Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [55]
“What’s that all about?”
“It’s customary for authorized guests to give succor to the sentinel,” Howard says with some relief. “Another toll, so to speak. I can only thank the Fates that this particular Truncator is of the heterosexual variety.”
You get the gist as you watch the Golemess unbutton a front flap on the Demon’s armor, revealing its penis, if it could be called that.
“You gotta be kidding me!” you exclaim. “That’s it’s-it’s-it’s—”
Howard sees fit to not respond.
The limp shaft of the Truncator’s penis looks like six red arteries grouped together, perhaps as thin as six-foot-long lengths of aquarium tube. You wince worse at the scrotum, which looks more like a cluster of Concord grapes, but even more appalling is the Demon’s glans: a pink, lopsided sphere of shining flesh at the end of the corded shaft, tennis ball–size, with not one but half a dozen urethral ducts.
You look away when the Golemess begins to . . . render oral “succor.”
Howard grabs the stick on which your head is affixed and climbs out of the car.
“So . . . what now?”
“Time to charge the Turnstile,” Howard says. “It’s quite a fascinating apparatus which harnesses cabalistic energy lines that exist in the Hex-Flux—Hell’s version of electromagnetics—and effects what we refer to as Spatial Displacement—one of Lucifer’s favorite cosmological sciences.” And with that—which you understand none of—Howard approaches a black-plane wall. There, you see a circle of engraved notches; at each notch there’s a small geometric etching.
“So this is a revolving door through space and time?”
“Just space,” Howard corrects. “There is no time in Hell. The use of this facility will give you the opportunity to see a variety of the Mephistopolis’s landmarks, which we hope will impress you.”
Impress me, you ponder, enough to stay? Is that what he’s talking about?
Howard touches one of the etchings, then—
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,