Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (36 page)

Looking
on it, but for the screaming, one would forget hell itself, except for the
smoke constantly drifting across it, rendering its classical beauty forever
sinister.

As
they drifted toward the bridge, a giant figure in a grey robe with vulture like
wings drifted down. It was perfectly proportioned and handsome, approaching
nine feet in height. Its very skin seemed to shine through its dull clothing.
Its robe was belted with a chord of braided gold, and buckled with the seal of
the Tetragrammaton, marking it as an angel of the Lord. Its hair was silver in
color, but in texture like a mass of shivering quills.

“Do
you know me, O man?” the angel asked in a stentorian voice heard even above the
howling of hell.

“Pariel,”
said Kabede, “called Kipod.”

“And
what is my duty here?” the angel demanded, turning his attention to the Rider.

The
Rider was glad Kabede knew this angel’s true name, or it would probably have
cast them back up the torreón. The Rider had a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of
angels and their duties from his years of study, but there were many he did not
know by sight.

“You
are guardian of the third gate,” said Kabede.
“The Sha’arei
Tzalmavet.
The Gate of the Shadow of Death.”

The
angel bobbed its chin.

“Pass,
then,” it said, and swooped back into the torrid sky, contemptuously batting
aside some mewling, eyeless, tortoise thing with wasp wings and the flailing
arms and legs of a man.

“I’m
glad he asked you,” the Rider mentioned to Kabede. “I didn’t know him by
sight.”

“Nor
did I,” said Kabede. “Often Igzee’abihier makes each angel a riddle. Pariel’s
name here is Kipod—hedgehog. That is why his hair appears like a hedgehog’s.”

The
Rider felt a twinge of delight at having learned a new trick, but the feeling
swiftly dissipated in the face of the cacophonous misery.

“It
is strange though, that he did not ask you to name him,” said Kabede.

The
Rider had to admit this was odd. Although it seemed redundant, guardians both
angelic and infernal usually let no one pass without they knew the correct
seals and names. The company you kept did not usually assure passage, in his
experience. In his youth he had seen stuttering pupils cast back into their
bodies as their instructors went on alone.

They
moved on, down the length of the black bridge toward Pandæmonium.

The
thoroughfare was clotted with demons and angels coming to and fro. The Rider
and Kabede attracted much attention. The Rider saw stately Sanegor, the
heavenly advocate who regularly argued the case for humanity against Satan
before God, and Temelechus, one of the ishim, body of snow and eyes of fire,
the chief of the tartaruchi who it was said cruelly expressed their own regret
at having turned against God in their exuberant torture of the souls of the
damned.

The
Rider and Kabede kept their eyes upon their destination, and ignored the angry
calls of demons in their braying animal tongue.

Up
to the gilded gates of Pandæmonium they passed, where to their surprise, two
lumbering, faceless, naked black giants stopped quarreling long enough to swing
open the doors.

Inside,
the air was clear and the fury outside was diminished. A tall angel, its
features amorphous, yet its two eyes glowing red through a long black veil that
stretched down to the hem of its black robes, met them. The arms that protruded
from beneath sleeves were pale and impossibly thin, wasted, the nails black and
ingrown. It was about seven feet tall, and its wings were naked black bone.
Hooves protruded from beneath the hem of its robe. The shape of its head
beneath the veil suggested three horns.

“Lucifuge
Rofocale, Prime Minister of Hell,” said the Rider, taking a cue from Kabede. It
was said this fallen angel’s order concealed God from man and hid the face of
mercy, hence the veil. “Marshal of the Order of Sathariel…,” he went on.

The
veiled angel held up its long, spindly fingered hand, then turned it in an
impatient gesture to follow. It went clacking off down the marble-floored
corridor.

