Surface Detail

Fifteen

Here was a gulf of space, an infinite valley, stuffed full to choking with scenes of torment spread out to the furthest reach of sight, filled with the low moans and the chorused anguished of the torn and tormented and infested with a miasmic stench of shit and burned, corrupted flesh. Here was a pressure on the eyes of fractal detail — torment within torment within torment within torment, endlessly — just waiting, stacked, lined up, marking time until it could be dwelt upon, comprehended, made part of the self; guarantors of perpetual nightmare.

Here was a seemingly infinite realm of torture presided over by slavering, wild-eyed devils, a never-ending world of unbearable pain, humiliation beyond imagining and utter, unending hatred.

…She had decided there was a perverse beauty about it, an almost celebratory fecundity about the depths of creativity which must have been plumbed to produce such imaginative cruelty. The very bestiality, the absolute depravity of it raised it to the level of great art; there was a transcendent quality to its horror, its complete commitment to agony and degradation.

And there was even a humour to it, too, she’d decided. It was the humour of children, of adolescence — determined to appal the adults or to take something to such an extreme you shocked even your peers — it was the humour of wringing every last conceivable shred of double-meaning or fanciful connection out of every even remotely misconstruable subject, every mention of anything that could be seen as having anything whatsoever to do with sexuality, bodily waste or any other function of simple, matter-of-fact creaturality or biochemicalness, but it was still humour, of a sort.

When Prin went through and she did not, when the blue glowing doorway she had been only very peripherally aware of rejected her and bounced her back into the groaning confines of the mill, she had lain on the sweated boards of the ramp, watching the blue glowing mist evaporate and the surface of the doorway turn to what looked like grey metal. She could hear the predator-demons howling and cursing and arguing. They were further up, on the level where Prin — in the form of an even larger demon — had brushed them aside moments earlier, before launching himself — and her — at the glowing doorway. She got the impression that they hadn’t yet noticed her lying there.

She lay still. They would find her, and probably very soon, she knew that, but for these precious few moments she was alone, undisturbed, yet to come to the attention of these most dedicated persecutors.

Prin was gone.

He had tried to take them both through to whatever was on the other side of the blue glowing doorway, but only he had got through. She had been left behind. Or he had left her behind. She wondered whether to feel sorry for him or not. Probably not. If he was right and there really was some other, pre-existing, non-tormenting life to be found beyond the doorway, then she hoped that he had found it. If he had gone into oblivion, then that was something to celebrate too, for oblivion, if it existed as a real, achievable possibility, meant an end to suffering.

As likely, though, she thought, was that he had simply gone to another part of here, another and possibly worse, more terrible quarter of reality, of what he had chosen to call Hell. Perhaps she had been the lucky one, getting to stay behind. There would be more torment, more pain and abasement in store for her, she knew that, but perhaps what now awaited Prin was even worse. She didn’t like to think about what would happen to her, now, but thinking about what might be happening or about to happen to Prin was even worse. She did not let herself shy away from it; she made herself think about it. If you thought about it, if you embraced it, then the revelation you might in time be faced with — of what had happened to him, what had been done to him — would lose some of its power and its ability to shock.

She wondered if she would ever see him again. She wondered if she would want to, given what they might do to him. He had disobeyed the rules of this place, the rules they lived by; he had gone against the very law of Hell, and his punishment would be extreme.

So might hers, of course.

She heard one of the demons say something. She didn’t understand exactly what had been said but it had sounded like an exclamation, like an expression of surprise. She knew then that she had been seen. She heard and felt crashing, iron-shod paws clattering down the ramp towards her. They stamped up to right beside her head.

She was hauled upright by both her trunks. She tried to keep her hand-pads over her face but she was shaken, and her body’s own weight tore their grip free. She caught a glimpse of a demon’s wide, furred face, its two great eyes staring at her, then she shut her eyes tightly.

The demon shouted in her face. “Didn’t get through? That’s bad!” His breath smelled of rotting meat. He marched up the slope, dragging her behind him. He was roaring to the others. Look what he’d found!

They took turns raping her while they discussed what to do to really make her suffer. In Hell, the seed of demons burned like acid and generally brought with it parasites, worms, gangrene and tumours, as well as the possibility of the conception of something that would eat its way out when the time came to be born. That conception could equally well take place in a male; a womb was not required and the demons were not fussy.

She found the pain astounding, the humiliation and degradation absolute.

She started to sing to them. She sang without words, just making sounds in a language that she herself didn’t understand and had not known she possessed. The half-dozen demons reacted with fury, taking an iron bar to her mouth, smashing her teeth. She kept on singing, even through the froth of blood and broken teeth inside her mouth, the sounds bubbling up and out, sounding more and more like wheezing, unstoppable laughter. One of them tied something round her neck so that she started to suffocate. She felt the life going from her, and wondered what new torments would await her when she was brought back to life again, to continue suffering.

