Wrath James White presents Poisoning Eros I & II (14 page)

*

She was not running for her life. She would have
stopped by now and accepted her fate if that’s all it had been.
Gloria was running for salvation, and for that of her daughter.
Running from an eternity of rape, torture, and mutilation. But the
demons were catching up. Their thunderous tread pounded the ground
behind her. Their fetid breath steamed on the back of her neck. She
imagined what they would do to her if they caught her, so she ran
faster. In hell she was spirit, and they were flesh. Gloria knew
she could outrun them.

Gloria’s abused and exhausted soul took flight
through the winding catacombs, hurtling like a leaf in a hurricane.
The ruckus from the demons’ pursuit slowly faded as the weight of
their flesh slowed them. Soon Gloria couldn’t hear them anymore,
couldn’t feel them breathing down her neck. When she finally turned
and looked, she was alone.

She slowed, and stumbled along through the dark
corridors, unsure of where to turn, no clue where her daughter
might be. No idea how to find the cave where she’d seen her
daughter tortured more than a year ago at the hands of Bill Vlad,
and there were countless thousands of caves to search. It didn’t
matter. Gloria had forever if that’s what it would take.

She lifted a torch off the tunnel wall and walked in
the direction of the loudest screams. Gloria winced as the sounds
of metal striking flesh, blood splattering against stone, shrieks
of purest agony, and cries for mercy grew more intense.

The winding catacombs presented danger. Any demon
she passed would know she’d escaped, and any one of them might
decide to reclaim her. But there was no turning back.

Gloria peered inside one cave. A spear-like dildo
was being rammed into the asshole of a rather flabby, sweaty man.
He was doubled over, his head and arms locked into a wooden frame,
his ass exposed and jutting upward. The head of the dildo was a
spiked battering-ram. The demon put his shoulder behind it and
forced the long phallus in to the hilt. Blood mingled with a large
portion of his internal organs exploded from the man’s mouth.
The man turned towards Gloria with wounded eyes
glazed in agony and screamed, blood sprayed from his lips onto the
cave floor. Gloria recognized him.

He was older than when she’d last seen him, but
there was no mistaking that acne scarred face and long oily hair.
It was Colin, one of the geeks who’d enticed her into having sex
with farm animals for money and had gotten rich doing it. She
wondered if the spear punching into his anus was as long as the
giraffe cock he’d wanted her to take. It was definitely a hell of a
lot longer than the donkey’s dick.

“Serves you right you son of a
bitch,” Gloria said.

The demon’s smile seemed to extend around to the
back of his head, like a snake unhinging its jaw to swallow a
rodent. He withdrew the battering-ram dildo from Colin’s prolapsed
rectum and slammed it in again. Colin’s flesh split with a
wrenching squelch.

Gloria turned her head and crept quietly past.

Each cave possessed a sight more hideous than the
last, but Gloria had no choice but to check them all. She had to
find Angela.

It seemed that hours—perhaps even days—passed. Time
meant nothing here. Her mind reeled from the hundreds of atrocities
she’d witnessed. Gloria stumbled into another large cavern.

Other lost souls, like her, were huddled at the
mouth of a long tunnel. Gloria’s heart stuttered. Her knees
wobbled. A smile crawled tentatively onto her face, which had not
known happiness in ages, as she staggered toward the tunnel,
reaching out desperately, like a drowning man grasping for a
lifejacket.

Light was coming from the tunnel. Sunlight.

Nearly a dozen others were huddled at the mouth of
the tunnel, but they didn’t look as ecstatic as she expected. In
fact, they looked even more miserable and terrified than the
tortured souls she’d left behind.

“I can’t do it. I didn’t know it would be like
this,” a woman sobbed. She appeared to be young enough to be
Gloria’s daughter—except for her eyes. They were ancient. Something
in those eyes told Gloria that the woman had been dead for a long
time, suffering ceaselessly for years upon years. She may have been
a child when she died, but not anymore. Her childhood had ended
here years ago, perhaps even decades or centuries.

“But isn’t this the way out?” Gloria asked,
perplexed.

