Infernus, Page 5

  “Ahhh,” said Red. “Her/His royal highness has deemed you important enough to allow you to at least hear His/Her commandments.” His eyes bled brown drops in horrid worship and slick clots splattered to the floor.

  “Who is this most noble of creatures who caresses my ears with liquid words, Father?”

  “It is the culmination of all evil that has ever lived/existed.”

  “It is a tangible representation of an intangible concept?”

  “No, for it does live. It is a singular life form created from the life forms that created a personality. And the next time I hear you psychoanalyzing me in that wonderfully cute fashion, I shall split you in two and bake your insides for a few thousand lifetimes. Is that very clear, or what?”

  “My lord, it is very clear. Is there anything that can be done to make it stop saying these things that so sweetly kill?”

  “It is foolish to think those words, let alone say them. The creature, knowing She/He has pleased you, will continue to do so now for thousands of the lengthiest lifetimes. Only by convincing Her/Him that you are unimpressed at all, will you make Her/Him stop.”

  And it was so.

  * * *

  Nothing of value, although they did talk, was discussed in the classroom between the Legend and the students, after this chapter. It would be of no interest here.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “THE HALL OF TABLEAUS”

  “My son,” shrieked the demon, “you must listen to the power of my words and understand my love for you.” He pulled the vampire satyr to his massive chest and entered him from below. “I must pull you apart, my son, and lay you upon hot stones to broil for thousands of lifetimes.”

  And he did so. Dutifully, it must be said, Red watched o’er his son, after he had torn him asunder, and wept the entire time. And the blood tears fell upon the son’s parts and baked the flesh hotter.

  * * *

  After thousands of lifetimes, the demon glued the son together with his spittle. And the son cracked open his eyeless sockets and stared with (no) love and (no) pity at the father.

  And such black horror was witnessed in Hell by crimson-jeweled lightning that hissed across the skies for thirteen nights.

  In the blackest night, a constellation appeared to commemorate this initial tableau.

  Then the demon spoke the ultimate blasphemy.

  * * *

  [The following has been edited, by the insistence of the Sire demonologist, who has said, “No one must know such secrets. The complete text, including the second half, will remain buried in a desert (or mountain) somewhere on Earth. One day, the sayings will adorn many crowns, but not until The Day! These sayings will never be auditioned for a single person.”]

  [This then, is the first half of what is considered (by many scholars) to be “The Most Unholy Single Thing.”]

  The demon grinned and the look was one that no human eyes could see and live. “Did you know that only so-called ‘heteros’ inhabit my kingdom, my son?”

  The satyr sang the truth directly into the demon’s mind and there was… hemorrhage!

  “Then you know why, also, my beloved! Yes, you are right. A ‘hetero’s’ worst fear is being forcibly raped over and over.” Both laughed over this for a while. Red gazed over a part of his park, and then said to his son, “This would not be torture for ‘homos.’”

  “That means—” began the son.

  “No, you could not imagine the ‘homo’ section of Infernus. No one can.” The demon grinned again, and black clots fled out of his mouth for a day’s time. “The second thing, my son, is that there is a truth here that there never was another king other than our king.”

  “Oh, Father,” bled the son’s face, “can it be true?”

  “It can, and is! Do you want to know who wrote their holy books — all of them? I’ll tell you…”

  [The following filth was ripped up by the woman Jane Millyberg, a fellow archaeologist of Anthony Begels’. In the next life, she will turn on a spit to be plucked and pulled by all who pass by her in Infernus for her rash foolishness. The narrative continues below.]

  “And yes, my son, I will reward your attentive ways of late by showing you your crowning creation in all Helldom. The delicious descriptions the Children of Hell use, when they speak of it, would fill ten volumes of fresh obscenities.

  “Look here and I will show you what you do to the one who sexually tortured you and oh so willingly sent you to me, perhaps a little before your time was up. This will occur on the very last day I train you. Look here. What do you see?”

  The vampiric satyr scanned the demon ruler’s urine stream. He was bathing his son with the hot liquid as he was often wont to do. It flowed constantly down through his leg pelt, and it was here that he searched for clues.

  “My lord, I do see something.” And it was true. “I see me, as an impossibly massive muscular machine, glittering golden, speckled scaled flesh as hard as diamond, rising up through exploding floorboards, and concrete and tile. I throw something through the floor that has no significance whatsoever, before I turn to the other. My log-like biceps are already grasping him and turning him around so I can painfully rip into him and permanently join my member to his intestinal walls. I rip through the weak mortal flesh with no resistance.”

  He had to stop for a few minutes as the father and son laughed until red tears flowed freely down their cheeks. “Oh, my lord, as I am mounting him from behind, the goodly doctor is looking back over his shoulder. His scream would shatter a mortal’s eardrum, but I drive him deeper, popping and snapping ligaments and tendons in my terror-drive! Then, oh my, I tell him, ‘I will always be with you and I will never stop pounding you, so get used to it. I will pound you into billions of infinite Earths.’ We will go deeper forever, for this is my exquisite revenge upon the one who sent me to Infernus.

