The Scarlet Gospels (3 page)

“I said down,” the Cenobite warned.

Felixson began to kneel. The demon went on.

“And naked. Dogs go naked, surely.”

“Oh … yes. Of course. Naked.” Felixson proceeded to undress.

“And you,” the demon said, extending his pale finger toward Kottlove. “Elizabeth Kottlove. Be his bitch. Naked as well, on your hands and knees.” Without further prompting, she started to unbutton her blouse, but he said, “Wait
,”
and walked toward her, the flies rising up from their blood-clotted dining places as he moved. Elizabeth flinched, but the demon merely reached out and placed his hand on her lower belly.

“How many abortions have you had, woman? I count eleven here.”

“Th-that's right,” she stuttered.

“Most wombs would not survive such unkindness.” He clenched his fist, and Elizabeth let out a little gasp. “But even at your advanced age I can give your abused womb the capacity to finally do what it was made to do—”

“No,” Elizabeth said, more in disbelief than denial. “You couldn't.”

“The child will be here soon.”

Elizabeth was out of words. She simply stared at the demon as though she could somehow make him take pity on her.

“Now,” he said, “be a good bitch, and get down on all fours.”

“May I say something?” Poltash said.

“You may try.”

“I … I could be very useful to you. I mean, my circle of influence reaches to Washington.”

“What is your offer?”

“I am simply saying, there are a lot of people in high office who owe their positions to me. I could make them report to you with a single phone call. It's not magical power, I grant you, but you seem to have all you need of that.”

“What are you asking in return?”

“Just my life. Then you name the names in Washington you need at your feet and I'll make it happen.”

The Cenobite didn't reply. His attention had been claimed by the sight of Felixson, who was standing in his underwear, with Elizabeth beside him, still preserving her modesty. “I said naked!” the demon snapped. “Both of you. Look at that belly of yours, Elizabeth. How it swells! What about those tired tits? How do they look now?” He pulled off the remains of her blouse and the brassiere beneath. The dry purses of her breasts were indeed growing fuller. “You'll do for one more breeding. And this time you won't be scraping it out of your womb.”

“What do you think of my offer?” Poltash asked, vying for the demon's attention.

But before the demon could respond, Heyadat interrupted. “He's a liar,” he said. “He's more of a palm reader than an advisor.”

“Shut your fucking mouth, Heyadat!” Poltash said.

Heyadat continued. “I know for a fact that Washington prefers that woman Sidikaro.”

“Ah. Yes. I have her reminiscences,” the demon said, tapping his temple.

“And you pass it all on to your Order, right?” Heyadat inquired.

“Do I?”

“Surely, the other members of your Order—”

“Are not with me.”

Heyadat blanched, suddenly understanding. “You're acting alone—”

Heyadat's revelation was interrupted by a moan from Elizabeth Kottlove, who was now on all fours beside the Cenobite's other dog, Theodore Felixson. Her belly and breasts were now round and ripe, the Cenobite's influence powerful enough to already have her nipples leaking milk.

“Don't let that go to waste,” the Cenobite said to Felixson. “Put your face to the floor and lick it up.”

As Felixson too eagerly bent to his task, Poltash, who had apparently lost all confidence in his offer, made a mad dash for the door. He was two strides short of the threshold when the Cenobite threw a look into the passageway from which he'd come. Something glittering and serpentine there sped from the other side of the wall, crossed into the chamber, and caught Poltash in the back of his neck. A beat later three more came after it, chains, all of them ending in what looked like hooks big enough to catch sharks, wrapping themselves around Poltash at the neck, chest, and waist.

Poltash shrieked with pain. The Hell Priest listened to the sound the man made with the attentiveness of a connoisseur.

“Shrill and inexpensive. I expected better from one who lasted this long.”

The chains rent themselves in three different directions, trisecting Poltash in the blink of an eye. For a moment the magician stood there looking dazed, and then his head rolled off his neck and hit the mausoleum floor with a sickening plop. Seconds later, his body followed after, spilling his steaming intestines and stomach, along with their half-digested contents, onto the ground. The demon raised his nose and inhaled, taking in the aroma.

