Infernus

fiercely glowing furnace. The heat was so intense that the son wondered if he had ever felt anything so wild in his life. It caused the machine to expand and retract without cease; probably intensifying the temperature to unimaginable heights the whole while. The son felt an internal giggle-fest coming on and satisfaction seethed within his shrieking chest.

A child-sized skeleton was whacking the bottom with the speed of a hummingbird’s wings. Red drew near and asked him to hold still for one moment. A strangely adult voice came forth from somewhere within the bones as it stopped whacking the pulped gray bottom.

“I will only hold for a moment. I must be about my eternal pleasure-quest.”

“Quick, son, read what is on the paddle. Quick, now, approach softly.”

The son did so and saw right before the skeleton began swinging again. “’Fathers, love your children and do not exasperate them.’ You mean-”

“Yes, my son. This creature dreamed of a world where he was a dogma deliverer and he had a woman who bore him this son. Foolish dreamer; he was only remembering his future. He only dreamed he killed the son so that he might feel better about being treated thusly here. He stripped the son of all his flesh in that other world, then poured salt on the wounds. What he really did was serve his ego and play like he was one of the gods. He thought, ‘If I kill the son in the dream state, maybe he will cease to exist in reality.’ How foolish.”

“Shall we find paddles and swing to our purpose, Father?”

“Yes, let’s.”

They found many paddles resting on the wall on the other side of the oven. The son chose one that said, “If you have love for another, they will know you!” The father snatched one that was covered with teeny writing. “Take the log out of your own eye first, then you will see the microscopic speck in your brother’s eye!” There the vampiric satyr son also found settings on the oven to increase the heat, and did so to an impossible level, then laughed. The father was already swinging the paddle with blurring speed against the man’s belly and exposed genitals. The son joined in and began applying the paddle to his backside. They enjoyed millennia doing this. It never grew tiring or boring. It was indeed a pleasure-quest.

“Is there anything that can be done,” the son asked, “to make this machine glow white-hot for many lifetimes?” He was smiling with a foot-wide grin.

The child-sized skeleton approached them and spoke matter-of-factly. “If you fill the iron beast’s stomach with metal ingots from that pile, I trust it will test the metal’s ability to endure for thousands of lifetimes.”

“Will the piglet squeal?” the son asked, his smile widening.

The child-skeleton grandly waved his arm around the room. “See. See.”

So the father and son filled the iron beast with metal bars until they were forced to withdraw from the roaring heat. The room instantly burned a violent gold as the heat could be felt, even in their bones.

The piglet within, if it was possible, screamed even louder and more earnestly than before. His golden legs pumped furiously but futilely. This had happened many millions of times before, the father explained between belly laughs. And it was always greeted with exactly the same response.

The son saw radiant amber fissures ripping along the surface of the machine, thick golden veins running down the metal cylinder, pulsing, threatening to burst its seams, and nearly firing liquid ore upon the pleased observers.

All within the room burned glittering gold, but the broiling creature locked deep within the embrace of the iron beast shrieked and shrieked, and the father and son laughed louder and longer. Longer and louder.

* * *

“My son, look at this stupid woman. She thought she was doing her gods a great service by having other people put to death because they did not believe in her dogma church.”

“Oh, Father, this is almost hideous, if it weren’t so funny. Look!”

“What do you see, my golden son; for behold, that is what you are becoming!” It was true. The son’s skin was becoming shiny and gold. “It is from supping on the buttocks of the golden demon. It sets you up to be great in size and the most powerful of the demons here in the real world.”

“My father, it is of no consequence to me. What I see is this: the wench is revolving over heated rocks on a spit that has pierced her anus and protrudes from her mouth. Oh, how slowly she turns. Many bruised and broken bodies are gathered around her, and they are shoving long metal poles in all of her openings.”

“Yes,” Red said, stifling a snigger, “and making new ones.”

A swollen, bloated man (or woman) approached her spinning corpse and inserted a long fork into both of her orbital sockets. It plunged them in and out. Many others did the same. Her breasts were slit. Green pus ran out and splashed on the rocks, heating them hotter still.

“Is this good for her, my son, or can you think of other delicious things to do to her? She was, after all, a queen in her day when the Horse Nebula was first discovered in the distant skies.”

“I can think of something to do to her which will please me greatly.”

“Good, go to it with a hearty will.”

As the son approached her, she seemed to look helplessly at him with her shattered, ragged eyes. Pity, was it? The son grabbed her sweaty green locks that clung to her wet shoulders. He pulled with all his might, which was considerable. She couldn’t scream any louder, so she continued as before, unabated. The son felt the scalp give way and he threw the hair onto the rocks to watch them curl and smoke and stink.

“Bravo, son, you have done well. Come here.”

The son returned to the father’s side and had to wait until he could undouble from his laughter. “My son, I am permitted to give you a gift at this time. Sink your beautiful aching teeth into my shoulder and draw from a true Well of Strength. Sup on your father’s Red blood and be even stronger than ordinary Golden demons.”

The son grabbed the father’s shoulder in his growing talons and steadied him as he bit into what tasted like the most delicious fruit of all time. He supped long and hard at this, and felt strengthened beyond description. The father, weakened, fell to the heated rocks, unconscious for a [fortnight] time and a few times. The son heard the head crack wetly and laughed. Completely void of any empathy, he shrugged his great shoulders, and waited for the father to regain enough strength to stand and continue the training.

* * *

“Look, my son, at the greatest preachers of all time.” Red pointed to a most heated exhibit. Before he could explain what he was seeing, the son was falling into a boiling pool of urine, laughing mindlessly. “Now, stop that, filth! I must tell you what it is.”

It was a garden of heated sand squares. Each square had diamond borders that rose from the floor only an inch or two. All preachers that occupied these millions and millions of shapes were bound, so it was irrelevant that little divided them.

“Look at this fool, my son. He is suspended in space, connected by his arms and legs to the roof of this cave by chains. Imagine how it must be to die forever without the energy to even feel your dislocated sockets. But, even more horrible, he cannot move — his arms and legs are pulled up behind him, deliciously, hideously. He must silently face the message handwritten in the sand that is heated to seven million degrees below him. His mouth, all mouths of the enslaved here, are very crudely sewn shut with large embalmer’s hooks. See how his wounds are millions of years old, yet never healing, never scabbing over? What is the message written by a demon that hates him even more than I hate you? What does it say that heats his head and sears his eyes but he must read forever? It is cruel, but it must be read, and loudly.”

“Oh, Father-” The son fell to the ground and fitfully laughed until great blisters arose on his scalp and popped into pustules of thin liquid. “May I mount him and take his virginity billions of times for his foolishness? Oh, great, bastard Father?”

“Yes, you may, but I must warn you, his ‘virginity’ you speak of has been removed many billions of times ago. There is naught of it left.”

The son mounted the preacher and roughly forced his large member into the rotund man, and fell to raping him with a grace hitherto unthought-of, and he screamed the message out loud directly into the ears of the bastard that lay silently below him. He felt the chain pull on all the sockets and sinews of the roasting preacher who was baked into jerky. But no bone snapped as each thrust of the joyous vampiric satyr strained with all the hated power of his massive, muscular, rippling body.