Infernus (5 page)

When the satyr regained consciousness, the demon was nowhere to be seen. He looked between his legs and saw one of his arms lodged in his arse.

[Thus ends this partial section.]

"Look, my son," the demon said. "On our walk through my jurisdiction, we come across the bones of some whalers. If their bones are here, where do you suppose the other parts of their bodies rest?"

The satyr did not know and vomited on the rock floor in response.

"Well, that's
good
, but not
quite
what I had in mind."

The satyr stood next to him and gazed into a boiling black pool set in the floor.

"They are all lying on the bottom of this percolating pool, spineless, boiling, unable to move, unable to breathe...just screaming."

The satyr stared into the pool in mock horror.
The black boiling mass must be old blood
, he thought. His reattached limbs grasped both sides of his handsome face in a grotesque imitation of terror. His mouth stayed open in its perpetual scream, and the satyr's eyes were bulging. He really wanted to roar with laughter.

"It is funny, isn't it?" the demon asked. "I only come to this exhibit to cheer myself."

Red pulled all of the skin off the satyr in one mighty jerk at the back of the neck. He ripped the spine out of the nerve-exposed body and flung it to the ground.

"You must be purified even further, my son." He prepared himself to throw the jelly-like mess of the satyr into the boiling pool. "I will only allow you to remain in here for one thousand times. I will then pull you out and we will continue our adventures."

The demon slowly lowered the shuddering corpse -
oh how it shuddered
- into the pool. When the water reached his eyes, they popped and oozed a thick, green liquid.

Red released the jelly creature, then stood and urinated into the pool. He waited one thousand times.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"BLACK BALLED AGAIN"

"Now, my son, since your pain threshold has increased three greatness levels, we are going to enter the second level, or the next dimension of torture."

"There are others?" the satyr asked casually, examining his reconstructed body.

"They are infinite," the father said.

He mounted his son from behind. As the sound of pounding became deafening, the demon's wings folded around them, and they vanished into another plane.

*****

They appeared in a new place: The Second Level, or Stair of Torture. They watched a small hooded woman with a wooden bucket come to a boiling river.

"Look what she does," the demon shrieked in (mock) surprise.

She lowered her bucket into the undulating crimson, and then set it down on the gray bank. She lowered her face into it and loudly slurped its contents.

"See, my son, what a great thing she does! She drinks all the foul deeds of mankind, for they boil in this great river. There is more to her sacrifice than meets the eye, and she does it for no one to see but her lord, her demon."

Behind her appeared the largest, most muscular demon the satyr had seen yet, at least twice the size of Red. He glittered entirely of gold: his skin, hair and eyes. And he must have been pleased, for he snatched the woman up by her head and began beating her against an oaken tree thousands and thousands of times, without pause.

*****

In another time, the demon showed his son a small cave. "Look at the theater and see the drama. Only one play is performed here, and the beings call it, 'The Single Reverent Thing.' Look within, my son, and tell me what you see."

The satyr did so. "A young lad is walking down a street on a sunny day. From his right a bullet enters his brain, causing a huge hole to appear in the left side of his head. He falls to the ground and is still. Later he awakens and realizes the wound has healed.

"The lad wonders at the meaning of all that when a voice rings out above him. 'Never tell anyone what happened to you today. Make it our secret and I will see to it that you have absolute dominion over all creatures, everywhere.' The lad agrees."

"Yesss, my son," the demon whispered, red stains flowing down his blistered cheeks. "It is the only history lesson any of us here cares to learn. You would be wise to do likewise."

In his ecstasy, the demon threw the satyr to the broiling floor and coupled with him for three thousand generations.

*****

"My son," the demon shrieked, "behold, another level!"

The environment flickered around them. When it righted itself, they were in a burning forest.

"Let me mount you in my joy. Let your jaws crack for screaming as I oppress my own kin."

And he did. The satyr was sexually dominated within the forest of yellow flame-trees for a [thousand parts of] time.

