Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades (9 page)
Read Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades Online
Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
"Yes,"
Eridan said, with a crescent grin.
Eridan said, with a crescent grin.
At last, like the hand of a clock, the boat had come around to the front of the tiny island, and Eridan cut the motor so they could watch the feeding frenzy clearly.
Petty was reminded of paintings of St. Sebastian, his arms lashed above or behind him, his bare chest pierced by arrows. Except that these were females, and the arrows whipped their tails, alive, their heads buried in smooth white flesh. For whatever reason, however, whether by natural inclination or training, the beasts obviously preferred the flesh and muscle of the face. Only a few chewed at the bodies below; the rest had covered the faces of the trio, muffling and choking off their cries.
Rule spun to the side of the boat and vomited violently over the rail. That made Petty smirk a little. So much for the great white hunter.
Blood did not stream down those nude bodies from the savaged faces—the hovering eels drank it up before it could trickle far. Despite the living nightmares completely enveloping their heads—or because of the heightened contrast—their bodies still struck Petty as immensely beautiful. Like the Venus de Milo without her arms, making her torso all the lovelier. Their succulent flesh was like the white stone of that statue, a marred purity. Petty couldn’t blame the eels for their passion; he almost wanted to consume the flesh himself.
He moved to the abandoned harpoon gun to press his eye to the scope, not caring what Eridan or his men or Rule might think of his blatant voyeurism.
Oh yes, that unalloyed beauty, stripped of clothes, of pretense, of society (and soon, of faces, leaving only the graceful figures without the rejecting sneer of lips, the disapproving squint of eyes). Petty was now reminded of the headless, armless, but spread-winged statue called the Nike of Samothrace. When the Romans conquered Greece, they lopped the heads off their statues. But how beautiful Nike remained, her stone gown clinging to her gentle curves, mutilated though she was…
The girl on the left was very thin, her raised arms pulling her small breasts entirely flat, her ribs showing distinctly through her parchment skin. Her ankles were also chained, he now realized, preventing her legs from kicking like those of a hanged man. But she managed to swing entirely around once, giving him a brief look at the sweep of her back, a tattoo of a butterfly in the hollow above her buttocks (one of his very favorite zones of the female form), and her small, cleft bottom. The girl on the right appeared to be the oldest of the three, her breasts heavier, her hips wide (perhaps she’d given birth?), but Petty loved sumptuous flesh. His eyes kneaded it like hands.
Like Goldilocks, however, he found the girl in the middle to be just right. She was, in a word, perfection.
Her back was forced into a tense arch, the buds of her breasts thrust out, their ends dipped in pink candy. Her skin so smooth that his eyes could feel its tautness across her sides, softer across her belly and thighs. Her pubic hair was red. He had always loved redheads, had married one in fact. Her bush was complemented by two more, under her uplifted arms. He knew most American men disliked underarm hair, but he with his refined tastes found it sexy, earthy, mirroring the hair of the crotch, and he wanted to press his nose into each of the three thatches, to draw in her intimate musk. One stray eel nursed at her skin beside the bullet hole of her navel, appearing like a new umbilical cord for her rebirth here in Hades. She was youth, she was a goddess, with her head covered in writhing bodies he thought of her as Medusa on the Half-Shell…so hideous, and so lovely because of it.
The wind started to die down, the windmill blades to become visible again. With a metallic clatter, the cages began to descend, and conditioned to this or trained like dogs, the eels darted away from their three victims before they could become trapped inside the cages, too. Besides, their bellies were full. As the cages lowered, and the eels escaped, Petty could see what was left of the trio’s faces. Bone, a few strands of hair (he could now see the center girl’s remaining short red locks). Without the eels to catch it, drops of blood began to patter and trickle across the bare canvasses of their bodies, which had mercifully slumped unconscious. Was that a faint, gurgling kind of moan coming from one or more of them?
"Now they will regenerate. Heal," explained Captain Eridan. "Until the next time the wind current comes." In an odd and unwelcome gesture of familiarity, he patted Petty on the shoulder. "I thought you might find this worth the extra time."
Petty straightened from the harpoon gun’s scope. He hoped the Demon didn’t notice his erection, tenting the fabric of his Angelic robes.
"Yes…it was…fascinating," he stammered.
"Would you care to have a shot at one of them before the cages are in place, Mr. Rule?" he called. "You’d better hurry…"
Rule only groaned, still hunched over the rail, and waved them away.
Eridan turned again to Petty. "Such sights to see in Hades, eh?" he whispered conspiratorially, as if afraid the Creator might overhear. "You won’t see the likes of this in Heaven."
And with that, he returned to the wheel, gunned the motor, and swung them back in the direction of the black, obsidian shore.
««—»»
In his room at the Demonic fortress, overlooking the churning Red Sea, Petty lay in bed and masturbated, imaging that the red-haired girl was going down on him. The scary thought that the face clamped to his groin might be ravaged down to the bone only excited him further. He imagined his hands pressing her head to him, running across the tight skin of her humped back. With a cry, he ejaculated into the maw of his imagination.
It wasn’t enough. As he lay there wheezing, the great island of his belly rising and falling, he knew it was not enough.
He went out into the fortress and asked for breakfast, sat down to it alone in a large echoing room built from blocks of volcanic glass. He asked one of the servant Demons if Rule was coming down. He was told Mr. Rule had left a short while ago, had asked to be taken south down the coast to where the ocean liners docked to pick up tourist Angels like himself.
