Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (35 page)

“You
serve the Adversary?” This was something new to him.

“I
serve the greatest of the archangels.
The master of this
world.”

The
Rider looked askance at the old hermit, and his expression bespoke his
thoughts; that this old beggar was delusional.

“Do
not underestimate me, judío. Each of us vows to spend a year in poverty serving
El Ángel Pavo Real. Come south and see me in my palace in a year, if you’re not
beaten away for a beggar from my gate.”

“You
will watch our animals?” Kabede asked.

“I
give my word,” the hermit nodded.

“Do
you know who we are?” the Rider asked.

“I
do not care who you are. You would not be here if you had no business, and if
El Ángel wishes it, you will not return this way.” He smiled again. “If you do
not, I will eat your animals.”

The
hermit chuckled to himself and went to his palette.

The
Rider turned in a circle. The yard of the torreón swirled with dark, infernal
energies, an ill updraft permeating the Yenne Velt, but that was all he could
detect.

Kabede
walked in a circle, drawing in the sand with the pointed end of the staff.

“You
should begin your preparations,” Kabede said. His skin showed a visible sheen
of sweat.

“We’re
going to enter here, in his presence?” the Rider said, gesturing to the hermit.

“He
has given his word. He will abide it.”

“A
devil worshiper?” the Rider said, watching the old man sip from a gourd.

“He
trusted us enough to let us in,” Kabede reasoned. “We could have killed him
easily. We have no choice but to afford him the same trust.”

He
finished inscribing a Solomonic seal in the center of the courtyard, then sat
down in the circle and laid the staff across his knees.

The
Rider haltingly unpacked his candles and set them up, murmuring his prayers and
keeping an eye on the bemused looking old man.

Preparing
for a journey to Gehenna was not as simple as slipping into the Yenne Velt. The
latter he could do almost in a matter of minutes without thinking. Just as
entering heaven, a visit to hell required much more preparation and the
enactment of a multitude of safeguards, due to the angelic and demonic entities
one encountered at every turn.

Kabede,
he noticed, did not prepare quite so extensively. What prayers he did make were
mostly in his own language. The Rider did detect a smattering of Hebrew now and
then, and at least one catalytic Aramaic prayer he knew. It was repeated over
and over in the devekut b’otiyot fashion: careful intonation of each syllable
in such a way that it created an ecstatic sound not unlike a Buddhist mantra.

The
Rider dedicated the circle to the Archangels of the four directions and planted
himself within facing Kabede. He closed his eyes and completed his own prayers,
then joined with Kabede’s chant, until their voices intertwined and spiraled up
the well of the torreón.

Much
time passed. Though the Rider’s eyes were closed he felt and saw though his
eyelids the falling of cooling shadow across the torreón as the sun behind the
lip. Then time itself was gone, as was all bodily sensation, beginning with a
warm tremor that emanated at the base of his spine and merged with a flow of
light pouring from the top of his head.

These
were the anchors of his personal merkabah, the chariot of light which alone
could carry his soul untouched through the fires of hell. He opened his
ethereal eyes then, and was startled to see Kabede, still in a seated posture,
but suspended in mid-air, his own eyes open and regarding him.

The
Rider looked upon Kabede’s whirling energy vehicle. The angles of blue and
golden light (actually two interlocked and counter-rotating tetrahedra, one pointing
up, the other down) surrounding him gave the impression of a stellated
octahedron, a whirling, three dimensional magen, a Star of David.

Kabede
sat calmly in the center of the brilliant energy field, like the eye of a
storm. Looking on him was disorienting for a bit, and the Rider glanced away to
dispel his own mounting vertigo, when he perceived a heretofore nonexistent
empty space beneath him. What had been solid earth in the physical world was
here a cavernous black stone staircase spiraling downwards, its lower levels
washed in shadow.

A
palpable, unearthly heat rose from below, so powerful that the Rider actually
felt it, even bodiless and protected by the merkabah magen. He could see the
waves of heat distorting the light of his emanation on the flags.

