Infernal Angel.
Lee, Edward.
NEW IN TOWN.
Why would Walter dream such a thing, such an awful thing?
He was standing on a street corner in a city, but it was unlike any city he could have ever imagined. The midnight sky was ruby-red, the low sickle moon was black. He could only see these features, though, by looking straight up because the buildings lining the street must"ve been hundreds and hundreds of floors high, skysc.r.a.pers unlike any he"d seen. He got dizzy just looking up. Do they even make buildings that high? he questioned himself.
"They do here," a little girl said.
She was skipping down the street, smiling at him. Walter almost fell over. Her pigtails flipped as she skipped. She wore black-strapped shoes and little white socks, a bright red-and-white checkered dress. Deep lines ran down her gray, wizened face. The girl was mummified.
She was playing hop-scotch but the squares weren"t formed by chalk, they were formed by long, odd bones. She couldn"t have been more than seven or eight. "You"re in the Mephistopolis, you"re in h.e.l.l," she told him....
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
Though in debt to many, I need to acknowledge the following for their support, inspiration, and friendship. Tim McGinnis. Dave Barnett, Wendy Brewer, Rich Chizmar, Douglas Clegg, Don D"Auria, Tony & Kim Duarte, Dallas, Tom Pic, Bob Strauss, Wrath James White, and Bel Wilson (& Harold). Much grat.i.tude also to Amy the Maemae and Scott, Charlie, Darren, Cowboy Jeff, Julie, Kathy, R.J., and Stephanie. Thanks additionally to Teri Jacobs for cool names, music, and impetus for cryptography. Thanks to Jeff Funk and Minh.
Inestimable thanks to-,-,-,-, and -. I am forever in your debt.
Prologue.
The metropolis sprawls. The moon is black and the sky is the color of de-oxygenated blood. Screams rip down streets and through alleys, carried by malodorous winds. The people of this place trudge the sidewalks back and forth, to home, to work, to stores, etc., just as they do in any city. There"s only one dissimilarity.
In this city, the people are all dead.
What... is this place? Cinny wondered. She lay in a stinking alley, flat on her back as if dropped there. Cut-off jeans and a holey t-shirt that read MOTORHEAD. A tiny tattoo on her ankle affirmed NOWHERE LEFT TO GO BUT DOWN.
What am I doing here? she thought, but the thought speared her mind like an ice-pick. She tried to think back, couldn"t remember. All she knew was this: I"m in a city...
It was too big for St. Pete, she knew. She turned tricks there all the time, when Harley Mack was either in jail or too strung out to deal ice. Cinny would do anything for Harley Mack-and she had, literally, anything-because she knew the only thing keeping them together was their mutual addiction to crystal methamphetamine. Her eyes opened wider, then she shrieked when something chittered alongside. A rat-a big one. She saw its shadow slip away into a pile of garbage. The animal looked the size of a puppy.
Cinny tried to get up but couldn"t yet. Her heart was beating funny-it did that a lot lately, when she smoked too much crystal at once-and her mind continued to reel, not just from the toll the drug was taking on her but from her confusion. Some john must"ve knocked her out and raped her; it happened all the time, a hazard of her profession and one she"d long since learned to live with. The f.u.c.kers were too cheap to fork over the twenty-five bucks, so they"d just hit her in the head with a blackjack or something, then dump her somewhere later. That must"ve been what happened. Some trick jacked me out and dumped me here.
But- Where, exactly, was here?
She peered harder out the mouth of the alley, leaning up now on her hands. No, she wasn"t in St. Petersburg and she knew as well that this couldn"t be downtown Clearwater. This city was too big for either of those. Tampa, she realized. Right now Cinny was looking at some big buildings, and there were plenty of those in Tampa. It just seemed a whole lot of trouble, though. Why would a psycho john drive her all the way from St. Pete to Tampa just to rape her?
She thought back harder, her heart still beating funny, beating slow. Then some memories began to emerge, recollections that dashed her previous suspicions: Wait a minute... I wasn"t turning tricks tonight. I was with Harley Mack. We were breaking into that place-it was a pharmacy or clinic or something... The memories continued to jell. Harley Mack had gotten wind of a local medical clinic that had a lot of Dilaudid and other synthetic smack stored in its pharmacy vault. That kind of stuff went for big money on the street these days, so he and Cinny had broken into the place ...
