Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (17 page)

 
          
With a sudden
cry, Jeremy took to his
heels. “Run, run!” he screamed back, as an afterthought.

 
          
They
stared around, nonplussed. There was nothing.

 
          
Then
Denise looked up and whimpered.

 
          
Demons
were dropping from the zenith as though newly cast out of Heaven, though there
was no sign of Heaven up there, only star-studded darkness.

 
          
Metallic
devils, cyborg devils—with visored helmet heads sprouting antennae, thin steel
arms clutching weighted nets, swollen blue pot-bellies and folded butterfly
wings! Half a dozen of them were falling fast. Their wings suddenly opened
—brimstone, spotted with false eyes like peacock plumes— clapping the air with
sonic booms. The creatures shat convulsively, offloading ballast. A foul rain fell.

 
          
“Run!”

 
          
The
demons’ diarrhea was transformed into billows of asphixiating gas as it
splattered the ground and the fleeing four.

 
          
Gasping,
eyes streaming blindly, Sean ran . . . directly into a clinging, tightening
mesh. It tripped him and wound around him. As he crashed to the iron soil, the
net jerked him back up again into the air—out of the clouds of tear gas.
Struggling to breathe, still half blind, he squinted through a mask of mesh at
rocking ground and yawing sky.

 
          
Three
other netted bundles were pirouetting beneath climbing demons, who warbled at
each other with the noise of high-speed data exchange. The demons slowly flew a
great circle course with the distant white hump as its center.

 
          
Presently
a wide crater appeared, dimly lit by fires deep down in it, flickeringly
illuminating machines,
apparatus
. A wretched, insane
scream rose thinly from the depths, again and again.

 
          
The
helmet-head dipped toward Sean’s head. “Welcome to the food-testing unit,” it
clucked. “So what shall we test first?
Your testicles,
perhaps?
We miss
so
many
pilgrims on their way to the Master’s banquet! But you smelled quite . . .
unprepared, from far off. Unbasted, unspiced, unstuffed, untenderized! We shall
rectify that, beginning perhaps with a stake up your rectum.”

 
          
The
demon shut its wings and dropped like a stone, pulling up with an ear-splitting
smack of air against those seemingly delicate wings only inches short of
tenderizing Sean’s whole trussed body on the crater floor. The net sprawled
open.

 
          
Other
demons—wingless ones these, animated suits of armor with tridents clutched in
their mailed gauntlets— meandered over. As they herded the prisoners to their
feet with sharp jabs, Sean saw the source of the screaming.

 
          
Beyond
an open oven large enough to walk around in, a man was stretched on a
complicated upright rack. ITie victim s body was abominably long; even his
fingers and toes had been disjointed to twice their proper length by separate
pulleys—and his scrotum was a long rubber hosepipe held in a vice. A tinman
with a beast’s head—a long piggy snout, wet little eyes and jagged hairy ears
capped by a tall cook’s hat—was supping in his testicles with a long silver
curette spoon, while the man shrieked. Other tinmen with a jackal head and an
eagle head supped, too, from other parts of his body selectively—the
tunneled-into liver, the eyeball, the flayed thigh—nodding like connoisseurs,
spitting what they tasted into tall silver spittoons set around the rack.

 
          
The
butterfly-winged demon sidled up to Sean. “Shock has a terribly detrimental
effect on the quality of our Master’s food, you see! Pale soft exudative meat
is the result. Wet, poor-textured stuff! Muscles become deficient in oxygen,
glycogen breaks down to lactic acid. His food should be pre-stressed well
before death, to get all this out of the system.” It cackled metallically.
“Hell exists to prepare the flesh of those who offer themselves to him, but
some fools still rush in. Our Master possesses a highly delicate sense of
taste. We must protect him from offensive flavors.”

 
          
“N-non-nonsense,”
stuttered Jeremy. “I’ve never
seen
a
band of you together! You’re just pirates.
Mavericks.
You’ve no
right. Devil!”
he shrieked,
as though the Devil itself would reach a hugely long arm over the crater wall
to haul him to safety in its bosom.

 
          
“Non-nonsense
must be sense,” the winged demon mocked him. “We like to learn about flesh, for
the day when we too will be fleshed out. You wouldn’t deny us that?
What,
hinder our evolution?” The demon stamped its foot
petulantly.

 
          
“These
things have gone mad! The real Devil is a lot saner ...”

 
          
“Too
damn sane,” giggled the demon. “So are you—you’ll give him indigestion.”

 
          
“Madness
is sanity,”
leered
another. “Sanity is damnation.”
This one seized Jeremy by the wrist and hauled him off. Other demons dragged
Sean, Muthoni and Denise. They were incredibly strong, for their size.
Resisting them was like trying to stop oneself being pulled along by a horse.

 
          
The
demons dragged their prisoners past the oven and the great rack toward a hill
of giant cooking utensils—fluted pastry wheels, cutters, whisks, carvers,
poultry shears, hinged gingerbread men molds, rolling pins, lemon- squeezers,
colanders—which now took on the dimensions of vicious intruments of torture. A great
meat shredder and mincing machine, a pork-fat cutter and a sausage boiler stood
puffing away, steam-propelled, at the base. A tinman with a bearded goat’s
head—which seemed now, as did the other beast heads, to be an organic
head-mask, something protoplasmic growing around the metal within, perhaps
built up from slices of people—scrambled up the hill and sledged back down it
astride a gingerbread mold. Jeremy gibbered as demons squeezed him inside this,
slammed the lid, danced up and down on it till it locked, and bore him off to
the oven. “Run, run, as fast as you can!” they chanted.

