“Let us proceed and see, shall we? Your threshold of pain will be increased many fold by the time you approach ‘The Wall of Full Cycles’ on the other side.”
“Please do not tell me, Father, that this is a place of religion, for my fury at what these demons have done in the names of the gods is hideous.”
“It is!”
“Then I now see how unnecessary it is to make us participate here. It will be my pleasure.”
“And mine,” Red said, blood flowing from his blackened sockets in pride for his son. “Look at our first charade.”
“But wait, Father — you have not allowed me to say what scene is repeated over and over on the right side of this wrecked wicker gate.”
“Oh, well, if you must, you pus-born bastard, proceed!”
“There are seven or eight men dressed in flowing robes that are chained to a great chest.”
“And what sign is attached on the treasure chest, my son?”
“It says: ‘It was for freedom that you were set free! Do not become slaves to legalities again.’ What can that mean?”
“There never was a more stupid race than man, my blood-filled bag. Not only would this foolish lot lock up the freedom they were given in a great chest of rules and regulations, but they willingly kept their own eyes from seeing it. Watch what the approaching beasts do to them. You won’t stop laughing for many lifetimes.”
Indeed, large blood-encrusted harpies came with razor-sharp spoons. They fell on all the self-imposed victims with no delay or mercy, scooping the tongues and eyes out of the screaming creatures. The job was efficiently done, as it had been done billions of times before, and the bound preachers screamed with exactly the same measure as they had before the harpies fell upon them.
“Don’t worry,” said the father to his son. “They will heal and you will get to see this again before you fulfill your destiny as our (the only) world’s greatest horror — The Scream. I promised you. Isn’t this hilarious?”
The son was already rolling on the hissing floor, helplessly laughing/screaming.
“My son, look at this, the first episode of ‘The Milling Murderers.’ Now, this is not — I repeat — not a tableau. Not a viewing of something long past, long dead. This is actually happening as we speak, and as I remount you.”
A man was writhing face down on the floor of a metal room that glowed red-hot. Another man stood above him and poured acid from a bucket over every inch of his body. Anonymous mewls issued from the pudgy potato head as he screamed in horror and disbelief.
“How can you do this to me? I’m family!”
The torturing man tittered helplessly and kept pouring.
“My son,” Red said, “dare to answer me this: if there was another creator, would he have created something as hideous as that? I think not!”
Red kept feeding his massive bloody member into his own mouth. His son was whacking his father’s black orbs with a metal paddle. The father’s sore-encrusted sockets were constantly leaking a red fluid and the corners of his mouth quivered in weepy silence.
The member shivered as it began pumping huge draughts of syrup-thick goo down his fevered, raw throat.
“No, my son,” the demon said. “Look at it this way. I will rip this off-” Snap… tear… “-and feed it to you like-” Shove… rip… “-and make you eat this, too!” Rip… insert…
They looked down at the dismembered corpse. It was gazing up at them, helplessly, saying these words through weak lips: “When will you stop torturing me? Don’t you know I cannot protect myself? When will you stop torturing me?”
Its eyes were pleading up at them. The demon and the satyr wept with howls of laughter for a thousand lifetimes.
He vomited up a clotty mass and said to his father, “It’s like having two snow cones shoved into your eyes while you’re flying through the air at ninety-five miles per hour!”
“Yes, my son, now shut up while I tell you a hideous story. Once, there was a lie that we lived a mortal life before our entrance here. No idea is more foolish — the true and final horror that you must face is that you have only dreamed such nonsense.” Flatulence occurred. “You have always been here!”
Their screams continued as before, unabated.
The father watched as the son leaned over the gray-white corpse. The son popped a dry eye from a socket and threw it to the rock floor. It cracked open.
“You are the cruelest vampire satyr any father ever had.”
“I feel no remorse at all, Father.”
“My point exactly.”
They began laughing and continued to do so for many eons.
“Why do you fear to show me this next exhibit, my father?”
The son was standing before a heavy crimson curtain, thirty feet wide and thirty feet high, and he knew not how to part it.
“Because I fear, my son, that ye will ne’er stop laughing.” Red looked at his son lovingly and noticed bright orange flames playing among the blood-clotted flanks of his fur-coated legs. It was advancement, and the son was unaware of it.
“Show me, Father, show me!” His mouth blathered in his never-ending screams. His vampiric teeth bled freely, streaming down his beard.
“Very well, bastard son.” Red then addressed the curtain. “Open… now!”
The curtain parted slowly. The son was unable to take in everything he saw.
“Oh, Father, what is this?” the son screamed/whispered through his quivering mouth.
There was a portly man in the middle of the red-lit room. A great silver machine encased his backside. Long needle-like arms protruded from the sides and entered deep into the ribs of the sweating man, penetrating repeatedly while the unseen rear of the squid-like machination thrust into him much like the workings of a steady clock. His eyes squeezed shut for the level of pain unknown to anyone
“He has no legs, my beautiful, bastard son. Well, they had to be removed in order to fit him for the machine, which is by far the most necessary thing, as you will soon see.”
There was a dull black machine in front of the fat man. A large black pipe came from somewhere above the room and fed into the top of it. A thick tube then ran from the machine into the man’s mouth, which was constantly salivating and blubbering. His throat expanded as some unidentified product sluiced rapidly down his gullet.
Standing all around the machines, watching him, screaming but doing their best to look as if they were hysterically laughing, were ancient bodies. They passed around a golden key between the fifty-odd souls. When one received it, a body seemed eager and drooling to put it in a machines’ slot. It only caused one thing to happen to both apparatuses at once: they sped up in their intensity. As the old souls watched this, especially the silver rods entering the sides of the man in a blur, they laughed and laughed, and quickly let another have the key. The fun would quite literally never cease.
“My son, listen to this wise tale of one of The Milling Murderers. This creature told the world (when he believed he lived in another world as a preacher of hideous dogma) that a creator came and told him that if this world did not give him many millions of [monies] for his ministry, that this creator would take him off the Earth and send him to this place.”
“Oh Father, surely no one-”
“Shut up or I shall scrape your soul raw, my beloved. Yes, the old ones believed this in that other dream. Actually, he was right here the whole time. So because he dared to have the dream that was nearly as mighty as The Mighty One (who is always here), he was given more pain. The pain that was given by merely blocking and unblocking his breathing was hooked to the entire sewer system of this world we love and live in and grow in. Can you imagine the exquisite delight we receive when we realize that for all [time] he is caught in that moment when someone drowns; yet, he can do nothing to make it stop? He is so preoccupied with struggling to breathe (which is a permanent, losing battle), that he, in his insanity, does not know that others here make it infinitely worse. He has always been as you see him here.”