The Scarlet Gospels

  “Yeah. That’s hard to top,” she said.

  Without anyone uttering another word, they began walking. The wind had escalated considerably, raising clouds of dirt and litter and, when it gusted with particular vehemence, opening and closing doors along the street. A crudely constricted chimney was toppled from a roof half a block closer to the regime’s headquarters, the sliding bricks bringing down slates and eaves with them. The wind brought clouds too, gray shreds like dirty clothes, torn between the roofs and the ever-grinding stone. Some of the clouds even pressed down into the streets and raced along with the wind at the level of the eaves.

  The Harrowers put their heads down against the bluster and moved on toward the unguarded gates of the monolithic structure without further challenge.

  “How thoughtful,” Harry said. “They left the front door open for us.”

  “Very considerate,” Lana said.

  “Here’s the plan,” Harry continued, never breaking stride. “Me and Dale will deal with any demons we find. Caz and Lana, if Norma’s in there, you grab her and get her out of there at all costs. Leave us behind if you have to. Any objections?”

  Of course, the objections were innumerable, but not one was uttered aloud, and without protestation they entered the tower.

  18

  “What the fuck is this?” Lana asked.

  They had entered the tower not knowing what to expect but anticipating at least the semblance of a fight. What they got, however, was a firsthand look at the aftermath of a massacre, and a recent one at that, judging by the steam that rose from the still-fluttering corpses. The bodies that blocked the passage just inside the front door were already the feeding and breeding place of Hell’s green-gold Doxy Flies, the smallest of which were ten times the size of their humble earthling equivalent. And their offspring were correspondingly eager; some of these bodies were already pulsing masses of larval life, devouring what they’d been born into with monstrous appetite.

  As Harry listened to the play of his friends’ footfalls, he surveyed the blood-drenched canvas before his eyes. He knew this was the work of the Cenobite. These, Harry guessed, were only the beginnings of the visions to which the Hell Priest had requested he bear witness. He was happy he’d declined the offer, not that he’d entertained the notion. But the demon they were chasing was powerful; that much was certain. The problem, however, was that he was far more powerful than Harry had ever wanted to admit. Harry was standing ankle deep in the organs of many large demonic soldiers—warrior demons, clearly, who likely spent the majority of their lives preparing for battle—and they had been felled in the blink of an eye. Harry shuddered.

  “Jackpot,” Caz said, bringing Harry back from his thoughts.

  Broken from his trance, Harry looked up and saw his friend collecting weapons from the dead soldiers. Caz had used his time wisely and had already acquired a considerable collection of belts bristling with knives, all ornately decorated but clearly more than showpieces.

  “Hallelujah,” Dale sang. “We’re trading up.”

  “Good thinking,” Lana said. She drew out a knife that sprouted a second, third, and fourth blade, intersecting the first so as to create an eight-pointed star. “I’ll take this one.”

  “Great,” said Harry, giving the chamber a twice-over. “Let’s take what we need and get the fuck out of here.”

  After making their selections from the vast array of infernal weaponry, they advanced toward the first set of stairs and, though each pair of eyes started on the same step, none landed upon same location.

  “Uh,” said Caz.

  “My thoughts exactly,” said Lana.

  “You think he’d go easy on us for once,” Dale said.

  “Oh, he has,” Harry offered.

  Everyone followed Harry’s gaze and there they saw a small stream of blood trickling down the face of one of the stone steps.

  “Hell’s bread crumbs,” Harry said.

  “You know,” said Lana, “most people wouldn’t follow the blood trail. Not us, though. Jesus Christ.”

  “Look on the bright side,” said Caz. “If there are bears in Hell, they won’t come after you first.”

  “That barely makes sense.”

  “Bear-ly?” Caz said, grinning.

  “Shut up,” said Lana.

