Slydes could not respond.
If anything, the street was worse. Cars that looked more like small steam engines chugged by on spoked wheels, a smokestack up front gusted black-yellow soot and vapor. Carriages and buggies rolled by as well, hauled along not by horses but by things like horses, whose flesh hung in dripping tatters. One carriage was occupied by a woman with skin green as pond scum who wore a tiara of gallstones and a dress made from tendons meticulously woven together. She fanned herself with a webbed, severed hand. In another carriage rode a creature that could’ve been a pile of snot somehow shaped into human form. Then came a haulage wagon of some sort, powered by six harnessed beasts with festering carnation-pink skin pocked with white blisters; Slydes thought hideously of skinned sheep when they bleated and spat foamy sputum. A man perched behind them cracked a long, barbed whip—or . . . perhaps man wasn’t quite right. He wore a wool cloak and banded leggings like a shepherd of the old days, yet atop his anvil-shaped head grew a brow of horns. The whip cracked and cracked, and the bleating rose to a mad clamor. Slydes looked one more time and noticed that, like the bat, these bald “sheep” had faces grimly tainted by human features.
“Oh my God, I am in some shit,” Slydes stammered. Things were starting to click in his head, and with each click came more and more fear. Did a tear actually form in his eye? “I-I-I,” he blubbered. “I don’t think this is a dream . . .”
“It’s not,” sounded a voice that was somehow raspy and feminine simultaneously. The woman who approached him was nude, and yet—he thought at first—checkerboarded. Slydes squinted at her impressive physique and recalled women with similar physiques whom he’d raped and sometimes even murdered without vacillation. But this woman?
Every square inch of her skin was crisply darkened by black tattoos of upside-down crosses. Even her face, around which shimmered long platinum blonde hair.
“Slydes, right?” she asked. “My name’s Andeen, and I’m your Orientation Directress. You may not even realize this yet, but you’re what’s known as an Entrant.”
“Entrant,” Slydes murmured.
“And, no, this isn’t a dream. You should be so lucky. This is all real. Over time your memory will re-form.”
Before Slydes could mutter a question, his gaze snapped to another passerby: another impressively figured nude woman. Her arms, legs, abdomen, and face were but one colossal psoriatic outbreak. Only the breasts and pubis were without blemish.
“Rash lines,” remarked Andeen. “In the Living World you have tan lines, here we have rash lines.”
Slydes’s gaze snapped back to the tattooed woman. “Here . . . as in . . .”
“As in Hell. You’re dead, and for your worldly sins, you’ve been Condemned.” Her slender shoulders shrugged. “Forever.”
Slydes began to grow faint.
She grabbed his hand and tugged. “Come on, Slydes. We gotta get you out of this Prefect. Believe me, you don’t want to be here.” Then she tugged him down the street and ducked into an alley. “We’ll lay low a while, and try to get you someplace where your ass won’t be grass.”
“I-I,” Slydes blubbered. “I don’t understand.”
“Listen, there’s no good place in Hell, but there are places that are worse than others. Like this place, St. Putrada Circle. You must’ve been a real scumbag to be Rematerialized here. Yes, sir, a real humdinger of a shitty person.”
“I don’t understand!” Slydes now sobbed outright.
“A Prefect is like a small District. And this one happens to be a Fistulation and Surgical Transversion Prefect. I’ll keep an eye out for Abduction Squads. They’ll Transvert anybody here, Humans and Hellborn alike, but Humans are the desired target. The Surgery Centers pay the most for Humans.”
Slydes looked cross-eyed at her.
“The short version. Every Prefect, District, or Town has to have an active mode of punishment, while there are some areas, known as Punitaries, that exist solely for punishment. But anyway, this Prefect uses Fistulatic Surgery to conform to the Punishment Ordinances. Fistula is Latin; it means ‘communication between,’ and Transversion is, like, rerouting things. That’s what they do here—they reroute your insides.”
Even though Slydes didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, he stammered, “Whuh-whuh-why?”
Andeen smirked. “Because it’s perverse and disgusting, the way it’s supposed to be. This isn’t Romper Room, Slydes. This is Hell, and Hell is hard-core. Eternal torment, suffering, and abhorrence is the name of the game. It pleases Lucifer, therefore, it’s Public Law.” She smirked more sharply this time. “Look, go over to that public washbasin and wash the bat crap out of your hair. It’s grossing me out.”
Dazed, Slydes noted the elevated stone basin only feet from the alley mouth. He dunked his head in the water, agitated the rank guano out of his hair, then seized up and jerked his head out when he realized what he was washing in.
“That’s not water! That’s piss!”
“Get used to it,” Andeen said. “Unless you’re a Grand Duke or an Archlock, you’ll never get near fresh water. Only other way is to distill it yourself out of the blood of what you kill.”
Revolted, Slydes flapped the urine off his face, then noticed lower basins erected intermittently along the smoky street. “What are those things? They look like–”
“Oh, the commodes. It’s another Public Law. In this Prefect, it’s mandatory that everyone urinate, defecate, and give birth in public.”
Slydes’s bearded jaw dropped.
“And there”—Andeen pointed—“across the street. There’re the various Surgery Suites.”
Slydes scanned the signs over each transom . . .
RECTO-URINARY TRANSVERSION
URETHRAL-ESOPHAGEAL REVERSAL
UTERO-RECTAL FISTULA
And many, many more.
Slydes could not conceive of any of this.
When he glanced inadvertently between two more spiring buildings, he could’ve shrieked. Far off in the distance, some monumentlike thing stood impossibly high, but it was a figure. He remembered seeing the Statue of Liberty once a long time ago, on a drug run between Florida and New York—that’s what this reminded him of . . . sort of. A giant statue, he thought. But . . .
Andeen caught him staring. “Oh, the Demonculus. It hasn’t been up long. Pretty awesome, huh?”
Slydes peered at her, incredulous, then peered back up at the statue. “A Deeeee—”
“Demonculus. It’s farther away than it looks—that’s actually the Pol Pot District over there. The Demonculus is 666 feet high. Looks like a statue, right?”
Slydes dumbly nodded, noting the pointed crown about the form’s head, akin to the Statue of Liberty. But . . . was it a crown, or horns?
Andeen inspected her black fingernails with tiny white upside-down crosses. “Well, it’s not a statue, it’s a living thing—just another one of the Boss’s obsessions.”
The impact of her words finally registered. Slydes looked pleadingly at her. “Living . . . thing?”
“Um-hmmm. Once it’s activated, it will tear the shit out of whole Districts to root out insurgents.” She smiled at his trauma. “For the rest of eternity, Slydes, you’re gonna be seeing some really wild and really awful stuff.”
Her evilly tattooed hand pulled him back into the alley. “And look, there’s an Abduction Squad. The clay men are called Golems. They’re like state employees, public works, police, security, stuff like that . . .”