  “Then I see, Father, I furiously pound the man, now dead and then quite alive again. He then suffers the final change in our eternal coupling. Oh, my father, must I say this?”

  “You must, my son. I pray, don’t make me tell you again.”

  “I open my mouth wider and wider, and as I do, my teeth grow longer.”

  “Your destiny, my beloved!” the demon bellowed, and his face burst into yellow flame.

  “My teeth grow longer and thicker. I easily sink them into the top and base of his baking skull. I ride the wretch this way for all time. He never stops screaming; thus we become what is known in legend as ‘The Scream.’”

  “There is now a room I must show you, my son.” The father led him into an illusion of a green forest where searing winds blew gracefully through the tops of the trees.

  The Legend was mischievous and brutal about it. It is something his later students would come to expect, taking nothing he said for granted. It was now, he decided, time to tease them in this fashion for the first time.

  “Students, I am now going to share with you a glorious story about a very singular tableau. It is in the beginning of The Hall of Tableaus, because it is beautiful and morosely innocent.”

  A student expressed his doubts. “I don’t believe you.”

  “I have fashioned this creature I merely call ‘The Tree’ after J.R.R. Tolkien’s magnificent creation ‘Treebeard.’ You will all love him very much.”

  The class was really in for it now. The Legend loved doing this sort of thing, with no apologies whatsoever. He quoted, from memory, this entire story of untold beauty.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “A SINGULAR TABLEAU”

  “My son, let me show you something so fierce that it is considered beautiful in my park of Infernus. The other ruling demons envy my collection of tableaus. I was blessed, because I rule well. Have I told you what the laws are that govern a few of the other parks?”

  “No, and I was afraid to ask.”

  “As well you should be. I provide (for you alone) all you need.”

  “How much do you know?”

  “As if you e
xpected me to reply with any answer other than, ‘Everything.’ Now be silent while I entertain you. There is a silver demon that rules a park not many light years hence. Its roiling hideousness does not suit your training, so you were sent here. Souls there just roll around in a darkness that can be felt. They bite each other and scream and slice one another endlessly with their claws.

  “Another ruling demon — his demonstrative, withering look would permanently liquefy you — is the black prince of The Kingdom of Burning Winds. His domain abuts mine on the eastern side.

  “There are a million others to cover the more than ten billion hopeless souls inhabiting Infernus.”

  “My father,” the son whimpered, “this knowledge boils my head further.”

  “As was its purpose!” The demon laughed. “Are you ready to witness this fierce tableau that many envy? It will burn away more of what is left of your tiny soul.”

  “Yes, my father.”

  The son’s mouth was white with cancerous sores; pus freely flowed past his sizzling lips onto the frying stones at their feet.

  “You have become quite the liar, my son.”

  “Yes,” the son stated simply.

  “We will pretend, for a moment, that the dream world was more than just that. As you can tell, we have entered the facsimile of a rich green forest. But only by the wildest stretch of the imagination could you believe it is a cool fall day, for we are toasting at a goodly rate. Now watch helplessly as the tableau plays out. You may laugh maniacally, but you can’t help them or interfere or join in to torment them further because it is in the past.”

  “And nor would I want to interfere or help anyone, my father.”

  “You are learning, son. Now hold tight and observe.”

  Two teenage boys enter the emerald glade. A big boy, quickly packing muscle onto his yet childlike body, carried an axe; the other one looked frail and carried a pick. The grass splattered the boys’ boots with dew as they fearlessly walked into a clearing. The yellow shafts of sunlight glittered among the garden.

  The skinny boy, dressed in simple peasant greens (that matched the other boy’s only in color) spoke up. His voice carried over the light breezes that played in the swaying tops of the trees. “I thought this was the place guarded by a hideous tree-demon. You told me-”

  “Shut up!” the big boy said. “The witch said there was a living heart in the tree. If we could chop out the heart, we will have all the treasures hidden within it.”

  “If that were true, then why hasn’t she done it?”

  The big boy’s cheeks flushed with impatience. “She said the tree magically prevents her from approaching this area. She guaranteed me (using her mortality as her pledge) that if she came here, the tree would crush her heart without remorse.”

  “Which tree do you think it is?”

  * * *

  Red said, “My son, this is the part I love watching o’er and o’er!”

  “I can’t wait to rejoice with you, Father!”

  * * *

  “Look!” the big boy said, pointing. “I’ll bet this is it.”

  They both, attracted to its differentness from the other trees, approached it deliberately, slowly. They tried to take in the foaming evil rolling out of its gray heart, tasting it in the crisp air. The bark jutted out from some of the gray branches; some limbs were starkly white, but large strips of cracked ancient bark were hanging loosely there as well. Many of its branches and smaller capillaries were littered around its trunk and base. Thick, green/gray veins of roots broke the ground, and a few looped back into the loam, anchoring the imprisoned tree to the earth.

  “Let’s chop it!” the big boy said, leading them to stand directly beneath its mighty swaying branches.

  “It almost seems like… ” The skinny boy chuckled anxiously. “… like it has a face.”

  The big one shouldered his axe and prepared to swing at the base with all his might. He grunted with the effort.