But that"s all she could remember.
Gotta get up, gotta get out of here, she told herself. She"d remember the rest in time; the actual events that had led to her being in this stinky, rat-infested alley weren"t important right now. She had to find Harley Mack. She had to get up and get going, and hitch a ride back home.
Get up, get up, get up! she was yelling at herself now, but she was still so dizzy and racked out, any movement sent her senses reeling. She sighed and lay back down against the slimy pavement, tried to settle down and catch her breath.
Then she heard the sound. what"s...
A vigorous, wet smacking.
The sound emanated from her left side; she quickly turned her head.
"Who are you?" she shrieked when she saw the man sitting there.
He sat against the alley"s wall, dressed in rags that reeked. A homeless b.u.m. He was loudly eating food and looking right at her at the same time. Eventually he said, "My name is Edward Teller." His yellowed eyes went briefly wide in some secret enthusiasm. "Have you heard of me?"
Cinny squinted. G.o.d, he stinks! "No," she replied.
"You"re not very well-educated, are you?"
Cinny chose not to answer the ridiculous question. So what if she actually had dropped out of school in the seventh grade? Who was he to insult her? At least I"m not a stinky b.u.m!
"I built the Fat Man with Oppenheimer," he said.
"Huh?" Cinny said.
"Then I invented the hydrogen bomb."
You"re crazy, Cinny thought. She saw street people like this all the time; they were all nuts, they were schizos.
Then he said, "Excuse me, my foot itches," and he pulled off a corroded tennis shoe. The stench that wafted up was the worst odor Cinny had ever encountered in her life. Her sinuses seemed to swell shut. Clumps of something fell to the pavement when he peeled off a sock; it took Cinny a moment to realize what the chunks were: pieces of dead flesh, white as paraffin. In fact most of the flesh on the bottom of his foot had peeled off with the sock. Toenails yellow as a YIELD sign stuck out inches long, out from under which grew parasitic green mold.
Cinny was reeling at the stench. "Put your shoe back on!"
"Oh, of course. You"re new here. You"re not acclimated to such things yet."
What did that mean? The smell was so awful it made her teary eyed, like tear gas. "What city is this?" She tried to get through to him. "Is this Tampa? I don"t know where I am."
"It"s not Tampa. It"s the Mephistopolis."
Cinny peered at him again. "It"s ... what?"
The b.u.m shrugged. "You"re dead. You died and went to h.e.l.l."
Jeez! she thought now. This guy really was crazy. But even beyond the impossible abstraction, Cinny knew she wasn"t a bad person. She"d done things in her life that were bad but they weren"t her fault. The meth made her do those things.
Her mind trailed back. Sure, she"d helped Harley Mack set up her first husband, Barny, but Barny had beaten her, he"d nearly killed her a few times, so Cinny had slipped Harley Mack the key to the trailer one night and he"d killed Barny with a hubcap mallet and made it look like a burglary. He"d also killed the dog and Barny"s mother, who"d happened to be visiting; then there was the neighbor who"d seen him go into the trailer-old Mrs. Hollis, who was, like, ninety or something. Harley Mack had had to beat her head in too because she was a potential witness. But Cinny hadn"t done those things, Harley Mack had, so why would Cinny go to h.e.l.l for his crimes? Turning thousands of tricks wouldn"t condemn her to h.e.l.l, would it? There were prost.i.tutes in the Bible, at least that"s what she"d heard. And then there were her two babies. She"d sold them both for meth money to an "adoption broker." He"d promised her that the babies would go to good, wealthy parents who"d give them a better life than Cinny could. It wasn"t Cinny"s fault that the broker was lying and that he"d actually sold them to some underground research lab where they did experiments with infant brain tissue. The broker would go to h.e.l.l, not me! she thought.
It didn"t matter anyway. She wasn"t in h.e.l.l, she was in Tampa, and she had to find someplace to hitch a ride back home. She could care less what this nutty old b.u.m was saying.
This time Cinny made a concerted effort to get up. She tried to put her feet down against the pavement- But couldn"t.
