Thomas M. Disch (21 page)

St-Loup pointed him to where his clothes lay in a heap atop a chair wrought (it seemed) from armor plate. Hell was better furnished than the episcopal palace in Montpellier-le-Vieux. Indeed, even this torture chamber boasted a superfluity of furniture, with several steel chairs (not stools), other chairs of wood, and two thronelike chairs built of cushions, as though meant for sleep. There were shelves and cupboards to house the instruments of torture, and even a small library of thin illuminated manuscripts. Two of these were placed on a low table, and by the same occult gift that enabled him to understand the demons’ speech, he could read their titles:
Outlaw Biker Tattoos
and
Tattoo Digest
. The illuminated binding showed other succubi like Delilah, painted with such artistry that one might think them alive.

There was no time to examine these manuscripts. He must dress in order to accompany St-Loup and Delilah to their infernal revels. First, he pulled on the breeches, which were made of a blue fabric as sturdy as drugget yet as yielding as the softest muslin. There were shoes that bore some charm or demon’s name unknown to him: ADIDA5. When he sat upon the chair to put the shoes on, he noticed that his feet had been scrubbed as clean as the skin of a suckling infant, the nails trimmed and calluses removed. Indeed, all his skin had been similarly cleansed and softened, no doubt to make it more receptive to torture. With each movement of his body as he fit his feet into the shoes, he could feel the fabric of the breeches caressing his legs.

Now the doublet. He studied it, uncertain if it was to be put on so that it opened to expose the chest or the back. He decided that he would be expected to display the torture that had been done to him, and when he wore the doublet so, St-Loup gave him a nod of approval.

“Gonna fly your colors tonight, huh?” Delilah said.

The Bishop nodded, and then, just to be on the safe side, repeated the oath of fealty that St-Loup had spoken earlier: “Hail fucking Satan.”

St-Loup chuckled. “A week ago,” he said, “I wouldn’t of believed this, Damon. You’re a changed man. I guess it’s like I said about how the tattoo’s like a door. Except I never seen
anyone
come out of that door at quite the speed you’re going. Maybe a bull at the rodeo coming out of the chute. But hey, that’s okay. I like it. I think Delilah likes it, too.” He winked at the succubus. “Am I right?”

“Fuck you, Wolf,” she said amiably. “And you,” turning to the Bishop,

“should zip your fly. Here, let me.” She came up to the Bishop and reached inside the front opening of his breeches to nip his male member one last time, then sealed the cloth together by a quick motion of her talons.

St-Loup–-or Wolf, to call him by his hellish name—touched an ivory plaque on the wall, and at once the flameless candle overhead was extinguished. The Bishop followed the two demons through the door and beheld, above the quivering silhouettes of windblown trees, a sky full of stars. He could even recognize the constellations—Lyra, Cygnus, Cassiopeia. They shone but dimly, as though obscured by smoke or mist, but that they shone at all astonished him. Was he, then, not in hell? Could hell have a sky with constellations identical to those of the earth?

“They’re bright out here, ain’t they?” Wolf said. “Closer in to the city, you almost forget there’s stars up there.”

A brighter light than the stars appeared suddenly at the horizon— not singly, but paired with another of equal brightness—and swooped forward like a double comet, threatening destruction. Wolf and Delilah gave it no heed, and as it sped by, the Bishop realized that what he’d thought an aerial phenomenon was in fact a very small armored house much like the one that Wolf was entering now. It moved on wheels by its own power, or else by the power of the demons within. The Bishop had always supposed demons were winged, but then he’d supposed that hell was beneath the earth and had no view of the stars.

Wolf bade the Bishop take the seat beside him within the armored house, opening a second door that he might enter. Delilah followed him into the house and seated herself on his lap, which was a source of excruciating pain to his tortured flesh. Pleased to inflict new pain, Delilah smiled and pressed her mouth against the Bishop’s in an obscene kiss, her tongue acting as only lips may be allowed, even between spouses. Yet, just as his tongue had pronounced Satan to be its liege, and would speak any other words that hell required, so now it shared in Delilah’s carnal transgression. He received her tongue in his mouth and protruded his into hers, tasting her spit. Was it only minutes ago that he had seen the Inquisition’s servitors begin to amputate this woman’s breasts?

