Messiah: The First Judgement (Chronicles of Brothers) (36 page)

Then, through the raging pain, Jesus lifted His head.

Charsoc followed His gaze, noting that He looked straight and deliberately towards Jether. For a fleeting moment, Charsoc could have sworn that a strange and exhilarated triumph lit the glazed and bloody eyes.

Then the voice that stilled the waters, that calmed the raging storms, that commanded satanic princes to be still, that opened blind eyes, and shattered the bowels of death uttered its last.

‘Tetelestai!’
(‘It is finished!’) Jesus screamed in exhilaration.

‘Tetelestai! Tetelestai!’
He cried. ‘It ... is ... finished!’ He screamed, screamed until His voice was hoarse. Screamed until the last of His life force ebbed from Him in total exhaustion. Screamed until He expelled His final agonized dying breath.

Jether stared, trembling. ‘His soul exchanged for the souls of the Race of Men,’ Jether whispered, tears mingling with the hot rain on his cheeks, his face raised to the heavens in wonder.

Charsoc watched, a strange uneasiness filling his soul. Mystified. Then Jesus’ head dropped onto His chest.

* * *

The heavy, glistening white veil of the First Heaven hung before the incandescent white throne beyond the Rubied Door, in the throne room of the First Heaven. Millions of angels lay prostrate. Unmoving before the throne.

Two resplendent great hands of light grasped the veil. Then with one movement, rent it from top to bottom.

‘That they, too, may know Me!’
Yehovah cried.

* * *

All at once, a great cacophony of the damned erupted from the bowels of the earth – a hellish din of triumph rising from the nether regions as the satanic shofar sounded.

And then, suddenly, from every quarter almost simultaneously, a strange, inexplicable silence fell. The infernal caterwauling subsided until there was no sound at all in the heavy, sweltering Palestine sky.

A subliminal roaring began that shook the trees and the three crosses above on the hill.

The earth underneath Charsoc shuddered and he was flung to the ground violently, the rocks sliding beneath his feet as he clung to the boulders about him. But even as Charsoc clawed the boulders for safe refuge, they split into smithereens about him. He lay face down in the dirt, the ground shuddering violently beneath him.

Jether watched in trepidation, the ground beneath him firm, seemingly untouched by the raging cataclysm.

‘This man was truly the Son of God!’ yelled a Roman centurion in terror, diving for safe cover.

Charsoc stumbled to his feet, levitated through the air, his jet black hair and beard blowing violently in the raging winds, until he stood next to Moloch in the chariot. He hung on to his strange broad-brimmed hat.

‘Call for the dark scribes!’ Charsoc cried, his eyes lit up in fervent exhilaration. ‘We verify the Nazarene’s death in the courts of Perdition.’

‘The Dark Watchers stand ready to deliver the findings to the First Heaven’s high council, to be witnessed in Eternal Law,’ Moloch growled.

Charsoc clapped his hands in triumph. ‘Moloch, my wicked prince!’ He gestured to the now limp and lifeless body hanging from the cross.

‘Transport our master’s booty to your slayers for the triumphal procession.’ Charsoc turned deliberately to Jether. ‘Our master awaits us.’ He smiled a smile of the damned. ‘Escort the Nazarene to hell!’

* * *

Moloch’s barbarous satanic vandals wrenched Jesus of Nazareth’s spirit from the bruised and battered body on the cross. Instantly it took on the same form as the body it had inhabited, though it was of a different, more ethereal substance. Otherwise it was identical.

Moloch’s fallen host manacled Jesus’ wrists and ankles with heavy iron fetters that ripped cruelly into His tortured flesh. ‘Your sorceries are spent, Nazarene!’ Moloch leered. ‘Bind His mouth!’ he commanded. The butchers bound Jesus’ mouth with filthy cloth soaked in deadly nightshade, then brutishly hauled Him onto their shoulders, seizing Him in a vice-like grip.

Moloch raised his whip. Instantly, they were sucked violently downward as though by some ferocious centrifugal force. Downwards ... downwards, thousands of miles downward, towards the molten core of the Earth, the party of the damned descended.