The girl didn’t look her way. She muttered to
herself, hugged her knees to her chest and rocked back and
forth.

“Yes. The way out.” This voice belonged to an aged
soul, one whose astral body looked as if he had been nearly a
hundred years old when he died. His eyes looked even older than the
girl’s. Who knew how long he’d been in hell.

“Then why aren’t you going through? Why don’t you
all leave? Why stay here?”

“Because
God
is in there.
That passageway takes you right past heaven.
He’ll see
us if we try to leave. I can’t face him. Not after all the things
I’ve done—after all that’s been done to me. I can’t face him. I
can’t do it.”

“But how can that be? Heaven is
above, and we’ve got to be in the center of the earth
somewhere.”

“Heaven and hell are everywhere and nowhere.” The
old man answered with a defeated shrug.

Gloria looked at the dozens of broken souls that
littered the cavern and then glanced back at the tunnel. She
thought about the sins that weighed on her own soul, and the
atrocities she’d been subjected to since her death. She looked at
her spirit body, which was still tacky with dirt, demon feces,
blood, and semen. Her every sin appeared as yet another stain on
her tarnished soul. Even after centuries buried beneath that
mountain of stolen flesh, the angel had looked less disheveled than
she did when he emerged from the lake of fire—and he probably had a
better chance at redemption.

“I look like a whore,” Gloria mumbled. But it was
worse than that. It wasn’t just her appearance. She
was
a
whore. And God would know it. He would see it and he would reject
her and send her back to inferno.

But there was no way she was going to let that fear
overcome her. Not after all she’d been through. “I’m going in,”
Gloria said, but her feet wouldn’t move. She was suddenly more
afraid of that cave than any of the tortures of hell, afraid of
being rejected by the one being who was always supposed to love her
no matter what. Rejected by the only one whose love truly mattered,
besides her daughter.

Gloria peered into the sunlit tunnel and felt a tug
at her soul. It was calling to her.

“I’m going in there,” she said aloud. “But not
without my daughter.”

Gloria turned away from the tunnel … toward the
catacombs … back into hell to find Angela.

*

No weapons. Nothing to protect her. And the demons
were everywhere. She didn’t know how long she could continue to
outrun them. Twice already she’d nearly been caught. One torturer
had reached out from a cave in back of her as she’d stood watching
a man being locked into an Iron Maiden. She’d felt the claws dig
into her arms and ran as fast as she could, jerking her arms free
of his grasp. If his talons had not been as sharp, if they hadn’t
shred through her like a hand parting a spider web but had been
able to dig in and hold on, she would have been captured right
then.

Later, she’d almost made the same mistake, pausing a
second too long to watch a boy who appeared no older than
seventeen, have the skin slowly sliced off of him by a demon whose
own ill-kept costume of human and animal skin appeared to be
decomposing. The demon was cutting long rectangles onto the boy’s
skin and then grabbing the very edge of it and wrenching the
epidermis free with a pair of ordinary pliers. Gloria was
transfixed by that wet ripping sound as the skin was torn away in
long blood red strips. She almost didn’t hear the demon’s coming up
behind her. Then she was almost trapped as she ran right into
another trio of monsters coming in the opposite direction. Only the
element of surprise and their sluggish fleshy bodies had allowed
her to race past them. But there was no way her luck could hold out
for much longer. Not in the hundreds of tunnels she had to venture
through, the hundreds upon hundreds of tortured souls she had to
pass, the countless demons that lie ahead in those dark catacombs.
She had to find Angela quickly before she was caught.

“Gloooooria …” The wind through the undercroft
seemed to sigh, carrying her name as if in a funereal march. The
sound led her further into hell, lulled her into the caves. Songs
of torment, of endless pain, compelling nonetheless because of
their dulcet tones. Dragging her farther and farther away from her
escape, from the tunnel of light.

“I’m not afraid …” she whispered, though her mouth
was dry, and she trembled. The surface of the cave wall was cold
and tacky as she ran her hands along its surface to guide her
through the darkness. Ahead she found candles housed in human
skulls and picked one up, aimed it toward the blackness ahead of
her.