Then she started screaming. By now her eyes had acclimated to the alley"s darkness and she could see why she couldn"t stand up.
Both of her legs were gone from the knees down.
"Sorry," the b.u.m said. "I couldn"t help it."
He continued to eat, lips smacking. He was gnawing ravenously on her left calf, like a big turkey leg. Her right calf and most of the foot connected to it had been consumed to the bone. It lay glistening beside the b.u.m.
Cinny screamed so hard she saw stars, but in between the stars two figures approached. They seemed hulking but quick, as if homing in on her horror. Were their eyes alight through lids like chisel-slits? She could make out no details, only the most vague fragments of features. Heads like silhouettes of anvils, with protrusions, like horns. Hooks for hands. Grins akin to black holes full of nails. That was all she could see, and all she needed to.
But it must be a nightmare: there were no people like this, not really. It was all those years of meth that made her see these things. They weren"t monsters, they were just men, and her mind was making her see the rest.
One of the men slammed her down immediately; Cinny"s stumps flew up, and her back arched as her shorts were torn off. Something hot and inordinately large penetrated her. Above this most primitive rape, black chuckling fluttered. Cinny continued to scream until the second man, kneeling attentively beside her, jammed two very long fingers down her throat. Reflex bid her to bite down hard on the fingers but that just seemed to urge more chuckling. She began to convulse, the screams quickly replaced by vicious gagging. When the fingers pressed down against the very back of her tongue, Cinny spontaneously vomited. Her attacker seemed to receive great pleasure from this act.
When he withdrew his fingers from her throat, Cinny could breathe again; her chest heaved. She was still being methodically raped by the first man, and through her horror more reflex emerged. She began to scream again, from the top of her lungs: "h.e.l.lLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLP! POLIIIIIII-IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICE! WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE CALL THE POLICE?"
The chuckling rose. The b.u.m remained where he sat, having just finished the last morsels of his meal, and he calmly informed her: "I hate to tell you this, but those two men are the police..."
Cinny convulsed harder when a mouth as big around as a fry pan closed over her face. Her screams for help were smothered now, and inhaled. Then the rows of teeth bit down and ate her face off her skull as an eager child might eat all the icing off a cupcake at once, and though Cinny never saw it, due to the dark, a metal sign stood up straight at the end of the alley, yellow with black block letters, spelling CITY MUTILATION ZONE.
Isobel would be typically referred to as a Hierarchal She-Demon, and less typically as a multi-bred species known as Demonus belarius. Everything human was all the rage now, especially in art and physical fashion. Feminine viewpoints differed little between here and the Living World. Isobel stood in the salon"s annex, tall and appraising in her sungla.s.ses, chiffon dress, and high heels made meticulously of Ghor-Hound bones. She slipped the sungla.s.ses up over the diminutive horns in her forehead, looking up at the runway.
"So how is the Grand Duke these days?" Isobel was asked. The woman who made the inquiry was a pet.i.te Troll with lovely carmine-spotted skin and elegant three-fingered hands-the salon"s manager.
"The Grand Duke is just fine," Isobel replied, though this response didn"t quite equate to the truth. Being a concubine for a member of the Unsacred College of Cardinals brought lofty social status for someone such as Isobel, but the status only lasted as long as the fascination. Isobel feared that Grand Duke Pilate was growing bored with her body of late; hence, she felt compelled to do something about the matter quickly, a few nips and tucks, a few maintenance spells, etc. Most of the other concubines in the Duke"s harem were human-he had a thing for them-so Isobel thought it only logical to try and follow their example, starting with h.e.l.l"s equivalent of a breast implant. Without the Grand Duke, where would she be? Gotta keep my man happy, she resolved. "Yes, yes, he"s just fine," she went on. "But a little enhancement couldn"t hurt, now could it?"
"Then you"ll simply love our latest models. I can"t wait for you to see them!" The Troll spoke with great enthusiasm because Isobel, as a Hierarchal, was always regarded as a priority patron. The Troll pa.s.sed Isobel a flute of blackish wine made from the finest aged Brooden blood. "One"s a bona fide succubus from the Lilith Subcarnation Inst.i.tute. And the others are brand-new acquisitions from the Ramirez Agency-"
"I"m looking for something human," Isobel interrupted.