Down through the mouths of seething volcanos. Through boiling seas of molten lava, until they emerged into the strange, churning violent world of floating continents and upside-down mountains that raged at 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the blast furnace that was the outskirts of hell.

* * *

Michael turned to the angelic legions. Ashen. ‘Gabriel meets us on the plains of Perdition. Christos commandeers the Ark of the Race of Men. We prepare for assault.’

Chapter Thirty-nine

Hell’s Gates

The massive iron Gates of Hell soared a thousand feet high into the hazy, bleak gloom of hell’s smouldering skies.

Six hundred gargantuan, jaundiced-eyed demonic seraphim nested on top of the colossal black iron gateposts of Perdition, their great scaled claws slashing at the posts. Red hot fires flamed from their nostrils and ears. Their black-veined webbed wings flapped like giant bellows as they patrolled hell’s skies, fanning the blistering blue flames of hell’s ‘Ring of Fire’. Hell’s sentries.

The great circular chasm of blue flames blazed miles high, stretching from the base of the gates, encircling the savage, scorching black pitch plains of Perdition.

Lucifer, magnificently attired in his ceremonial regalia, reclined on his black diamond throne, which was carried on the shoulders of twelve satanic princes. His gleaming raven hair, intricately plaited with flaming jewels, fell past his shoulders to his glistening satin garments. On his head rested his crown of state of pure gold embedded with chrysolite and black rubies. A glistening white cloak hemmed with ermine was draped across his shoulders, and his sandals were of freshly molten gold. He held hell’s sceptre in his left hand.

The king of hell. Followed by thousands of his menacing satanic warrior princes, who in turn were led by the ghoulish company of hooded Shaman Kings, hell’s macabre drummers. The legion of Necromancers, wizards of the dead, marched near the gates, their great armies of skeletons and zombies filling the plains.

Charsoc walked below Lucifer, next to the procession, his hat and cloak now exchanged for his favoured bright vermillion and orange striped flowing robes of Chief Magus. His sorcerer’s hat was pointed, its tip and rim of platinum. His scarlet shoes were long and narrow and curved upwards at the toe with diamond buckles that changed colour with each new dark incantation. Charsoc held his crooked magus rod high. Live serpents writhed from under the folds of his robes onto the burning pitch below.

Ahead of both Lucifer and Charsoc, in advance of the fiendish parade, swaggered the leering Moloch and his horde of strapping demonic butchers, to the ominous rhythm of hell’s pulsating war drums.

Jesus, manacled and bound, clad only in the bloody loincloth in which He was crucified, was raised high on the massive oiled shoulders of ten of Moloch’s most depraved slayers. They marched directly in front of Lucifer.

The Nazarene – hell’s trophy.

As the demonic armies approached the gates, the skies grew black with thousands of screeching banshees. They hovered overhead, hissing asps flowing from their bare skulls, their wings beating furiously as the riotous hellish army continued its march to the slow mutinous rhythm of hell’s throbbing war drums.

The ‘Ring of Fire’ flamed ferociously. Hundreds of the seraph monsters left their nests and swooped down across the gates, their nostrils flaming, smelling the intruder. Their jagged claws slashed, hovering menacingly over the manacled Jesus.

A great shuddering drew nearer as a band of Shaman-Ogres lumbered towards the entrance, then peered through the iron bars, their squat yellow eyes glinting in the semi-darkness.

‘We are the keepers of the Gates of Hell and the grave,’ a voice rumbled.

‘We await you and your trophy, O Satan, king of hell,’ Ruber, leader of the Shaman-Ogres growled through the iron bars, leering at Jesus. The war drums stopped, and a heavy silence fell, broken only by the vicious snarling of the five-headed sentry hellhounds.

Twenty of the Luciferean Black Horde, led by Dagon, marched forward out of the darkness. Carried high on their shoulders was a huge black casket. ‘We present the keys of hell,’ Dagon roared.

The Black Guard placed the casket down before the gate and bowed deeply to Lucifer.

Dagon unlocked the casket and opened it.

Lying on a bed of magenta velvet was an enormous golden key, engraved with angelic lettering, a ruby embedded in its crown.

