“Your tattoos?” asked Caz.
“Berserk,” said Harry.
“Any ideas?”
“None I like.”
9
The entire wood was in a bewildering complex motion, the air around the Hell Priest a cosmos of mote-freighted paths, so elaborately intertwined that in places they formed knots through which the traffic of light fragments continued to flow. Shock waves spread from the spot in all directions, their force pressing the bright dust away from the epicenter, creating in the process an expanding sphere of steadily more concentrated matter.
“Get inside,” the Hell Priest said to Felixson, who had retreated into the softened thicket as a safe place from which to watch the events unfold.
He trusted his master and immediately did as he was instructed, moving out of the thicket. Still crouched over, he stepped through the wall of flaming brush. It was quick, but it wasn’t pleasant. The hair on his head and body was instantly seared off. The clothes he had made himself in a pitiful attempt at propriety burned to gray ash in a second, adding fire to cleanse his groin. He now looked like a child down there, he thought, his manhood reduced to a nub, his balls tight against his body. But he was safe inside the still-expanding sphere, and close to his master.
Then the Hell Priest quickly scrawled something upon the air, leaving a few black characters in front of him. “I’m unlocking the restraints I put on your memory.”
“Re … traints?”
“Of course. Without them, you would have gone mad long ago. But I have need of your assistance. There. A small part of what you knew has been restored. Use it sparingly, and in my service, and I will reward you with more, by increments.”
A few narrow doors had suddenly opened in Felixson’s head, each one a book, its contents a piece of his power. The knowledge brought with it a tiny piece of his history and he was suddenly mortified at his state: a freakish, prostrate gibberer, his hairless groin and inadequate genitals humiliating. He would cover himself as soon as he had an opportunity. But for now he put the problem of his metaphorical and literal nakedness aside and returned his attentions to his master.
“The gift is most welcome, Master,” he said, finding that the power to form a coherent sentence had also been restored. Whether it was on purpose or an unintended side effect of his master’s working, Felixson knew not, but he knew enough not to question it.
“Remember that,” said the Hell Priest.
“Of course. Your generosity—”
“Not the gift, Felixson. Master. Remember my name. Forget it for an instant and I’ll wipe you clean. You won’t even remember to crouch when you shit.”
“Yes, Master.”
As he trembled, his mind filled with doors opening and closing in howling winds that had sprung up from compass points he could not even name, and in those winds came words and phrases arbitrarily loosed from the remembered pages.
The place where he had stepped into the blazing thicket was becoming brighter by orders of magnitude. So bright indeed that Felixson had to avert his eyes and, shielding his face with his right hand, he studied what he could see at this oblique angle. The Hell Priest wasn’t smiling now; Felixson was fairly certain of that. Indeed there were signs suggesting that even the Hell Priest was taken aback by the scale of this eruption.
“Watch,” the Cenobite had said, “every detail.” And then the remark from which Felixson had taken the greatest comfort: “The future will want to know.”
How much better might the Hell Priest be persuaded to treat him now that he wasn’t simply a naked runt of a man but had witnessed a part of his master’s journey toward apotheosis? Nor was it just any part; it was the beginning he’d witnessed, the purging of the old, the piercing of his flesh, and the striking of a spark that was going to blossom, if he judged the Priest’s nature and ambition correctly, into the conflagrations that would change the shape of history forever.
Felixson’s speculations ceased there. The Hell Priest was walking toward the ignited air, and Felixson followed step for step. The brightness divided around them, but not without leaving traces of its energies that, as they advanced, broke against their faces.
The effect upon Felixson was not unlike that of his first snort of very pure cocaine—the heart quickening, the skin suddenly hot, the senses more alert. The sudden rush of confidence was there too, and it made Felixson want to pick up the pace of their advance, eager to see what, or who, lay on the other side of this bright passage.
Felixson saw a sliver of that other place now: specifically, a dark street, by night, with some figures retreating from the spot where he and his master were emerging. Felixson was disappointed. This wasn’t the way he’d expected it to be, not at all.
They were almost at the end of their passage now: two more steps and the Hell Priest was standing on asphalt—another two and Felixson had joined him. This was the place where Felixson had done his time wearing the mask of a magic man—Earth—and memories flooded him. It wasn’t the sight of the street and the dark houses that pricked Felixson’s memory most deeply, however; it was the smell of the city air and of the sidewalks. A feeling of intense loss overwhelmed him for a moment as he thought of his once-charmed life—of love, and magic, and friends, all of it, and all of them, dead.
If he hadn’t quickly governed himself, tears would have blinded him and this outward display of weakness on this of all occasions would have been the end of him. His punishment, he knew, would be severe in contrast to the already-limitless acts of unspeakable butchery that could be found in his master’s grimoire.
It was difficult after the blaze of the passage and the onslaught of familiar, unwanted recollections to make much more than rudimentary sense of the scene into which he and his master had stepped: lightless street, lightless houses, lightless sky, and some figures, visible only because they were illuminated by the wash of brightness from the fire-framed door through which he and his master had emerged.