“After
you,” said Kabede.

He
nodded, and with a mental contraction of his will, he went floating down the
staircase.

For
a long time they descended in silence. The darkness was impenetrable,
retreating only briefly, like seawater around their glowing bodies, to fall in
and close once more in their wake. The tower seemed to stretch for hours into
the earth, and there were no landings. The steps themselves were quite steep
and narrow, and would not have allowed for comfortable rest without fear of
tumbling in one’s sleep.

He
never spent enough time in the other worlds to know if souls needed sleep. They
certainly tired, for will and concentration were what provided an astral body
with locomotion (
his own
maintenance of the complex
merkabah magen was quite taxing). He pitied any souls who had to make their way
up or down these treacherous stairs in pitch black. The loneliness alone would
drive most minds to the brink.

Soon
they became aware of a sound. It was far off and muffled at first. Gradually,
it grew louder and was accompanied by a faint reddish glow from below.

It
was a roaring.
No, a screaming.
A multitude of voices
all
raised
at once, clamoring to be heard above each
other, yet indistinct in the very act of doing so.

They
came to the bottom at last, and a tall narrow doorway afforded them their first
glance of hell.

It
was similar to the torreón in structure. A great deep well, though so massive
in size that its far walls were nearly out of sight, obscured in a combined haze
of heat, black smoke and distance. Likewise, the open mouth was a single
pinprick of unattainable light as distant as a star in the darkness above. It
shimmered in and out of sight. The Nehar Dinur, The River of Fire, whose source
was the sweat of the seraphim that bore the Throne of God in the seventh
hekhalot, cascaded down in a tremendous flaming waterfall. It emptied into the
great lake, which pooled at the center of the lowest point, whose stony shore
the entrance to the torreón opened onto.

Several
other minor, nameless falls poured from above, fed from numerous twisting
streams of murky gall and black bubbling pitch and yellow poison, creating a
foul, unspeakable brew like a great cesspool below, steaming with constant
plumes of acrid smoke and ash like a lava flow boiling the sea. The surface of
the ever churning, ever burning lake of poison was crusted over in places with
drifting patches of impossible, thick gray ice through which the blue centered
flames shone and crowds of frantic humanoid shadows hammered bootlessly
beneath.

Around
jagged holes in the dirty ice hunkered clusters of monstrous demons, dark,
eyeless creatures who knew no home but hell and whose twisted, amalgamated
bodies, ungainly and misshapen, looked sheathed in or held together by glowing,
superheated iron and links of black chain or twisted ropes of barbed razor
wire. They stood as if they were colossal malformed fisherman gathered around
the holes in the ice. Instead of plucking sustenance from the depths, they used
great pikes to shove heaps of tiny flailing figures who tried to claw their way
out back under.

Seven
subdivided compartments comprised Gehenna, and they found themselves in the
lowest, the furthest from Paradise. This was the dark place where Lucifer,
greatest of all the betrayers, made his home. Every limb of the stark,
petrified trees that thrust twisting through the miry clay banks of the lake of
fire and jutted out from the rock walls of the abyss were adorned with
screaming men and women, bound in wire and suspended there by long spikes
driven through their tongues.

The
merkabah magen shielded them from feeling most of the abominable climate, which
was a mix of ash, fire, blood and filth, navigated by buzzing clouds of strange
winged vermin who swarmed around them but disintegrated in little buzzing pops
when they tried to pass through the whirling angles of energy. The magen did
nothing to filter out the horrible clamor of wild shrieking that the myriad
tortures of the realm elicited, and the cavernous acoustics of the place
magnified.

Every
noise of terror and agony, every gibber and howl, every base animal protest was
being raised all at once, incessantly and without pause by voices rendered
hoarse with unending, unendurable torment and despair. The resulting ambient
sound was like that of a slaughterhouse manned by lunatics in full swing, with
cattle-like lowing and mad, mostly unintelligible fits of the foulest
obscenities in a thousand languages randomly intermixed with painful, pitiful
cries for succor and mercy. The names of God and demons and parents and
children long since passed from memory were invoked with equal desperation.