Dagon nodded to his militia, and six of them hoisted the key up onto their shoulders and marched over to where Ruber stood, waiting in front of the lock.

Ruber held out his huge leathery hand, lifted the master key upward, and placed it in the lock, then turned it. The sound of a hundred monstrous locks of hell unbolting resounded through the lava plains.

‘Welcome to your domain, master. Hell and the underworld await you.’

A hundred Shaman-Ogres heaved the iron monstrosity back. Slowly the mammoth gateway opened, the entrance into the molten core of the earth. The underworld of departed spirits. Fiery blue tempests howled through the gates while molten lava rain lashed down on the procession as it passed through. Balberith waited next to Lucifer’s magnificent dark-winged royal stallion, tethered inside the gates.

Ahead loomed a raised road of crystal ore, with seething pitch glowing red beneath it. The road became a fluid glass passageway that fell away on both sides into a blasting chasm of molten iron ore that stretched thousands of miles below into the very bowels of the earth. This was the Crystal Corridor of the underworld, some three thousand miles below the surface and some fifteen hundred miles across – earth’s inner core.

Ahead, glistening through the crystal core, a league in the distance, stood the Black Palace – Lucifer’s imposing palace of black crystal. Inside the palace citadel, resting beyond the magenta veil in the black necropolis, lay the ‘Ark of the Race of Men’, guarded by the satanic warriors of Lucifer’s Black Horde, his elite militia.

To the left of the corridor, through the transparent liquid crystal walls, loomed hell’s monstrous penitentiaries, which incarcerated the wicked dead.

Millions of penitentiaries housing Lucifer’s penal colonies were hewn out of the jagged iron cliffs, which stretched steeply upward thousands of feet and plummeted thousands of feet downward – the labour camps of the damned.

A thunderous malicious caterwauling rose from behind the iron bars – the tormented screams of millions of the wicked dead from the Race of Men, mingled with the cackling roar of hell’s prison warders, the wort devourers and banshees that lined the corridor to Perdition, shrieking their incantations of the damned. To the right of the corridor, beyond a great gulf, lay the strange, gloomy shadowlands, the abode of the slumbering Righteous dead. The Grave.

It was one monstrous sheer block of translucent crystal that stretched thousands of miles above the corridor and fell thousands of miles beneath.

The twelve satanic princes laid Lucifer and his throne onto the ground. Lucifer rose. He turned, surveying Jesus, lifted high on the arms of Moloch’s Philistine horde as they marched through the tempests and molten rain towards him. He raised his arm. ‘Deliver the Nazarene to the underworld!’ he cried, then pulled his cape tighter around him and mounted his stallion. Its black veined wings extended, and they flew ahead, straight into the raging tempests.

Instantly the party was sucked downward until the grey shadows of hell dimmed to the oppressive pitch blackness of the lower crystal road, lit only by the flickering lanterns of the wort devourers.

* * *

‘On the left, Nazarene...’ Lucifer smiled viciously as Moloch roughly pushed Jesus’ head to the left, ‘...the rabble of the Race of Men who reject Yehovah – blasphemers, murderers, rebels...’

Screaming men and women, their eyes veiled with grimy opaque film, clawed blindly at the iron penitentiary walls, their lower bodies burning alive in the seething black lava.

‘And now the crème de la crème of the Race of Men – the intellectuals...’ Lucifer turned disdainfully towards the chain fences where a group of prisoners screamed in torment, clawing wildly, the fingers of their spirit bodies torn and bleeding, their nails ripped from clawing the jagged barbed barrier.

‘Atheists, philosophers, agnostics – all rejecting the existence of a personal creator. Their god was their own minds and opinions. They scream the most volubly when they arrive in my domain and discover that I was real.’ Lucifer smiled. ‘When they realize that Yehovah exists,’ he shrugged, ‘they are driven out of their minds and beg for death.’ Lucifer raised his hand. ‘Release the hell bulls into the penitentiary, Adzeal.’

A hundred raging snarling hell bulls, each weighing two thousand pounds, pawed the lava with their horn hooves, then charged the damned prisoners, their curved horns goring their bodies, throwing them onto a pile of writhing screaming prisoners in the corner of the burning black pitch.