A young woman caught his eye first, her loveliness a welcome respite from the innumerable forms of ugliness that existed in the place he had just left behind. But there was nothing welcoming on her face. Her gaze was fixed on the Cenobite, of course, and while she watched him her lips moved, though he could not catch a word of what she was saying.
“D’Amour!” the Hell Priest called, his voice, though never loud, easily heard.
Felixson turned, startled by his master’s words. They had come back to Earth for the detective. They had come back, Felixson assumed, to finish what they’d started in New Orleans.
Felixson, naked as the day he was born, searched the musk for the man his master was summoning. There was a short man who wielded a machete and a bemused look. Next to him was a tall, broken-nosed fellow who seemed to be protecting a blind black woman. Like the younger woman, there was no hint of welcome in her expression; she had curses on her lips, no doubt of that.
And then, from the darkness off to their left, much closer to the doorway than any of the others, walked a man with a face that showed the marks of a life lived hard. Felixson had only a moment to scan the man’s scars, because the man’s eyes demanded his attention and they would not be denied. He seemed to look at both the Hell Priest and Felixson at the same time.
“Nobody touched your goddamned box,” D’Amour said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I no longer have need for the box and its games,” the Hell Priest said. “I have begun my sublime labor.”
“What in fuck’s fuck are you talking about?” said Harry, tightening his grip on the knife Caz had given him.
“I have brought an end to my Order, so as to begin an endeavor I have been planning for most of your life. A life, it would seem, that refuses to be snuffed out. You have survived that which no man ought. I have given great thought to the choice of eyes that should witness the birth of the new world. I have need for a mind that will preserve the events that are to unfold from this moment on. I have chosen you, Harry D’Amour.”
>
“What? Me? What about fuckstick over there?” He threw a ragged gesture out toward Felixson. “Why not him?”
“Because Hell has made you its business. Or you have made Hell yours. Perhaps both. I would be excused nothing by a witness such as you. Indeed I encourage you to seek out the tiniest sign of frailty in me and, should you find any, magnify it in your final testament.”
“My final testament?”
“You won’t simply witness what is going to unfold in Hell from this point outward; you will make a testament of it, wherein my acts and my philosophies will be recounted in full detail. They will be my Gospels, and I will forbid you nothing in their chapters and verses, as long as it is observed truth, however far from my ideal of myself I may fall.
“Your job is to witness. To see and remember; changed perhaps by the sights you will have seen, but amply rewarded.”
Norma reached out to D’Amour, starting toward him, but Caz caught hold of her arm and gently restrained her. He couldn’t restrain her tongue, however.
“I know how these deals end up,” Norma said. “There’s always a catch. Always a trick.”
“I have made my intention clear,” the Hell Priest said. “What is your decision, Detective?”
“Somehow the words ‘fuck you’ don’t seem strong enough,” Harry said.
As if in response to the Priest’s anger, the flames around the fiery door suddenly lost the parity of their brightness, tainted by the darker colors, as though something was being burned alive, its boiling blood darkening the blaze. Pieces of its fire-withered stuff tumbled from the walls of conflagration, sending up columns of black-gray smoke that eclipsed the flames.
“What part of ‘fuck you’ don’t you understand?” Lana said.
The demon uttered an indecipherable order as he made a counterclockwise flick of the wrist. The action sent Lana flying across the street at speed. She crashed against a chain-link fence, knocked unconscious before her head even hit the ground. Though the demon’s incantation went unheard, his message was clear; the demon possessed a power he wasn’t supposed to have.
“What is your answer now, Detective?” the demon said.
By way of reply, Harry pulled out his gun and walked toward the Cenobite, firing as he did so. He didn’t bother wasting bullets on the torso—even minor demons could take a lot of lead and not be slowed by it. Instead he aimed for the head. If he could, he’d take out the bastard fuck’s eyes, Harry thought. He leveled the Colt, aiming as carefully as speed would allow, and fired. The bullet entered the Cenobite’s cheek an inch below the left eye, and the force of it jerked back his head. He didn’t lift it again, and this offered Harry a clear shot at the creature’s throat, which he took. It opened a hole in the middle of his throat, and air whistled out.
From behind him Harry heard Norma yelling, “Let go of me! Harry? Help me!”
Harry glanced back to see that Pinhead’s accomplice had slipped past Caz and had grabbed hold of Norma’s hair. He held a crescent-bladed knife, like a small scythe, pressed to the lower portion of her abdomen. By the crazed look in his eyes and the vicious way he pushed the point of the weapon into her it was clear that he would be happy to eviscerate her if Harry or his compatriots made one false move. Caz held his lanky arms in the air and was pleading with the thing.
“Take me,” Caz said. “Let her go.”
“I like them vulnerable,” Felixson said, backing away toward the hell gate.
Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw that Dale was making a slow move toward the magician, apparently unnoticed. Harry felt a momentary sense of relief. And then the Priest uttered an incantation. Harry felt a stinging in his sinuses and turned to see that the Cenobite was leaking a dark, ominous ooze that was so potent it was dissolving the asphalt upon which it fell.
The black ooze was a dark blood that ran from the wounds Harry had inflicted in the demon. The blood followed the lines of the scars on the Cenobite’s face—down, across, down, across—until the drops cascaded down his neck and forked off toward each arm.
