Lucifer's Lottery (18 page)

A great, nearly electronic hum fills the black room.

How do you like that jazz?
you think.

The configuration increases in size until it’s as large as a typical doorway. Yet a sheet of black static is all you see beyond the threshold. That’s all you see, but what you hear is something else altogether:

Screams
.

“Shall we go, Mr. Hudson?” Howard asks, holding your head-stick like an umbrella.

You feel stunned, half by curiosity and half by dread. “What about the Golemess? Shouldn’t she go with us?”

Howard veers the stick aside, to show you the corner. “As you can observe, Mr. Hudson. The Golemess is . . . detained.”

“Oh.”

Howard smiles and adjusts his spectacles. He steps through the uneven doorway of black static and takes you through . . .

Even though you don’t have a stomach, a nauseating sensation rises up. Stepping through the egress feels like stepping off a high window ledge; you expect a deadly impact but none arrives. Instead you hear a crackling that sounds more organic than electric. Fear seals your eyes and you scream, plummeting . . .

“We haven’t fallen even a millimeter, Mr. Hudson,” Howard chuckles. “It’s merely the nature of the concentrated Flux we’ve just traversed.”

Your head feels overly buoyant when you open your eyes. You leave them open only long enough to see that you are on a cacophonic street clogged with monsters, steam-cars, and carriages drawn by horned horses that look leprous.
Flies the size of finches buzz around sundry corpse-piles on corners, a sign stuck in each pile:
RECYCLE BY FEDERAL ORDER
. You notice the sidewalk as well as the walls of most buildings are made of roughly crushed bones and teeth hardened within pale mortar. One storefront window boasts
TORSOS: HUMAN & HELLBORN—ON SALE
, and another window has been streaked on the inside with blood:
OUT OF BUSINESS.

The sheer noise prevents you from ordering your thoughts: the clang of metal, the sound of hammer to stone, shouts—“Come back with my ears, you Imp fuck!”—vehicular horns that sound more like the brays of tortured animals.

“Pandemonium in sound and vision,” Howard says, wending down the stained sidewalk with your head-stick in his hand. “Take the opportunity to look around.”

This is the mistake.

As far as “looking around” goes, there’s nothing to see save for horror and revulsion. In no time, you find that when you dare look at something, your psyche is arrested by some adrenaline-packed inner scream—perhaps the sound of your soul rebelling at the wrongness of this place.

A city, a city
, you keep thinking in a panic.
Hell is a city
. . .

You can only look for a second at a time, in grueling snatches that demand an alternating surcease. Each “snatch” shows you something either horrific or impossible:

—blood-streaked skyscrapers rising higher than any building on Earth, each leaning this way or that. When one collapses in the distance, before the churning bloodred sky, hundreds leap off corroded balconies with wizened shrieks—

—street gutters gushing with lumpy muck over which dilapidated Demons and Humans—obviously homeless—hunt for tidbits, while packs of cackling Broodren—Hell’s children—stalk through the sidewalk horde hunting for
the elderly or the defenseless to quickly eviscerate so to make off with their organs—

—Arachni-Watchers, like spiders the size of box turtles, crawling up walls and across high ledges. A cluster of eyeballs form the body, ever watching from all directions for citizen behavior in violation of current Luciferic Laws. Psychic nerve sacs at the body’s core immediately transmit real-time hectographs of infractions to the nearest Constabulary Stations—

—streets, gutters, and alleyways aswarm with indigenous vermin such as Bapho-Rats, Caco-Roaches, Brick-Mites, and Corpusculars, all hunting for the unsuspecting to infect, to ensile with larva, or to eat—

—shapely She-Demons—some brown, some black, some spotted—chatting inanely behind a salon window as trained Trolls paint their horns and administer pedicures with their teeth—

—sewer grates belching flame, while beneath the iron grills faces strain, screaming, charred fingers wriggling in the gaps. Over some grates more Broodren roast severed feet on sticks—

—hot-air balloons floating in and out of soot-colored clouds overhead, each suspending iron-bolted baskets from which dog-faced Conscripts dump buckets of infectious waste, molten gold, or Gargoylic Acid onto the masses below. The skin of the warped balloons reads
SATANIC NOBLE GAS FLEET
—

—more storefront windows passing by.
LIVE SEX WITH THE DEAD SHOW! LIVE PULPING SHOW! LIVE EYE-SUCKING SHOW! LIVE HALVING SHOW!
When you peer into this latter window, you glimpse destitute Demons and half-breeds being drawn slowly across tables fitted with band saws, while spectators applaud from rows of theaterlike chairs—