“Better.”

Then, a tiny gesture from the Cenobite and the chains that had ended Poltash's life snaked across the floor and slithered up the door, wrapping themselves around the handle. Tightening themselves, they pulled the door closed and raised their hooked heads like a trinity of cobras ready to strike, dissuading any further attempts at escape.

 

3

“Some things are better done in private, don't you think, Joseph? Do you remember how it was for us? You offered to be my personal assassin. And then you shit yourself.”

“Aren't you a little tired of all this by now?” Ragowski replied. “How much suffering can you cause before it fails to give you whatever sad, sick thing it is you need?”

“Each to their own. You went through a phase when you wouldn't touch a girl over thirteen.”

“Will you just do it already?” Ragowski said.

“Soon. You are the last. After you there'll be no more games. Only war.”

“War?” said Ragwoski. “There'll be nobody left to fight.”

“I see death has not made a wise man of you, Joseph. Did you really think this was all about your pitiful secret society?”

“What then?” Heyadat asked. “If I am to die, I'd like to know the reason!”

The demon turned. Heyadat looked into the shiny darkness of his eyes, and as if in answer to Heyadat's question the Cenobite spat a word in the direction of the open wall. A flight of twenty hooks, trailed by glinting chains, came at Heyadat catching him everywhere—mouth, throat, breasts, belly, groin, legs, feet, and hands. The Cenobite was bypassing the torture and interrogation and going straight to the execution. Lost in his agonies, Heyadat babbled as the hooks steadily worked themselves deeper into his three-hundred-and-fifty-pound body. It was hard to make much sense of what he was saying through the snot and the tears, but he seemed to be listing the books in his collection, as though he might still be able to strike a bargain with the beast.

“… the
Zvia-Kiszorr Dialo
 … the only … remaining … of Ghaffari's
Nullll
—”

The Cenobite then called seven more chains into play, which came swiftly, sweeping around Heyadat from all directions. They hooked themselves into his shuddering body and wrapped themselves so tightly the fat man's flesh oozed from between the rusted links.

Lili edged herself into her corner and covered her face with her hands. The others, even Kottlove, who appeared now to be eight months into her term while Felixson hammered at her from behind, looked up as Heyadat continued to chatter and sob.

“… Mauzeph's
Names
 … n-n-names of … Infernal Territories…”

All twenty-seven chains had now secured themselves in the man's body. The Cenobite murmured another order and the chains proceeded to tighten further, pulling on Heyadat's body from several directions. Even now, with flesh and bone under unbearable stress, he continued to list his treasures.

“… oh God … Lampe's
Symphony,
the … the … the Death Symphony … Romeo Refra's … Romeo Refra's—”

“
Yellow Night,
” Ragowski prompted. He was watching Heyadat's torment with a dispassion perhaps only a dead man could have worn.

“… yes … and—” Heyadat started to say.

There the list stopped, however, as Heyadat, only now comprehending what was happening to him, unleashed a stream of pleading cries, all rising in volume as his body was subjected to the contrary demands of the hooks. His body could not withstand the claims made upon it any longer. His skin began to tear and he started to thrash wildly, his last coherent words, his entreaties, overtaken by the ragged howls of agony that he now unleashed.

His belly flesh succumbed first. The hook there had gone deep. It ripped away a wedge of bright yellow fat ten inches thick and some of the muscle beneath. His breasts came next: skin and fat, followed by blood.

Even Lili watched now through her fingers as the spectacle escalated. The hook in Heyadat's left leg, which had entered behind his shinbone, broke it with a crack that was loud enough to be audible above Heyadat's screams. His ears came off with scraps of scalp attached; his shoulder blades were both broken as the hooks there pulled themselves free.

But despite the thrashing, the screams, and the reflecting pool of black blood below his body now so large it lapped against the hem of the Cenobite's vestments, the demon was not satisfied. He issued new instructions, using one of the oldest tricks in magic: Teufelssprache.

He whispered instructions and three new hooks, larger than any that had come before—their outer edges sharp as scalpels—flew at the exposed fat and flesh of Heyadat's chest and stomach and sliced their way into his interior.