As though he’d spoken this question aloud, the succubus took his left hand and guided it beneath her doublet to grasp the pliant tissues of her right breast. Hesitantly at first, and then greedily, like a suckling babe, he palpated the complex flesh, aware of structures beneath the skin that eluded his touch and his understanding. The Bishop was not without all carnal knowledge, but such times as he had taken women in his arms, their breasts had not been unbound, nor had he placed his hands directly upon them. The experience was arousing, in an animal sense, but also physically distressing, a sensation that combined a sense of famishing hunger with a wrenching disgust and nausea.

Delilah pulled her tongue from his mouth and whispered in his ear, “Hey, come on,
twist
it!” Her talons guided his fingers to the pierced, beringed nipple as her tongue pressed into his otic orifice. He groaned with a pleasure that expressed, in a language that dogs or cattle would have understood, his complete surrender to the requirements of hell. Just as Esau traded away his father’s estates for a bowl of porridge, so the Bishop for the sigh and the shudder of this single ravished moment was ready to cede an eternity of heavenly bliss. He had no desire beyond the pleasure of this instant.

Even as his flesh gloried in its own damnation, the armored house flew forward through space with inconceivable velocity. Had he doubted, seeing the stars above his head, that he was in hell, he could have doubted no longer, for only supernatural forces could have propelled a house and inhabitants at such speeds. And now, as Delilah’s tongue resumed its first indecency, the lights of other such houses as theirs flared up in front of them and then were swept away. They joined a river of such houses (two rivers, in fact, flowing on a parallel course but in opposite directions), some as large as the Bishop’s stables. The beauty of that double river of lights hurtling through space, combined with the carnal pleasure of Delilah’s embrace, was such that the Bishop wished he could sing hell’s praises aloud. He was in ecstasy.

Unbidden, he took Delilah’s other breast in his right hand and squeezed it as though crushing juice from a large lemon. She writhed about, responsive to each increase of pressure, and raked his back with her talons. She withdrew her tongue from his mouth and began biting his face, wherever her teeth could obtain purchase, clamping down and then moving her head from side to side like a hound trying to tear meat from a fresh carcass.

Delilah bit down on his upper lip. There was a sudden, sharp pain, and then the succubus drew back, spitting something black into her hand. “What the fuck!” she said, looking at what was in her hand and then at the Bishop’s face.

“What’s the matter?” Wolf asked, looking sideways, and then, looking again, he laughed aloud. “You bit off his fucking mustache!”

Delilah began to laugh as well. Her laughter was precisely the same as Madame de Gaillac’s, a low chortle full of phlegm.

The Bishop felt relieved. Not knowing that he had a mustache (what bishop ever was adorned so?), he had thought the demon had actually bitten off a part of his lip. Her hunger had seemed equal to the task. He curled his tongue up to be sure his lip was intact. There was only a trace of blood, such as might have resulted from being shaved by an inept barber. It was fitting, for had not Delilah acted as a barber to Samson as well? At this thought, he found himself joining in their laughter.

As is so often the aftereffect of laughter, the Bishop felt his carnal impulses waning, and the succubus seemed less eager to tempt him as well. In any case, the little house they were in had reached a new and more amazing precinct of hell, a roadway as wide and smooth as the southmost Rhône as it nears the sea. On both sides of this teeming thoroughfare were buildings, some of ordinary scale, others towering to heights of seven or eight stories, and all of them ablaze with lights of various colors. Many of these lights took the form of messages the Bishop was often unable to interpret, such as xxx HOT

PORN XXX or SAUNA HOT TUB BODY RUB. Others served to indicate the presence of a pothouse or stews. It was on a dark plaza behind one of these, the Limbo Bar and Grill, that Wolf brought the armored house to a stop. He touched the wheel by which he had guided the house’s motions, and the rumbling sound that had accompanied their flight through hell fell silent. Wolf opened the door beside his chair and stepped into the dark plaza. Delilah did the same.