—and Broodren, Broodren, and more Broodren—the hooligans of the Abyss—shifting stealthily through the
throng with eyes bright and fangs sharp, absconding with whatever they can tear away from passersby: purses, wallets, skin, pudenda. One Broodren runs off with half of a Troll’s face, only to be palmed flat into the sidewalk by a vigilant Golem—

—and a final dizzying scan of the noxious city’s skyline: a sea of smoke, sinking rooftops, and screams; endless rot-encrusted buildings atilt; mile after mile of crackling power lines dipping from rusted towers decorated by corpses hanging from gibbets; evil winged things gliding through the mephitic air, forever and ever—

—and ever and ever . . .

. . . and then the “snatches” end.

“Of course, acclimation takes a while,” Howard mentions. “But you’ll scarcely take in anything with your eyes closed most of the time.”

You’re too afraid to take in another glimpse; it’s all too tumultuous because you know that every impossibility here is utterly real. You open your eyes, then, to slits, careful . . .

“Here’s something you’ll find interesting . . .” Howard approaches a business establishment with a saloon-style swing-door as an entrance. The sign reads:
LOODY’S MAM-MIFERON TAPROOM
.

“Taproom!” you exclaim. “Beer?”

“Regrettably not, Mr. Hudson. Kegs of lager aren’t on the offering, just kegs—so to speak—of milk.”

“Milk?”

“Mammiferons . . .”

You enter the narrow bar. Various Demons and Humans sit about slate tables sipping from crude metal cups.

Howard points to the craggy brick wall behind the bar top. There is, indeed, a row of “taps” as one would expect in a beer hall but . . .

Are those . . . BREASTS?
you ask yourself.

“Mammiferons,” Howard repeats. “They’re Hexegenically manufactured; particularized genes are spliced and then enspelled, for the desired result.”

All you can do is stare.

Six carriages of flesh hang along the wall, each sporting two bulbous breasts as large as basketballs. Veins pulse beneath the stretched, translucent skin. At first you think they must be torsos of preposterously endowed Human women but then you recall what Howard said about their “manufacture.” Betwixt each pair of breasts there seems to be an organic “chute” of some sort, and each rimmed chute yawns open as if in wait of something.

“It’s a wall of boobs!” you have no choice but to yell.

“The Mammiferons exist to produce milk in these more upscale taprooms.”

The metal gird that surrounds each enormous nipple reminds you of the connector on a car battery, and affixed to the top of each gird is a tap.

You watch as a shockingly attractive werewolf yanks down on a tap and fills a cup for a demonic customer.

“The barkeeps are Lycanymphs,” Howard elucidates. “Erotopathic female werewolves, oh, and look.” He points to one of the organic chutes between one of the pairs . . .

The bar’s janitor—some manner of ridge-browed Troll—lackadaisically drops a shovelful of sloppy refuse into the chute. The chute closes, pauses, then
gulps
.

“They’re brainless,” Howard goes on. “You can think of Mammiferons as living beverage dispensers. Miss?” he asks of the furred attendant. “A cup of the vintage, if you will.”

The voluptuous She-Wolf holds a metal cup beneath one of the massive teats, works the tap, and fills it up with slimy off-white milk.

“All we need do is feed them garbage and they produce milk for eons . . .” Howard smiles at the cup. “I must have some sustenance, lest exhaustion supervene the necessary
ambling to come.” Howard drinks the cup of dense milk. “Such a treat!”

Yet all you can do is gawp at the row of preposterous, sodden breasts on the wall.

Hell really is a screwed-up place
. . .

The feisty werewolf pours more drafts from the papillic taps.

“Howard?” you ask. “Can we get out of here? This is too much for me.”

“As you wish.” Howard takes you back out to the hectic street, and turns. “This is the ‘artsy’ District, though the insinuation, like all else in Hell, is quite false. It’s all petulantly commercial, I’m afraid.”

You pass some sort of café that reminds you of Starbucks, but the cups of coffee look more like cups of mud. Trendy Hellborns yak pretentiously, batting their eyes. When you pass what appears to be a bookstore, Howard exclaims, “Drat!” and then you spot the window sign that announces
BOOK SIGNING TONIGHT! EDGAR ALLAN POE WILL AUTOGRAPH YOUR COPY OF HIS LATEST RELEASE,
THE RISE OF THE HOUSE OF USHER!

