Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey (17 page)

“The beating of my heart became a dirge, then a march toward darkness. If I couldn’t gain solace and understanding from above with my pleadings, I would embrace the abyss and seize my desires by whatever means and force necessary. I lost my faith the day Rhoda died, but I didn’t lose my desire to bring her and, if possible, my Elsie, back to life.”

Heraclix stopped, then looked around, as if waking from a trance.

“Then what?” Pomp asked.

“Then . . . I don’t know,” he said. “The memory ended, and I entered into this place.” Heraclix looked around again, listened. “This has to be Hell.”

“Come.” Pomp hurriedly scraped slime from him. “We find our way out.”

“I wouldn’t count on it, Pomp.” He stood and cleared the slime from himself anyway. “We can’t go back the way we came. I don’t know if I want to ever reenter that ocean of memory. Though a part of me wishes I could see other memories beyond the one I saw.”

“You remember nothing else?”

“Nothing. The memory seemed to start from nowhere and end nowhere, without any connection to other events. I’ve told you everything I remember. Anything beyond that is inference or guesswork. I can’t even tell you what Elsie looked like, though I know I loved her. Rhoda I might be able to identify, but only because I clearly saw her dead body. And what exactly I did after her death, I cannot tell. But whatever I did, I was driven by a mad passion. I felt it back in there. I don’t think I would have stopped at anything,
anything
, to have my Rhoda and Elsie back. I’m beginning to think that my past might have been as ugly as my present form.”

“You are not ugly . . . inside.”

Heraclix smiled at Pomp’s tactful self-correction.

“You don’t know that,” he said. “
I
don’t even know that. Again, we are back to inferences.”

A fumarole belched out a shaft of flame near them.

“And back to the inferno,” he said.

A loud scream and the rattle of chains sounded from behind a wall of rock. He drew close to the wall’s edge, with his back against the barrier, then peeked around the corner.

He ducked his head back, then turned to address his fairy friend.

“Yes, we are definitely where I thought we were, Pomp.”

“Hell?”

“No need to swear,” he said jokingly.

He turned to look back around the corner, then jumped, completely surprised by what looked back at him from around the other side.

The creature’s body was red and covered in fine bristling hairs. It stood perhaps four feet tall at the top of its horns, though the pair of lacy wings that sprouted from its back were fully eight feet high at the tips. Another, smaller pair of wings spread straight out to the creature’s side, just beneath the others. It stood on two
corvine feet, sharp talons scratching the ground. Four stunted arms dangled from the torso, just above the distended belly that squatted upon those skinny bird-legs. The arms that protruded from the torso were covered with bristling hairs and insectile in their segmentation, though each of the four arms ended in something like a human hand, with four fingers and an opposable thumb. But the most disturbing aspect of this insect-human-devil hybrid was the thing’s bulbous head. It was ridiculously out of proportion to the rest of the body, fully two-thirds the size of the torso. Atop the head were two sharp horns that stood up with the look of small, curved daggers. The eyes looked as if they had been stolen from a giant fly and grafted to the head. They bulged like two multi-faceted black bubbles. The thing’s nose was also obscenely large, a proboscis with gargantuan nostrils that crawled up the side of the sausage-like extremity. The fiercest feature of the creature, its mouth, was cut in such a way that the creature was forever smiling, an ironic mockery of being consigned to Hell and eternal torment. The fang-lined mouth, however, hinted that it could inflict torment as well as be subjected to it.

“Vizzitōrzz,” the devil-fly said with something between a wheeze and a buzz. “Or new arrivalzz?” it asked. It walked around the pair, bobbing up and down as it examined the strangers.

Pomp discovered that her invisibility didn’t work here. She was unable to hide from the devil, so she settled down on Heraclix’s shoulder, which increased her sense of security. For a moment.

Another nose peeked around the corner and sniffed. A second devil-fly stepped out from behind the corner, this one a foot taller than the other and significantly more corpulent than its companion.

“Estok, where have you gone? It’z almost time for our whipping, and you know how duh tormentorzz get when we’re late for our”—the bigger one spotted the strangers—“oh!”

“Juzt found these two zzniveling around, Salamon,” the smaller one wheezed.

“Should we report dem?” Salamon asked.

“Nah! We’d juzt get an extra whipping for not reporting them sooner. Besidez, we don’t want to be late for our whippingz. Juzt azz well to keep ‘em around. They might be useful to uzz.”

A great gong sounded from the other side of the wall.

“C’mon Estok, we gotta go!” Salamon said.

“You stay here, yezz?” Estok said to Heraclix and Pomp. “We’ll be back for ya later!”

The pair of devils disappeared around the corner. The pair of non-devils, of course, peeped around the wall to see what was happening.

The wall curved some two hundred feet away from their present location, forming a semicircular arena of sorts. Atop the wall stood a variety of devils, a circus of grotesquery. A dozen of them lined the wall, like the antithesis of the saintly statues adorning Prague’s stone bridge. Yet these were not statues. They were very much alive, or at least animated. One had the body of an infant and the wings and head of a dove with plucked-out eyes that shed great gouts of bloody tears. Another looked like a woman who had been skinned, save for her scalp, from which a knee-length mass of barbed wire grew. The wire’s barbs continually lashed her exposed muscles and nerves, causing her to convulse maniacally. A third looked like a stout, pot-bellied human whose arms, legs, nose, mouth, and eyes grew from all the wrong places. There was no hint of gender, though Heraclix thought of it as a man. The other nine were equally bizarre, sporting a variety of strange forms.

