Both shifted along, piteously, while strings of viscous fluid bubbled and burbled from their quavering lips.
The light winked out. And the dream? Continued.
“Here’s a clue,” said the old man. “In my lovely romance, I slam three doors in your face. This last paragraph is one of them.”
Student Amanda, dressed entirely in black, stood and asked. “Why would you do this?”
“Well, what’s the point of reading books that don’t have puzzles in them?”
“Well, rather a lot, really,” she replied, without smiling.
“Not for me. As I was saying, I slam three doors in your face in chapters nineteen and twenty. If I have done my job right, I will throw so much light on them all that you will not notice which one of them cannot be real.”
“Not fair!” cried another student. “You have given us no prior clues that would lead us to believe that. How poor.”
“Oh, really,” the old man said, laughing. “Do you remember the publisher telling the archaeologist that there was something about the Red Ants Escher graphic that wasn’t right? Not real? Part of it could not be real?”[3]
“Yes.”
“Well, there was your clue. One of these three endings cannot have been real. You figure it out by yourself. You’ll get no help from me. Now, here we go to the last chapter of Infernus. Ready?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“THE FINAL HIDE”
“Now, my son, I have one final thing to show you to complete your education. You have become the grandest, most powerful demon in all the kingdoms. I have convinced you that you, because you created all this in your imagination, are the most hateful and cruelest creature that ever existed. After all, it is merely the truth. You have fully become the vampiric satyr son, with long, glorious gray wings that can split rocks with their force and strength. The only thing left for you to do is to link eternally with the one who abused you, and sent you here — in your dream. You will link with him and become the thing known in Infernal Furnace as ‘The Scream!’ I am now going to give you the necessary push in that direction.
“You will never see my face again. In fact, your joy will be so complete, and you will be so busy, you will never wish to see me again, I assure you. As I told you before, and as you have seen in your vision, you will break through the floor of the hospital where he resides, mount him from behind with no lack of speed, because of your large member, bite through his head with your long fangs, feast on his cooking brain, and then you will ravage him over billions of miles, on many earths, throughout all eternity; your anger will never lessen in intensity, never!”
“Oh, Father, if that were only true!”
“Well, then let me show you what awaits you at the wall that no creature can pass; even I! You see, my son, on the other side of this obstruction, in all appearances a wall, there is another vast park governed by a ruling chief much like me. There are, of course, millions of such parks.”
“This brilliant podium — no, a sundial — is this what you want me to see, Father?”
In the distance, there shone, shimmering in the intense heat, a sundial. Beyond it was a wall of flame that none could breach. The image kept flowing in and out of focus in the brilliant, truly yellow flame. Even if the former man had not become a golden demon, he would have appeared thus here. Everything glowed the bright corn-yellow that burned nearly as bright as the sun. The topaz blazed against their skin harshly.
“Yessss,” he said, speaking as if the son were not standing next to him. “It stands before the wall that no creature can penetrate. There is one before every impenetrable wall. It is known as the final truth — the only truth, which I cannot express. It will cause all of your resistance to the thresholds of pain to burst at once and for all your blood to spoil. Prepare yourself to see the most hideous thing in all your life, my son. Your world will surely never be the same!”
The son approached the golden sundial.
“My father, the sundial—”
“Yes, my son, the sundial,” said the father. If he had any eyes, they would have flashed wetly and sparkled in the bright red flash emitting forth. “For this is the beginning of the truth of it!”
“The sundial is covered over with — oh, my — living letters. Letters that live! I have ne’er seen anything such as this!”
“And ne’er shall ye e’er again, my son, after you have seen these. There will not only never be a reason to read anything else again, because of the hideousness of its messages, it is the sum total of all knowledge. It will have spent the last of your patience in these things. Just think, after you have ingested this, how many times I have been reminded of it being here. Vibrating, always vibrating. What little hope you may have had will permanently rot, when you see this, you poor tool.”
There were larger letters at the top. They shivered because they lived; there were no other words that lived but these two alone:
“What is this, Father? I thought you said that this was Untruth!”
“I could not have told you all of this, or any of this. This is the last betrayal. You now see, at last, the absolute lack of hope, of love, certainly. Now, if you see this, you know I have never had any love for such a one that I could have led thus far.”
The father fell to the baking plate of infernal earth and began to leak laughing tears to the floor. Even though he had brought countless sons here, it never pleased him less. The immense painful joy it brought him to play along and pretend to adore his sons, each of whom he had assured was his only son.
“The rest of the message, Father, oh, my brain is boiling. I cannot read it aloud! Hatred — ahhhhhh!” The son looked up to the vast height of the blood-encrusted ceiling and shouted, “Where are you, Doctor?” His steaming sockets searched the ceiling of Infernus.
Red reached up, roughly grabbing and turning the jaw of the massive golden demon’s head here and there, back and forth. “Look for him. Seek him out.”
“There!” the golden demon cried. “He’s there… where I was.”
“Go to him,” hissed the father.
With a hideous strength the son bellowed, “Oh, Doctor — mortal man who sent me here — I am coming for you now! Our wedding begins this very moment!”
And with a great beating of wind and heat and wings, and the strength and muscular beauty of twelve men, he launched himself into the air and crashed through the roof above.
After many millennia, the father was able to stop laughing long enough to approach the podium and read aloud the final message that had so enraged the worm. He could not circumvent the significance; neither could he get his mind around it. Apparently mortals, or former mortals, could comprehend it on some level, which he never ceased to find a constant source of humor. He was tempted to gaze longingly at it when he wanted his torture to be most keen.
“There is no other name under heaven
Given to men by which we must be saved.”
Acts 4:12
In his white clinical office, the small pock-faced doctor took in the News, leaned back in his vastly oversized chair and sighed. “You’re sure, he, uh, Dr. Mountfountain is dead, Carl?”