Thomas M. Disch (20 page)

The water was brought, a ceramic basin containing about four quarts of tepid water. There was no soap, but a large towel of coarse linen was placed beside the basin. As he began to pull the filth-stiffened robe over his head, the fat priest grabbed hold of the boy who’d brought the water and hastened out of the room with him. And truly, the state of his naked body, unwashed for weeks, was not a pretty sight. “Bring
more
water!” he called out after them.

By the time they had returned with a second basin (he draped the linen towel about himself, toga-fashion, so they might enter the room, which they did with eyes downcast), he had managed to clean off just those parts of his torso that had been covered by the tattooist’s blasphemous design. The symbolism of his action seemed transparent: He was washing off the tattoo. But it seemed
wrong
(in the sense, once again, of being undreamlike) that he should be conscious, as he dreamt, of the symbolism of his dream.

By the time he’d gone through a third basin and the terra-cotta floor about the basin was puddled with the filthy water, he was simply too exasperated and too chilly to think about such logical niceties. He wasn’t really clean yet, not by the standards of his own century, and his skin, stripped of its exoskeleton of dirt, itched terribly (he was certain he had lice), but he wanted to be dressed and busy about some more exciting purpose.

Maybe he should suggest returning to the crypt, where the heretics were being tortured. But despite the fact that his dream presented such a possibility, he wasn’t really that keen to witness such things, not even if they were phantasms. The Legate had said something about a knife being put to a woman’s breast. Father Bryce had had no very great interest in women’s breasts in the twentieth century, whether bared or bra-ed, and the thought of threatening a naked breast with a knife was distasteful and disgusting.

Then it came back to him: the woman who’d entered the back room of the tattoo parlor after Wolf had begun his work. She’d worn a tank top that exposed both her breasts, which were elaborately tattooed. Her arms were tattooed as well, and her shoulders. She had ridiculously long, cherry-red fingernails. She had touched his penis. She’d asked Wolf if she could take over his tattooing. That’s when he’d fainted. That was why he’d come here.

“Will you dine now, Your Grace?” the fat priest asked.

“I guess there’s nothing else I can do at this point, is there?” He smiled oddly.

The priest gestured toward the clothes that had been laid out for him atop one of the coffinshaped wardrobes. “Then I will tell the Legate that you are dressing and will join him shortly.”

Silvanus knew almost as soon as he opened his eyes that he was in hell.

One minute he had been witnessing the interrogation of the heretic Aielot de Gaillac in the crypt of Notre Dame de Gevaudon, and the next he found himself strapped down to a pallet, much as Madame de Gaillac had been, while she, by a kind of infernal symmetry, had been transformed into a succubus or a female demon and was using an instrument of torture upon the exposed and anguished flesh of
his
male member. Her unbound breasts, which the interrogator had been about to cut from her body, remained intact, and now were covered with Satanic embroideries—images of serpents and flowers twined together, illuminating her flesh as if it were a living parchment. Her very flesh had become an emblem of an Eden fallen into the power of hell, where the serpent might live among the roses without the fear of God.

To his amazement, when he had seen the knife pressed against the heretic’s flesh, he had fallen into a swoon. It had not been the thought of the butchery that had unmanned him, nor yet his animal response, which had been one of arousal—an arousal he had not encouraged by any act of self-stimulation and which was therefore guiltless. His distress had sprung, rather, from an intense, unreasoning pity for the heretic and, correlative to that, a doubt as to the necessity, even the justice, of her being put to the question in this manner. That doubt had passed beyond a scruple to a conviction that the interrogation was a sinful act and that his motive for having Madame de Gaillac examined by the Inquisition was not a godly abhorrence of heresy but, rather, a carnal pleasure in witnessing her tortures and a further satisfaction in thinking that the Church would soon attach her properties, which were among the most considerable in Montpellier-le-Vieux. It was just as he had formulated these misgivings that he had swooned, and been transported to this chamber of hell. But had he been brought here in the flesh, as the pain of his torture seemed to suggest, or was this a vision?

