He looked at me for a long moment, his face as blank as a weathered statue of some ancient king. “Yes, Smyler,” he said. “Of course.”
“You don’t need to play games, big man. You hold all the cards. Do what you’re going to do. I’m not giving you the feather, and I’m not going to tell you where it is. You’ll just kill me anyway, so why should I make it easy on you?”
He smiled, his lips curling slowly back, an unhurried predator with a staked-down meal. For the first time, I could see that he was probably as old as the planet, if not older. “Very good. The hero speech. But I think you’re supposed to say that after I’ve tried to soften you up a little. Has more resonance that way.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Take your best shot. What are you going to do with this—” I gestured to the conference table and the bad oil paintings, “—make me sit through a sales pitch for a time-share condo?”
“Oh, you don’t approve of the decor?” Eligor looked around. “I requested it just for you. I thought it would make a small-timer like you feel at home. We can do something else if you’d rather—”
And just that suddenly the room was gone, and I was falling through whistling blackness, grabbing at nothing, helpless.
“How about this?”
Watery light all around me, dirty glass, stainless steel tables striped with old blood, ancient linoleum brown with the dried scum of countless vile fluids. Hanging above the operating table on which I was strapped was a gallery of machines that would have made Torquemada flinch: drills and bone saws and claspers and graspers whose purposes I couldn’t even grasp, but whose rusted, stained surfaces spoke volumes.
“Or if you’re more of a traditionalist,” said Eligor’s voice, “we could try this.”
The light dimmed. Now there was only a single torch, just bright enough to reveal that the ancient stone floor around me boiled with crawling things. The walls, too, were alive with moving, clicking shapes. I gasped and jerked, but I couldn’t get up, let alone away.
“How about Surrealism? You like all that 20th century stuff, don’t you?”
I was stretched in a dozen directions, my eyes impossibly far apart, binocular vision in two separate directions. A vast mouth had replaced the pale ceiling above my head, lips as big as the front end of a car that giggled and made kissing noises and murmured things I couldn’t quite hear while a fine mist of saliva fell down onto my face. Spiders with the heads of birds and birds with the heads of medieval harlequins hopped and fluttered all around me. The lips made a choking noise, then rounded into an “o” and something gray and ropy and as big as a gorilla began to climb down from between the teeth, eyes floating around in its body like bubbles in a bag of liquid.
“Or maybe you’re beginning to appreciate the original theme,” Eligor said, and suddenly the hotel conference room snapped back into being around me. “You see, it doesn’t really matter. You’re not in a place, Doloriel—you’re in my place. And you will tell me where the feather is. It’s only a matter of time, and we’ve got . . . forever.”
Great roiling, billows of crematory flame leaped from the walls, red and yellow and orange, the same hideous orange as Eligor’s eyes. I couldn’t see Eligor anymore, though. I couldn’t see anything but the flames.
I felt my skin charring. I felt it dry and then crack, then burn away. I felt my nerves become blackened wires, my muscle tissues shrivel and catch fire, my very bones burst into flames. I felt just what you would feel as you burn to death, a level of shrilling pain in every fiber that cannot even be described, agony beyond anything I could have imagined. And I kept feeling it. It went on. It went on, and on, and on.
I don’t know when it stopped. Hours later. Days later, maybe. I was somewhere else by then. I was someone else. The person who had been burned that way, that Bobby, that Angel Doloriel, was gone now beyond retrieval. That person could never exist again. And the thing that remained behind would never stop screaming, I felt sure. Never stop burning.
Eligor carefully picked out a donut. “The last powdered sugar,” he explained. “So, where’s my feather?”
It took a while to form words, although from what I could see of my trembling hands I was whole and unburnt again, as though I hadn’t just experienced a lifetime’s worth of scorching, unholy agony. “Fuck . . . you.”
“Right, then!” he said and saluted me with his World’s Greatest Boss mug as the flames blazed up once more.
He had lots of other ways to hurt me when he got bored with hellfire, some of them quite inventive. I had to watch Caz tortured and raped by Eligor himself and various demons, or at least something that looked like her. Then later I had to watch another version of Caz participating happily, even enthusiastically, in all the same activities, even as my own nerves were stretched and burned and scraped and tormented. Eligor liked to cover all the bases.
I talked, of course. Fuck, yes I did. I told him everything I knew about the feather and everything else. Pain hurts. Pain in Hell hurts even more. And this was personal pain that Eligor wanted me to feel, and he made sure I got every last drop. I don’t think it had as much to do with Caz as it did with me being an annoyance. The fact that unimportant me had managed to waste so much of his precious, infinite time. You’d think he’d have thanked me for the diversion. But no.
It didn’t seem to matter that I was vomiting out every secret I had, though. Eligor went right on hurting me. After the flames I found myself in a place bright and white as an industrial clean room, where men with faces featureless as thumbprints pounded on me with iron hammers, smashing every bone in my body, flattening me like a cutlet. Each blow forced more screams out of my mouth, which changed shape with each strike, so that it was almost impossible to form words. But still they kept hitting me, and I kept screaming out what I knew.
Dark, oily liquid. Writhing things sinking their teeth into my flesh and wrapping around me like sex-crazed eels to pull me down. I managed to kick free just before I drowned and made it back to the surface, gasping out foul, poisoned air and taking in lungfuls of something not much better, only to be yanked down into the darkness again. And again. And . . . you’ve got it by now, right?
Packs of rotting skeletons trying to eat my face as I struggled to escape over mounds of garbage. This was less fun than it sounds.
My skin trying to tear itself loose from my body. Exactly as fun as it sounds.
A chamber full of stinging ants and biting flies the size of pigeons. Me with no arms or legs.
An all-black room, where nothing happened except an excruciating pain blooming right in the middle of my skull, like an insane sea urchin with thumbtack spines trying to shove its way out through one of my eye sockets. It got worse and worse until I finally tore my own head off my neck, at which point my head grew back and the process started over.
And every now and then, just to remind me why I was literally suffering the tortures of the damned, I would be back in the original conference room with Eligor. He would ask me a few more questions, or the same questions again. Sometimes he just looked at me and laughed, then I went back into the acid bath or dangled on the electric fence again. A couple of times he was reading emails on his cellphone and didn’t even look up. Once I saw Caz, standing straight and silent as Eligor held her with one hand around her neck, like a chicken going to the chopping block. Her eyes were wet and her lashes frosty with crystallizing tears, but she didn’t move, didn’t speak.
Back to the crematory flames again, but this time all my friends from the Compasses were there with me—Monica, Sweetheart, Walter Sanders, all of them shrieking as they burned, begging me to help them.
The next time I came back to the conference room, Lady Zinc was waiting for me, eyes bright with madness. While Eligor watched and drank his coffee Vera raped me again, just as she had before. Then she took me in ways she hadn’t been able to do before. It all hurt worse than you can imagine—merciful God, a lot worse.