The effect of one of the three was immediate: it pierced his left lung. His screaming stopped and he began to gasp for air, his thrashing becoming desperate convulsions.

“Finish him, in mercy's name,” Ragowski said.

The Cenobite turned his back on his victim and faced Ragowski. The demon's cold, lifeless stare caused even Ragowski's stiff reanimated flesh to prickle.

“Heyadat was the last man to give me orders. You would do well not to follow in his footsteps.”

Somehow, even after experiencing the hand of death itself, Ragowski still found himself afraid of the calculating demon who stood before him. Taking a deep breath, Ragowski conjured what courage he could.

“What are you trying to prove? Do you think if you kill enough people in the worst ways imaginable they'll give you a name like the Madman, or the Butcher? It doesn't matter how many abhorrent tortures you devise. You'll always be the Pinhead.”

The air went still. The Cenobite's lip curled. Quick as a flash, he reached out for Ragowski, seized the dead man's scrawny throat, and pulled him close.

Without taking his black gaze off Ragowski for an instant, the demon lifted his trephine from his belt, activating the device with his thumb as he brought it to the middle of Ragowski's upper brow. It fired a bolt through Ragowski's skull and then retracted.

“Pinhead,” Ragowski said, undeterred.

The Cenobite made no reply. He simply hooked the trephine back on his belt and put his fingers into his own mouth, seeking out something that lodged within. Finding it, he drew the thing out—a small, slick, blackened hunk, like a diseased tooth. He returned his fingers to the hole in Ragwoski's skull, inserting the object and letting go of Ragowski's throat in the same moment.

“I'm guessing I'll be dead soon, right? To paraphrase Churchill, I'll be dead in the morning, but you'll
still
be Pinhead,” Ragowski growled.

The Cenobite had already turned his back on Ragowski. The hooks that held Heyadat in place had clearly waited for their master to turn back to them before they performed their coup de grâce. Now, blessed with his gaze, they showed their skills.

The hook, a weapon that the demon had affectionately named the Fisherman's Hook, was attached to a chain that had found purchase in the ceiling. It suddenly and swiftly tore through the roof of Heyadat's mouth, lifting his entire body clear of the ground. The moment the Cenobite's gaze landed upon the rusty blood-caked links, eruption followed eruption. Heyadat's hands split in two, the feet the same. The huge bulk of his thighs was gouged from groin to knees. His face was stripped of skin, and the three deeply embedded hooks in his chest and stomach pulled out heart, lungs, and entrails all at once. Surely a faster autopsy had never taken place.

Their task complete, the hooks dragged what parts of him they'd claimed through the pools of blood, back toward the place from whence they'd come. Only one remained: the Fisherman's Hook, from which the empty and significantly lighter carcass of Yashar Heyadat hung slowly swinging back and forth, the drooping doors of his stomach—bright with fat—flapping open and closed.

“All the fireworks were red again tonight,” the Cenobite said, as though bored of the whole affair.

Felixson, still rutting like a dog, pulled himself out of Kottlove and retreated from the spreading blood. Seeking purchase, his hand landed on something soft. He turned and his face fell.

“Lili…” was all he said.

The demon turned his head to see what Felixson saw. It was Lili Saffro. The sight of Heyadat's slaughter had apparently been too much for her. She was slumped dead against the far wall. There was a stricken expression on her face, and her hands still clutched at her chest.

“Let's be done with this,” the demon said, turning to face the three remaining magicians. “You. Felixson.”

The man's face was all snot and tears. “Me?”

“You play the dog well. I have work for you. Wait for me in the passage.”

Felixson didn't need to be told twice. Wiping his nose, he followed the demon's instructions and fled for the exit. Though Felixson was going naked into Hell on the heels of the creature who had slaughtered almost every friend he'd ever had, he was happy with his lot.

So happy, in fact, that he scurried through the ragged door in the mausoleum wall to wait for his new master to come to him and never once looked back. He went far enough down the passageway to be reasonably certain he would not hear the screams of his friends and then he squatted against the crumbling wall and wept.