"It"s all the rage these days!" the manager exclaimed, bat-ting crystal-red eyes the size of billiard b.a.l.l.s. She leaned over to whisper, even though no other customers occupied the salon. "It just so happens that yesterday we signed on two absolutely stunning human women, whom we"ve reserved especially for our favorite buyers such as yourself."
"Show them," Isobel said, sipping her wine. "Just the humans. I"ll pa.s.s on the succubus and half-breeds."
"Of course!"
The manager snapped her fingers and an instant later, two reasonably well-fed human females traipsed out onto the runway. Both were nude and well-curved, one a strawberry blonde, the other a brunette with the most stunning sea-green eyes.
"Marvelous," Isobel whispered to herself. A nine-foot-tall Golem made of polluted riverbed clay had brought the pair of models out. It stood behind them dead-faced, arms crossed. The Duke would love those! Isobel thought in glee. This glee, of course, she couldn"t express vocally because that would"ve been unrefined. In truth, Isobel was desperate to keep her man"s eyes off of the other concubines. If he gets sick of me, it"s the end of the line. The Grand Duke had no ex-concubines; when he tired of one, he had his chef prepare her as marinated satay to be served at the next orgy.
"Yes, marvelous," Isobel repeated.
"The blonde?" asked the proprietor.
"No, no. The brunette."
"Very good!" Next the Troll gave a single nod to the Golem, and the Golem nodded likewise. One arm shot around the brunette"s neck in a split-second, lifting her kicking and screaming off the runway floor. With the long curved knife in its free hand, it neatly sliced off both of the woman"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her screams sounded more akin to some kind of high-rpm machine with bad bearings.
I"ll look ravishing with her b.r.e.a.s.t.s! Isobel thought. "Oh, and the irises, too," she hastened. "I simply adore those sea-green eyes."
The manager nodded again, and next the Golem was expertly removing the brunette"s eyeb.a.l.l.s from their sockets with a specially made ocular retractor. The eyeb.a.l.l.s and severed b.r.e.a.s.t.s were then pa.s.sed to a waiting surgeon dressed in a black mantle and hood.
"And don"t worry," the giddy Troll prattled on, "our transfigurists are all licensed. They"re the best in the district." She put her dainty, clawed hand at the small of Isobel"s back and gently urged her toward the surgery suites in back. "The procedure"s completely painless. You"ll be out of here in a jiffy! With brand-new human b.r.e.a.s.t.s and irises!"
"I really can"t thank you enough," Isobel replied. "And I"ll be sure to tell all my friends about your fabulous salon."
Isobel was led into the back, where the transfiguration would take place. Eventually, the Troll-woman returned to the showing room. Eyeless, breastless, and now too deep in shock to scream, the brunette shuddered on the runway.
The Troll sternly instructed the Golem: "Now cut this b.i.t.c.h"s guts out and call the diviners. Then sell what"s left to the pulping station down the street." She clapped her hands sharply twice. "And be quick about it!"
The Golem nodded.
h.e.l.l is a city.
It stretches, literally, without end-a labyrinth of smoke and waking nightmare. Just as endlessly, sewer grates belch flame from the sulphur fires that have raged beneath the streets for millennia. Clock towers spire in every district, by public law, but their faces have no hands; time is not measured here in seconds or hours but in atrocity and despair. In the center of this mora.s.s of stone and smoke and butchery and horror stands the 666-floor Mephis...o...b..ilding, where Gargoyles prowl the wind-blown ledges and from whose highest garrets the innocent are hung from gibbets and left to rot for cons. The lone occupant of the very top floor looks down upon his dominion and smiles a smile that is brighter than a thousand suns. Here, yes, everyone is dead yet everyone lives forever.
Welcome to the Mephistopolis.
Welcome to the city of h.e.l.l.
Welcome.
Part I.
Etherean.
Chapter One.
(I).
"You would do that? For me?"
The voice which had spoken the words was incalculable. Words like light, a vocal utterance like a caress.
The response to these words was nearly as luminous. A simple, resolute "Yes."