Infernus (13 page)

Carl's eyes narrowed. "Dump him in the caverns? When is this going to
stop
?"

"Don't reproach me, my friend. I am - no,
we are
- conducting valuable research."

"We
were
doing valuable research, Doctor. You had a very personal thing with this 'patient.' It repulsed me - it's still repulsive. And at what cost are we doing this?" He looked at the little dark man and hated him, a new fleshly hatred.

"All of this will cost me nothing but dollars, Carl. He has no family; I know, okay? Nothing but dollars." He stood up. "Where is he, the body, I mean? Take me to him."

*****

The lab was cold and lit in a vibrating cool blue. In the center of the room, where many stainless steel tables stood, there was one distinctive surface. It is to this table that they shuffled their feet forward. A white sheet covered the still form of a person.

The little doctor pulled back the slippery, clean shroud to stare into the eternally expressionless face. Here was a simple nobility; a handsomeness that cannot be bought, only envied; a quiet dignity the little man could never achieve in his frantic existence and, he now at last knew, was neither able to remove from Mountfountain or take it for himself.

"His
character
," he said before he could stop himself, then blushing, noticing Carl gazing at him out of the corner of his eye.

"Pardon me?" Carl asked, puzzled. It struck him what the little doctor meant. He smiled wryly, pitifully, and then shook his head. "Be honest, Doctor. Off the record. What was it you were hoping he could tell you?"

"I wish I knew, Carl. I wish I knew. At this moment, I am perhaps more confused than I've ever been in my whole life." He began to unbuckle his belt. "Carl, I wish you to witness my farewell to the good doctor here. Would you please do me the honor of doing just that?"

His pants slid to the floor. He slowly, ritualistically removed his lab coat.

Carl pursed his lips, slowly shook his head, clasped his hands behind his back until his knuckles grew white and his fingers grew numb, and spread his stance wide. "As you wish, Doctor."

"What was that?" the small doctor asked, his hand on the covered crotch of the dead man. "I heard a noise."

They both listened with focused hearing and thought they heard, faintly, a low rumbling.

"Listen there, it sounds like metal bands, or something, snapping." The little man bent to pull his pants up from around his ankles.

"No, Doctor!" Carl was becoming agitated quickly. It now dawned on him what it was. "It sounds like an
earthquake
!"

He made a move for the swinging double-doors. The floor in front of them heaved instantly upward and belched forth rock and mud, and the foulest single odor Carl could ever recall smelling. The room filled with shrapnel that looked like lightning.

What flashed upward through it in a blur was impossible! In the last few seconds of his life, Carl saw a golden beast, completely covered with jet-black wiry hair. The creature had the most piercing, yellowed tiger-eyes he had ever seen; they were filled with intelligence and, especially, malice. As the beast burst through the hole, it unfurled its large gray wings, and smashed their dark gray knuckles at the ceiling like monstrous fists (
BOOM!
), pulverizing the ceiling tiles (Carl felt the thunder all the way down into his feet), then settled them down behind him in a matter of seconds. A long, thick member swung freely, unashamedly, between its legs. Great tiger fangs yellowed, flashed in his sore-filled, bleeding mouth. Splats of emerald and crimson chunks fled to the floor all around its massive, scaled hooves. Carl's pants instantly filled with warm feces. The beast threw a great fist filled with razor talons at Carl's head. He thought -

Crack!

The vampire satyr threw Carl through the space in the floor with such force, by the cracked top of his head, that when he struck the rocks below, the body evaporated in a shower of sparkling red spray.

Carl would never know (until his training below was
well
underway), that the dried, shriveled rope hanging from a massively muscled bicep was a piece of roasted entrail. Later, he stayed inside a blood-bricked wall in a forgotten corridor. What appeared to be clenched between his teeth, sending sparks inside his brain, was a live wire.
He was having some fun now!

