Father and son watched, enchanted, with blood streaming from their sockets like warm tears.
Red light weakly flared up from within a cave. An eternal play continued inside, ceaseless.
“My son, this is a bit of drama from your dream world. From the past, we have an infinite number of these little plays. Only the sweetest ones play here. The daintiest morsels are repeated!”
The son gazed at the scene until he perceived the point. He then laughed so hard that his pain threshold increased.
A little boy of four or five was dancing around a replica of an earth kitchen while his mother stood above him with a large carving knife. Down upon his weaving head and waving arms, always connecting with the child, never once missing. She didn’t laugh — she was much too busy.
“Look at this hideous tableau, my son. What do you see?”
“I see a dark room beginning to glow red. It throbs there, a bloody-looking room. There are two men in the middle, lying flat on their backs on the floor. Writhing, oh, my father, writhing like little babies; like spoiled babies… ”
The demon looked at the son and loved him. “Yes, they are burning, as we all are.”
“Two giant, blood-muscled canines break through the shattering door, and — oh, my father! — make me turn from this vision!”
“You may not!” screamed Red.
“Oh, the monster dogs shred the men and leap on them — their screams — they plunge their broad members into them, and frothingly rape them as they disembowel them! Oh, my sad, sick father, what have you done to me?”
“Shown you that the one thing mortals think they leave behind in death is their conscience — it is only amplified here.” The son could almost swear he heard a piano playing dramatically in the background. “We’ve-” the demon begins to weep piteously. “thought of-” sob “-everything!”
“Look! Another room, my father.” The son ignored Red’s emotion, for it seemed to him quite irrelevant. “It blazes up, glowing yellow. What is this?”
“Surely there is beauty here, also, Son. Let’s listen in, shall we? I think we are coming in the middle of a conversation. First, what do you actually see?”
“I see a dwarfish, bright blue demon, his limbs all cramped and crabbed to the point of being morosely disabled, standing hunched over before a woman burning like a torch. I can barely see her features as they are blurred beneath roaring flames.”
“That’s right. What she looks like is, of course, unimportant. Pointless. Now, listen to what he is saying to his disciple.”
“No,” the blue demon whispered, clearly near the edge of being overcome with laughter. “That’s the shame of it all.” His teeth glittered bloody in the flames. “That’s not even the worst of it.” He fell into a sizzling urine pool, uncontrollably laughing.
“Oh, really,” she said, watching the fire constantly engulf her naked body, her skin popping and sizzling. “Something worse than dying, and leaving that drunk of a husband of mine, who beat me for ten years, to die and come here, or at least maybe dream this hell hole?”
“Yeah,” he said, his eyes literally bugging out of their leathery sockets, his idiot smile mindlessly agape, drooling. “Even worse than all of that. In fact, it’s soooo funny, my head might explode from the sheer hell of it.”
“Hit me, creature,” she said, baiting him to top her hideous reality.
“Are ya ready? Here goes. You’re so pathetic; you don’t even know that the other world is the dream world. You were ruined when you woke up here. In other words-”
The dead woman looked to the son as if she might begin screaming now.
“-you’ve always been here! And, here’s the kicker, you are so stupid, you created that life with the abusive husband to forget about this place.” He began laughing until the top of his head actually did explode. He grinned from ear to ear. “I got one last bit of news for you, my little roast-pork suckling.”
“Worse than what you just told me?” she asked.
“Oh, yes, a lot worse!” His eyes were winking rubies. “Ready for a shot of love?”
“What could be worse than the knowledge that I’ve always been here and dreamed my former life? Hit me, creature!”
“You didn’t begin your life here as a woman.” He began tittering, searching her face for the reaction he knew would eventually come.
“You mean-”
He laughed in earnest now, fell to the burning floor, and rolled around hysterically.
She began an endless scream.
The father addressed the son. “That story always moves me to tears of joy.” He sighed, and moved the son to other tableaus of bliss and perverse beauty.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“THE MILLING MURDERERS”
“Look, my son, the end of The Hall of Tableaus. Was it good for you?”
“Yes, my beloved. Look!”
The demon entered his son from behind and they both gazed at a golden arch with purple veins running through it, encircled with carvings of the finest diamonds. It led into a garden legitimately thought at one time (before the souls crowded its borders and it became a city) to once be a mere tableau.
As the father filled the son with love, they both wept openly. It was as still as a freshly vanquished life.
“My son!” the demon screed into his son’s ears. “We now come to a pit in the vast park known as ‘The Milling Murderers.’”
“Is it so, Father?”
“Yes, it is. It is a vast land of Hate Cults. It belongs to people who invented religion in their dream world and then used it to slay their fellow man through the service to their egos. It is the only place in my jurisdiction whereas if you don’t participate to increase their horror and pain, you will replace them in their torment. You would have found out, anyway, if you had been patient enough to watch the various threads of continuity. This is the place where the religionists have been throughout eternity. Thankfully, they are unmoved by facts or discussion; their minds are closed to anything other than the so-called reality of their self-righteous world, which means that you can torture them most heinously and they won’t even believe it is happening to them. To escape their torment here, they dreamed of a world where they were superior to others. Their man-made religion allowed them to believe they could treat any mortal with contempt, or kill, or slaughter thousands in holy wars. Or, better and funnier, they thought they could oppress children or other mortals with breasts. Infernus is too good for them. Their reality is that they burn and burn, as they always have.”
“Suppose,” the vampire satyr replied, licking his blood-encrusted lips, “I do both. I mean, refuse to torment them, then torment them.”
“You are truly the most hideous son ever born by a father. And you are my burden to bear. Prepare for my mounting.”
The father tore the son open from behind and intercoursed the wound for many lifetimes. The son screamed throughout, as did everything else that died there.
“Now we may enter, my child.”
“It is indeed a large pit, Father. Look here at the entrance. What do I see? On the left side of the wicker, decayed gate, it looks like a corpse lying — is its eyes nothing but seething worms? Yes! With a long wad of cloth rolling out of its mouth.”
“This is delightful!”
“Oh, Father, it is so enigmatic! It has writing on it. It says: ‘Suppose that servant is wicked and beats his fellow servants. He shall be torn to pieces and assigned a place for hypocrites.’ Is that what this place is, Father?”