heads. Some are even insane.”
The Etheress has an insane angel for an escort,
Walter thought,
and I’ve got a talking head.
He wondered who was better off.
“The Caliginauts are like Heaven’s commandos. They do deep cover, in Hell, in the Netherspheres, and on earth. They have to have their wings cut off to prove their faith. This one’s a lot like me.”
“You’re not an angel,” Walter asserted.
“No, I’m a damned soul, a mystic in Hell.”
“Then what did you mean when you said the angel’s a lot like you?”
“She can’t reveal any Heavenly Secret, without suffering great pain. I can’t reveal what I know about the future, without losing my spirit body—and as you can see, I don’t have much of one left.”
Walter made little sense of this.
An angel without wings, and a seer who can’t tell what she sees.
He was tired of being confused, which seemed, by now, a perpetual mental state. “I don’t know why you can’t tell me what to do, or what’s going to happen. Some soothsayer.”
“I’m sorry, Walter, it’s my curse.”
“You know all these universal secrets but you can’t tell them. What good does that do? What purpose does that serve?”
“They’re not universal secrets, Walter. They’re preternatural. They’re abstruse.”
Abstruse.
Walter sputtered to himself.
Wonderful
.
“Remember one of the first things I told you,” No-name continued from under his arm. “The future isn’t mutable. It just is. I am part of it and so are you. We are both an integral component of what could happen, what might happen, or what might not. You’re smart. Think about that.”
“I’m not a philosopher. I’m a physicist and a mathematician.”
“And an Etherean,” the head reminded.
“Yeah, big deal. An Etherean with no power.”
“Walter, I never said that you’ll never harness your powers. I only suggested, without violating any
abstruse
codices, that you probably won’t because you’re not strong enough. You don’t have the resolve, or the confidence.”
Walter was walking aimlessly. He was just as depressed here as he was in the Living World, so what was the point? The only reason he didn’t want to blow his head off
here
was because there was a chance of seeing Candice. And he’d already been told—by a friggin’ Dactyl-class soothsayer for King Mursil the First—that Candice would never love him.
What’s the point? What’s the point in anything?
“Look,” No-name said. “The Wall of Skin.”
Now they were walking by a long section of the bordello that was composed not of bricks or board but of smooth sweating flesh. Yet in the flesh were lead-lined windows where various prostitutes sat for display to passersby. There were all manner of demonian species in the windows—Mongrel, City-Imp, Troll, Succubus, Hybrid, etc., along with some Humans—all naked and poised voluptuously. When ugly, butt-faced demons strolled by, the girls would enthusiastically raise their windows and whistle at them, urge them to come over, with corny lines like “Hey handsome, where you been all my eternity?” and “Take me, I’m yours.” Others were much more direct: “Come on! Let’s get it on!” and “I’m the best trick in Hell! What are you waiting for?”
Sadly, though, none of the girls so much as noticed Walter. A few of them even looked at him and laughed.
He trudged on, with the inexplicable head tucked under his arm.
“Are we getting close to where Candice works?”
“Maybe.”
“Thanks for being so informative.”
“Hey, Walter, that little-boy-hurt stuff doesn’t work with me.”
Walter just frowned and let it slide off. At least that was one thing he was getting good at. “Can I ask you something, No-name?”
“Yes, but only if it doesn’t involve the revelation of an ethereal abstrusion.”
“Are you my friend?”
“Yes,” she said without pause.
“Then why do you give me crap all the time?”
“Because I’m your friend.”
Walter could’ve laughed.
Sometimes it sounded like he was walking on something wet, and when he looked down he’d see periodic used condoms lying on the sidewalk, demonic seed leaking though their factory-made perforations. He’d also see occasional charred hands and feet, from low-end hookers who’d sold the parts to street-side smoke-diviners for drug money. Across the street, two horned pimps were mugging a john, and a block down, a pair of Imp prostitutes were stabbing each other. Golem police officers walked slowly by, unconcerned.
“Turn here,” No-name said when they finally got to the end of the half-mile-long bordello block.
BOTTOM OF THE BARREL ALLEY a street sign read.
Denizens strolled out, hands in pockets. One bearded man was walking and he looked right at Walter and said, “I told you I’d see you here.” His head sat on his shoulders at an angle, and the bloody shirt he wore read: PIL: THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT, THIS IS WHAT YOU GET. Walter watched him walk by, speechless.
Shouts could be heard from the distance. The left side of the alley remained the window-pocked Wall of Skin, but here the skin shined less lustrously and eventually grew infectious. Chancres throbbed, gonorrhea raged in folds of flesh, chlamydic discharge oozed from pocks. Some of the epidermal pocks squirmed from chiggers embedded beneath.
The women in these windows were all afflicted in one way or other: missing a limb, missing a scalp, burned, covered in demonic rashes, and the like. One girl sat dejectedly in one window, looking to one side. She appeared petite and attractive, until she turned to reveal the other side of her face, which had been scraped off to the bone. Another Human woman could’ve been a model, save for the fact that her breasts had been chewed off. Another, a She-Troll, looked out her window sightlessly, her eye sockets empty. A sign under her window read: ANY HOLE OF YOUR CHOICE: $5.
Walter felt petrified now. What would await him?
“Get ready, Walter,” No-name consoled. “Remember, it’s better to regret the things you have done than the things you haven’t done.”
“Meaning?”
“You’re not going to like what you’re about to see. But you wanted to come here. You willingly came through that Deadpass to see Candice, and now you’re going to see her. So. We’re here. This is what you want...”