Damned (7 page)

As we meander, Leonard continues to recite the names of demons we might
encounter: Mevet, the Judaic demon of death; Lilith, who steals children;
Reshev, the plague demon; Azazel, demon of deserts; Astaroth... Robert
Mapplethorpe... Lucifer... Behemoth....

Ahead of us, Patterson and Babette stroll up a gentle slope, topping a
rise which blocks the view beyond. Reaching the crest, the two of them stop.
Even from behind we can see Babette's body stiffen. In reaction to what she now
sees in the distance, both her hands come up to cover her face, her fingers
cupped over her eyes. Babette bends slightly from the waist, bracing her hands
against her thighs, and turns away from the view, stretching her neck as if
about to retch. Patterson turns to see us, jerking his head for us to hurry and
catch up. To witness some new atrocity just over this next horizon.

Archer and Leonard and I trudge along, mounting the slope of nail
parings, soft under each labored step, like snow or loose sand, climbing until
we stand alongside Patterson and Babette, at the edge of a steep cliff. Half a
step ahead of us, the land drops away, and below us boils a sea of insects
which stretches to the horizon... beetles, centipedes, fire ants, earwigs,
wasps, spiders, grubs, locusts, and what-all churning constantly, a shifting
soft quicksand composed of pincers, feelers, segmented legs, stingers, shells,
and teeth, darkly iridescent, largely black but speckled with hornet yellows
and bright grasshopper greens. Their constant clicking and rustling generates a
din not unlike the crashing surf of a briny ocean on earth.

"Cool, huh?" says Patterson, waving his football helmet in
one hand as if to direct our attention over this morass of seething, undulating
horrors. He says, "Check it out... the Sea of Insects."

Gazing down into the surging swells and rolling troughs of clamoring
bugs, Leonard sneers in righteous disgust, saying, "Spiders are not
insects."

Not to belabor the point, but counterfeit luxury goods truly represent
a false economy. To witness, Babette's plastic shoes look to be falling apart,
the straps severed and the soles loose and flapping—subjecting her lithe feet
to fingernail and busted-glass abrasions—while my own sturdy Bass Weejun
loafers barely appear to be broken in by our lengthy underworld trek.

As we gaze out across the vast squirming, humming pudding of insect
life, a scream approaches us from behind. There, sprinting between the hills of
nail parings, panting and running, comes a bearded figure dressed in the toga
of a Roman senator. Craning his neck to glance backward Over his shoulder, the
man races toward us, screaming the word
Psezpolnica.
Screaming,
"Psezpolnica!"

At the cliff's edge, teetering near where we stand, the lunatic toga
man points a quaking finger in the direction he's come. Beseeching us with his
wide-open eyes, he screams, Psezpolnica!" and dives, plummeting, flailing,
falling to vanish beneath the seething surface of bug life. Once, twice, three
times the toga man comes up for air; his mouth is choked with beetles. Crickets
and spiders sting and strip t he flesh from his twitching arms. Earwigs swarm,
eating deep into his eye sockets, and millipedes weave through
ragged,
bloody holes nibbled between his now-exposed rib bones.

As we watch in horror, wondering what could drive a person to such an
extreme course of action... Babette, Patterson, Leonard, Archer, and I... we
turn in unison to see a lumbering, towering figure approach.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. It might amuse you to hear we
were beset by a demon of thrilling size. This precipitated the most amazing act
of heroism and self-sacrifice—really, from the least likely person among our
company. In addition I've included more of my own background, in the event
you're interested in learning more about me as an interesting, fully faceted
overweight person.

A
s
our little group
stands atop the ridge overlooking the Sea of Insects, a looming figure stomps
toward us. Each of its thundering footfalls trembles the surrounding hillocks, bringing
down dusty cascades of ancient finger-and toenail clippings, and the figure
stands so tall that we can discern only the silhouette of it as outlined
against the flaming orange sky. So violently does the giant's weight shake the
ground that the cliff on which we stand heaves and shimmers beneath us, the
loose nail parings threatening to subside and deposit us into the seething,
devouring bugs.

It's Leonard who speaks first, whispering only the single word,
"Psezpolnica."

In our immediate distress, Babette appears to be far too self-absorbed,
the poor quality of her fashion accessories too blatant a metaphor—impossible
to ignore—representing her choice of surface appeal over inner quality.
Patterson, the athlete, seems frozen in his conventional, traditional
attitudes, a person for whom the rules of the universe were fixed very early
and will always remain unchanged. In contrast, the rebellious Archer presents
himself as a knee-jerk rejection of... everything. Of my newfound companions
Leonard shows the most promise of evolving into something more than an
acquaintance. And, yes, once more I recognize
promise
as a symptom of my nagging, deeply ingrained tendency to hope.

Prompted by this hope, made manifest by my instinct for
self-preservation, when Patterson very slowly fits his foot-hall helmet over
his head and says, "Run," my stout legs don't hesitate. As Archer and
Babette and Patterson each flee on their own tangent, I run beside Leonard.

"Psezpolnica," he pants, legs working against the soft, malleable
layers of nails, his bent arms pumping the air for momentum, Leonard says,
"The Serbians call her 'the tornado woman of midday."' Gasping for
breath, running beside me, his shirt pocketful of pens bouncing against his
skinny chest, Leonard says, "Her specialty is driving people insane,
lopping off their heads and ripping them limb from limb…”'

In a glance, I look back to see a woman who towers as tall as a
tornado, her face so distant it seems tiny against the sky, as straight-up and
high above me as the sun at noon. Like a flaring funnel cloud, her long black
hair whips and streams out from her head, and she hesitates as if deciding
which of us to pursue.