He had had one such vision before, on the feast day of Saint Macanus, following the accident in the sacristy when Abbé St-Loup had bled onto the white wool of the pallium, and he had found himself in this same chamber with his flesh being covered with the heraldry of hell. The man, or demon, whom he’d seen then and who so much resembled St-Loup, was present again, standing behind the succubus who was torturing him. The man’s hands played with silver rings that hung from the pierced nipples of her painted breasts, like the rings placed in the snout of the pig, an animal symbolizing female lust. Her snout was beringed, as well, and each ear was a little marketplace of finely crafted silver. The Bishop almost forgot the pain he was suffering in the amazement of seeing Madame de Gaillac so bizarrely transfigured.

“Hey,” said the hellish version of St-Loup, “better ease up. He’s awake.”

“Yeah, but I think he’s like me, I think he grooves on it. His dick is sure as hell hard as a rock.”

Madame de Gaillac laid down the instrument of torture while continuing to grasp his male member in her other hand. Both hands had bright red claws instead of fingernails. She smiled at him. “Hi. We were never formally introduced, but I know you’re Damon. I’m Delilah.”

It seemed to make much more sense that one would meet the Philistine whore Delilah here in hell than an Aveyronaise heretic who had yet to be dispatched to her reward. Did that mean that the succubus was
not
Madame de Gaillac, despite the strong resemblance? Or could she somehow be both women, Delilah
and
Aielot de Gaillac? He remembered that St-Loup, in the earlier vision, had addressed him then too as Damon. Perhaps in hell one’s Christian name is forfeited and one assumes a new name reflecting the fact of one’s damnation. Thus, Madame de Gaillac had become Delilah, as he was now Damon.

“Hail, Delilah!” the Bishop said, speaking the language of hell with an uncanny fluency, as though it were indeed his native tongue. And then, from a conviction that it was always politic to render obeisance to one’s liege, he declared: “All praise to the power and glory of Satan!”

This provoked the mirth of both the succubus and the demonic St-Loup, who, even so, added his own oath of fealty. “Yeah, right on, man—hail fuckin’

Satan.”

“You’re really into that devil shit, aren’t you?” Delilah asked respectfully.

There was no help for it. Hell set the terms here. So he followed her prompting and said, “Yes, praise to Satan’s shit. Praise to his piss as well.”

“Hey,” Delilah said with a snaggletoothed smile, “you are one weird motherfucker.”

The Bishop was too shocked to respond at once. Needless to say, he had never committed incest with his mother. That was an outright lie—but then in hell lies would be the order of the day. Moreover, to be accused of incest would be a compliment. So, after thinking this through, he said in a tone of modest pride, “Thank you.”

“Well, Satan can be real proud of you tonight, Damon,” St-Loup said with a chuckle. “Here, I’ll show you.”

As in the earlier vision, St-Loup held up a silvery speculum large enough that Silvanus could see his entire torso in it. The horned face of Satan was now inscribed there with a clarity and precision surpassing the best illuminations the Bishop had ever seen. The leering face itself, with its hollow eye sockets and snarling mouth, was formed from roiling clouds of smoke, but the smoke had thickened, darkening and becoming more convoluted, and colored flames now shot up all about the face like fiery hair. There had also been added, on his abdomen (or else he’d not noticed it during the earlier, more fleeting vision), the figure of a Norman horseman carrying a flaming brand, whence issued the smoke forming the Satanic face. Interpreting this allegorically, the Bishop took it to mean that it was the Crusaders at war against the Albigensians (who had been summoned from Normandy and the Ile de France, and ultimately from the far north of Europe) who were the true vassals of Satan, just as the Albigensians maintained. Could it be that in assisting in the extermination of their heresy he had actually been assisting in the work of Satan? Unthinkable—but how else to interpret this allegory branded on his very flesh?

“Well,” St-Loup insisted, “whadaya think?”

“It is”—he had almost said “very good,” before he remembered he was in hell—”evil. It is truly evil.”

