The son was already eagerly popping eyeballs out of a smallish shark-faced man. It kept idiotically murmuring, “I am a tin god, you cannot hurt me. I am an elder, a semi-apostle.”
“Infernus is too good to them, Father. I wish it was possible to throw them into other dimensions that they had no threshold of pain for.”
“It is done,” said the father simply.
And it was so. The room was suddenly empty, save the two spelunkers. “If you could only hear their shrieking, as only I can feast upon,” the father said, closing his black sockets so he could concentrate on their terror more acutely.
“Is it truly horrid, my father?”
“It is so much so that even I cannot imagine the horror of what they feel. I can let you listen for only [one second] of times.”
And instantly, in the son’s brain, he felt the most heinous pounding, as the voices of many morons were tortured many millions of times, greater than anything they ever thought was possible. But, even though it only lasted a brief hour, the son’s brain felt like curdled oatmeal.
They laughed many a lifetime.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“COMING ALONG NICELY”
“My son, I must show you how all must enter my park — ah, actually, no. It is how all must awaken and remember where they have lived all along. This is what some would consider the entrance to Infernus, although there is no such thing, for every sore is an entrance. It is all the same. Listen, I hear the wailing of the new arrivals now.”
“What does this mean, Father?” asked the son, his growing gray wings at last beginning to unfurl and glisten like oily leather.
“When a soul realizes that all its fears have been realized; all its dreams, all of its life of coming here were expressly fulfilled; when it realizes that all the nightmares of its life were its awakened realities; when it realizes that it was only a dream and that all souls were only dreaming their future; or only waiting to awaken and be here; when souls realize that the ‘earthly’ dream was an attempt of an insane mind to try to make sense of all of this; when they realize all this when they arrive here, or, actually wake up to face what is really the rock-solid truth (that this is all there ever was), the mind bursts open and trickles its soul onto the boiling rocks. Many souls go through this process trillions of times. Look, here are two that must reawaken now!”
They watched as two human bodies (looking like corpses) were being dragged into this great cavern by two giant white demons. The demons threw the two bodies (one man, one woman) to the hard floor and walked to a wall where many large, blood-encrusted metal torture devices hung.
“The mind would stagger, Father, were it to contain all the knowledge of what these weapons could do.”
“Yes. And now you will see one of the weapons and its uses.”
The two demons approached the two corpses as they lay, aware on the floor, but not technically “alive” yet, as they would be soon in Infernus. Their dry, white eyes only looked where their bodies fell, gazing at what was only before them, which was the Baking-Roof. The demons flashed their great powder-white buttocks as they fell to their work. Each held up one of the corpses by their hair in its immensely strong arms and began plunging the great tongs into the spongy bodies, calling them to stop all of their nonsense and reawaken. The bent, unbreakable spikes tore the bodies as they were held; the flesh was pulled impossibly outward like rubber. The demons yanked and popped and pulled it, but it would not separate from the bodies entirely.
The bodies began to jerk mindlessly, then with more and more control, until finally they were doing everything they could to make the torture stop, pushing their feeble hands against the diamond hard shells of their tormentors.
“Come, my son, this will not end for many millennia and we have much more to see in your continuing education. Come, our time grows dim!”
“My father, are you telling me that the most hideous thing I will ever see lies in the park of ‘The Milling Murderers’?”
“It is a tableau, believe it or not, in the park. It represents the torture of The Unnamed One.”
“Who is she/he, Father?”
“If you had done any classical studying in your dream state, you will know who the Unnamed One is. Behold!”
They had entered a blackened cave. The walls were glowing numbingly red. The thick glaze that covered them like crimson glue shimmered in the internal haze of heat. The son ran a hand over one and knew it to be many hardened layers of blood, black, flecked in places, like scabs. That would also explain the smell of a slaughterhouse. All of them, he thought to himself with satisfaction, were wounds with black caps. He never thought to do this before, but he pushed a finger into the wall, and was immediately rewarded with a thick black ooze running down where the hole was.
A white light sprang up at his touch and showed more detail throughout the room. A shiver ran through the nerve of the wall and every surface cracked open. The growing light showed that embedded everywhere, gazing fixedly at the floor, were eyes, myriads of them.
The son gasped and backed up to bump into the father as he saw a quivering mass in the middle of the floor. Grub worms and maggots seeped under and over a rolling, churning mass. One moment you could see blood-clotted chains; then another you could see black-taloned fists; then a huge hairy foot, trying to break free of the worm bed, but to no purpose. The chain and the worm bound it fast.
“My son, the eyes have only one purpose — to forever witness the sores and smoke that forever roiled in thick clouds from the creature that boiled upon the floor.” The father did not laugh in this room. “It must be so for all eternity.
“The Unnamed One never gets to see beyond the worm; his eyes never see. Worms cover him and he lies on a bed of maggots. He can never feel less than the numb pain and floor that boils his blood. He can never stop smoking in his flesh. The smoke can never stop ascending up to the surfaces. He can never be named. The eyes can never stop beholding him. If you knew the history of the Unnamed One, and what he was, or thought he was, you would know why this torture was the most hideous one of all.”
They passed on from there, the son confused. He was indeed aware of his long gray wings now, the father thought. He was able to flash them and wrap them about his body at will. They hung down to his muscular buttocks, and they were willful. He might be unaware that they were already a weapon, able to snatch life from a mortal in a single slash. He could sunder mere inches of flesh with the razor edge of the wing or slam through solid wall with the support of the steel-like bone that lay beneath.
“The unnamed one has had a few sons. This creature, beautiful as he was, was one of them. See if you can guess who this great lover of the Magick Arts was.”
The cave they entered was ablaze with the red/green light that two identical symbols on the wall gave off — long lightning bolts. Below the signs was a piteous sight.
“Oh, Father, was this my lord?”
“Since he is one of the few sons of the Unnamed One, I cannot say, for he must likewise remain Unnamed. Clever, manipulative, little boy!”
The hideous creature was lying on his back, gagging mightily. An olive tree was growing out of his throat. Its roots were spreading like oaken cords throughout his body, growing and protruding from every unsealed place, even as they watched. Cracking and snapping from the growing branches that continued to sprout through him. He could not even cry out, although groaning sounds came from him, or somewhere near him.