*****

On one of the rare occasions that Professor Delaney spoke, she asked the old man, "In your fiction, do you really propose that there is religion in Hell, uh, I mean, Infernus?"

"Oh yes," he said. "But, only because it amuses me. Just a trifle to amuse others, not that there are such things, really."

"Oh," she said, momentarily satisfied. She crossed her hands in front of her, holding her wrists, and waited for him to continue.

"In fact," he said, realizing there might be a need for clarification, "if I had followed the Biblical model, the book would have been boring. How could I have made an exciting adventure about screaming in the dark, for that is the Biblical model. No, I wanted my version to be exciting and fun."

"It's hardly 'fun'!" said a student.

He looked to the rear of the class but could not determine who was speaking. He laughed. "And there will be more of religion. Actually, it's coming up in the very next chapter. I have put hate cults there. They are eternally punished, also. For no other reason than it amused me."

CHAPTER TWELVE

"TIN BELLS"

"Have you ever thought," said the demon, "that there are laws here?"

"No," the satyr said.

"When you dreamed that you lived on a world, and had a day-to-day existence, all creatures thought a being existed that was above all else. He was known as a creator or
the
creator. Try to speak the name of this being."

The demon's sockets glittered and filled to overflow with black blood.

"You mean the..." the satyr said.

"Yessss," hissed his father, "sssssay the NAME!" He coaxed him and laughed.

"It's..." The satyr gritted his teeth and they cracked in the heat. "Uhhhh, his name is...'' The satyr pulled on his lips and tore his skin from his face.

Red laughed until his sides actually split.

The satyr kept ripping the flesh from his own face.

*****

"My son," sighed the demon while holding the satyr's head as he roped his entire member into the throat. "Do you know what the most evil thing in all the omniverse is?"

The satyr could not reply.

"It is
your
heart, my son." The satyr tried to squirm free to protest, but he could not break Red's grip. "Well, think about it." He ceased to snake his member down the throat, for the two cold black orbs lay under the satyr's chin, roasting over burning embers. "You dreamed all this up - you would have to be the cruelest bastard that ever lived to do that."

If that were true
, the satyr was thinking,
then you would be on the receiving end of my oversized member.

"And it is so," the demon said.

And it was.

"You must become all things, truly," Red said later, after he had spit the son out of his mouth.

*****

"My beloved," Red said, "I will give you another gift only because of my great love for you."

He ran a finger over the hot teeth of his son and removed his canines. Two long bloody fangs emerged through the gums.

"You have now become a
vampiric
satyr! A new glory has dawned!"

At this, the demon grew excited and split the satyr's cheeks with the snap of his fingers on both hands. He lovingly watched the blood flow down his face.

*****

"My son!" shrieked the demon as he ran his fingers through the vampire satyr's exposed brain. "I need to show you a vision of the last days (that were) of Earth. It is a hotel in The Decadent City."

The satyr saw in his head (the demon played among the hot fibers of his brain as if it were an instrument) the most opulent hotel of all time. As he imagined that he was approaching the front of the hotel, he saw marble columns wrapped in gold overlay. As he went through the great hall, he saw satin curtains and lamps made of pure silver hanging from the ceiling forty feet above the ground. It was the last, great hotel.

The corridor was well-hung with what seemed to be silk tapestries, all done in the deepest reds and browns. The walls were liberally decorated with gold torches.

A doorman, sharply dressed in a suit with finely pressed edges, stood waiting before a door. Another man approached and showed him a card key.

"What is your pleasure, this evening, my lord?" the doorman asked.

"I'd love to see you in my chambers in five minutes in red briefs," the man stated matter-of-factly.

"Your pleasure is my desire, my lord."

The vision ended.

"Alas, my son," the demon said, "the last decade of man's mortal age was his best. You could never have accomplished in thirty thousand lifetimes what we can do with these indestructible bodies. That age was the only elegant, decadent century of man."

