Infernus (10 page)

"Yes, my son. This creature dreamed of a world where he was a dogma deliverer and he had a woman who bore him this son. Foolish dreamer; he was only remembering his future. He only dreamed he killed the son so that he might feel better about being treated thusly here. He stripped the son of all his flesh in that other world, then poured salt on the wounds. What he really did was serve his ego and play like he was one of the gods. He thought, 'If I kill the son in the dream state, maybe he will cease to exist in reality.' How foolish."

"Shall we find paddles and swing to our purpose, Father?"

"Yes, let's."

They found many paddles resting on the wall on the other side of the oven. The son chose one that said, "If you have love for another, they will know you!" The father snatched one that was covered with teeny writing. "Take the log out of your own eye first, then you will see the microscopic speck in your brother's eye!" There the vampiric satyr son also found settings on the oven to increase the heat, and did so to an impossible level, then laughed. The father was already swinging the paddle with blurring speed against the man's belly and exposed genitals. The son joined in and began applying the paddle to his backside. They enjoyed millennia doing this. It never grew tiring or boring. It was indeed a pleasure-quest.

"Is there anything that can be done," the son asked, "to make this machine glow white-hot for many lifetimes?" He was smiling with a foot-wide grin.

The child-sized skeleton approached them and spoke matter-of-factly. "If you fill the iron beast's stomach with metal ingots from that pile, I trust it will test the metal's ability to endure for thousands of lifetimes."

"Will the piglet squeal?" the son asked, his smile widening.

The child-skeleton grandly waved his arm around the room. "See. See."

So the father and son filled the iron beast with metal bars until they were forced to withdraw from the roaring heat. The room instantly burned a violent gold as the heat could be felt, even in
their
bones.

The piglet within, if it was possible, screamed even louder and more earnestly than before. His golden legs pumped furiously but futilely. This had happened many millions of times before, the father explained between belly laughs. And it was always greeted with exactly the same response.

The son saw radiant amber fissures ripping along the surface of the machine, thick golden veins running down the metal cylinder, pulsing, threatening to burst its seams, and nearly firing liquid ore upon the pleased observers.

All within the room burned glittering gold, but the broiling creature locked deep within the embrace of the iron beast shrieked and shrieked, and the father and son laughed louder and longer. Longer and louder.

*****

"My son, look at this stupid woman. She thought she was doing her gods a great service by having other people put to death because they did not believe in her dogma church."

"Oh, Father, this is almost hideous, if it weren't so funny. Look!"

"What do you see, my golden son; for behold, that is what you are becoming!" It was true. The son's skin was becoming shiny and gold. "It is from supping on the buttocks of the golden demon. It sets you up to be great in size and the most powerful of the demons here in the real world."

"My father, it is of no consequence to me. What I see is this: the wench is revolving over heated rocks on a spit that has pierced her anus and protrudes from her mouth. Oh, how slowly she turns. Many bruised and broken bodies are gathered around her, and they are shoving long metal poles in all of her openings."

"Yes," Red said, stifling a snigger, "and making new ones."

A swollen, bloated man (or woman) approached her spinning corpse and inserted a long fork into both of her orbital sockets. It plunged them in and out. Many others did the same. Her breasts were slit. Green pus ran out and splashed on the rocks, heating them hotter still.

"Is this good for her, my son, or can you think of other delicious things to do to her? She was, after all, a queen in her day when the Horse Nebula was first discovered in the distant skies."

"I can think of something to do to her which will please me greatly."

"Good, go to it with a hearty will."

As the son approached her, she seemed to look helplessly at him with her shattered, ragged eyes. Pity, was it? The son grabbed her sweaty green locks that clung to her wet shoulders. He pulled with all his might, which was considerable. She couldn't scream any louder, so she continued as before, unabated. The son felt the scalp give way and he threw the hair onto the rocks to watch them curl and smoke and stink.

"Bravo, son, you have done well. Come here."

The son returned to the father's side and had to wait until he could undouble from his laughter. "My son, I am permitted to give you a gift at this time. Sink your beautiful aching teeth into my shoulder and draw from a
true
Well of Strength. Sup on your father's Red blood and be even stronger than ordinary Golden demons."

The son grabbed the father's shoulder in his growing talons and steadied him as he bit into what tasted like the most delicious fruit of all time. He supped long and hard at this, and felt strengthened beyond description. The father, weakened, fell to the heated rocks, unconscious for a [fortnight] time and a few times. The son heard the head crack wetly and laughed. Completely void of any empathy, he shrugged his great shoulders, and waited for the father to regain enough strength to stand and continue the training.

*****

"Look, my son, at the greatest preachers of all time." Red pointed to a most heated exhibit. Before he could explain what he was seeing, the son was falling into a boiling pool of urine, laughing mindlessly. "Now, stop that, filth! I must tell you what it is."

It was a garden of heated sand squares. Each square had diamond borders that rose from the floor only an inch or two. All preachers that occupied these millions and millions of shapes were bound, so it was irrelevant that little divided them.

"Look at
this
fool, my son. He is suspended in space, connected by his arms and legs to the roof of this cave by chains. Imagine how it must be to die forever without the energy to even feel your dislocated sockets. But, even more horrible, he cannot move - his arms and legs are pulled up behind him, deliciously, hideously. He must silently face the message handwritten in the sand that is heated to seven million degrees below him. His mouth, all mouths of the enslaved here, are very crudely sewn shut with large embalmer's hooks. See how his wounds are millions of years old, yet never healing, never scabbing over? What is the message written by a demon that hates him even more than I hate you? What does it say that heats his head and sears his eyes but he must read forever? It is cruel, but it must be read, and loudly."

