“Where’s the damned door?” he pleaded, whined. Desperation leaking out of his sweaty brow, the little doctor heard something sizzling, smelling it before he heard it, perhaps.
When the hot eyes rested on the little man, he peeped briefly. His head was instantly engulfed in flames and he instinctively held his hands to his temples, and they caught fire.
“Flame on, my little Scream.”
Gold belched ashes. He burped a low laugh at the futile flagellations of the little doctor. Having failed to put out his hands and head by feeding oxygen to the flames, he was now trying to knock himself unconscious against a wall. Repeatedly.
Gold grabbed his inhumanly large organ, and shook it, spitting a sloppy yellow goop at the good doctor. “Or was more of this what you were looking for?”
Gold began again, watching the doctor’s head cook. “I will be the part of you that rules you for all time, little man. I will mount you and never stop ramming you through all the collected earths themselves. I have been told, by those in authority, that I must mount you through billions of earths. And the only thing you will be able to do is scream. You will do it for me so that I never have to scream again. It is your gift to me.”
One last Boom! The wing knuckles bashed the ceiling and receded within a second, and white powder fell on the flaming head of the little doctor.
Gold grabbed the man by one shoulder to turn him around and four razor talons easily punctured flesh, muscle and marrow, and welded there to become one bone and body. His head was still burning. The man began his endless scream. The demon, with absolutely no resistance, but with manifold purpose, punctured the other shoulder when he had turned him around. In one movement, instantly, with no shame or horror or regard, it ripped off all the man’s clothes, shearing great flaps of skin and muscle from his back in the process.
Its member throbbed and stood erect, large and long. The little man, in more pain than ever before, did the best he could to turn and look behind him. He saw the impossible thing again, and still could not believe it. His scream went on, unabated.
With the last vestiges of his conscience burned away, because of his father’s betrayal, the demon forced all of itself into the good doctor with a single thrust. There was no hesitation, no request, no pity, just solid activity.
The demon, by sheer will that was accomplished by a set purpose born in the eternities of Infernus’ blackest wisdom, opened its mouth wider and wider. And wider still. Its jaws shattered and found new form as it drew its face willfully to the back of the little man’s head. The vampire teeth ached for feeding, and bled furiously, freely. They sunk, like hot, razored knives in cold butter, without resistance, into the doctor’s brain. Oh, the warm, cooked brain! It felt so good that the demon groaned deeply. Its teeth met in the center of the cranium and shattered into one another, fusing, locked, eternal. It set its jaws and was done.
An elderly woman in a white lab coat burst into the room and tried to take into account what she was seeing. “Oh my God!”
“Guess again!” a voice burst inside her brain, instantly slamming her into a wall, unconscious before she fell heavily to the feces and blood-smeared floor. It kept laughing in her head, but she didn’t hear it, her brain having turned into something resembling soup. And would never hear anything again.
And they at last were one. The Scream. And the doctor’s brain (he knew this not when he saw it so many millions of millennia ago in the vision in Infernus) was his. The son had two brains and the doctor had none. Its brainless task was set to screaming, it was its only purpose.
As the little man began to cease to be human, he died, but never stopped screaming. For as he died and rose again, he never ceased becoming what he would be throughout all eternity — The Scream! No thoughts, no training, just dumb animal instinct. Being what he already was.
As The Scream exited through the hole in the floor, more girders were struck and shattered deliberately. Many of the staff had left the building minutes before, assuming an earthquake was tearing the confines apart. The entire structure, now stressed beyond its capacity to endure, fell inward to be swallowed by the great cavern below. It lay, sleeping, hiding its own mysteries in silence.
And when all the ruling demons in Infernus saw The Scream become a reality and coming their way, they rejoiced loudly, and hell burned much brighter for a while.
As our eyes sweep across the expanse that was a smoky pit that housed two sleeping, quavering bodies that could not awaken, now it was a part of a limitless ocean of burning sand. There were no bodies any longer quivering in their sleep. All had become one. There wasn’t even so much as a bump in the sands. All were one. All experienced all. Infernus was the flattest expanse where all were one. No more anything; only dreaming, unable to even shiver in their fright.
EPILOGUE
“What a freakin’ weird story that was,” said a thin young man with dyed white hair.
“I have others,” the old man said, putting his clothes on.
“I’m going to report you to the authorities for blasphemy,” said another student.
“Oh, goody,” was the nude man’s reply. “I could use the publicity. Maybe it will make me famous.”
“Could some of us -?” asked a woman with a blue shawl. “Could some of us hear more of your stories?”
“What a brave soul. Are there others in this room who would like to hear other demented stories of mine?”
“Yes,” said a few.
“The other stories are not like this one, I assure you. Another is a take on a fantasy novel, like this one was a take on a horror novel. An experiment, I assure you, nothing more.”
The class and professor were silent for a beat.
“I’ll tell you what. I’m editing some notes on a piece I’ve been writing for about seven years now. When I have collated them successfully, I could invite you up to my loft in the north for a reading and discussion time. Would you like that?”
Some said they would be open to that.
“Would you like me to tell you what the next short novel is called?”
“Yes,” said some enthusiastically.
“Well, I won’t tell you,” he laughed. “Maybe I will see you soon, and invite you all up for that. Adieu, my friends. It’s been fun.”
And with that, he left.
APPENDIX
[This chapter, originally the first chapter of the book, has been placed at the end for the purpose of informing others of the origins of this terrible manuscript. It has little value beyond that. Many have chosen to scan it or skip it entirely. I will leave that up to you.]
Anthony Begels was a celebrated anthropologist. She wore her long brown hair in a ponytail and always sported safari clothing ordered from catalogs. She now sat stiffly in a chair, staring across the publisher’s polished mahogany desk. It would have been impossible for her to ignore a giant reproduction of a woodcut that stretched the entire length of the wall behind him — “Moebius Strip II.” Much red, black, and gray-green. Red ants crawling over a grid twisted into a figure eight, a google, or sign of infinity. Its inside and outside were equally twisting in and out of itself. Yet the ants seemed to be unaware of this; pacing, pacing, always tracking onward towards infinity… towards nothing. To her, it looked stereoscopic.