After a few moments, the demon lost interest in the red-wine spray. It (he) had stopped chuckling and rumbling. It stood up to its full height and allowed all of itself that was to fall upon the little doctor's soul. It threw out its chest, and in doing so, perhaps accidentally, the wings flew back and shattered an entire wall of glass and metal cabinets. The wingspan was nearly sixteen feet. The thunderous sound made the little doctor cower, and expect. Expect and shiver and wait.

Its hatred, a living and dripping pre-ejaculate, spattered green on the floor, made the demon shiver at last with the excitement that would drive it for all eternity.

"BLACKEN! Blacken all hope and free your teeny soul, you futile mortal! Never has such hatred possessed and roiled me! Ne'er have ye seen such a visage as loathsome as mine!"

As if to emphasize its point, the wings, seeming to have a mind of their own, knuckled the roof above the ceiling and threatened to cave it in on top of them.
Boom!
was the sound.
Crack!
was the ceiling's answer.

The little doctor unloaded a great bowel movement into his falling trousers. Urine stained his front.

Great drops of flowing red rained from the demon's eyes, and splattered and hissed on its feet. It sobbed openly, its broad golden shoulders shaking with the effort. The little doctor, seeing this and not comprehending it, soiled himself anew.

"Know this, and despair, you self-destructive little morsel! We are wedded for three trillion infinities. Ye will know what it is like to be with your beloved now and forever - to be one with him, intimately!"

Boom!
The wings jutted above them again and slammed into the failing ceiling.

The demon's expansive chest rose and fell. No one spoke. The silence began circling the room. In the distant hall, the little doctor hoped that he heard the footsteps of help thundering and clacking this way. Then he realized that they would only be killed; he somehow instinctively knew no one could halt the purpose of this thing. The little man could not believe what he was seeing.

It spread its massive arms to invite the little man into its embrace. The great gray wings swept from behind, teasing. It smiled and opened its mouth. "Is
this
what you were hoping I would tell you, little man?"

The small, dark one looked at the body of his beloved covered with the shroud; thought he had heard those words ringing in his head recently; realized it was impossible, then shook his head and frowned at the thing. But it was suddenly standing directly in front of the man, having moved inaudibly. The little doctor jumped back, and the wall he collided with briefly knocked the air out of him.

The yellow tiger-eyes raked across the wall with immense heat, to follow the man as he sought along for the door he knew must surely be near, without taking his eyes from the demon, using only his hands. Gold's face was frozen into an impossibly wide grin. The wall's melting surface rippled, no match for the demon's searing vision, and cracked with the high-pitched whine of a gun as holes popped into the plaster, and intermittent gray puffs of smoke escaped from the ever-widening seam.

"Where's the
damned
door?" he pleaded, whined. Desperation leaking out of his sweaty brow, the little doctor heard something sizzling, smelling it before he heard it, perhaps.

When the hot eyes rested on the little man, he peeped briefly. His head was instantly engulfed in flames and he instinctively held his hands to his temples, and
they
caught fire.

"Flame on, my little Scream."

Gold belched ashes. He burped a low laugh at the futile flagellations of the little doctor. Having failed to put out his hands and head by feeding oxygen to the flames, he was now trying to knock himself unconscious against a wall. Repeatedly.

Gold grabbed his inhumanly large organ, and shook it, spitting a sloppy yellow goop at the good doctor. "Or was more of
this
what you were looking for?"

Gold began again, watching the doctor's head cook. "I will be the part of you that rules you for all time, little man. I will mount you and never stop ramming you through all the collected earths themselves. I have been told, by those in authority, that I must mount you through billions of earths. And the only thing you will be able to do is scream. You will do it for me so that I never have to scream again. It is your gift to me."

One last
Boom!
The wing knuckles bashed the ceiling and receded within a second, and white powder fell on the flaming head of the little doctor.

Gold grabbed the man by one shoulder to turn him around and four razor talons easily punctured flesh, muscle and marrow, and welded there to become one bone and body. His head was still burning. The man began his endless scream. The demon, with absolutely no resistance, but with manifold purpose, punctured the other shoulder when he had turned him around. In one movement, instantly, with no shame or horror or regard, it ripped off all the man's clothes, shearing great flaps of skin and muscle from his back in the process.