They
passed through a long, high ceilinged hall lined with black marble statues
depicting the chiefs of the Fallen, apparently as they had been before their
corruption. The Rider recognized none of them, though he did see the seal of
Beelzebub upon the base of a figure of a four-winged cherub. There were other
seals he knew as well: Jekon, Nisroch, Baal Berith, Ramjul…it was a roll call
of infamy. Yet the statues were of surpassing beauty and grace, strange to find
in the heart of hell.

Lucifuge
led them at last to a great inner door covered with a stylized sunburst of
beaten gold, and ushered them beyond.

They
found themselves within an enormous gilded chamber lit by flickering light,
commanded by two rich black velvet draperies that hung from ceiling to floor.
The walls were adorned with tapestries and dimly discernible paintings from every
era, each depicting some human artist’s conception of Satan. William Blake’s
Lucifer was there, Alessandro Vellutello’s Lucifero, Gustave Doré’s Depiction
of Satan, William Hogarth’s Satan, Sin, and Death, and strange works by
Swanenburg, Martin, Breughel and Bosche. There were bizarre illuminations from
books the Rider had never seen, made more sinister by the intermittent light.

One
of the paintings moved upon the wall.

Its
subject matter was tame compared to the rest of the works on display, being
only two fully-clothed modestly-dressed women and two men in toppers and frock
coats walking in a circle in a backyard garden on a sunny day. But the effect
was dreadful to the Rider and to Kabede. There was no color at all, but blacks
were deeply shadowed and the whites flaring and intense, like a poorly
developed daguerreotype. The depiction was disturbingly lifelike, the motions
almost natural, but decidedly off putting and jerky thanks in part to the
strobe of the light, which shone full upon this painting.

The
figures in the painting converged in their circular perambulation, but in less
than a second they froze in place, leapt back to their original locations, and
performed the whole odd dance over again. It happened again and again before
their eyes, grainy shadows and light skipping and leaping back and forth on the
wall.

The
repeating image was accompanied by an incessant whirring sound, mechanical, as
of a clockwork bee beating its wings in the air.

The
Rider moved in front of the terrible painting to regard it, and his shadow
suddenly appeared huge on the wall, obscuring the image.

“Roundhay
Park, in England,” came a calm, unassuming voice from the surrounding darkness,
startling the Rider and Kabede both.

They
turned toward the direction of the voice, and saw a flashing eye like the light
on the nose of a steam engine coming down a tunnel.

“That’s
enough, Belphegor,” said the voice.

The
light winked out, the mechanical whirring stopped, and the golden chamber
sconces (which appeared to be gas lit) flared, illuminating the entire room.
They stood in a grand study, quite modernly adorned. Those walls not covered in
paintings bore shelves of books that stretched from black floor to red,
cathedral ceiling, just as the two immense curtains did. There was a massive
pattern on the marble floor, but the Rider could not make out what it was.

Where
the eye of light had been, stood a carved cherry wood desk, and atop the desk a
squat, boxy machine of some kind, with spools of black ribbon affixed to it.

A
similarly shaped demon crouched behind the desk, short, hunchbacked, bug-eyed,
and sparsely haired. It had prodigiously hairy, ape-like arms and overly large
nostrils. Its yellow and black grin was much too wide, and seemed to stretch
from ear to ear. Its once angelic nature survived only in a pair of stubby
brown moth-like wings sagging like wet paper on his deformed shoulders. It was
dressed in a shabby tweed suit, the shirt open at the collar, bursting with
tufts of wiry orange hair. It resembled an orangutan.

The
too-tall figure seated in the high-backed chair beside which the orangutan
stood contrasted the hunchback as sharply as a thoroughbred stallion does a
drooping canner being led to the glue factory. The figure was princely in its
comportment and oddly handsome, though not conventionally good looking or
young. Its features were thin and smooth, its lips slightly pinched, its
close-set eyes disapproving, eyebrows arched, short-cropped hair receding from
the top of its head but neatly groomed and tasteful. Instead of startling
beauty and youth, it gave off an air of refined, austere maturity. It was
slightly pale, but it was angelic nonetheless. Its wings were full and brightly
plumed, scintillating gold and purple and blue like a peacock’s, only slightly
dulled from its original angelic sheen in that the Rider could actually
perceive and quantify the colors. Its eyes were a startling gold, golden as the
doors that had opened to admit them.