She pulled down her doublet over her breasts, so that the declaration of her shame was once again clearly legible. Then she said, “Let’s party, dudes.

Whadaya say?”

The Bishop said, “Okay!”

XVIII

Three days had gone by. Three days and three nights—the days measured only by the gradual lessening and then deepening of the gloom within the episcopal palace, the nights by the slow wasting away of candles until he fell asleep or had become so drunk as to amount to the same thing. But when he woke, it was always to these same stone walls. Could a dream go on so long, at such a humdrum pace? Could one dream a toothache that would not let up? Or kidney stones? He knew what kidney stones were like, having had two large ones taken out, and this pain was the ghost of the kidney stones he remembered—but no pale ghost, a ghost with teeth.

But suppose it was not a dream.

Suppose that in some way he could not explain he had been catapulted back into an earlier existence to become Silvanus de Roquefort, the Bishop of Rodez and Montpellier-le-Vieux, slipping into his life as if it were a tailored suit. The bishop’s face, when he saw it reflected in a basin of water, was more or less the face he knew from the bathroom mirror. The teeth were in sorry condition, the skin was mottled with the scars of some childhood disease, but any of his parishioners would have recognized him, even so, as Father Patrick Bryce, the pastor of St. Bernardine’s Church in the archdiocese of Minneapolis. Father Bryce and the Bishop were the same person in two different centuries.

Intellectually, even theologically, this was an unacceptable idea. He did not believe in reincarnation—or, for that matter, in time travel. These were the realms of New Age airheads like Shirley MacLame or, God help us, of A. D. Boscage. After Clay had browbeat him about it, he’d made himself skim Boscage’s ridiculous
Prolegomenon
, but he could remember few details, only his general sense of contempt for the man’s zigzagging, self-contradictory flights of fancy. But he had a vague recollection that in one of the middle chapters Boscage had traveled to southern France and had one of his time-traveling raptures when he’d visited some ruined cathedral. Then he’d

“transmentated” and become some kind of workman at the time the cathedral was being built. Dipping into Boscage’s tale, a paragraph here, a paragraph there, Father Bryce had never once been tempted to give any credence to his fabrications. He’d just become more and more impatient with Boscage’s incompetence as a writer and with the crudeness of his hoax. As a work of historical imagination, Boscage’s account of the Middle Ages was on a par with Prince Valiant in the comics section of the Sunday paper. But suppose something of this sort had really happened to Boscage. It would not have made him a better writer, necessarily. He sounded just as flaky writing about the details of his daily life in the seventies and eighties—the girlfriends, the parties, the hangovers—as when he went into ecstasies of paranoia about his UFO abductions. That was probably one of the secrets of his success. The weirdness of his theories wasn’t any weirder than Boscage’s everyday life, as reported by Boscage.

And no weirder than Father Bryce’s own life here and now. Though
weird

was the wrong word, for on an hour-to-hour basis his life had become a limbo of monotony. Once, on a flight from New York to Rome, bad weather had forced his plane to land at the airport on Malta, where the plane itself had developed mechanical problems, so that he’d had to spend almost two days in the airport waiting room as the promised time of departure was postponed again and again. Malta itself might have been strange, but the waiting room at the airport was like all waiting rooms, with the barest amenities and nothing to distract him from the single question, the same that obsessed him now: When would his plane leave? When would he get back to his own life? Only in the present case, there was not even an airfield in sight beyond a wall of plate glass, with its assurance that the machinery existed that would, sometime or other, effect his release. He didn’t know how he had been brought here and could do nothing to expedite his departure. There was no ticket window, no information desk. Perhaps—this had become his worst fear—there was no exit.

That basic anxiety had made it hard to take a disinterested, tourist-like interest in the thirteenth century. In some ways, he realized, he was reacting in classic tourist fashion. During his first visit to Florence he’d gone into a state of culture shock, holing up inside his hotel room, ordering his meals from room service and reading Perry Mason mysteries. He’d wanted nothing to do with the great stone heap of the past, its cathedrals and museums and palaces. It hadn’t seemed real to him. The real life of Europe was hidden away somewhere else, where tourists couldn’t get to it.