Each of these held an instrument of torture in its hands, claws, tentacles, or whatever it happened to be equipped with. Several held bone-studded scourges, one a pitchfork, one a giant set of pincers, one a pair of red-hot pokers, one a maul, and so forth.

In the arena itself a rack had been constructed from large bones and sinew. Beneath it were gossamer bits of wing, an insectile arm, and a shattered eye. Surrounding the rack were a hundred or so of the devil-flies, most intact, though some were missing limbs or a wing or an eye. None of them claimed the pieces on the ground, however. A few of the devil-flies were adorned with headgear that differentiated them from the others: a battered crown, a soldier’s helmet, a priest’s mitre.

As the pair watched, a devil-fly wearing a bronze laurel, which Heraclix took to be some representation of past authority from the condemned’s mortal sojourn, approached the rack where he was tied down by his companions. The surrounding flies pushed and
shoved each other in their eagerness to torture the bound fly, who, as his limbs were stretched, shouted out, “My name izz Ernezt Federici. I am guilty of crimezz against my family and myself, having extorted my father’zz fortune from my widowed mother and squandering it on cheap whorezz and wine. My punishment izz just!” Whereupon one of the quorum of twelve demons descended off the wall, falling, flying, or flopping to the ground. It then approached the one on the rack. After ensuring that the victim got a good, long look at the device with which it was to be tortured, the torturer fell upon the confessor with such vengeance, lust, and brutality that Heraclix had to admit that he had never seen anything so violent, so ruthless. The other devil-flies mocked worship of the tortured, kneeling and bowing, praising the victim as it screamed and whimpered in the midst of its torment. After a time, the devil-fly was unstrapped from the rack, the torturer returned to the wall, and the cycle started over again with the next volunteer.

When the ritual ended, the swarm of devil-flies fell upon each other, kicking, biting, rending. Heraclix and Pomp headed off in a different direction, away from the orgy of rancor. The sounds of suffering were, however, present no matter how far away they walked.

They occasionally saw groups of Hellish inhabitants marching in chained-together lines or gathered in tortured groups, mostly of the devil-fly variety, though the number of mutations, maimings and surgical perversions seemed infinite. The imagination boggled not at the possibilities but at the reality of a cosmic punishment so excruciating yet so infinitely just, based on the confessions that continually filled the air.

So, this is eternal torment
, Heraclix thought.
If mankind were given a glimpse of what awaited the wicked
,
would they cease to cause suffering to one another in mortality, or would they simply despair and surrender to all animal instincts, knowing that they would eventually have to suffer in the afterlife for their sins anyway?

He wasn’t sure of the answer, nor did he really want to know, fearing, most of all, the answer he himself might give to such a question. For he had come to doubt his own judgment and his own motives, good or bad. The more he learned, the more he
worried that he was on the verge of learning many things about himself that he would rather not have known or have known by others.

Pomp stays on Heraclix’s shoulder, mostly. Except when she’s flying up to look over the walls, like now. The cavern is as large as a world, though this world has a black sky, a red earth, and no sun or stars—only fire and the occasional shining of some fallen angel wailing its way over the maze of walls in which they travel. She is careful not to attract their attention. There are many other things flying around here. She has seen bat-winged black mares snorting gusts of fire; great bird-winged amorphous blobs that drip acid behind them; fallen angels who shine with a bright light but whose faces look like those of hideous, pestilence-stricken old women; a floating pair of crowned babies tethered together by one umbilical cord between them; dog-sized mosquito-like things with tattered reptilian wings; and clouds of red-eyed golden flies equipped with pincers large enough to take a ten-kreuzer-sized disk of flesh out of a man or devil or anything else it might encounter. She keeps her eye on the sky, Pomp does, or else!

She stands atop a wall, next to, but above Heraclix, scanning the twists and turns of the way ahead. A skyward cry grabs her attention, and she looks up to see, in the distance, a gigantic serpent with a fanged head at either end, attempting to entwine itself around a gigantic blue gorilla. About the gorilla’s neck is a necklace of skulls. The combating pair plummets toward the ground at breakneck speed. Pomp follows the fall downward, entranced. At the very moment the snake and ape disappear behind a volcano, Pomp sees teeth, then shadow, then nothing as she is enveloped from beneath by the mixed odor of bad breath and rotting meat.

C
HAPTER
11

H
eraclix looked up just in time to see Estok swallow Pomp whole. The devil-fly’s momentum carried its hook of a nose over the top of the wall, enough that Heraclix could jump up and grab the great snout, hauling the creature up and over by the proboscis, breaking it in the process.

“Gnnaah!” Estok exclaimed. “You should have stayed where I said! Than thizz wouldn’t have happened! Ah, my poor, beautifully nozze.”

Heraclix hadn’t let go. He jerked his hand this way and that, snapping the nose twice more.

“Stop! You broke it thrice!”

“Let her out, or your neck is next! I’ll rip her out of you if I have to!”

The devil-fly belched up Pomp, who flew up to the area between Estok’s eyes and plucked out a pair of black hairs.

“Ai, ai! Ztop it!” it said.

Heraclix let go the shattered remains of its nose. It flopped down like a certain unmentionable which, Heraclix noted, Estok did not possess.

It continued to cough and gag. “She scraped my tonzilzz!” Estok complained.

“I’ll do more than that if you don’t give us the help we need,” Heraclix said after puzzling out what the creature had said.

“Oh will you, now?” Estok said, suddenly full of bravado now that Heraclix had let go of its nose.

The golem reached out and tore one of the devil’s arms off.

“Yes I will!” Heraclix said.

“I zee,” the now-humbled devil replied. “Ungh,” he rubbed his new stump with one of his three remaining arms. “What can I do for you?”