Infernus (8 page)

"Father-"

"Aaaah, this is a beautiful scene," said Red, ignoring the son as he was often wont to do. "Do you wish to pretend this has meaning?"

"Yes."

"Very well." He sighed. "She was asked, many, many years ago if she knew why she was here. Foolishly, she should have said that there was no good reason she was there/here."

"No?"

"No. She believed she came from another place called ancient Greece, where she had been a queen. She said her name had been Gamoor, and she had, in a strange fit of maladies, drowned her five daughters in a large vat of boiling pig's blood."

"But, why this punishment, Father?" The son swept his arms toward the comedy playing out before them.

"This is the revenge that was set before her for believing such nonsense. No such thing ever happened. And there are no daughters. It was asked of five demons if they would pose as her daughters that she'd dreamt and torment her for all eternity. Naturally, they were only too happy to comply."

"How long has this been happening?"

"It cannot be expressed properly for you to comprehend, but it's close to billions of infinities."

"This cemetery is somber and beautiful, Father," the son said as the woman came out of the building on the right once more, whole and ready to begin again.

Father and son watched, enchanted, with blood streaming from their sockets like warm tears.

*****

Red light weakly flared up from within a cave. An eternal play continued inside, ceaseless.

"My son, this is a bit of drama from your dream world. From the past, we have an infinite number of these little plays. Only the sweetest ones play here. The
daintiest
morsels are repeated!"

The son gazed at the scene until he perceived the point. He then laughed so hard that his pain threshold increased.

A little boy of four or five was dancing around a replica of an earth kitchen while his mother stood above him with a large carving knife. Down upon his weaving head and waving arms, always connecting with the child, never once missing. She didn't laugh - she was much too busy.

*****

"Look at this hideous tableau, my son. What do you see?"

"I see a dark room beginning to glow red. It throbs there, a bloody-looking room. There are two men in the middle, lying flat on their backs on the floor. Writhing, oh, my father, writhing like little babies; like spoiled babies..."

The demon looked at the son and loved him. "Yes, they are burning, as we all are."

"Two giant, blood-muscled canines break through the shattering door, and - oh, my father! - make me turn from this vision!"

"You may not!" screamed Red.

"Oh, the monster dogs shred the men and leap on them - their screams - they plunge their broad members into them, and frothingly rape them as they disembowel them! Oh, my sad, sick father, what have you done to me?"

"Shown you that the one thing mortals think they leave behind in death is their conscience - it is only amplified here." The son could
almost
swear he heard a piano playing dramatically in the background. "We've-" the demon begins to weep piteously. "thought of-" sob "-everything!"

"Look! Another room, my father." The son ignored Red's emotion, for it seemed to him quite irrelevant. "It blazes up, glowing yellow. What is this?"

"Surely there is beauty here, also, Son. Let's listen in, shall we? I think we are coming in the middle of a conversation. First, what do you actually see?"

"I see a dwarfish, bright blue demon, his limbs all cramped and crabbed to the point of being morosely disabled, standing hunched over before a woman burning like a torch. I can barely see her features as they are blurred beneath roaring flames."

"That's right. What she looks like is, of course, unimportant. Pointless. Now, listen to what he is saying to his disciple."

"No," the blue demon whispered, clearly near the edge of being overcome with laughter. "That's the shame of it all." His teeth glittered bloody in the flames. "That's not even the worst of it." He fell into a sizzling urine pool, uncontrollably laughing.

"Oh, really," she said, watching the fire constantly engulf her naked body, her skin popping and sizzling. "Something
worse
than dying, and leaving that drunk of a husband of mine, who beat me for ten years, to die and come here, or at least maybe
dream
this hell hole?"

"Yeah," he said, his eyes literally bugging out of their leathery sockets, his idiot smile mindlessly agape, drooling. "Even worse than all of that. In fact, it's soooo funny, my head might explode from the sheer hell of it."

