Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [71]
Lower. Lower. Lower.
You close your eyes for you cannot watch the entire process, but you do hear the escalating shrieks and then the finality of the great SPLAT!
When your eyes reopen, the dizzy, headless woman is no longer pregnant, and already the demonic newborn is being spirited away in a barrow.
“Take me the fuck out of here!” you yell.
Howard rolls his eyes, scratching at some tiny red pocks on his face that appear to be ingrown hairs. “Really, Mr. Hudson—was the profanity necessary? And, truly, I regret your distress, but it’s necessary that you recognize the systematics that exist here. You must perceive Lucifer’s ultimate ideal of pursuing an order of faith antithetical to God.”
“Fuck that shit,” you cuss again, and now even you are shocked by the sudden use of the vulgar. “This sucks. None of this makes any sense—”
“Excellent! You’re beginning to comprehend!” Howard enthuses, taking you out.
“It doesn’t make any sense at all for Lucifer to go to all this effort to do all this evil stuff!”
Howard continues to beam. “Exactly! Because, antithetically speaking, the absence of logic is the perfect logic in a domain that must exist contrary to God!”
Your confoundment dizzies you when Howard finally wends you back outside into the creeping scarlet daylight, and as you move away from the Barracks, the wails of newborn Demons and the shrieks of women in labor follow you like an atrocious banner.
Still, details bother you, and now that the shock of your witness is past, you slowly observe, “They use their babies for the ‘gourmand market,’ and they use their mammary glands for demonic implants, and once they’ve had sixty-six babies, their headless bodies are sentenced to eternity in the Decapitant Camp. Have I got it right so far?”
“Quite,” Howard confirms.
“So . . . what happens to their heads? Earlier, didn’t you say something about—”
“An exclusive construction component!” Howard continues to be pleased by your attentiveness, but then—
The black static veil crackles and surges and—
Here we go again . . .
—you psychically plummet into the next stop on the tour . . .
“This, Mr. Hudson, is the second bird from the stone,” Howard intones.
You stare out, mortified, mystified, and transfixed all at once . . .
PART THREE
MANSE LUCIFIER
CHAPTER SIX
(I)
Krilid rubbed fatigue from his oblong eyes. He waited, sitting on the luminous rim of the Nectoport’s mouth within the sooty cloud he’d found at the prearranged coordinates. He still felt himself psychically recovering from the sheer vision of the Vandermast Reservoir. Just a great big empty black hole in the ground, he tried to convince himself. Why should the sight of the place fill him with such dread?
They haven’t told me everything. When will they? This isn’t fair . . .
He was serving God now, after all, but could God hear prayers from Hell? No salvation would be in store for him upon his Hellbound death, so . . .
Do I really need this?
But when he wiped his brow, which the Head-Bending had transformed into a warped cone, he remembered his true motives.
One way or another, I’ll make them pay for what they did to me, and if I die trying? So what?
When one was unfortunate enough to be born in Hell, there was not another Hell to follow in afterlife. Only the sweetness of nonexistence . . .
Krilid made a mental note not to forget that. His mood improved at once.
BAM!
More reflex than the awareness of danger flung his runneled hand up to fire the sulphur pistol. Blackish glop and curls of tentacles flew all about, some of the glop slapping him in the face. Frowning, he wiped it off on his sleeve. Great . . .
He’d almost sensed rather than seen the repulsive Levatopus that had crawled out of the clouds. Had he been a second