profound ignorance.”
A small voice spoke sweetly to the vampiric satyr. Its light words were high and innocent, settling gently into the ear of the screaming son. But the words it chose clashed together like tin bells, fashioned in a way that no mortal could fathom and stay sane.
“Ahhh,” said Red. “Her/His royal highness has deemed you important enough to allow you to at least hear His/Her commandments.” His eyes bled brown drops in horrid worship and slick clots splattered to the floor.
“Who is this most noble of creatures who caresses my ears with liquid words, Father?”
“It is the culmination of all evil that has ever lived/existed.”
“It is a tangible representation of an intangible concept?”
“No, for it does live. It is a singular life form created from the life forms that created a personality. And the next time I hear you psychoanalyzing me in that wonderfully cute fashion, I shall split you in two and bake your insides for a few thousand lifetimes. Is that very clear, or what?”
“My lord, it is very clear. Is there anything that can be done to make it stop saying these things that so sweetly kill?”
“It is foolish to
And it was so.
Nothing of value, although they did talk, was discussed in the classroom between the Legend and the students, after this chapter. It would be of no interest here.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“THE HALL OF TABLEAUS”
“My son,” shrieked the demon, “you must listen to the power of my words and understand my love for you.” He pulled the vampire satyr to his massive chest and entered him from below. “I must pull you apart, my son, and lay you upon hot stones to broil for thousands of lifetimes.”
And he did so. Dutifully, it must be said, Red watched o’er his son, after he had torn him asunder, and wept the entire time. And the blood tears fell upon the son’s parts and baked the flesh hotter.
After thousands of lifetimes, the demon glued the son together with his spittle. And the son cracked open his eyeless sockets and stared with (no) love and (no) pity at the father.
And such black horror was witnessed in Hell by crimson-jeweled lightning that hissed across the skies for thirteen nights.
In the blackest night, a constellation appeared to commemorate this initial tableau.
Then the demon spoke the ultimate blasphemy.
[The following has been edited, by the insistence of the Sire demonologist, who has said, “No one must know such secrets. The complete text, including the second half, will remain buried in a desert (or mountain) somewhere on Earth. One day, the sayings will adorn many crowns, but not until The Day! These sayings will never be auditioned for a single person.”]
[This then, is the first half of what is considered (by many scholars) to be “The Most Unholy Single Thing.”]
The demon grinned and the look was one that no human eyes could see and live. “Did you know that only so-called ‘heteros’ inhabit my kingdom, my son?”
The satyr sang the truth directly into the demon’s mind and there was… hemorrhage!
“Then you know why, also, my beloved! Yes, you are right. A ‘hetero’s’ worst fear is being forcibly raped over and over.” Both laughed over this for a while. Red gazed over a part of his park, and then said to his son, “This would not be torture for ‘homos.’”
“That means—” began the son.
“No, you could not imagine the ‘homo’ section of Infernus. No one can.” The demon grinned again, and black clots fled out of his mouth for a day’s time. “The second thing, my son, is that there is a truth here that there never was another king other than our king.”
“Oh, Father,” bled the son’s face, “can it be true?”
“It can, and is! Do you want to know who wrote their holy books — all of them? I’ll tell you…”
[The following filth was ripped up by the woman Jane Millyberg, a fellow archaeologist of Anthony Begels’. In the next life, she will turn on a spit to be plucked and pulled by all who pass by her in Infernus for her rash foolishness. The narrative continues below.]
“And yes, my son, I will reward your attentive ways of late by showing you your crowning creation in all Helldom. The delicious descriptions the Children of Hell use, when they speak of it, would fill ten volumes of fresh obscenities.
“Look here and I will show you what you do to the one who sexually tortured you and oh so willingly sent you to me, perhaps a little before your time was up. This will occur on the very last day I train you. Look here. What do you see?”
The vampiric satyr scanned the demon ruler’s urine stream. He was bathing his son with the hot liquid as he was often wont to do. It flowed constantly down through his leg pelt, and it was here that he searched for clues.
“My lord, I do see something.” And it was true. “I see me, as an impossibly massive muscular machine, glittering golden, speckled scaled flesh as hard as diamond, rising up through exploding floorboards, and concrete and tile. I throw something through the floor that has no significance whatsoever, before I turn to the other. My log-like biceps are already grasping him and turning him around so I can painfully rip into him and permanently join my member to his intestinal walls. I rip through the weak mortal flesh with no resistance.”
He had to stop for a few minutes as the father and son laughed until red tears flowed freely down their cheeks. “Oh, my lord, as I am mounting him from behind, the goodly doctor is looking back over his shoulder. His scream would shatter a mortal’s eardrum, but I drive him deeper, popping and snapping ligaments and tendons in my terror-drive! Then, oh my, I tell him, ‘I will always be with you and I will never stop pounding you, so get used to it. I will pound you into billions of infinite Earths.’ We will go deeper forever, for this is my exquisite revenge upon the one who sent me to Infernus.
“Then I see, Father, I furiously pound the man, now dead and then quite alive again. He then suffers the final change in our eternal coupling. Oh, my father, must I say this?”
“You must, my son. I pray, don’t make me tell you again.”
“I open my mouth wider and wider, and as I do, my teeth grow longer.”
“Your destiny, my beloved!” the demon bellowed, and his face burst into yellow flame.
“My teeth grow longer and thicker. I easily sink them into the top and base of his baking skull. I ride the wretch this way for all time. He never stops screaming; thus we become what is known in legend as ‘The Scream.’”
“There is now a room I must show you, my son.” The father led him into an illusion of a green forest where searing winds blew gracefully through the tops of the trees.
The Legend was mischievous and brutal about it. It is something his later students would come to expect, taking nothing he said for granted. It was now, he decided, time to tease them in this fashion for the first time.
“Students, I am now going to share with you a glorious story about a very singular tableau. It is in the beginning of The Hall of Tableaus, because it is beautiful and morosely innocent.”