"Hit me, creature," she said, baiting him to top her hideous reality.

"Are ya ready? Here goes. You're so pathetic; you don't even know that the other world
is
the dream world. You were ruined when you woke up here. In other words-"

The dead woman looked to the son as if she might begin screaming now.

"-you've always been here! And, here's the kicker, you are so stupid, you created that life with the abusive husband to
forget
about this place." He began laughing until the top of his head actually did explode. He grinned from ear to ear. "I got one last bit of news for you, my little roast-pork suckling."

"Worse than what you just told me?" she asked.

"Oh, yes, a lot worse!" His eyes were winking rubies. "Ready for a shot of love?"

"What could be worse than the knowledge that I've always been here and dreamed my former life? Hit me, creature!"

"You didn't begin your life here as a woman." He began tittering, searching her face for the reaction he knew would eventually come.

"You mean-"

He laughed in earnest now, fell to the burning floor, and rolled around hysterically.

She began an endless scream.

The father addressed the son. "That story always moves me to tears of joy." He sighed, and moved the son to other tableaus of bliss and perverse beauty.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"THE MILLING MURDERERS"

"Look, my son, the end of The Hall of Tableaus. Was it good for you?"

"Yes, my beloved. Look!"

The demon entered his son from behind and they both gazed at a golden arch with purple veins running through it, encircled with carvings of the finest diamonds. It led into a garden legitimately thought at one time (before the souls crowded its borders and it became a city) to once be a mere tableau.

As the father filled the son with love, they both wept openly. It was as still as a freshly vanquished life.

"My son!" the demon screed into his son's ears. "We now come to a pit in the vast park known as 'The Milling Murderers.'"

"Is it so, Father?"

"Yes, it is. It is a vast land of Hate Cults. It belongs to people who invented religion in their dream world and then used it to slay their fellow man through the service to their egos. It is the only place in my jurisdiction whereas if you
don't
participate to increase their horror and pain, you will replace them in their torment. You would have found out, anyway, if you had been patient enough to watch the various threads of continuity. This is the place where the religionists have been throughout eternity. Thankfully, they are unmoved by facts or discussion; their minds are closed to anything other than the so-called reality of their self-righteous world, which means that you can torture them most heinously and they won't even believe it is happening to them. To escape their torment here, they dreamed of a world where they were superior to others. Their man-made religion allowed them to believe they could treat any mortal with contempt, or kill, or slaughter thousands in holy wars. Or, better and funnier, they thought they could oppress children or other mortals with breasts. Infernus is too good for them. Their reality is that they burn and burn, as they always have."

"Suppose," the vampire satyr replied, licking his blood-encrusted lips, "I do both. I mean, refuse to torment them, then torment them."

"You are truly the most hideous son ever born by a father. And you are my burden to bear. Prepare for my mounting."

The father tore the son open from behind and intercoursed the wound for many lifetimes. The son screamed throughout, as did everything else that died there.

"Now we may enter, my child."

"It is indeed a large pit, Father. Look here at the entrance. What do I see? On the left side of the wicker, decayed gate, it looks like a corpse lying - is its eyes nothing but seething worms? Yes! With a long wad of cloth rolling out of its mouth."

"This is delightful!"

"Oh, Father, it is so enigmatic! It has writing on it. It says: 'Suppose that servant is wicked and beats his fellow servants. He shall be torn to pieces and assigned a place for hypocrites.' Is that what this place is, Father?"

"Let us proceed and see, shall we? Your threshold of pain will be increased many fold by the time you approach 'The Wall of Full Cycles' on the other side."

"Please do not tell me, Father, that this is a place of
religion
, for my fury at what these demons have done in the names of the gods is hideous."

"It is!"

"Then I now see how unnecessary it is to make us participate here. It will be my pleasure."

"And mine," Red said, blood flowing from his blackened sockets in pride for his son. "Look at our first charade."