“I can’t abide to miss a signing,” Howard laments. “But duty does indeed call.”

Marquees of lights blink around the next corner, and suddenly your inhuman ears pick up a punchy beat behind a low, crooning voice that sings, “Hardheaded shovel, stone-cold ground, six feet under’s where
I’ll
be found, so don’t you, step on my blue-suede shroud . . .”

“Hey, that voice is
very
familiar!” you insist and when your head-stick passes the little honky-tonk’s front door, you glimpse a flaming stage before a packed house. On the stage itself a man in a pompous white suit fringed with silver locomotes about, jerking his pelvis. He’s got heavy black sideburns and horns in his head.

No!
you think.
It can’t be!

Or . . . can it?

“Six for the money, six for the show, six for Lord Lucifer—go, cat, go!”

No!

“I’m not attuned to that particular genre of music,” Howard says, “though the singer seems to be very popular here. However, Mozart plays with regularity, and so does Paganini. In fact, the former’s latest opera,
Gloria de Satonus
is marvelous.” But then Howard seems to catch himself in an oversight. “Oh, I suspect we’ll be rephasing soon; I haven’t been counting—”

“Counting
what?
”

“My steps. The Turnstile is programmed to rephase our location every 666 steps—”

“I never would’ve guessed,” you groan.

“Don’t scoff, Mr. Hudson. The Imperfect Number is quite a powerful force of Nether-Energy. As God proclaimed seven to be the
perfect
number, he unwittingly empowered the
imperfection
of one digit lower. Lucifer
embraces
it. In fact, when God cast his Once Favorite off the Twelfth Gate of Heaven, Lucifer, the Morning Star, plummeted in the configuration of the number six. Through that number, in one manner or other, all occult science is activated—the
Senarial
Science. You’re about to behold more examples.”

You suddenly grimace as the crackling black fuzz of the Turnstile shreds the sights before you. You feel the pressure drop, and again that feeling of falling recurs to the point that you wail, when—

PUNITARY FILLING STATION #5096—HUMANS ONLY
, the next sign reads.
NEXT LEFT
.

You shake off the vertigo to find yourself being walked into a compound supervised by figures in policelike garb. Every six of the figures is joined by a hooded monk with an aura of luminous black mist. “The Constabularies are the
federal police,” Howard says. “They’re mostly Human-Demon Hybrids who undergo extensive training and Spirit Manipulation. And the hooded gents are Bio-Wizards, in the event of, shall we say, civil disobedience.”

As usual, you’re duly confused. “That sign said
filling
station, but I don’t see any cars. They have gas here?”

Howard ruefully shakes his head no, and carries you farther . . .

“It’s a
Human
filling station, Mr. Hudson. Another demonstration of Lucifer’s execration for the Human Damned.” Then Howard gestures a prison wagon being drawn in by more unnameable horned beasts. Within the wagon’s iron bars, you can’t help but see the group of naked Humans. They’re either pleading for mercy, or down on their knees in desperate prayer.

“This Cove tends to Humans who have the audacity to continue to pray to God. It should go without saying: Lucifer does not approve of such behavior . . .” Now Howard points upward to a high water tower but when you look at it, you do a double take.

The tower reads,
URINE ONLY.

“Every urinal in the District empties into that collection tank. It’s 66,666 gallons, by the way.”

You’re already getting sick in the contemplation; then your eyes follow several pipes leading from the tower’s base to six objects that appear almost identical to gasoline pumps in the Living World.

Six at a time, then, Humans from the prison wagon—male and female alike—are strapped to gurneys and rolled before the pumps.

You feel your spirit paling as you watch . . .

Equally identical nozzles are brandished by Imp attendants. “Fill ’em up!” a Constable shouts, and then the Imps part the jaws of the Humans and insert the nozzles down
their throats. The handles are depressed, and bells begin to ring for each gallon dispensed.

The Human prisoners are promptly
filled
.

“Next!” shouts the Constable. “Keep ’em moving!”

“Exactly six gallons are pumped into each captive,” Howard adds.

The gurneys are moved off, to be replaced by more. Of the Humans already filled, their abdomens
bloat
. More Imps move now, holding objects that look like blowtorches but when the triggers are pulled, mist, not flame, shoots out. The mist is applied across the mouths and anuses and urethras of the captives, and before your own eyes, their lips and excretory orifices are impossibly sealed shut.