Infernus

Foolishly, the son breathed deeply of the intoxicating, enslaving fumes. In his mind, a tiny stream spoke chilly rain into his brain. “Never, never leave me. Love me forever. I am afraid.” The son looked to the father hopefully (forgetting the utter lack of hope of Infernus). There was an abundance of hopelessness in his soul.

He nodded to the father. “She is totally vulnerable. Absolutely harmless, physically.”

“Living proof of the completeness of your moronic mentality. Listen to her.”

“Just promise me that you will never send me away; that you’ll never make me go away.”

Her voice caressed the son’s mind like a wet whisper. He listened. She fell like scented feathers into his open arms, sighing, her body perfectly curving until it fit his massive, hard shell. For the first time since his awakening in Infernus, he felt afraid of fear. He looked up at the father with hissing water running from his eyes.

“Look at her now, my son.”

He did. Just in time to see a little runner sore streak across her breasts. She cried out weakly and covered her bosom. A sizzling sound. A weak ringlet of smoke escaped between her fingers. She upraised her palm to his face to show that it was white with an [infectious disease].

“My father, what is happening?”

“She is deteriorating, son. All that is beautiful must decay.”

They heard a sharp crack and saw that her head had opened, and became exposed. She lost weight so rapidly that she became a mere bag of quivering bones in his arms. Her eyes darkened and shrank and fell back into her dry sockets like raisins. She cried out as the shrinkage coursed through her tiny frame and caused unknowable pain. Her skin wrapped itself tighter and tighter around her body until the bones could be felt. Her visage changed as a fever attacked her brain and made her forget who she was, and who they were. She gurgled mindlessly and mewed and spit her teeth onto the dirt floor.

Her hips showed her bones jutting out angrily and her body began to contort as it wracked her violently with pain. Her fragile limbs were shrinking and snapping. Her hands became pencils clothed in flesh.

The son held a heaving bag of bones. She looked into his eyes, reached up with a white, thin hand and ran it over his stony face. She whispered into his shrieking brain, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I came into your life, and ruined it. Forgive me. I love you.” She then evaporated in a whirlwind of fleeing ash.

The son fell to his knees and screamed as loudly as he could, which meant that all of Infernus heard it. His pained low-pitch howls shook the walls. The fog magnified his grief and (lack of) love until it was beyond monstrous. The horror of seeing this great sorrow wrapped his heart with barbed wire.

He looked at Red. “How could you do this to me?”

“This is your dream, son, not mine. You are the cruelest bastard in all of Infernus for having thought of it at all in the first place!”

“I could never have devised anything so evil!”

“Certainly. However, you did. If it weren’t in a dream, you would not continue. What you are about to discover is so horrible, I assure you, if ye knew it beforehand, then you would not press forward. But since you shall press forward, it is living proof that it is your dream. Proceed, then, to your horror. The horror that will make you more terrible than any other demon that Infernus has ever seen.”

* * *

Electricity buzzed like bright veins on the blood walls, and loudly crackled. The moving shadow of light revealed two ambling creatures with great flapping lips and tongues hanging out. The one in front had a black and red caked chain firmly gripped in a quivering hand. It was attached to a collar that was around the neck of the one shuffling behind, shaking, each individual step, in unspeakable agony.

Both shifted along, piteously, while strings of viscous fluid bubbled and burbled from their quavering lips.

The light winked out. And the dream? Continued.

* * *

“Here’s a clue,” said the old man. “In my lovely romance, I slam three doors in your face. This last paragraph is one of them.”

Student Amanda, dressed entirely in black, stood and asked. “Why would you do this?”

“Well, what’s the point of reading books that don’t have puzzles in them?”

“Well, rather a lot, really,” she replied, without smiling.

“Not for me. As I was saying, I slam three doors in your face in chapters nineteen and twenty. If I have done my job right, I will throw so much light on them all that you will not notice which one of them cannot be real.”

“Not fair!” cried another student. “You have given us no prior clues that would lead us to believe that. How poor.”

“Oh, really,” the old man said, laughing. “Do you remember the publisher telling the archaeologist that there was something about the Red Ants Escher graphic that wasn’t right? Not real? Part of it could not be real?”[3]

“Yes.”

“Well, there was your clue. One of these three endings cannot have been real. You figure it out by yourself. You’ll get no help from me. Now, here we go to the last chapter of Infernus. Ready?”

CHAPTER TWENTY

“THE FINAL HIDE”

“Now, my son, I have one final thing to show you to complete your education. You have become the grandest, most powerful demon in all the kingdoms. I have convinced you that you, because you created all this in your imagination, are the most hateful and cruelest creature that ever existed. After all, it is merely the truth. You have fully become the vampiric satyr son, with long, glorious gray wings that can split rocks with their force and strength. The only thing left for you to do is to link eternally with the one who abused you, and sent you here — in your dream. You will link with him and become the thing known in Infernal Furnace as ‘The Scream!’ I am now going to give you the necessary push in that direction.

“You will never see my face again. In fact, your joy will be so complete, and you will be so busy, you will never wish to see me again, I assure you. As I told you before, and as you have seen in your vision, you will break through the floor of the hospital where he resides, mount him from behind with no lack of speed, because of your large member, bite through his head with your long fangs, feast on his cooking brain, and then you will ravage him over billions of miles, on many earths, throughout all eternity; your anger will never lessen in intensity, never!”

“Oh, Father, if that were only true!”

“Well, then let me show you what awaits you at the wall that no creature can pass; even I! You see, my son, on the other side of this obstruction, in all appearances a wall, there is another vast park governed by a ruling chief much like me. There are, of course, millions of such parks.”

“This brilliant podium — no, a sundial — is this what you want me to see, Father?”

In the distance, there shone, shimmering in the intense heat, a sundial. Beyond it was a wall of flame that none could breach. The image kept flowing in and out of focus in the brilliant, truly yellow flame. Even if the former man had not become a golden demon, he would have appeared thus here. Everything glowed the bright corn-yellow that burned nearly as bright as the sun. The topaz blazed against their skin harshly.

“Yessss,” he said, speaking as if the son were not standing next to him. “It stands before the wall that no creature can penetrate. There is one before every impenetrable wall. It is known as the final truth — the only truth, which I cannot express. It will cause all of your resistance to the thresholds of pain to burst at once and for all your blood to spoil. Prepare yourself to see the most hideous thing in all your life, my son. Your world will surely never be the same!”

The son approached the golden sundial.

“My father, the sundial—”

“Yes, my son, the sundial,” said the father. If he had any eyes, they would have flashed wetly and sparkled in the bright red flash emitting forth. “For this is the beginning of the truth of it!”

“The sundial is covered over with — oh, my — living letters. Letters that live! I have ne’er seen anything such as this!”