Harry snapped to attention. It was Caz who had been screaming at him. He looked about and found that his friends were bruised and battered but heading directly toward him, toward the porthole through which one of the most notorious demons in Hell’s army had just fled with his best friend. Harry realized he had no time for measured decisions; he had to move, but quick.
“Right behind you, asshole,” he heard himself say.
Hell had come for Harry D’Amour on this street and, failing to catch him, had taken Norma Paine instead. Now Harry would go after her, even if he had to go alone. Without even thinking, Harry leaped through the gate.
Harry heard Caz yell something behind him, but with the flames dying out and the passage through becoming harder and harder to see Harry didn’t dare risk looking back. Another two, three strides and he drew a breath that was denser—no, dirtier—than the breath that had preceded it. And two strides later he ran into what felt like fresh cloths hauled from a pail of hot water and shit being pressed against his face and thrust down his throat as though to smother him.
His momentum faltered, his heart hammering as he tried to keep panic from overcoming him. It was the greatest of his terrors—smothering—and he was sorely tempted to retreat a step, or two, or three, back into the crisp, merciful air of the world at his back. But his friends were at his back now.
“Fuck. Me,” Lana said in short, suffocated bursts.
Harry looked at them with disbelief in his shit-teared eyes.
“This is my fight. You have to go back,” Harry said.
“My dream told me to be here,” Dale said. “And here I will stay.”
“We’re not leaving you, or Norma, behind,” Caz said.
“No way,” said Lana.
“You guys sure about this?” said Harry.
“Not at all,” said Caz.
Harry nodded. They pressed on. No more was said as they made their way through the miasma, never once looking back.
10
From the first, Hell surprised them—even Harry, who had caught a fleeting glimpse of its geography in Louisiana. They stepped out to the other side of the place of passage into a far from unpleasant sight: a grove in a forest of antediluvian trees, their branches so weighed down with age that a small child could have picked the large, dark-purple-skinned fruit simply by reaching up. However, none such child had been on duty to harvest the fruits and as a result they littered the ground, the sickly stink of their corruption only one part of the stew of smells that had added its own particular horror to the oppressive stench that had stopped Harry in his tracks as he’d passed from Earth into Hell.
“Goddamn,” Lana said, “I thought the roaches in my apartment were big.” She was looking down at the brown-black insects that appeared to have a close familial relation to the common cockroach, the main difference being they were perhaps six times larger. They covered the ground at the base of the trees, devouring the food that had fallen there. The sound of their brittle bodies rubbing against one another, and of their busy mouthparts devouring the fruit, filled the grove.
“Anybody see Pinhead?” Harry said.
“Is that his name?” Lana said. “Pinhead?”
“It’s a name I know he hates.”
“I can see why,” Dale said, chuckling to himself. “It’s not a very kind nickname. Or even accurate for that matter.”
“Is he some kind of big noise in Hell?” Caz asked.
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I’m sure he thinks so. I just want to get Norma back and fuck off out of here.”
“That’s a good plan in theory. But the execution might prove a bit more difficult,” said Caz, gesturing toward the door through which they’d come, or rather toward the place where it had once stood. The door was no longer there.
“I’m sure we’ll find a way out,” Harry said. “It’s easy enough to get in. We should all—”
“Back off, you little freak!” Lana shrieked, interrupting Harry’s suggestion.
It didn’t take long to figure out why. Dale was wiping blood from the knife Caz had given him. Without warning, he had stuck a knife into the meat of Lana’s palm. It was a nasty wound. When Caz caught hold of Lana, whose face was already gray and clammy, he persuaded her to raise her hand and keep it raised so the blood could drain. The blood coursed down her arm, soaking her blouse in the process.
“What the fuck!” Lana blurted. “I’ll kill you!”
Caz maintained his hold on her. Dale cracked a mischievous smile. Harry moved between them as a buffer and faced Dale, closing his hand around the hilt of his knife once more.
“Mind explaining what the fuck that was, Dale?” Harry asked.
“He’s fucked! What else do you need to know?” Lana said.
“Dreadfully sorry. Really I am. It simply needed to be done. The dreams told me. I recognized the moment and got swept up in it.”
“I think your friend might be disturbed, Harold,” said Caz.
“I’m gonna be sick,” Lana said.
“No, you’re not,” Caz told her. “Don’t look at your hand. Look at me.” He shrugged off his battered leather vest and pulled off his black T-shirt, tearing it up into bandage-width strips. “I’ll have all of this out of sight in just a few seconds,” he promised Lana. “You’re going to be fine.”
“This fucking sucks. That’s the hand I use for … uh … you know.”
Caz smiled, doing his best to get the wound bound tightly enough to stop the flow of blood. Harry, meanwhile, watched Dale closely, who was trying his best to apologize. But his supplication fell on deaf ears.
None of Harry’s alarms were sounding when he pointed them toward the diminutive man, but then again he was smack-dab in the middle of that no-longer-fabled land where villains were supposedly dealt their karmic justice and, as a result, his tattoos were behaving erratically. Harry went with good old-fashioned intuition and separated Dale from the group.
“You’re on probation,” Harry said. “Out in front. Any other tricks and I let Lana have her way with you.”