 
          
A
winged demon seized Denise’s hair as another capered down the slope with a
selection of shears, small and large. “Too many appendages!” it shrieked. “Off
with the hair, then the fingers, then the toes. Then the tongue and the tits!
Shear the ears, nip the lip!
Then a bit of grafting, and bind
up a nice rolled ham.
Perfection is a
sphere.”

 
          
Another
began pinching Muthoni all over with metal claws, drawing blood. “I smell black
pudding!” it cried.
“Too much white fat in this one though!
Is it a white pudding or a black one?”

 
          
It
reached for Sean, and nipped his buttock searingly.
“White
pudding in a black skin?
That’s a sin!
Got to change
your skins around!”

 
          
Sean
bit down hard on his lip. “How can you evolve if you’re so cruel?” he said.
“You can’t evolve this way! You’ll never learn to live!”

 
          
The
demon with shears skidded to a halt. “Oh, so the pudding argues? So riddle me
this, my wrong-skinned sausage: what is the only thing in the universe that is
deliberately and intentionally cruel? Isn’t it
man?
And
woman?
So if we can be deliberately cruel, we will be
men
at last! Ha!” With great hacks, it sheared off Denise’s golden
hair, stuffing it into a hole in its visor. From a nozzle in its rear a long
golden wire extruded, in coils. It whipped this wire, which had been her hair,
around her, trussing her tightly; caught up one leg, crashing her to the
ground, and snipped off one little toe which it passed to Goathead to taste.
Denise either fainted, or was knocked senseless by her fall. The demon
abandoned her temporarily, in annoyance.

 
          
“Can’t
you
feel pain?” shouted Sean. “Can’t
you? I ask for a reason—for
your
sake! You’re the victims here, not us.”

 
          
The
demon held the shears before his nose. “What?”

 
          
“It’s
our duty to help you, because we hindered you once. We never gave you the full
life. Denise could have told you that, but you cut her toe off! Listen, you
don’t understand pain.”

 
          
“We
know how to produce it.” The shears tweaked his nose, but did not cut through.
The pressure relaxed. “Proceed.”

 
          
What
could the purpose of pain be? How about as a stimulus? Sean improvised
furiously, in terror.

 
          
“Look,
the nature of living beings is to avoid pain. Pain forces them to do things, to
cut out the pain. But really they want to do nothing—they just want to be
stable, and still. Avoidance of pain’s a negative feedback control, cybemeti-
cally, you poor machine. You’re hungry, so you eat,
then
you aren’t hungry any more. But that’s all. Nature doesn’t like much change, or
there’d be no stability. Avoidance of pain is avoidance of rapid evolution.
Without pain—”

 
          
The
shears nipped hard. “So we are doing you a favor!”

 
          
“But
not yourselves,” he gasped.

 
          
“I
hear how there’s a lot of evolutionary
pleasuring
in other parts of the planet,” remarked another demon.
“Parts
where we may not go!
Denied to us.”

 
          
“Maybe
you can go there if you know pain, yourself!” said Sean desperately. “Not other
people’s pain—your own!”
Another tweak.
Some salty
blood ran on to Sean’s lips. “How shall we know it, if not by tests on such as
you?” “Reprogram yourselves, if you can—so that you can feel pain! Look inside
you—you’ve something missing. Maybe you’ve got a screw loose!”

 
          
A
bubbling noise came from Muthoni.
Of agony?
Rolling
his eyes he was able to see her despite the hold on his nose. She was stifling
insane laughter. The demon holding her applied a free claw to her nipple,
converting her bubbling noise into an awful cry.

 
          
“Wait,”
said the other demon thoughtfully. “Now I
do
remember something.” It loosened its hold on Sean’s nose, so that blood
flowed freely from his nostrils. “Inhibitor circuits, oh my brothers. Apply a
point-five microvolt surge across alpha-eighteen, tau-fifty-three. ’’

 
          
Abruptly
the two demons burbled loudly. Releasing Sean and Muthoni, they backed away
from each other. Muthoni sagged, but recovered her balance; blood seeped from
her breast. Still burbling—the noise was almost ultrasonic now, a
head-throbbing shriek—all the demons were beginning to scatter away from each
other, racing and taking flight at random to avoid one another. The crater was
bedlam. Sean hoisted up Denise, with some difficulty, in a fireman’s lift— her
cropped head lolling down his back.

 
          
“What
about Jeremy—and the guy on the rack?” Muthoni ran around the oven to the
unattended rack, Sean staggering along behind her. She spun little wheels on
the sides of the rack frame, releasing the awful tension. The tortured man
flopped to the ground, screaming more shrilly than ever, and writhed
convulsively like a nest of snakes. She bent over him and fiercely
rabbit-punched him in the neck; he lay still.
Dead?
She hoped so. Then she ran to the oven itself, where the gingerbread mold was
heating, and dashed heedlessly inside. Her hair and eyebrows flared as she
wrenched the mold open and hauled Jeremy out, dragging him by his armpits.
Parboiled, he already bore a growing resemblance to a gingerbread man, but he
was still conscious. She propped him on his feet. “Run, run!” she shouted in
his ear. “They can’t catch you!”

 
          
Demons
were still darting about overhead and racing zig-zag through the crater in a
sort of Brownian motion.

 
          
“That way!”
Sean pointed to a distant line of great steps
roughly hewn in the crater wall.