The mad, ghastly thrusting that was tearing her apart suddenly stopped. The thing round her neck was torn away and she gulped air, then spat and retched as the blood coughed itself up, then was able to roll over onto her side and take a sequence of further deep, painful gasps, letting the blood and the bits of her teeth fall from her mouth onto the stained, uneven surface of the floor. There was more snarling and shouting and some thumping, like bodies being thrown about or being forced to the floor. She could see the boards better than before because the door to the outside was open and a giant beetle was visible.

She looked up and, standing over her, saw a demon like the one Prin had become: massive and powerful, six limbed, fur striped yellow and purple, accoutred with jagged armour. Another one, striped yellow and black, not quite so fantastically armoured, stood behind, its powerful forelimbs holding a struggling minor demon, one of those who’d been raping her. The other minor demons had been scattered around the floor of the mill and lay moaning and slowly picking themselves up.

The giant predator demon lowered its face to hers as she wheezed and spat the last of the blood from her mouth. Between her legs, it felt as though she had been split apart. Inside, it was as though they had filled her with boiling water.

“Unclever, little one,” the giant demon told her. “Now we go to a place where soon you will beg to come back here and let these scamps resume their play with you.” It straightened. “You bring her,” it said to the yellow and black demon, which threw the minor demon it held across the floor and into the rotating machinery of the mill. It howled as it was crushed; the machinery creaked to a stop. The demon lay like a limp rag leaking blood within the cogs and gears of bone.

The yellow and black demon picked her up as easily as Prin had done and took her to the giant beetle waiting outside.

Inside the flier, she was thrown into a giant open pod with a glistening red interior and brown-black lips like some enormous animal; the lips closed around her neck as her body was sucked further into the centre of the closing pod. She felt dozens of barbs connect with her skin, then penetrate her flesh. She waited for the next symphony of pain to consume her.

Instead; everything went numb. A feeling of something like relief flooded her. Even her mouth stopped hurting. No pain. For the first time in months she was free of pain.

She was facing forward, just behind the craft’s control deck, where the giant beetle’s hollow eyes looked out over the valley. She heard the ramp behind thud closed. The two giant demons squeezed themselves into seats, one looking out through each of the beetle’s segmented eyes.

“Sorry about all that,” the yellow and purple one said to her, glancing over its shoulder as the other demon worked the craft’s controls and the whirring sound of giant beating wings filled the beetle’s interior. The demon’s voice was quieter now, conversational, though it still carried above the sounds of the wings.

“Has to look and sound good for the minions; you know.”

The other demon pulled on some sort of headset. “Portal we agreed, first choice,” it said. “Flight time as simmed.”

“Sounds good to me,” the first demon said. “Last one through’s unfavoured.” The demon wearing the headset pulled at the controls. The beetle lurched upward, reared back as it rose, then tipped forward. It settled level but still felt as though it was pointing upwards as it accelerated away across the riven, smoke-streamered landscape beneath, rising almost to the greasy-looking brown overcast.

The first demon looked over its shoulder at her again. “Could only get one of you out, yes?”

She blinked at it. No pain. No pain. To be flying, trapped in this thing, but to be feeling no pain. It made her want to cry. The demon looking at her made a shape with its great, tooth-filled mouth that was probably meant to be a smile. “It’s all right to talk,” it told her. “You are allowed to reply. The cruelty has already stopped, the madness ceased to be. We’re going to get you out of here. We’re your rescuers.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. Her voice sounded strange to her, without teeth. Her tongue had been bitten and although not causing her any pain it was swollen, and that was making her voice different too. She didn’t know if she had bitten her own tongue or if one of the demons in the mill had.

The senior demon shrugged. “Suit yourself.” It turned away.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“What?” It turned back to look at her again.

“I’m sorry I don’t believe you.” She shook her head slowly. “But I don’t. Can’t. Sorry.”

The demon looked at her for a moment. “They really have chewed you up bad, haven’t they?”

She didn’t say anything for a while. The demon continued to look at her. “Who are you?” she asked eventually.

“I’m called Klomestrum,” it told her. It nodded at the demon flying the beetle. “Ruriel.”

The other demon waved one forelimb but did not look round.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Place we can all get the fuck out of here. Another portal.”

“A portal to where?”

“The Real. You know; the place where there isn’t all this pain and suffering and torture and shit?”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“And where will we be then? Where in this ‘Real’?”

“Does it really matter? Not here, that’s the point.”

The two demons glanced at each other and laughed.

“Yes,” she insisted, “but where?”

“Wait and see. We’re not there yet. Best not to give anything away, eh?”

She blinked at him.

He sighed. “Look, if I tell you where we’re going to come out and they’ve somehow managed to listen in on this then they might be able to stop us, see?”

The first demon half-turned his head to her. “Where did you think you were going back to just there, back at the mill?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “Another part of here,” she said. “There is no ‘Real’. It’s just a myth to make things seem even worse here.”

“You really think that?” the demon said, looking aghast at her.

“It’s all that makes sense,” she said. “It’s all there is. This is all there is. How could there be a Real where people would allow something so terrible as this to exist? This place must be all that there is. What people call the Real is a myth, an unreachable heaven only there to make existence all the worse by comparison.”

