Infernus

“And ne’er shall ye e’er again, my son, after you have seen these. There will not only never be a reason to read anything else again, because of the hideousness of its messages, it is the sum total of all knowledge. It will have spent the last of your patience in these things. Just think, after you have ingested this, how many times I have been reminded of it being here. Vibrating, always vibrating. What little hope you may have had will permanently rot, when you see this, you poor tool.”

There were larger letters at the top. They shivered because they lived; there were no other words that lived but these two alone:

JESUS CHRIST

“What is this, Father? I thought you said that this was Untruth!”

“I could not have told you all of this, or any of this. This is the last betrayal. You now see, at last, the absolute lack of hope, of love, certainly. Now, if you see this, you know I have never had any love for such a one that I could have led thus far.”

The father fell to the baking plate of infernal earth and began to leak laughing tears to the floor. Even though he had brought countless sons here, it never pleased him less. The immense painful joy it brought him to play along and pretend to adore his sons, each of whom he had assured was his only son.

“The rest of the message, Father, oh, my brain is boiling. I cannot read it aloud! Hatred — ahhhhhh!” The son looked up to the vast height of the blood-encrusted ceiling and shouted, “Where are you, Doctor?” His steaming sockets searched the ceiling of Infernus.

Red reached up, roughly grabbing and turning the jaw of the massive golden demon’s head here and there, back and forth. “Look for him. Seek him out.”

“There!” the golden demon cried. “He’s there… where I was.”

“Go to him,” hissed the father.

With a hideous strength the son bellowed, “Oh, Doctor — mortal man who sent me here — I am coming for you now! Our wedding begins this very moment!”

And with a great beating of wind and heat and wings, and the strength and muscular beauty of twelve men, he launched himself into the air and crashed through the roof above.

After many millennia, the father was able to stop laughing long enough to approach the podium and read aloud the final message that had so enraged the worm. He could not circumvent the significance; neither could he get his mind around it. Apparently mortals, or former mortals, could comprehend it on some level, which he never ceased to find a constant source of humor. He was tempted to gaze longingly at it when he wanted his torture to be most keen.

“There is no other name under heaven

Given to men by which we must be saved.”

Acts 4:12

* * *

In his white clinical office, the small pock-faced doctor took in the News, leaned back in his vastly oversized chair and sighed. “You’re sure, he, uh, Dr. Mountfountain is dead, Carl?”

“Yes, sir, multiple shock treatments are much too stressful on any system for such a long time, Doctor, I am afraid.”

“Afraid?” the other replied, looking out a window wistfully, hopelessly. Now, everything is ruined, he thought. “I’m not afraid of anything. Not really. Well, I suppose we’ll need to put him with the others.”

Carl’s eyes narrowed. “Dump him in the caverns? When is this going to stop?”

“Don’t reproach me, my friend. I am — no, we are — conducting valuable research.”

“We were doing valuable research, Doctor. You had a very personal thing with this ‘patient.’ It repulsed me — it’s still repulsive. And at what cost are we doing this?” He looked at the little dark man and hated him, a new fleshly hatred.

“All of this will cost me nothing but dollars, Carl. He has no family; I know, okay? Nothing but dollars.” He stood up. “Where is he, the body, I mean? Take me to him.”

* * *

The lab was cold and lit in a vibrating cool blue. In the center of the room, where many stainless steel tables stood, there was one distinctive surface. It is to this table that they shuffled their feet forward. A white sheet covered the still form of a person.

The little doctor pulled back the slippery, clean shroud to stare into the eternally expressionless face. Here was a simple nobility; a handsomeness that cannot be bought, only envied; a quiet dignity the little man could never achieve in his frantic existence and, he now at last knew, was neither able to remove from Mountfountain or take it for himself.

“His character,” he said before he could stop himself, then blushing, noticing Carl gazing at him out of the corner of his eye.

“Pardon me?” Carl asked, puzzled. It struck him what the little doctor meant. He smiled wryly, pitifully, and then shook his head. “Be honest, Doctor. Off the record. What was it you were hoping he could tell you?”

“I wish I knew, Carl. I wish I knew. At this moment, I am perhaps more confused than I’ve ever been in my whole life.” He began to unbuckle his belt. “Carl, I wish you to witness my farewell to the good doctor here. Would you please do me the honor of doing just that?”

His pants slid to the floor. He slowly, ritualistically removed his lab coat.

Carl pursed his lips, slowly shook his head, clasped his hands behind his back until his knuckles grew white and his fingers grew numb, and spread his stance wide. “As you wish, Doctor.”

“What was that?” the small doctor asked, his hand on the covered crotch of the dead man. “I heard a noise.”

They both listened with focused hearing and thought they heard, faintly, a low rumbling.

“Listen there, it sounds like metal bands, or something, snapping.” The little man bent to pull his pants up from around his ankles.

“No, Doctor!” Carl was becoming agitated quickly. It now dawned on him what it was. “It sounds like an earthquake!”

He made a move for the swinging double-doors. The floor in front of them heaved instantly upward and belched forth rock and mud, and the foulest single odor Carl could ever recall smelling. The room filled with shrapnel that looked like lightning.

What flashed upward through it in a blur was impossible! In the last few seconds of his life, Carl saw a golden beast, completely covered with jet-black wiry hair. The creature had the most piercing, yellowed tiger-eyes he had ever seen; they were filled with intelligence and, especially, malice. As the beast burst through the hole, it unfurled its large gray wings, and smashed their dark gray knuckles at the ceiling like monstrous fists (BOOM!), pulverizing the ceiling tiles (Carl felt the thunder all the way down into his feet), then settled them down behind him in a matter of seconds. A long, thick member swung freely, unashamedly, between its legs. Great tiger fangs yellowed, flashed in his sore-filled, bleeding mouth. Splats of emerald and crimson chunks fled to the floor all around its massive, scaled hooves. Carl’s pants instantly filled with warm feces. The beast threw a great fist filled with razor talons at Carl’s head. He thought —

-Crack!

The vampire satyr threw Carl through the space in the floor with such force, by the cracked top of his head, that when he struck the rocks below, the body evaporated in a shower of sparkling red spray.

Carl would never know (until his training below was well underway), that the dried, shriveled rope hanging from a massively muscled bicep was a piece of roasted entrail. Later, he stayed inside a blood-bricked wall in a forgotten corridor. What appeared to be clenched between his teeth, sending sparks inside his brain, was a live wire. He was having some fun now!

After a few moments, the demon lost interest in the red-wine spray. It (he) had stopped chuckling and rumbling. It stood up to its full height and allowed all of itself that was to fall upon the little doctor’s soul. It threw out its chest, and in doing so, perhaps accidentally, the wings flew back and shattered an entire wall of glass and