The blood dance held Harry’s gaze for a long moment, long enough for the power accruing in his adversary’s hands to reach critical mass. The Priest flicked his hands toward Harry and a few stinging flecks of the black venom broke loose and burned Harry’s gun hand.
An idea formed in Harry’s mind, and before he had time to rethink it he advanced toward Pinhead, taking off his jacket. As he did so, Pinhead unleashed another burst of his murderous mud that Harry quickly dodged. Harry was determined not to give the bastard a third chance.
“What are you doing, D’Amour?” Pinhead demanded.
As if in answer, D’Amour wrapped his jacket around his hands, and then, with no time to formulate a clear plan, he used it to catch hold of the demon’s arms. It was a move that had proved effective before, so, Harry thought, it couldn’t hurt to attempt it a second time.
Pinhead let out a cry that had a measure of fury in it but was mostly repugnance and outrage. The wild thought flashed through Harry’s mind like sweet lightning. And his notion proved true. The demon had for so long lived uncontaminated by the proximity and, certainly, the touch of humanity that a rush of revulsion passed through him and momentarily gave Harry the advantage. He used it. Before the demon could entirely regovern his will, Harry pressed the demon’s arm toward the ground between them. The churning filth continued to erupt from the creature’s fingers, the asphalt it struck cracking and scattering fragments in all directions.
Harry wrenched the creature around, but with such violence and suddenness that the flow of filth emanating from his arms was spat off into the dark street. It hit Caz’s van, the metal shrieking as it was torn open, the muck apparently throwing itself around inside the vehicle, causing more damage than seemed possible.
Five seconds later the gas tank exploded in a fat blossom of yellow and orange fire. There apparently was something combustible in Pinhead’s killing muck, because the flame instantly followed the trail of filth back toward the demon.
It came with incredible speed, faster even than the demon could summon the words to extinguish it, and crawled up the poisonous arms that Harry had been gripping. Harry had barely let go of the remnants of his jacket, which was all but eaten away, when the fire consumed it and a burst of searing energy struck him so hard he was hurled to the ground.
The demon was blown back, and the conjuration of poison and flammable filth seeping from his arms disappeared as though it had never existed. The demon rose to his feet and tried once more to concentrate his efforts on reclaiming the mystical killing force of his black blood.
The trouble was that this magic wasn’t any part of his training as a Cenobite; it was something he learned from an obscure magical treatise—the Tresstree Sangre Vinniculum. He had been certain he’d mastered it, but there was instability in the summoned matter that the treatise had made no mention of: once a taunting element had been introduced—D’Amour’s filthy presence at the Cenobite’s left, the fire on the right—the equations were catastrophically thrown off.
Had he exited Hell using the conventional methods, he simply could have utilized his hooked weapons of choice, but that option was no longer available to him. And in calmer circumstances he would have quickly scanned the contaminating outside forces and dispatched them, but with the confusion of the moment and his defenses compromised he had no option but to retreat.
He took three quick backward steps toward the threshold, looking for Felixson as he did so. The Priest noted that, to Felixson’s credit, he had taken hold of the blind woman, whom he’d judged to be the second-likeliest source of trouble on this field of battle.
Felixson’s maneuver had had the effect of driving the whole of Harry’s entourage back. The two males, one a wan, brutish thing, the other a diminutive fey specimen, were on their knees, in thrall to an incantation of dubious efficacy.
Both men were forcibly resisting; the taller of the two’s body was twitching with the effort
it took to pull himself up, but it was clear that he was seconds from breaking free of Felixson’s magic manacles. Clearly, there was nothing to do but go and leave D’Amour and his allies to the elements. However, given the strength he sensed in the attachment between D’Amour and the blind woman, the demon realized that something could still be recovered from this failed coup.
“Felixson! Bring the blind meat with you.”
“Don’t you fucking dare!” D’Amour shouted.
As ever, the magician was quick to obey his master’s words and, ignoring D’Amour and his empty threat, pulled Norma toward the burning door, dick and balls flapping as he wrenched her closer to its fiery archway. She fought furiously, scratching and kicking at Felixson over and over, but none of her blows were powerful enough to make him release his grip.
The scene was too much for Harry: the all-too-crisp night air, the scent of infernal fire, the imminent loss of another partner at the hands of a malformed beast. The combination was too specific in its repetition to be believed and it rendered Harry utterly immobile.
When the magician turned, the last of his powers over Caz and Dale went out. Caz, freed from Felixson’s hold, got to his feet and immediately went in pursuit of Norma. But Felixson had gained the door by now and in a few strides he and his captive were through it and gone from sight, leaving only the demon on the threshold.
Lana had finally regained consciousness and picked herself up from off the ground, though her short waking exposure to Pinhead’s toxic secretion had left her feeling nauseated and unsteady. The demon disregarded them entirely. He continued to step back through the gate and into the bright passageway beyond. In that little time, the flames from which the door was formed had already started to diminish.
“Do something!” a man’s voice said somewhere very far from Harry. “Jesus Christ! Harold! Fucking wake up!”