“Another satisfied customer,” St-Loup said, putting aside the speculum, and beginning to loosen the knots of the ropes by which the Bishop’s arms were bound to the pallet. “Sorry we had to tie you down like this, but a couple times your muscles started spasming. Nothing serious, but it made it hard to work. You was Out a long time, so I was able to get a lot done. One more session like this and we’ll be through. Unless, of course, you’ve got some other ideas for more shit you want done. Like, why not a full bodysuit? If you dig that idea, I’d be happy to lower the rate, if that would make it easier for you financially. When I first set the price over the phone, I figured we’d need more sittings, but your blanking out the way you do makes it a whole lot easier for me to concentrate on the needlework. So think about it, okay?”

“Okay,” said the Bishop. Unbound, he was able to look at his own hands, which were as he remembered them. He’d thought that his fingernails might have been turned into claws, like Delilah’s.

“I’m sorry I can’t offer you any more booze. Delilah killed the bottle that was here. But I know an after-hours place that’s still open. It’s a little late to get polluted, but a couple brews would hit the spot right now.

Whadaya think?”

“Okay,” said the Bishop. Okay seemed to be the most acceptable form of obeisance. It was strange how St-Loup dealt with him—not as a new arrival in hell but as one of its regular denizens, familiar with its customs and leal to its liege. Undoubtedly it behooved the Bishop to continue to act as though this were the case, as though he were the willing companion of these demons.

In that way, disguised as a demon himself, he might be spared the worst of hell’s tortures. Why he had been assigned the role of one of hell’s familiars he could not imagine, unless it was that in the afterlife our worst punishment will be to commit in a perfected form those sins that earned us our damnation, that hell’s cruelest punishment is just to be ourselves, the selves our sins have formed. He had heard theologians maintain this, but he’d felt only contempt for such doctrines, which seemed designed to minimize the terrors of hell. Who would cease sinning if the only punishment threatened were to reenact one’s sins throughout eternity? The heaven promised to Mussulmen was precisely that—a harem where the lustful might gratify their lust forever.

Perhaps this was the heaven of the infidels! Perhaps the infidel heaven and the Christian hell were the same place, like cities whose peoples speak two languages and which are called sometimes by one name and sometimes by another.

“We can take my Jeep,” St-Loup said, “if you don’t mind Delilah sitting on your lap. Come to think of it, you must be a little sore down there.”

“I like the pain,” the Bishop assured him. “The pain is evil.” He had noticed, observing the interrogations of heretics, that any expression of fear of the torture continuing, any visible trepidation, would excite the torturers to inflict new pains. Ergo: To avoid pain, he must accept and even praise it.

His calculation seemed correct, for Delilah gave a final pinch of her talons to his male member, and said, “Hey, you’re my kind of guy.”

The Bishop pushed himself up into a sitting position and then got off the pallet and stood upon the actual floor of hell. Where he had been tortured, his flesh was sore, but the customary pains of his body had been intermitted. He could twist his back freely, and flex his knees. His toothache was gone. How long had it been since he’d been without his toothache?

“Well,” said St-Loup, opening a finely carpentered door, “shall we go?”

“Okay,” said the Bishop. He walked through the opened door and entered another larger, and noticeably hotter, chamber of hell, lighted, like the room where he’d been tortured, with long cones of unwavering brightness, candles that burned without flame or smoke.

Ahead of him was another door, and he walked toward it, feeling something almost like eagerness to see more of hell.

Behind him, Delilah and St-Loup laughed in a gleeful way, not maliciously as one would expect of devils, but as parents laugh at the antics of a favored child. He turned around to know the source of their merriment.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” St-Loup asked.

“Am I?”

“Your clothes?”

“Oh.

Even though his two companions were wearing clothes, it had not occurred to him that he must dress to promenade through hell. Admittedly, their tailoring was quite indecent—each of them in breeches of black cloth that was molded to the contours of their legs and loins and each wearing, above their waists, doublets imprinted, like their flesh, with heraldries of hell. On St-Loup’s doublet, a snarling wolf, punning on his name, as heraldic devices so often do; on hers, a single word declaring her shame, BITCH.