  Harry had already begun to climb the stairs, far too intent on his mission to allay his fears with humor. His sobriety quickly caught on, and Lana and Caz silenced themselves, following Harry up through the vertical labyrinth. They passed through chamber after chamber without error, always following the beginning of the blood trail at the end of another. For there were many bodies in the various chambers of the Bastion through which they passed: some looked as though they’d turned on one another, others like they’d simply been casually murdered by someone passing by. There were a few who were still faintly alive, but they were all too far gone to answer any question that might have been put to them. On Harry and his followers pressed until they reached the sixth and final chamber at the top of the black tower.

  Like every door they’d reached up to this point, this too was wide open, though the chamber Harry and company walked into was vastly different from anything they had seen until now. The area was chaotic—there was no doubt of that—but there was no blood to wade through as there had been in the previous chambers. And there had clearly been a struggle here, but there were no corpses. Pinhead had failed in destroying the regime, and by the looks of the place he hadn’t been very happy about it.

  “Once more into the proverbial breach, then?” Dale said.

  “When in Rome,” Harry said as he entered the chamber.

  Harry stared across the wreckage in the room, his eyes fixated on a large archway—seemingly the only other means of entry or exit found in the room—at the opposite end of the chamber. Inside this archway, he saw, was a void. No bricks or mortar, but for that matter, no light, objects, colors of any kind; all sense of place was lost there. In the world above, a sight such as this one would have invited madness—in this realm, however, it was yet another one of Hell’s tiresome mind games. Harry found it surprising how soon his senses had numbed to the madness of this place.

  “Do as the demonic do,” Dale said, finishing Harry’s thought for him. “That’s how the expression goes, right?” Dale walked through the debris, spinning his cane as he moved on.

  “What the fuck, man?” Caz said. “What does this thing want? Like, what’s the endgame, you know?”

  “No,” Harry said, drawing closer to the archway of nothingness, “I don’t know.”

  His eyes were fixated on the sight (or lack thereof), and as he approached he realized that the archway wasn’t as barren as it had appeared to be. The nothingness was an illusion, and the closer Harry drew the more this nullity before him was beginning to form a flat, monochromatic image. Perhaps the magic of this thing depended upon the nearness of a warm body. Or perhaps it simply begged scrutiny in order for it to work; whatever the case, Harry was now within a stride of two of its location and he could now plainly see a flickering image of one of the streets he and his Harrowers had passed through on their way to the tower. He recognized the location because it wasn’t easy to miss the remains of the recently slain and infected damned who were still lying there.

  “Can someone tell me what I’m looking at?” Harry said. “Is this magic, or technology?”

  “What? Where?” Dale said, turning to look in Harry’s direction.

  “Whatcha got there, Harold?” Caz said.

  Harry opened his mouth as if to say something, but no words escaped his lips. Dale, Lana, and Caz joined Harry at the threshold of the archway. Silently, they all stood staring at the image before them. Finally, Lana spoke.

  “Looks kind of like a television. Like a really shitty closed-circuit image.”

  Harry squinted. He hadn’t seen much television in his lifetime, but from what he remembered, it was a very different experience.

  “Can I
borrow your cane?” Caz said to Dale.

  “You can hold my cane as long as you’d like,” Dale said, handing Caz his cane with a playful glance.

  Caz took the cane, trying to conceal his smile, and quickly turned toward the flickering image. Lifting the cane, he extended his arm, careful not to get too close, and made to press the ivory tip onto the surface of the screen.

  “Be careful!” Harry said.

  “Harold, I’m fine,” Caz replied, and then pressed the tip into the archway. The image rippled where the tip touched the surface, like concentric waves disturbing a serene, translucent lake.

  “Ah,” said Harry. “It’s not either-or. It’s both. Technology and magic.”

  “Looks that way,” Lana said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, but that’s gotta be some kind of liquid display screen, held upright with some kind of working.”

  Caz, continuing the experiment, moved the cane across the liquid, causing the image before them to turn like the pages of a book. The view of the streets folded and gave way to a new and entirely unfamiliar vista of the world in which they were outsiders.