Back through the caves, witnessing punishment that
she had grown numb against, forms of torture that no longer made
her cringe. Focused instead on finding her daughter, not caring
what crimes the condemned had committed, what sins they had thrust
upon others. Though she suspected that they couldn’t all be guilty,
couldn’t all deserve the fate that awaited them. After all, she was
in hell under unconventional circumstances, and had to figure
others were as well. But she couldn’t care. Like her, they would
have to find their own salvation. Their own way out of hell.

What disturbed her, despite her efforts not to care,
were the children. Not that she came across many, but when she did
… and now, a small boy, perhaps nine—though she imagined that was
just the look of his astral body; not knowing how long he had been
in hell. Like the girl at the tunnel, his eyes were ancient; dark
and terrible, a child who had seen too much.

He was alone in the cave, alone except for the
endless swarms of insects crawling on his body. He sat in a chair,
his arms and legs tied down by barbed wire, and Gloria could tell
by the bloody welts that he had been fighting against his
restraints.

The child glanced at her as she peered into the
cave. “Help me,” he sobbed, spitting out the cockroaches that
skittered into his mouth.

She moaned, rushed over to him, stomped bugs that
surrounded and attacked him. Thousands of cockroaches, waterbugs,
red ants, chiggers, brown recluse spiders, dung beetles, hornets
and wasps—endless species of bugs swarming and flying and attacking
the boy, burrowing into his flesh, biting and stinging
relentlessly, crawling up his nose and into his mouth and ears.

The boy jerked his head, struggled against his
restraints, squeezed his eyes and mouth shut. Gloria swiped madly
at the bugs, squashing some beneath her bare feet, brushing them
from his face. She knew she had to get him out of that chair, that
her assault on the insects wasn’t making a difference. They just
kept coming.

She had no weapon. She looked frantically around the
room for a tool to cut the wire and found nothing.

The boy kept his mouth shut, and his screams were
muffled. She raced back over to him and pulled at the barbed wire,
trying not to hurt him further. The jagged edges dug into her skin,
but she ignored the pain; she would heal again. She managed to
loosen the restraints around his arms, and he began to flail,
slapping the bugs away from his face and upper body. The barbs bore
into her flesh as she tried to free his legs.

She yanked him free of the chair and dragged him
across the floor, toward the exit. The bugs followed, streaming
across the dirt like a tsunami, and she pulled the boy out of the
cave and into the corridor, fleeing with his wrist clasped tightly
in her hand. The insects chased, noisily chittering, hissing,
spitting, their thousands of tiny insect legs sounding like horses
stampeding on the packed dirt floor.

They ran until Gloria could no longer hear the
insects’ pursuit, until their terrifying screams died out. She
rested against a wall and rubbed her hands over her face,
trembling.

“Are you all right?” she managed to ask, and the boy
nodded. The light was faint in the tunnel, but she could make out
the movement of his head. “Why were you being punished?” She
couldn’t begin to imagine what such a young child could have done
to deserve to be in hell, but whatever it was she didn’t care. Even
if God didn’t give a shit, didn’t believe in the innocence of
children, she did. Condemning a child to hell was beyond her
comprehension.

The boy shrugged.

“Don’t you know?”

He shrugged again. “Thanks for setting me free.
Those goddamned bugs were getting on my nerves.”

It felt as though those bugs were swarming again.
Her flesh crawled and itched at the chilling tone of his voice.
“Did I just make a mistake?”

“I dunno—did you?” He grinned, but his eyes remained
cold, dark.

She started to move away from him, to head down the
corridor, but he followed.

“Where are you going?”

“I-I’m looking for someone.” He kept up with her as
she backed away. “I have to go now.”

“Don’t go.” His fingers sank into the flesh above
her wrist. Gloria jerked her arm, tried to pull away, but his grip
was remarkably strong. He slammed her into the wall, bashed her
head against the stone.

She crumpled to her knees, her head clutched in her
hands. Blood trickled between her fingers. “Why are you doing
this?” she gasped, trying to look up at him.

“Because this is what I am. Did you think I was in
hell by accident?”