“Can’t I now?” Lana said.
“Just wait,” Dale said. “You’ll see. The dreams are never wrong. I found you, didn’t I, Harry?”
There was silence for several seconds, at least among the two-legged occupants of the grove. The roaches continued their seething sibilant song among the decaying fruits.
Finally, Harry spoke, ignoring Dale’s question.
“Let’s prioritize here. At the risk of stating the obvious, this isn’t going to be easy. We need to find Norma as fast as we can, avoid the powerful demon that wants me as his slave, and then get the fuck out of Hell. I’m sure we’ll encounter some heinous, unthinkable, soul-scarring shit along the way, but hopefully we all make it out alive.”
His friends fell silent. Lana gripped the tender flesh of her wounded hand close to her chest and snorted, “Good pep talk, Coach. I feel much better now.”
11
Norma had been sitting what she judged to be many hours now in a darkness within a darkness. For the first time in her life she saw nothing at all. Her blindness oppressed her. She longed to be cured of it—to be able to see something of the demon and his human underling, the one with the breath of a man who had an ulcerous stomach. Though the world as sighted people saw it was a closed book to her, she saw what they could not: the presence of phantoms—everywhere—their faces, ripe with need and unspent passion, trailing their hunger like pollen from flowers that were past their hour but refused to wither and disappear.
These sights had been, until now, more than adequate compensation for whatever spectacles she’d been denied. She had envied the sighted masses who walked the streets below her apartment nothing as long as she had her ghosts. But there were no ghosts here. She heard the dusty whispering that she knew was a sign of their presence, but no matter how loudly she called out to them, no matter how hard she willed them to appear, they would not come.
“You are alone,” the Cenobi
te said.
She flinched. She had not heard him come in. It made her uneasy. Usually she knew in her bones when something—anything—was nearby. But the demon was quiet. Too quiet. And he stank. God almighty, he stank! Her sensitivity to the nuances of smell was another gift of her sightlessness, and this creature stank to high heaven. This was a being who trafficked, of course, with demons; their countless varieties of bitterness were all over him. So too was blood, as of the overpowering scent off a butcher’s apron. Whiffs of it came off whatever instruments of hurt hung from his waist.
But the strongest scent was also the oldest—it was the perfume of his transgressions. There were other smells too, some of which she could name—incense, books, sweat—and far, far more that she had no name for.
He had spoken to her scarcely at all except to remind, as if she did not already know, that he was an expert in the provision of suffering and that if she did anything to irritate him she would instantly have firsthand knowledge of his expertise. Only when her nerve endings and her sanity had given up (“and only then,” he had said) would she be granted an undignified death.
So she had not moved.
She’d stayed in the darkness within the darkness and done her best to reach out past the horrors to some comforting memory: the face of a happy revenant, one whom she’d directed to the place where his loved ones would be, or the fine, happy times she’d had with Harry and a bottle of brandy, reminiscing about some shared craziness. But for some reason the memories gave her no pleasure now. There was a stone in her stomach and it weighed her down, stopping her from flying off into the past.
She was therefore glad, in point of fact, that the demon had finally condescended to come back into her presence, even with his bitter scents invading her senses. In that, she was at least saved from boredom.
“The detective and his band of misfits will surely have come for you,” he said. “I will keep you alive. Despite your friend’s protestations, he has already begun his work as my witness.”
Then, without warning, he hit her in the stomach. The blow bent her double. There she stayed, gasping for air. Before she could catch her breath, he went at her face with a left, then a right, then another left, each blow a loud, stupefying sound in her head. There was a moment’s hiatus, and then he came back at her, physically unbending her by seizing hold of her shoulders and lifting her up as he threw her against the wall. Again the breath went from her, and her legs, which were going increasingly numb, threatened to fold up beneath her.
“No,” he said as she began to slide. “You stay standing.”
He put his right hand around her throat to hold her head up and with his left proceeded to strike her again and again, delivering hammering blows to her liver, her heart, her kidneys, to her breasts, to her gut, to her sex, and then up to her heart again, twice, three times, and down through the same already tender, aching places.
It was pleasure he was feeling, she was certain. Even now, as she barely held on to consciousness, some part of her that could never relinquish the study of body language heard the little exhalations of contentment emerge from the demon when he stood back for a moment and reveled in the tears and anguish on her bloodied and swollen face.
She felt his stare like a subtle pressure upon her, and knowing that he was finding joy in her suffering, she pulled together every thread of strength in her soul and she brought those tears up behind her face to deny him the satisfaction. She knew it would piss him off, and that knowledge only strengthened her.
She closed her mouth and coaxed the threads of strength into turning up the corners of her lips into a Gioconda smile. Her eyes she also closed, slowly lowering her lids to conceal from him her frailty. There would be no more tears now, nor shouts of pain. The threads had sewn the expression in place. It was a mask; whatever she truly felt was hidden behind it, unreachable.