"Why do you say that, Father?"

"Because, for the first time in history (although each generation before it assumed that it was the first
free
generation), mankind had finally managed to believe that guilt was just a farce that got in the way of living. Mankind finally cast off the costs of doing anything it desired - there was no fear of reprisal, no fear of dire consequences.

"There is Dark Logic here, my son. Learn it well."

*****

"There is something in my park, my son," the demon screamed in horror, "that you must see to believe. Come and I will show you what takes place at the temple."

They walked through a few thousand meters of burning jungle and came to a golden door that led into a stony hill. They stood to one side and waited. A figure in a black hooded robe approached the wall and spoke. "Oh Lord of my worship, please grant me admittance to your righteously extreme level of torture. Please allow this unworthy creature into your chambers!"

A tiny hatch above the door opened. A bloody hook shot forth and sank rapidly into the supplicant's skull. The hook then quickly withdrew and pulled the shrieking disciple through the hole, cracking his bones and bursting his innards.

"Do you mean...?" began the vampire satyr.

"Yessss," the demon said. "There is religion here, e'en here. There are faction cults here the likes of 'Those who love to torture those who love to have their legs amputated.' The most sought-after honor cult is the one called, 'Dulling the soul through flames.'"

"Oh, my G-"

The demon's empty sockets flashed red. "Never attempt to say The Betrayer's name here! Now I must punish you."

Red mounted his son from behind and slammed him for a thousand times.

Later, he grabbed a small gold demon, found squirming among roasting stones, and took it from behind. It began to shriek even louder and wriggle violently to twist out of Red's grip. The large demon held him fast, though the golden demon was a shuddering blur.

"My son, sink your vampiric teeth into the buttocks and take the power he would willingly give none. Do it!"

The demon spread the buttocks of the small demon. The vampire satyr did what came natural and sank the two throbbing razors into the fat gold flesh. His teeth instantly popped the skin and he felt the power flow down his throat into his rotting belly as he drank the golden blood.

When he finished and the gold demon had been released to run back into the stone jungle, the vampire satyr rose with the new dripping canines. "What was that all about?"

"Only a vampire satyr can take a demon's blood. You start with the small and eventually take over a big one like the golden beast who regularly mounts me. It's the only way to evolve here. My purpose here is to see to it that you never cease to evolve."

*****

The small doctor had been observing him closely for the past three days. Dr. Mountfountain would probably rise to consciousness today. He was alone with the nearly nude man, both in boxer shorts. Dr. Mountfountain was lying flat on his back on a metal table.

He ran a quivering palm over the hairy thigh of the physician. "I've always wanted you, Doctor. Always. Even when we were in college, I would have given anything,
anything
, if you had just noticed me. Just once, but no, not ugly little me. Old me. But now you belong to me. I've already had more sex with you than I ever could have fantasized. Of course, you have been unconscious the whole time, but I pretended your hairy body was responsive to mine. And I will do it to you again and again."

He ran his sweaty palm up the thigh to the impressive mound below his belly.

*****

"Look, my son," the demon sighed.

"What, my father?" the vampire satyr shrieked.

"Look at this puddle and tell me what you see."

Red forced the head of the son into a position where he could see the black, liquid hole.

"I see a thousand pointless deaths: I see a child mindlessly murdering an old woman; I see the most shredded suicides..."

"You see," hissed the demon, "what tangible sadness looks like."

"Are all the maddening injustices of mankind against mankind recorded here?"

"All save one," grinned the father, red tears hissing down his cheeks.

"Which is that?"

"Yours. The cruelest stroke is that you made all this up. The reality of this consists in your continued belief in its reality! You even created the reality that says all reality is a dream of yours. What arrogance! What presumption! You are a deceiver! The Truth - even though it cannot be known or believed here - is that you and I are eternally dreaming in a pit, snuggling together and shivering from the horrors of it all. Which is real?"