"Oh, Father-" The son fell to the ground and fitfully laughed until great blisters arose on his scalp and popped into pustules of thin liquid. "May I mount him and take his virginity billions of times for his foolishness? Oh, great, bastard Father?"

"Yes, you may, but I must warn you, his 'virginity' you speak of has been removed many billions of times ago. There is naught of it left."

The son mounted the preacher and roughly forced his large member into the rotund man, and fell to raping him with a grace hitherto unthought-of, and he screamed the message out loud directly into the ears of the bastard that lay silently below him. He felt the chain pull on all the sockets and sinews of the roasting preacher who was baked into jerky. But no bone snapped as each thrust of the joyous vampiric satyr strained with all the hated power of his massive, muscular, rippling body.

Lo! There were e'en the beginnings of great gray wings that the son was unaware of and the father could not tell him. The father saw them peeking through the flesh of his shoulders.

"This is a participatory exhibit. All of Infernus' multicolored demons have had their worst field day with this idiot child, and their unholy ilk."

The son kept filling the preacher with his ever-growing member and shouting the sand-written message into his ears, as many have done many times. "All men will know you are my disciples if you love one another!"

The father watched with unguarded glee and pride as the son tried to break the bones or the chains with his powerful muscles and practiced zeal. It was a furious attempt and he didn't fail for want of trying or desire.

They approached another sand pit.

"This being," said the father, "thought he had a program where he sat on the world's thrones and pontificated on the causes of the world's demises. The beings he blamed for its problems were people that were (as you might have guessed) unlike him." He laughed. "Look at what happens to him always."

The televangelist was repeatedly being struck in the back of the head with an axe by a roasted, blackened man. He was fixed where he could not look left or right, only straight ahead to a bleeding wall where this was inscribed in light:

'The heart is deceitful above all things,
and beyond cure
. Who can understand it?'

The man was trying to reason with his abuser. "Oh my - ahhhh! It was others! It wasn't me.
I did
have a right to speak for the creator and say who caused the world's downfall! I did have the right!"

The man paused his axing, and said between laughing, "You are living proof of the veracity of this poem. And you still do not understand its meaning. Ahh, you are to be pitied more than the fools that die in the streets. At least they know they are dead, or wrong, or poor. You seem to know naught." And he heartily began axing the man with even more vigor than before.

The red demon turned to his son and said, "In the other world, he fell well."

And the son laughed quietly to himself.

*****

"My son, look at this pathetic wench."

They had entered a small cave.

"What appears to be happening, Father, is that three faceless toddlers are endlessly torturing an adult-type person with breasts. There's much more to it, though. Let's take in what we are seeing."

The first thing the son observed was a child-like thing holding a raging torch of fire and oily black smoke under the chin of a quivering adult that sat on the baking floor, unable anymore to even pretend to escape. Large breasts trembled. A solid flame engulfed the adult's head and sought to consume it entirely, but could not. The child-like thing with a skinless face turned toward the two visitors, giggling softly, and showed them the tableau for their approval. The father and son nodded. It, in turn, was pleased.

"If it runs," said the skeletal child, "we continue unabated. It just gave up many [days] times ago."

Another toddler, its epidermis also vacant, had long brown hair that seemed to have a life of its own in the heated air. It [she] was plunging a long carving knife into the back of the hopeless adult. This little girl-thing seemed to grin at them with her lipless mouth, and the visitors nodded their approval of her. [It] she was pleased.

The third toddler never seemed to notice the visitors, continually bringing a baby-sized hammer down on the unresponsive adult's knees.

"This foolish woman creature, in her belief that the dream world was real, murdered these three children there. She beat one to death (so she thought) with a ball peen hammer, killed another with a huge butcher knife, and baked the other one alive in the oven. She tried to kill them there to avenge herself here - give this existence meaning. As if it
had
any meaning. She stripped all their faces off and thought she was done with it. She only feared her reality. It will never stop. Death is too good to her."

They both laughed as loud as they could over their own screams.

*****

In their wandering, they came upon a lake of diamond, one flat solid body made of a precious jewel. It was absolutely clear. As they stood on its surface, they could easily see the bottom miles below.

"This is the lake of the seven thousand, my son. Notice how you can see bodies below these bodies near the surface? And bodies below them all the way to the bottom?"

"My father, are they dead?" he asked, hypnotically staring at the wide-eyed bodies of all the people stacked, seemingly, one on top of the other, all the way to the bottom.

"Look at me, son. Think about what you asked, 'Are they dead?'"

"Oh," he said, humiliated.

"The lie of death is one of the most cleverly guarded secrets until now. Since all are here now, and hope alone has died, there is little reason to support the lie. So what is the reality, my son?"

"There is no such thing as 'Death'?"

"Yes, good. Now look at these. They are frozen in the diamond lake. But they are all mortal. How can this be? Those that drown state that right before death swallows you, there is a moment of panic that takes you that is so profound, so horrid. It occurs right before the surrender that everyone experiences where 'going over' is pleasant. If that were to happen here, Infernus would be a joy. No, these all experience that profound, soul-stripping panic I was just telling you about. All of them. Yet, they cannot go on; they must endure the most hideous pain for billions of infinities [one billionth of an endless microsecond].

"Now, if we were to jump on the absolutely balanced surface of this solid lake, it would quake the bones of every occupant. At least that would be a different set of circumstances for them to deal with."

"Let's, Father!"

"But all the bones would break simultaneously."

"And, your point being?"

So they proceeded to do that for many millennia with much glee.

*****

"That is
so
horrible, and tasteless," one student offered. "Why would you
want
to produce a book like that?"

"It's the most honest way I could convey these concepts," the naked model simply replied. "I am powerless to do it any other way. I commit my crimes on paper, some people inflict them on the world, and shatter the societal order. How self-destructive."