"But wait, Father - you have not allowed me to say what scene is repeated over and over on the right side of this wrecked wicker gate."

"Oh, well, if you must, you pus-born bastard, proceed!"

"There are seven or eight men dressed in flowing robes that are chained to a great chest."

"And what sign is attached on the treasure chest, my son?"

"It says: 'It was for freedom that you were set free! Do not become slaves to legalities again.' What can that mean?"

"There never was a more stupid race than man, my blood-filled bag. Not only would this foolish lot lock up the freedom they were given in a great chest of rules and regulations, but they willingly kept their
own
eyes from seeing it. Watch what the approaching beasts do to them. You won't stop laughing for many lifetimes."

Indeed, large blood-encrusted harpies came with razor-sharp spoons. They fell on all the self-imposed victims with no delay or mercy, scooping the tongues and eyes out of the screaming creatures. The job was efficiently done, as it had been done billions of times before, and the bound preachers screamed with exactly the same measure as they had before the harpies fell upon them.

"Don't worry," said the father to his son. "They will heal and you will get to see this again before you fulfill your destiny as our (the only) world's greatest horror - The Scream. I promised you. Isn't this hilarious?"

The son was already rolling on the hissing floor, helplessly laughing/screaming.

*****

"My son, look at this, the first episode of 'The Milling Murderers.' Now, this is not - I repeat - not a tableau. Not a viewing of something long past, long dead. This is actually happening as we speak, and as I remount you."

A man was writhing face down on the floor of a metal room that glowed red-hot. Another man stood above him and poured acid from a bucket over every inch of his body. Anonymous mewls issued from the pudgy potato head as he screamed in horror and disbelief.

"How can you do this to me? I'm family!"

The torturing man tittered helplessly and kept pouring.

"My son," Red said, "dare to answer me this: if there was another creator, would he have created something as hideous as that? I think not!"

*****

Red kept feeding his massive bloody member into his own mouth. His son was whacking his father's black orbs with a metal paddle. The father's sore-encrusted sockets were constantly leaking a red fluid and the corners of his mouth quivered in weepy silence.

The member shivered as it began pumping huge draughts of syrup-thick goo down his fevered, raw throat.

*****

"No, my son," the demon said. "Look at it this way. I will rip this off-"
Snap... tear...
"-and feed it to you like-"
Shove... rip...
"-and make you eat this, too!"
Rip... insert...

They looked down at the dismembered corpse. It was gazing up at them, helplessly, saying these words through weak lips: "When will you stop torturing me? Don't you know I cannot protect myself? When will you stop torturing me?"

Its eyes were pleading up at them. The demon and the satyr wept with howls of laughter for a thousand lifetimes.

*****

He vomited up a clotty mass and said to his father, "It's like having two snow cones shoved into your eyes while you're flying through the air at ninety-five miles per hour!"

"Yes, my son, now shut up while I tell you a hideous story. Once, there was a lie that we lived a mortal life before our entrance here. No idea is more foolish - the true and final horror that you must face is that you have only dreamed such nonsense." Flatulence occurred. "You have always been here!"

Their screams continued as before, unabated.

*****

The father watched as the son leaned over the gray-white corpse. The son popped a dry eye from a socket and threw it to the rock floor. It cracked open.

"You are the cruelest vampire satyr any father ever had."

"I feel no remorse at all, Father."

"My point exactly."

They began laughing and continued to do so for many eons.

*****

"Why do you fear to show me this next exhibit, my father?"

The son was standing before a heavy crimson curtain, thirty feet wide and thirty feet high, and he knew not how to part it.

"Because I fear, my son, that ye will ne'er stop laughing." Red looked at his son lovingly and noticed bright orange flames playing among the blood-clotted flanks of his fur-coated legs. It was advancement, and the son was unaware of it.

"Show me, Father, show me!" His mouth blathered in his never-ending screams. His vampiric teeth bled freely, streaming down his beard.