He released the clamp of his hand from her neck, and she slid down the wall, her legs folding up beneath her. He pressed his booted foot against her shoulder, and she toppled over. After that, he delivered one vicious kick to her body, cracking several ribs, and another to her throat, which really tested the strength of her mask. It held, however. Knowing what was coming next, she tried to bring her hand up to her face to protect it, but she wasn’t fast enough. His boot got there first, one straight kick to the face, blood bursting from her nose. Another kick at her face and now, finally, she felt the darkness within a darkness wrapping her in its blanket of nullity, and she was grateful for its imminence. The demon raised his foot and brought the boot down hard on the side of her head. It was the last thing she felt.
Oh Christ, she thought, I can’t be dead! I’ve so much left unfinished!
Funny, she didn’t feel dead, but then wasn’t that the most common thing she heard from her visitors? And if she wasn’t dead, why could she see for the first time? And why was she hovering nine or ten feet above the place where her body lay against the wall?
The demon—what did Harry call him? Dick face? Pinprick? Pinhead! That was it. He was backing away from her, his breathing ragged. It had taken no little effort for the Cenobite to brutalize her the way he had. And having stepped away, he changed his mind and approached her again, kicking her hands away from her face.
He’d made a real mess of her, no doubt about that, but she was very pleased to see that her enigmatic smile was still in place, defying him. There was a sliver of satisfaction in that, no question, however hard the rest of the news was to take.
Aside from the obvious, she found it impossible to think of the demon as a Pinhead. That was a school-yard insult or the name of a pitiful sideshow freak. It did not belong to the monster standing over her body now, his body shaking with excitement from the beating he had just delivered.
The demon retreated a few more steps, still looking at what his brutality had achieved, and then reluctantly withdrew his gaze and turned his attention to the little weasel of a man who had just entered the room and was lingering by the door. She knew without need to hear his voice that this was the creature who’d first caught hold of her on the street back in New York, whispering all manner of obscene threats into her ear to keep her from resisting his hold on her. He was more pitiful to look at than she’d imagined, a wizened gray thing, throwing peasant rags over his naked body. And yet on his face—even now after what he’d done to her by hauling her here—she saw the remains of what had surely once been a man possessed of luminous intelligence. He had laughed much once, and pondered deeply too, to judge from the lines left by old laughter on his cheeks and frown marks on his brow.
As she studied him, she felt herself plucked away from the room where her beaten body lay. Some invisible tether was pulling her through this building, which was a maze of once-beautiful rooms, grand halls where plaster rotted and fell away from the walls and the mirrors decayed, their gold leaf frames flaking and crusting over.
Here and there, as she made her unintentional departure, she caught sight of the remains of places where others—prisoners of circumstance like herself—had been tortured. The remains of one such victim lay with his legs in the furnace, where a fierce fire had once burned, consuming his extremities somewhere above the knee. The victim had died long ago, his flesh long since petrified, leaving behind something that resembled a bronzed diorama that paid tribute to a murder scene.
She saw the victim’s ghost too, hanging in the air, forever tethered to his agonized remains. The sight of him gave her comfort. She didn’t understand this seemingly abandoned place, but she would be able to learn from its ghosts. They knew a lot, the dead. How many times had she said to Harry they were the world’s greatest untapped resource? It was true. All they’d seen, all they’d suffered, all they’d triumphed over—lost to a world in need of wisdom. And why? Because at a certain point in the evolution of the species a profound superstition was sewn into the human heart that the dead were to be considered sources of terror rather than enlightenment.
Angelic work, she gu
essed; some spiritual army, instructed by one commander or another to keep the human population in a state of passive stupefaction while the war raged on behind the curtain of reality. The order had been carried out, and instead of being allowed to comfort humanity’s collective soul, the dead became the source of countless tales of terror, while the phantoms that were their spirits made manifest found themselves shunned and abominated until, over the generations, mankind simply taught itself a willful blindness.
Norma knew what a loss there was in this. Her own life had been immeasurably enriched by the dead. Much of the human rage and appetite for war and its atrocities might have been soothed away by the certain knowledge that the threescore years and ten of our biblical span were not the full sum of things but rather a thumbnail sketch for a glorious, limitless work. But this knowledge would not come to light in her lifetime.
Norma had only ever shared her thoughts on this with one living person: Harry. But she had listened countless times to ghosts unburdening themselves of their anguish at being unseen, unable to comfort their loved ones by simply saying, “I’m here. I’m right beside you.” Death, she had come to realize, was a two-sided mirror of griefs: that of the blind living, who believed they’d lost their loved ones forever; the other of the sighted dead, who suffered beside their loved ones but could not offer a syllable of comfort.
Her reverie was broken as she passed through the roof of the building and the light of Hell washed over her. She had assumed that at some point her sight would desert her, but it did not.
As the building fell away beneath her, she was granted a bird’s-eye view of the wilderness through which the Cenobite and Felixson had brought her. She hadn’t really expected infernal regions to resemble anything that the great poets and painters and storytellers evoked throughout the millennia, but she was still astonished that they had fallen so far short of what her spirit’s eyes now saw.
The sky contained neither sun, nor stars, which was predictable enough, but what it did contain was a stone the size of a small planet. The stone reached high above the immense landscape that spread out below, and it threw off fissures like lightning bolts, through which brightness poured. The effect upon the vast panorama was uncanny.