A swollen, bloated man (or woman) approached her spinning corpse and inserted a long fork into both of her orbital sockets. It plunged them in and out. Many others did the same. Her breasts were slit. Green pus ran out and splashed on the rocks, heating them hotter still.
“Is this good for her, my son, or can you think of other delicious things to do to her? She was, after all, a queen in her day when the Horse Nebula was first discovered in the distant skies.”
“I can think of something to do to her which will please me greatly.”
“Good, go to it with a hearty will.”
As the son approached her, she seemed to look helplessly at him with her shattered, ragged eyes. Pity, was it? The son grabbed her sweaty green locks that clung to her wet shoulders. He pulled with all his might, which was considerable. She couldn’t scream any louder, so she continued as before, unabated. The son felt the scalp give way and he threw the hair onto the rocks to watch them curl and smoke and stink.
“Bravo, son, you have done well. Come here.”
The son returned to the father’s side and had to wait until he could undouble from his laughter. “My son, I am permitted to give you a gift at this time. Sink your beautiful aching teeth into my shoulder and draw from a true Well of Strength. Sup on your father’s Red blood and be even stronger than ordinary Golden demons.”
The son grabbed the father’s shoulder in his growing talons and steadied him as he bit into what tasted like the most delicious fruit of all time. He supped long and hard at this, and felt strengthened beyond description. The father, weakened, fell to the heated rocks, unconscious for a [fortnight] time and a few times. The son heard the head crack wetly and laughed. Completely void of any empathy, he shrugged his great shoulders, and waited for the father to regain enough strength to stand and continue the training.
“Look, my son, at the greatest preachers of all time.” Red pointed to a most heated exhibit. Before he could explain what he was seeing, the son was falling into a boiling pool of urine, laughing mindlessly. “Now, stop that, filth! I must tell you what it is.”
It was a garden of heated sand squares. Each square had diamond borders that rose from the floor only an inch or two. All preachers that occupied these millions and millions of shapes were bound, so it was irrelevant that little divided them.
“Look at this fool, my son. He is suspended in space, connected by his arms and legs to the roof of this cave by chains. Imagine how it must be to die forever without the energy to even feel your dislocated sockets. But, even more horrible, he cannot move — his arms and legs are pulled up behind him, deliciously, hideously. He must silently face the message handwritten in the sand that is heated to seven million degrees below him. His mouth, all mouths of the enslaved here, are very crudely sewn shut with large embalmer’s hooks. See how his wounds are millions of years old, yet never healing, never scabbing over? What is the message written by a demon that hates him even more than I hate you? What does it say that heats his head and sears his eyes but he must read forever? It is cruel, but it must be read, and loudly.”
“Oh, Father-” The son fell to the ground and fitfully laughed until great blisters arose on his scalp and popped into pustules of thin liquid. “May I mount him and take his virginity billions of times for his foolishness? Oh, great, bastard Father?”
“Yes, you may, but I must warn you, his ‘virginity’ you speak of has been removed many billions of times ago. There is naught of it left.”
The son mounted the preacher and roughly forced his large member into the rotund man, and fell to raping him with a grace hitherto unthought-of, and he screamed the message out loud directly into the ears of the bastard that lay silently below him. He felt the chain pull on all the sockets and sinews of the roasting preacher who was baked into jerky. But no bone snapped as each thrust of the joyous vampiric satyr strained with all the hated power of his massive, muscular, rippling body.
Lo! There were e’en the beginnings of great gray wings that the son was unaware of and the father could not tell him. The father saw them peeking through the flesh of his shoulders.
“This is a participatory exhibit. All of Infernus’ multicolored demons have had their worst field day with this idiot child, and their unholy ilk.”
The son kept filling the preacher with his ever-growing member and shouting the sand-written message into his ears, as many have done many times. “All men will know you are my disciples if you love one another!”
The father watched with unguarded glee and pride as the son tried to break the bones or the chains with his powerful muscles and practiced zeal. It was a furious attempt and he didn’t fail for want of trying or desire.
They approached another sand pit.
“This being,” said the father, “thought he had a program where he sat on the world’s thrones and pontificated on the causes of the world’s demises. The beings he blamed for its problems were people that were (as you might have guessed) unlike him.” He laughed. “Look at what happens to him always.”
The televangelist was repeatedly being struck in the back of the head with an axe by a roasted, blackened man. He was fixed where he could not look left or right, only straight ahead to a bleeding wall where this was inscribed in light:
’The heart is deceitful above all things, and beyond cure. Who can understand it?’
The man was trying to reason with his abuser. “Oh my — ahhhh! It was others! It wasn’t me. I did have a right to speak for the creator and say who caused the world’s downfall! I did have the right!”
The man paused his axing, and said between laughing, “You are living proof of the veracity of this poem. And you still do not understand its meaning. Ahh, you are to be pitied more than the fools that die in the streets. At least they know they are dead, or wrong, or poor. You seem to know naught.” And he heartily began axing the man with even more vigor than before.
The red demon turned to his son and said, “In the other world, he fell well.”
And the son laughed quietly to himself.
“My son, look at this pathetic wench.”
They had entered a small cave.
“What appears to be happening, Father, is that three faceless toddlers are endlessly torturing an adult-type person with breasts. There’s much more to it, though. Let’s take in what we are seeing.”
The first thing the son observed was a child-like thing holding a raging torch of fire and oily black smoke under the chin of a quivering adult that sat on the baking floor, unable anymore to even pretend to escape. Large breasts trembled. A solid flame engulfed the adult’s head and sought to consume it entirely, but could not. The child-like thing with a skinless face turned toward the two visitors, giggling softly, and showed them the tableau for their approval. The father and son nodded. It, in turn, was pleased.
“If it runs,” said the skeletal child, “we continue unabated. It just gave up many [days] times ago.”
Another toddler, its epidermis also vacant, had long brown hair that seemed to have a life of its own in the heated air. It [she] was plunging a long carving knife into the back of the hopeless adult. This little girl-thing seemed to grin at them with her lipless mouth, and the visitors nodded their approval of her. [It] she was pleased.
The third toddler never seemed to notice the visitors, continually bringing a baby-sized hammer down on the unresponsive adult’s knees.
“This foolish woman creature, in her belief that the dream world was real, murdered these three children there. She beat one to death (so she thought) with a ball peen hammer, killed another with a huge butcher knife, and baked the other one alive in the oven. She tried to kill them there to avenge herself here — give this existence meaning. As if it had any meaning. She stripped all their faces off and thought she was done with it. She only feared her reality. It will never stop. Death is too good to her.”