“Of course, Master,” said the toy bear in his gruff little voice. He produced a sphere about the size of a golf ball from the pocket of his smock and held it out in a furry paw. The thing was partially transparent, like a cloudy bubble, and I could see something sliding wetly inside it, something with very little room to move.
Eligor took it from him and held it out for me to see. It had too many teeth and too many scrabbling legs, and its eyes watched me through the filmy sphere as if it were already thinking about drilling into me and laying eggs or something. “Do you recognize it, Doloriel? You’ve seen more than a few.”
I leaned away from the hideous thing. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s an intracubus, our version of one of your guardian angels. These are assigned to every human born, to keep track of all the things they do that will eventually bring them to us here. On Earth, intracubi are insubstantial, but here they’re quite real, quite . . . physical. In fact, to implant this one, Doctor Teddy’s going to have to do a little surgery on you.”
“Surgery . . . ?”
Eligor smiled and gestured. The hotel conference room disappeared, instantly replaced by the chamber with the rusted, stained table and cutting tools. A moment later, without anyone touching me, I found myself facedown on the table and unable to move. I felt little Torture Me Elmo climb up onto my back, then move forward until he straddled my neck. Worst of all, I could feel that he had a little furry erection.
“It has to go in at the base of the skull,” the grand duke said. “That way, if you talk to anyone in Hell, I’ll know about it, and if the Mastema catches you—well, our little intracubus will just eat his way out and we won’t have to worry about your saying something you shouldn’t.” He chuckled. “But if you do somehow make your way out of Hell and back to Earth, Mister Dollar, the intracubus will disappear with the demon-body you’re wearing now. And I’ll be waiting to hear from you. You know my office number. Call me when you have the feather, and we’ll arrange our little swap.”
Then Eligor was gone. I could feel his absence like a flame suddenly extinguished. It was just me, the thing in the sphere, and the furry monstrosity who promptly began to gouge a hole in the back of my head with what felt like a rusty screwdriver. Anaesthetic? In Hell?
I had really hoped I was done screaming for the day.
You would have thought that after all the terrible things that had happened to me lately, after all the attacks, torments, violations I’d suffered, this would have been just the latest and the least, a small price to pay for escaping alive or, at least, being given the chance to escape. You’d have thought that, but you’d have been wrong. The hideous sensation of having my skull gouged open paled into absolute insignificance next to the thing that Doctor Teddy pushed into me until it nestled against the meat of my brain. It felt like a hermit crab made of razor blades forced into far, far too small a shell—a shell that just happened to be attached to my neck. Then those legs and teeth closed on my nerve stem, anchoring the thing, and worse by far than the pain was the feeling of its connecting itself to me in a thousand horribly intimate ways. I’ve talked with spirits and demons and guardian angels, and I’ve met things that would make a Green Beret wet himself and never even notice, but I swear I’ve never felt anything as disgusting as having that thing get comfortable inside my head.
When the toy doctor was finished with the skull-rape, he took a few brisk moments to close me back up, sewing the wound with what felt like baling wire, then Doctor Teddy and the conference room suddenly swirled and evaporated, as though a drain had opened up and let it all flow away.
I found myself standing outside on the grounds of Flesh Horse, hidden in an ocean of shadow. The great tower loomed so that it blocked even the light from the highest beacons. Still, enough light filtered down to the great house’s main entrance to let me see the host assembled at Eligor’s gate. Any one of the huge, fierce, mounted Purifier soldiers could probably have crushed me by himself, and there were dozens of them, armed to the teeth with strange guns, long spears, and axes with oversized, jagged blades. Their horses were carcasses, skin tattered to reveal yellow bones and drying organs. But what really made me uneasy were the tracking beasts that slavered and pulled impatiently at their harnesses. They were smaller than the horses, although not by much, but so strong and so eager to be after their prey (me, remember?) that several times they yanked bulky handlers off their feet and had to be dragged back by many hands pulling together, as though they were drifting four-legged zeppelins.
In the middle of one such struggle, one of the animals lifted its malformed head and howled, a noise that turned my bones to water. The others chimed in, until the grounds beneath Flesh Horse rang with their chilling cries. I’d heard of hellhounds, but this was the first time I’d ever seen them in their native element, and suddenly I felt more sorry for Robert Johnson than I ever had. As I stood there, my heart beating so hard I could barely stand, I heard the old bluesman’s mournful, doomed voice singing for me and me alone.
And the days keeps on worryin’ me
There’s a hellhound on my trail
As if sensing the hopelessness of my thoughts, the intracubus tugged at the strings of my mind like an impatient driver racing the accelerator, making everything that was in me turn cold. I reached up and touched the back of my head where the unspeakably nasty thing had been inserted. Doctor Teddy’s stitches felt big as shoelaces, crudely knotted, and the incision was still oozing. A little bit of Eligor was going with me, whether I liked it or not.
Bad as it all was, I didn’t really have any options left. It was time for me to run for my life and my eternal soul.
thirty-six:
the deeps
HELL’S DARK hours were coming on, which helped a little. I was naked and bruised, bleeding in a few places, but most of the horrible things that Eligor had done to me hadn’t left marks. Nakedness was less common in Pandaemonium than in other parts of the inferno, but it certainly wasn’t unheard of.
As I scuttled through the shadowed places, across cinders and broken stone, I prayed that Riprash hadn’t already sailed back to Cocytus Landing. For all I knew, I could have been Eligor’s prisoner for months or even years, and although I doubted that, some time had definitely passed: the hand that Block had bitten off was now mostly regrown. The gray skin was too smooth, and puckered like burn scars, but the fingers all worked, and I could touch them with the thumb, which meant I could hold things in it. Weapons, was what I was thinking about, of course. Angel bodies are ambidextrous and, apparently, so are demon bodies; I hadn’t suffered too badly by being one-handed, but when it comes to fighting, two hands are definitely better than one.
Even as I made my way down through the outskirts of Sulfur Lagoon, not too far from where I had been entertained so interestingly by Vera, I heard the alarm being raised around the city, the shriek of sirens and the howl of my animal pursuers, the last thankfully still distant. That was little old me everyone was being warned about. Luckily, most of Pandaemonium’s citizens would be locking themselves behind doors, since nobody would want to come into contact with the hellhounds, which weren’t always real selective about what they caught and ate. “I didn’t do anything!” is not an excuse that went very far with either the hounds or their masters. A massive sign hung above the Via Dolorosa at the entrance to the city, where most municipalities had things like “Welcome to Sheboygan!” Pandaemonium’s said “Nobody’s Innocent” in ten-foot flaming red letters.