  “How the fuck—”

  “Don’t burst a brain cell, Harold,” Caz said. “It’s like a security camera—shit!”

  Caz lost the grip of the cane, and it fell into the archway.

  “My lucky cane!” Dale shouted. (Though no one was to know, he had a collection of over two hundred lucky canes. All identical. All with the same opulent design. All, according to Dale, equally necessary.) Quickly Caz dropped to his haunches and reached his hand out toward the rippling void.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Harry said. “A cane’s one thing, but—”

  “Relax. My ink ain’t saying shit. And I’m assuming yours isn’t either.” Harry said nothing. Caz nodded. “That’s what I thought.” And, so saying, he thrust his hand into the liquid void and grabbed for the cane.

  “Please be careful,” Dale said.

  Caz turned to Dale and smiled, wordlessly retrieving the cane from the void and bringing it back into the chamber.

  “I got a notion,” Harry said. “Caz, let me try something.”

  “You mind?” Caz asked Dale.

  “He can touch my cane too,” Dale said.

  “I’m honored,” Harry said as Caz handed him the cane.

  Harry inserted the cane into the liquid and flicked it quickly, revealing image upon image. Faster and faster Harry flicked it, and in different directions—up, down, left, right, revealing different locations and images based on each of the differing movements.

  “I’ll be,” said Dale. “It’s like the walls have eyes.”

  “Yeah. And each direction,” Harry said, moving the cane at a slower, more deliberate pace, “represents an axis. Looks like we can go left, right, forward, backward.”

  “In and out?” Dale said.

  Caz chuckled.

  “Good question,” Harry said, and he pressed the cane deeper into the image on the screen—a vast mountain range of craggy, jagged rocks—and the picture zoomed in for a closer look.

  “That would be a yes,” Harry said, continuing to play with the mechanism. “I don’t say this often, but I’m impressed.”

  “Yup,” Caz said “These fuckers definitely got the gizmos— Wait, what was that? Go back! Fuck!”

  “What did you see?” Lana said.

  “The other way,” Caz instructed. “There! Stop!”

  Harry brought the image around again and saw, on the screen, the Hell Priest, accompanied by several regime soldiers, each of them at least seven feet tall. Resting comfortably on the shoulders of the tallest soldier was Norma.

  “Fuck me dead,” Harry said.

  Harry and his Harrowers stood there, looking into the void at the image of Norma surrounded by a small army of fiends.

  “There you are, momma,” said Caz. “We’re coming for you.”

  “You bet your fucking ass we are,” said Harry.

  “What is that?” Dale asked.

  “Oh God,” said Lana. “Look at the other soldier. In its hand. Is that—”

  “A severed head,” said Harry. “I’ve seen enough of ’em to know.”

  Harry pushed the cane deeper into the liquid image. The picture of the figures onscreen grew larger.

  “I still don’t know what we’re seeing or how we’re seeing it, but it’s great to see Norma again,” Harry said.

  Harry gently eased the cane in farther, ensuring he not lose sight of the Hell Priest and his brigade. Suddenly the Priest and his entourage stopped dead in their tracks. The demon who carried the severed head lifted it up and the Priest slowly and cautiously turned back and began walking toward them.

  “What are they doing?” Caz said.

  “No fucking clue,” Lana said. “This thing doesn’t have audio, does it?”

  “If it does, I haven’t figured out where the mute button is yet.”

  Harry and his Harrowers watched as the Hell Priest reached for the severed head and lifted it toward his face, putting the mouth to his ears.

  “You gotta be fucking kidding,” said Caz.

  “Afraid not, old friend,” Harry said, turning to Caz. “That fucking head is still talking.”

  “Yeah,” said Lana. “And I have a pretty good idea what it said.”

  And, all too soon, so did the rest of the Harrowers. On Lana’s prompting, they had returned their gazes to the screen and saw that the Hell Priest had now lowered the head and was looking out at Harry and his companions as though seeing perfectly clearly the lens through which he was being watched.