The
rain of blood sluiced down in torrents from the carved granite gutter spouts on
the ledges of Abaddon high above, where the bodies of the unrepentant were
systematically torn to pieces and constantly reassembled haphazardly by
callous, clawed hands. Limbs and organs fell too, cast into the center like the
innards of fish. Droning locusts the size of horses with women’s faces and
flowing hair and red crowns snatched the discarded matter in mid-air and
gobbled them up with serrated teeth.

The
Rider watched in morbid fascination as one of the locust things fought for the
twisting, screeching figure of a naked, corpulent man with a whole flock of
squawking, flaming ravens, each bearing the angry red face of a bawling,
black-eyed infant. Then an enormous creature with the head of a mottled furless
cat, and six-fingered hands waving excitedly like flippers from its shoulders,
reared up from the rolling fog of cinder and batted both warring parties aside.
It gobbled the man up like a grub then scuttled up the wall of the infernal
cistern, its slick, millipede body worming into one of the side tunnels
overhead from which flowed a stream of viscous bile.

The
Rider turned away, sickened. He only glimpsed the horrors of this place of
punishment once though a mystic lens. The lesson served to harrow his soul and
teach him the importance of virtue.

Being
here, immersed in terror, observing the intensity of the suffering, was another
matter entirely. He felt a deep, penetrating revulsion, like a spurt of venom
bursting from his heart to fill every limb and extremity, to flood his mind
with a thick, staggering melancholy. If the passion, the love and hate of
HaShem were responsible for these horrors, then how could the utter
indifference of The Great Old Ones be worse for mankind?

The
Rider saw luminous, many colored angels passing up and down the Nehar Dinur.
Many of these bore the ruined carcasses of souls who had served their requisite
term and had been sufficiently purged of their iniquity. He watched an angel
with glorious parrot green wings fly twisting like a daredevil in and out of
the fiery waters as it soared upwards. It bore a sagging, wasted body in its
arms. At each immersion in golden fire the pitiful cargo was restored, healed
of its grievous wounds.

The
envious dead clawed at them in passing, lunging desperately from the clutches
of their winged tormentors, seeking to cling to the robes of the angel and thus
be born away from their own agonies, but these were savagely beaten back by the
patrolling mazzikim, monstrous beings whose bat wings carried them deftly upon
the mad, infernal winds.

Kabede
had also apparently fixed his attention on this brief scene of respite, and he
craned his neck to watch the green winged angel with its burden, until they
were a bright speck far above.

“It
is said that at death, the kedoshim, the most righteous of the hidden saints,
come here,” he said. “They may bring with them into Paradise all the souls they
can carry.”

The
Rider looked at Kabede. There was an expression of extreme sorrow on his face.
The Rider’s own soul blanched at the terror and the fury all around him. He
wondered how
God,
or any creation of God could even
conceive of such horror let alone bring it into being.

“Let’s
go,” he said, his voice cracking. It was almost a plea.

Before
them a granite bridge spanned the lake, and beyond that lay Pandæmonium, the
grand palace of hell. It stood atop a mound of smoking magma in the center, a
mockery of the suffering all around it and a testament to the hubris of its
occupants. It was gargantuan and shining, gaudy as a wedding cake. It was
similar in its basic design to the old depictions of Solomon’s Temple, yet it
was defaced by the clashing opulence of a dozen different architectural styles.
Belted by innumerable Roman columns of white marble, its foundation festooned
with cheerful Parisian style lamps and Venetian arches, its outer stairs lined
with sumptuous balustrades. Its walls were adorned with baroque pilasters, each
framing a flattering Babylonian style bas-relief depicting one of the high
marshals of hell—three-headed Asmodeus, dragon-winged Astaroth, Molech (whose
countenance the Rider was all-too familiar with), the upright wolf Mammon in
Estrucan dress, Thammuz cradling a cannon in his arms, Ornasis the father of
vampires. The walls and their panels stretched on into the distance.