  Then everything changed.

  A great roaring tumult of snapping branches and twigs arose to splatter the boys’ four eardrums. They both covered their ears — too little, too late. Blood trickled thinly between their fingers. The pain was mighty. Their ears rang.

  When they looked up, they saw Doom staring in their faces; they shrieked while their sanity fled and hid. They stained the front of their pantaloons brown.

  A stretched, splintered face hung above them. It quivered with unhinged evil and seared them with its gaze. What they now saw in its “eyes” was wrath, contempt, such unmitigated, shrieking, blood-soaked murder!

  Its jaws, teeth and the wooden sinews of its visage cracked and threw splinters into their faces as it spoke. The voice thundered through the boys’ bodies like hot shockwaves in solid bass notes. They desperately tried to shriek until their brains exploded.

  “We can’t have all this screaming,” said the tree. “You’ll bring the rest of those rat-bag villagers before I need them.”

  Its groping branches shattered their teeth as it searched for something within their mouths. Both tongues were ripped out while they stood quivering in place.

  A great branch in the form of a “Y” came coolly snaking from behind its trunk and lifted the skinny boy into the air. Cradled by his neck, he hung to the side of the tree.

  It creaked its trunk to look at the skinny boy, but spoke to the fat one. “You will not believe the ease with which I shall dispose of your companion, fat boy. Know two things: one, the death of the skinny boy will only be sudden for my immediate pleasure and your amazement; two, the length of time I will torture your baby fat body will be legendary, even by my standards. When the villagers find what profanity I have accomplished — of course finding drying strips of you in my branches won’t hurt, either — they will run from this glade, filling their pantaloons, and will be too afraid to ever come here again.”

  The tree spoke softly, almost maternally. “You have been told about the living heart that lives within me. The witch who told you this is my slave. She no doubt told you some nonsense about riches untold that I’m supposed to have somewhere here. It is her heart that I have imprisoned inside that keeps me alive, boys. To kill me would free her to die in an instant. She has lived many hundreds of years now, and that’s a long time, even for a witch. She’s tired and wants to rest.”

  The tree turned its face to the big boy who still stood on the ground, quite insane. Within seconds, the tree had separated every part of the skinny boy from the rest. As the creaking and snapping subsided, little thumps could be heard when the parts thudded to the ground like soft drumbeats.

  “Now,” the tree said, with an expression that resembled unbridled affection (but wasn’t quite), “do you have any idea what I am going to do with you, boy?” The tree lowered its face until it touched noses with him. The boy felt a gnarled branch scrape the seat of his pants. “Gasp! Right below your — Yes, boy! I’m going to do things to you that I have only seen in my nightmares. You, young foolish boy that once was, cannot imagine what those things might be!”

  The tree shivered again with unbridled delight and began to drool sap as it slowly, slowly, oh, so slowly, went about his work.

  * * *

  What the father and son savored in their viewing made them heave bile onto the forest floor for [days] segments of time.

  As they walked out of the dream and back into the heated plains of Infernus, the son asked the father, “Can I come here often, beloved?”

  “Not only can you, but each time you enter this blessed tableau, you will see a different rendering. Through the eons, there were only 1,176 of them. Shame, really.”

  “But, were they delicious, Father?”

  “They were, indeed. The old ladies who foolishly stumbled into the clearing can be savored for [many times]. They were all uniquely dispatched and consumed, but the only singular one was-” [here Dr. Anthony Begels thought it best to edit out what your imagination has certainly already supplied]. “Of course, what we s
aw was the last one. The villagers had evolved to the point where their wrath was greater than their fear.”

  “Is that recorded in the tableau, Father?”

  “Yes, but, wait… are you saying you would like to see that which would rip out your heart with sorrow and sadness?”

  The son was drooling with anticipation.

  “Go by yourself, son. I will wait here for you.” The father soothed him. “It has now become that day, my child. Go look!”

  The son returned to the tableau and looked, and felt himself falling into the illusion of it, disappearing and becoming the activity.

  * * *

  The place all around the tree was covered with men and women in simple green raiment, waving every kind of sharpened silver. A bearded oak of a man stood in the clearing, apart from the others, and made his solemn pronouncement. “You, spawn of Hell — go back to the pit in which you were born. You will never again kill, after the sun sets this very day!”

  All the eager, pressing bodies fell upon the tree with shrieks.

  The tree shot its cracking, splintering face to the heavens and unleashed a scream so immense that all the ears of the villagers broke simultaneously. Nothing could deter or slow them down. They blurred together as their silver hacked the ancient bark and meat of the tree. Some of them missed and slashed the appendages of their deaf neighbors.

  The demon twisted and tormented its trunk, then attempted to elongate itself to escape the tools in their hands.

  And the villagers’ shouts of hatred did not subside. Some wept in their single purpose. Before many hours had elapsed, they found a gray, beating heart, which they burned on the spot.

  The tree became firewood. Then it became kindling. Then it became single chips before they stopped. And many [weeks] times after, when every root had been pulled up and burned in the clearing, the villagers salted the entire area and had their shaman pray a protective chant for their eternal protection. They were satisfied.