It
wore a black tunic of a strange cut, with black riding pants English cut and
high shining boots. Over this, it wore a homespun Roman toga, red as a wine
presser’s robe.

“Did
you like it?” Lucifer asked, meaning the moving painting, which had disappeared
from the wall. Only a blank space existed where it had been.

The
Rider and Kabede said nothing.

“It’s
a moving picture, a painting of light and shadow. A similar apparatus to a
photographer’s camera is used to capture it, only understandably more complex.
I think the result is quite beautiful, Belphegor,” Lucifer said to the
hunchbacked demon at his side, without looking at it.

“Thank
you, Lord,” said Belphegor, bobbing its head.

“As
a matter of fact, I think it’s your greatest invention yet. I plan to introduce
it in a few years. I’m sure in no time at all men will be watching each other
fornicating with animals, but for now it
remains
a
thing of beauty. That will be all, Belphegor.”

“Yes,
Lord,” said the hunchback. He gathered up the clunky machine under one simian
arm and limped through a side passage out of the chamber.

“I
know you are the Rider,” said Lucifer. “You beat that idiot Molech in the Sitra
Achra years ago. In fact, I’ve followed your career through intermediaries for
so long, I feel almost as if I know you.” He fixed his unimpressed stare on
Kabede. “But I don’t know you.”

He
regarded him from head to toe, then rose from his chair and came around to sit
on the edge of the desk. “I know the staff you bear all too well, however. You
are in good company, Rider. Not many men can even lift that stick.”

“We’ve
come to demand two things of you,” Kabede said, ignoring his comments.

“Demand?”
Lucifer said, smirking and raising his eyebrows.

“You
will call off the servants of Lilith who pursue the Rider…,” Kabede began.

“I
have no power over Lilith or her bastards.”

“You
lie, Satan,” said Kabede.

“Is
your companion entirely without manners, Rider?” Lucifer said, ignoring Kabede.

“If
you’re not lying, then explain yourself,” said the Rider.

Kabede
turned to look at the Rider.

“Surely
you don’t expect to believe…”

“It
was your idea to come here,” the Rider said, cutting him off. “Let him speak.”

Lucifer
smiled thinly.

“Thank
you. Lilith is no demoness. She’s a witch from the dawn of your history. I’ve
been obliged to employ her children as a favor to an old friend. As of late,
what she and her kin do has been her own affair.”

“What
do you mean, ‘a favor to an old friend?’” asked the Rider.

“Lilith’s
lover was Samael, the Angel of Death. When they had their ill-advised tryst,
the Almighty punished Samael and Lilith both. Samael was bound to his office,
and Michael cut him so he could no longer father bastards upon her. She in turn
was driven from him.”

“Samael’s
the friend you spoke of?”

“Samael
was the greatest of us.
The strongest.
He led every
charge in the First War. He was our Michael. And yes, he was my friend, till
that mud-born whore brought him down to the level of a filthy Grigori.”

“But,”
said the Rider, “if he was cast out alongside you, then how was he given the
office of Angel of Death?”

“Do
you think being the Angel of Death is an honor?
To serve as
psychopomp to a lot of pleading mortals?
Samael exists in a prison
without walls, without place. No angel or demon can perceive him, and he can
speak to no one except the measly soul of whatever dying ape he comes to
collect and only then in the time it takes him to deliver that soul to its
judgment.”

“And
Lilith…,” mused the Rider.

“….is
immortal,” said Lucifer. “And thus undying, they can never meet. Some would
call this a tragedy. I think it’s really the best thing for either of them. In
all of Creation, he is the only being truly alone. In that, his punishment is
greater than mine.”