  “That’s fucking spooky,” said Caz.

  “Right,” Harry said, his voice tremulous. “There goes the element of surprise.”

  19

  Norma had done her best to create a rough map in her mind, tracing the journey she’d taken in the company of the Cenobite, the few soldiers he had conscripted from among the survivors of the massacre at the Bastion, and the still-living severed head of a military general named Pentathiyea, one of Hell’s highest-ranked officials, whom the Cenobite had beheaded without hesitation or effort. And though the chance of ever making the return journey seemed remoter by the mile, she still held on to the tender hope that she might find a way back.

  They had left the Bastion with one of the soldiers carrying Norma on his back. She still had enough powers of persuasion to get her mount, whose name was Knotchee, to quietly describe to her the territory they journeyed over once they were beyond the Bastion. It seemed to be a promising arrangement from the start, with Knotchee using a soldier’s unadorned vocabulary to describe the landscape through which they traveled. But his simple eloquence quickly faltered once they got beyond the last of Pyratha’s streets and ventured out into the wasteland itself. There was nothing for him to describe except emptiness.

  “Are we not on a road of some kind?” Norma asked him.

  Knotchee lowered his voice to keep his reply from reaching the Hell Priest’s ears.

  “The only road we’re following is the one in the Lord Tempter’s head. And if he loses his way we’re all dead.”

  “That’s not very comforting,” said Norma.

  This silenced the conversation for a long while. When Knotchee took up talking again it was because finally there was a change in the view. Now, however, what he was seeing wasn’t so easy to describe, and he fumbled for words. There were huge pieces of wreckage, he said, strewn across the desert, the remains of machines the likes of which he had never seen before. To his soldier’s eye it looked as though a war had been fought here, though he freely admitted he could see no killing purpose to which these vast toppled devices could have been put. And if there were demons who might have died during this war he had no way of knowing, since there was not so much as a single bone underfoot.

  “Do demons have ghosts?” Norma asked him.

  “Of course,” Knotchee replied. “There will always be those that won’t let go of who they were.”

 
“If this had been a battlefield, there’d be ghosts wandering around.”

  “Perhaps they are.”

  “I’d know if there were,” Norma replied. “Ghosts and I have a way of crossing paths. And I don’t sense them here. Not one. So if this was a battlefield, it was one where all the dead went to a contented rest. And that would be a first for me.”

  “Then I have no more ideas,” the soldier said.

  Despite Norma’s encouragement, the descriptions grew steadily sparser. But as she was riding on his shoulders, her arms wrapped around his neck, it wasn’t hard for Norma to read the signals that were rising off the soldier’s body. His skin was getting clammier, his pulse quickening, his breath too. He was afraid. Norma knew better than to impugn his masculinity by attempting to reassure him. She just held tight and kept her peace. The wind rose for a time, its gusts so strong they would have thrown her over if she’d been on her own.

  And then, just as the rising velocity of the wind started to cause Knotchee to stagger, the storm died away completely. There was no slow diminishing of the force. One moment, they were being struck by gust upon gust; the next, the wind seemed to have died away completely.

  “What happened?” Norma whispered to Knotchee.

  The sound of her own voice gave her some answer to the mystery. The wind hadn’t suddenly stopped blowing; they had simply stepped out of it into what sounded, to judge by the noise of their feet on pebbles and her words, like some kind of passageway, the walls of which corrupted the sounds, stretching them or slicing them into slivers.

  “The wasteland’s gone,” he said. “The stories are true. It’s all folding up around us, and we’re going to get folded up in it.” He started to turn around, his breath coming in panicky gasps.

  “Don’t you dare,” Norma said, catching hold of one of his ears and twisting it as hard as she could.

  It was the kind of thing an irritated parent might do to a troublesome child, and perhaps for that reason it gained the soldier’s attention. He stopped in mid-turn.