Petty was a bit insulted, but relieved, that Rule had not invited him to join him. When the servant poured him his second coffee, he told her to send word to Captain Eridan that he wanted to ride on his boat again today; specifically, he wanted to ride out again to the series of blood clot islands.
««—»»
When they finally arrived, after what Petty judged to be three hours or more, the wind current had already found the islands, the windmill was already spinning, the cages already lifted. The eels already feeding.
"I wish we could have gotten here sooner," Petty groused to Eridan.
"Sir?"
"I wanted to see their faces."
"Oh…I see…I’m sorry, sir. Well, when the wind dies down, we can linger a while. You can nap, sir, or have a few drinks. Their faces will reconstitute. Then I can draw us in closely, sir. We can even land on the island, if you like."
Land there. Disembark. Might he be able to touch some part of the living triptych through the holes in the mesh of their cages? Might he even coax Eridan, who was required to serve him, into opening one of the cages…even setting one of the prisoners free? That prisoner might be very grateful for her release. Grateful enough to serve him, as well…
"Yes," Petty said, trying not to betray to his guide the tremulous energies swimming through his system. "That would be fine…"
Petty fetched a beer, and watched the display again through the scope. (They couldn’t land on the island until the cages had lowered and the bulk of the eels had departed, for fear of being attacked themselves.)
The wind finally roared away across the ocean of red corpuscles. The eels fled, perhaps to feed on other prisoners on other island chains. The cages descended. Now, Eridan drew them in closer as he had promised, though in a way Petty wished he had waited a while—but he supposed a half reformed face would be no less horrible than these denuded skulls. More horrible, maybe. They came close enough that he could hear the wheezing through their gaping nose cavities, the gargling blood in their throats. He saw breasts rising and falling. Drops of blood flecked their chests like rose petals on snow. So lovely.
Two of Eridan’s men hopped off the boat, into knee-deep blood, and attached lines to the legs of the windmill. They drew the boat against the shining lip of the blood clot raft (and jabbed at the few remaining eels with harpoons to keep them at bay). But Petty did not climb ashore just yet. He had another beer. He watched the slow regeneration. He listened as gurgles became moans, evolved into sobs.
When they had lips again, would they curse him for being one of the blessed? An Angel, never tortured, never suffering? Well, what did they know of his suffering? In life, young beauties like these would have scorned him. It had been that way all his life. Was their Promethean torture any worse than that? Did their physical degradation really outweigh his psychological degradation?
It was unfair, was it not, that Petty was so gross and repulsive an Angel, and these Damned so perfect and lovely? Where was the justice in that? Since becoming reborn, Petty had repeatedly questioned the workings of the Creator’s mind. How could it be that in Heaven he had come to feel so numb, a reanimated zombie, and yet here in the netherworld he suddenly felt vital and alive? Was it the contrast of death? Or just the lust of a younger body whose urges he had forgotten over the past few decades?
The short red hair of the center girl was sprouting anew from the scalp it had been torn from. It was like watching the minute hand of a clock, but it was happening. He noted the curly black hair of the lush-figured girl, the straight mousy brown hair of the thin girl, but the center girl had become his crucified Christ, flanked by nameless fellow sufferers, though in this case all three were resurrecting from the dead…
Yes, he wondered if this were such a good idea after all. When they had eyes again, they would hate him as much as the Demons beside him. He couldn’t sneak his fingers through the mesh; they would withdraw from his touch. And even if he were able to persuade Eridan to lift the middle cage, free his little redhead, and even if she did submit to him, she would despise him. Reject him even as she gave in to him.
Maybe it was better to return to Heaven, flawed as it was. To content himself as best he could with the zombie-like Fannie Mae. She accepted him mindlessly. Wasn’t that perfection, if he could get past the fact that she was essentially a robot? He mustn’t be so jaded, so spoiled. Heaven, however imperfect, could do that to you…
Still, he knew he had to see this through. He had waited this long, and he wouldn’t feel closure unless he could see their restored faces closely. But even as he dreaded having their eyes on him, he couldn’t keep from admiring their bodies. Couldn’t keep from subtly pressing his erection against the bow rail. It was a blind eel aching to feed.
He realized Eridan was directly behind his shoulder, and he flinched as the Demon purred, "Do you wish to go onto the island, sir?"
"I can see well enough from here," Petty muttered.
Muscle now layered the bone, threaded together with bright lattices of vein, elastic bands of tendon tethering this section to that. Were those raw globes in their sockets really eyes? Petty’s own eyes watered to gaze upon them.
Soon, the outer rind of flesh started spreading like a fungus, a cancer, to again put a mask to the horrible beauty that lay beneath, just as it hid what lay inside the rest of their glorious bodies. The flesh asserting its mastery, even here in the spiritual world.
The rotting miasma of the island was so overpowering this close that he cupped his hand over nose and mouth. Or was that reek from the faces themselves, rematerializing in a reverse dissection, a rewound flaying?
The red hair of the center girl stopped growing at the edge of her jaw. That must have been its length when she died, and it would not grow beyond that point. Pretty red hair like copper, framing eyes that now showed blue irises, and black pupils, and which bulged and darted in mad agony.
Then the eyes locked on him with such a force that he almost flinched again. They remained fixed on him. The girl’s struggles against the chains binding her wrists and ankles grew more frantic. Her body moved in serpentine jerks, like the eels had when they were worrying free a hunk of flesh. Her sobs rose, rose in a wail, a banshee shriek, a siren…
And there were words coming on that scream; he could sense them struggling to take form as her flesh was doing. He could feel the words riding at the top of her cry, building toward a crescendo…
"Dahhh…" the center girl screamed.
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