Beyond the giantess, Babette staggers, both of her cheesy, way-shoddy
shoes flapping around her feet, hobbling and tripping her. Patterson hunches
his shoulders, dodging and weaving, his cleats throwing up a rooster tail of
nail filings as if he were running a football through some defensive line,
headed for a touchdown. Archer rips off his leather jacket and tosses it aside,
sprinting full-tilt, the chains looped around his one boot clanking.

The tornado demon crouches, reaching lower with a hand, the fingers
spread as wide as a parachute, steadily lowering toward the stumbling,
screaming figure of Babette.

Granted, there exists an element of play in all of this panic; having
witnessed the demon Ahriman render and consume Patterson, and Patterson's
subsequent regeneration to a redheaded, gray-eyed footballer, on some level I'm
aware that my absolute death is no longer possible. All of that said, the
process of being plucked apart and devoured still seems like it would sting
like all get-out.

As the towering tornado demon reaches to snatch a screaming Babette,
Leonard shouts for her to dive. Cupping both his hands to make a megaphone
around his mouth, Leonard shouts, "Dive and dig!"

So that you might learn from my ignorance, it's a tried-and-true
strategy when escaping danger in Hell to dig into the nearest available
terrain. Hell offers scant cover, no flora to speak of—except for the
inexplicable accumulations of Beemans gum, Walnettos, Sugar Daddys, and popcorn
balls—thus the only consistent, ready manner in which to conceal oneself is to
tunnel until completely buried, in this case by the vast accumulation of
castoff fingernail shards.

Distasteful as this might sound, for this piece of advice, you owe me.

Not that you're ever actually going to die. Perish the thought. Not
with your hours and hours invested in aerobic exercise.

On the other hand, if you do find yourself dead and in Hell, menaced by
Psezpolnica, do as Leonard would recommend: Dive and dig.

My hands burrow into a hillside of loose, cascading parings, and with
every inch I dig a steady landslide of the same avalanches down upon me,
prickly and itchy, abrasive but not entirely unpleasant, until I'm completely
interred, Leonard interred at my side.

About my own death, my
death-
death,
I remember very little. My mother was launching a feature film, and my father
had gained a controlling interest in something— Brazil, I think—so of course
they'd brought home an adopted child from... someplace awful. My brother du
jour, his name was Goran. He of the brutish, hooded eyes and beetling brow, an
orphan sourced from some war-torn, former-socialist hamlet, Goran had been
starved of the early physical contact and imprinting required for a human being
to develop any sense of empathy. With his reptilian gaze and broad pit-bull
jaw, he arrived forever and always as damaged goods, but this only added to his
appeal. Unlike any of my previous siblings, now apportioned to various boarding
schools and long forgotten, I found myself quite smitten with Goran.

For his part, Goran had merely to cast his churlish, ravenous eyes upon
my parents' wealth and lifestyle, and he was determined to curry my acceptance.
Add to those factors one overly large baggy of marijuana supplied by my dad,
plus my impulse to finally smoke the nasty herb, if only to bond with Goran,
and that's the sum total I'm able to recall about the circumstances of my fatal
overdose.

Currently, lying fully buried in a grave of fingernails, I listen to my
heartbeat. I hear my breath rushing in my nostrils. Yes, without a doubt, it's
hope that makes my heart continue to beat, my lungs to breathe. Old habits die
hard. Above me, the ground heaves and shifts with every step of the tornado
demon. The parings trickle into my ears, stifling any sound of Babette's
screams. Stifling the clicking din from the Sea of Insects. I lie buried here,
counting my heartbeats, resisting an urge to dig one hand sideways in search of
Leonard's hand.

In the next instant my arms are pinned to my sides. The fingernails
press in close, tightly around me, and I'm lifted into the stinking sulfurous
air, rising into the flaming orange sky.

The fingers of a huge hand are clasped around me as tight as a
straitjacket. This giant hand has been thrust into the loose soil and has
plucked me the way one might pull a carrot or radish from its buried slumber.

Ye gods, I might be the privileged, wealthy, insulated scion of
celebrity parents, but I still know where babies and carrots come from...
although I was never entirely certain where Goran originated.

Soaring into the air, I can survey it all: the Sea of Insects, the
Great Plains of Broken Glass, the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm, an endless array
of cages containing the damned. Below me spreads the whole geography of Hell,
including demons wandering hither and yon to gobble hapless victims. At the
highest point of my ascent, a canyon of wet teeth await. A wind of rank, wet
breath buffets me with a stink worse than the communal toilets at Ecology
Clamp. There heaves a monstrous tongue carpeted with taste buds the size of red
mushrooms. All of this ringed by lips as fat as greased tractor tires.

The hand brings me to the mouth, where my arms stretch to brace against
the upper lip. My feet push against the lower lip, and like a fishbone I hold
myself too wide and rigid to be swallowed. Under my hands, the lips feel
surprisingly plush, leathery like a banquette in a good restaurant, but very
warm. Like touching the upholstery of a Jaguar someone's just driven from Paris
to Rennes.

So vast is the demon's face that all I can see is the mouth. In my
peripheral vision, I'm vaguely aware of eyes above me, broad and glassy as
department store windows, except curved outward, bulging. Those eyes, fenced by
the black pickets of huge eyelashes. I'm conscious of a nose the size of a mud
hut with two open doorways, each door hung with a curtain of fine nostril hairs.

The hand pushes me against the teeth. The tongue thrusts to make wet
contact with the buttoned front of my cardigan sweater.

In the moment I am resigned to my immediate fate, to be masticated and
swallowed, my bones cast aside like the skeleton of every Cornish game hen I've
ever eaten, at that instant the mouth screams. What occurs seems less like a
scream than an air-raid siren blasting point-blank into my face. My hair, my
cheeks and clothing, these are all blown and rippling, snapping like a flag in a
hurricane.