Its member throbbed and stood erect, large and long. The little man, in more pain than ever before, did the best he could to turn and look behind him. He saw the impossible thing again, and still could not believe it. His scream went on, unabated.

With the last vestiges of his conscience burned away, because of his father's betrayal, the demon forced all of itself into the good doctor with a single thrust. There was no hesitation, no request, no pity, just solid activity.

The demon, by sheer will that was accomplished by a set purpose born in the eternities of Infernus' blackest wisdom, opened its mouth wider and wider. And wider still. Its jaws shattered and found new form as it drew its face willfully to the back of the little man's head. The vampire teeth ached for feeding, and bled furiously, freely. They sunk, like hot, razored knives in cold butter, without resistance, into the doctor's brain.
Oh, the warm, cooked brain!
It felt so good that the demon groaned deeply. Its teeth met in the center of the cranium and shattered into one another, fusing, locked, eternal. It set its jaws and was done.

An elderly woman in a white lab coat burst into the room and tried to take into account what she was seeing. "Oh my God!"

"Guess again!" a voice burst inside her brain, instantly slamming her into a wall, unconscious before she fell heavily to the feces and blood-smeared floor. It kept laughing in her head, but she didn't hear it, her brain having turned into something resembling soup. And would never hear anything again.

And they at last were one. The Scream. And the doctor's brain (he knew this not when he saw it so many millions of millennia ago in the vision in Infernus) was his. The son had two brains and the doctor had none. Its brainless task was set to screaming, it was its only purpose.

As the little man began to cease to be human, he died, but never stopped screaming. For as he died and rose again, he never ceased becoming what he would be throughout all eternity - The Scream! No thoughts, no training, just dumb animal instinct. Being what he already was.

As The Scream exited through the hole in the floor, more girders were struck and shattered deliberately. Many of the staff had left the building minutes before, assuming an earthquake was tearing the confines apart. The entire structure, now stressed beyond its capacity to endure, fell inward to be swallowed by the great cavern below. It lay, sleeping, hiding its own mysteries in silence.

And when all the ruling demons in Infernus saw The Scream become a reality and coming their way, they rejoiced loudly, and hell burned much brighter for a while.

*****

As our eyes sweep across the expanse that was a smoky pit that housed two sleeping, quavering bodies that could not awaken, now it was a part of a limitless ocean of burning sand. There were no bodies any longer quivering in their sleep. All had become one. There wasn't even so much as a bump in the sands. All were one. All experienced all. Infernus was the flattest expanse where all were one. No more anything; only dreaming, unable to even shiver in their fright.

EPILOGUE

"What a freakin' weird story that was," said a thin young man with dyed white hair.

"I have others," the old man said, putting his clothes on.

"I'm going to report you to the authorities for blasphemy," said another student.

"Oh, goody," was the nude man's reply. "I could use the publicity. Maybe it will make me famous."

"Could some of us -?" asked a woman with a blue shawl. "Could some of us hear more of your stories?"

"What a brave soul. Are there others in this room who would like to hear other demented stories of mine?"

"Yes," said a few.

"The other stories are not like this one, I assure you. Another is a
take
on a fantasy novel, like this one was a
take
on a horror novel. An experiment, I assure you, nothing more."

The class and professor were silent for a beat.

"I'll tell you what. I'm editing some notes on a piece I've been writing for about seven years now. When I have collated them successfully, I could invite you up to my loft in the north for a reading and discussion time. Would you like that?"

Some said they would be open to that.

"Would you like me to tell you what the next short novel is called?"

"Yes," said some enthusiastically.

"Well, I won't tell you," he laughed. "Maybe I will see you soon, and invite you all up for that. Adieu, my friends. It's been fun."

And with that, he left.

APPENDIX