“There could still be a Real,” the demon protested, “but one where the people—”

“Leave it,” the other demon said.

Somehow, without her noticing it happening, the demon piloting the giant beetle had turned into one of the smaller demons, a dark little squirmy thing with a long glistening body. It looked like something that had just been born, or excreted.

“Fuck,” the other demon said. It had turned into something much smaller too; a sort of featherless bird with pale, raw, tattered skin and a beak whose top part had been broken half off. “You really think your friend just went to another part of Hell?”

“Where else is there to go?” she asked.

“Fuck,” the demon said again. It seemed to stiffen. So did the other demon.

“Oh, fuck, we’re not even getting to—”

There was no transition. One instant she was numb and without pain in the pod inside the giant flying beetle, the next she was pinned, flayed, in agony, her flesh opened out and spread out all around her, on a slope in front of some sort of ultimate Demon. She was shrieking.

“Shush,” something said, and the force of it tumbled across her like a gigantic wave, pressing her into the noisome earth beneath her where things crawled and squirmed and invaded her flesh. Now she could not scream. Her throat had been sealed, her mouth had been sewn shut. She breathed through a ragged hole in what was left of her neck, chest muscles working to expand and compress her lungs but leaving her unable to make any sound. She writhed, moved side to side, tried to jerk herself loose from whatever held her. The motions produced only more pain but she persisted.

A noise like a sigh rolled across her, scarcely less batteringly heavy than the sound of “Shush” a moment earlier.

The pain ebbed, retreated, left her quivering. It did not go away entirely but it left her room to think, to feel other things besides the agony.

She could see properly now. The pain before had been so bad she had not been able to understand what she was looking at.

Before her, across a dark valley full of smoke and half-hidden red and orange flames, on a dully glowing throne the size of a great building, sat a demon at least a hundred metres tall.

The demon had four limbs but looked alien, bipedal; its upper limbs were arms rather than legs. Its skin was made from living pelts and hides and flesh, its body from an obscene amalgam of sweating metal, stretched gristle, pitted ceramic gears, reconstituted, pulverised bone and inflamed, smouldering sinew, tattered flesh and leaking, boiling blood. The vast throne glowed dully because it was red hot, producing a greasy slow upwelling of smoke from the fleshes and pelts that cloaked the demon, filling the air with a continual sizzling, spitting noise.

The thing had a lantern head, like an enormous version of a four-paned, inward-sloping gas light from ancient history. There was a sort of face shown within the lantern itself, an alien face made of a dirty, smoking flame; it peered out through glass made dark and filthy by the soot and livid fumes within. At each of the four external corners of the lantern, a giant candle of tallow stood, each containing a hundred shrieking nervous systems intact and in burning agony within. She looked at it, knew it, knew all this, and could see herself through its eyes, or whatever infernal senses or organs it used to see.

She was a skinned skeleton-plus-musculature figure, a tiny distant doll of a thing, her flesh pulled away from her and pegged, pinned to the ground around her.

“I hoped to make you hope,” the vast voice said, the syllables rolling over her like thunder. Her ears hurt with the force of it and kept on ringing afterwards. “But you are beyond hope. That is vexing.”

Suddenly she could talk again, the stitches that had sealed her mouth gone in a blink, the ragged tear in her neck sealed, her throat no longer crushed closed, her breath coming and going normally.

“Hope?” she gasped. “There is no hope!”

“There is always hope,” the vast voice declaimed. She could feel the force of it in her lungs, feel its words shaking the very ground beneath her. “And there must be hope. To abandon hope is to escape part of the punishment. One must hope in order for hope to be destroyed. One must trust in order to feel the anguish of betrayal. One must yearn, or one cannot feel the pain of rejection, and one must love in order to feel the agony of witnessing the loved one suffer excruciation.” The vast being sat back, producing wreathes of smoke like the currents of dark continental rivers, candles spearing flame like huge trees burning.

“But above all one must hope,” the voice said, each word, each syllable smacking into her body, resounding inside her head. “There must be hope or otherwise how can it be satisfyingly dashed? The certainty of hopelessness might become a comfort; the uncertainty, the not-knowing, that is what helps to bring on true despair. The tormented cannot be allowed to abandon themselves to their fate. That is insufficient.”

“I am abandoned, I am nothing but abandoned; abandonment is all there is,” she screamed back. “Make your myths but I’ll not believe in them.”

The demon rose up, fire and fumes and smoke beating and wallowing in his wake. The ground beneath her shook to his foot-steps, jarring the few teeth left in her head. He stood over her, towering above like an insane statue of something unbalanced, unnatural, two-legged. He stooped, causing a great roaring as the flames around him tore brightening through the air. A finger longer than her whole body scooped something from the ground near her head. Dripping wax from one tower-sized fleshy candle splashed spattering onto her torn-open skin, stinking of rotten, burned flesh, causing her to howl with fresh pain until it cooled, part solidified.

“You did not even notice this, did you?” the great voice bellowed, rolling over her. He held the tiny-looking necklace of barbed wire which she had worn for as long as she could remember. He rubbed it between his body-thick fingers, and for an instant took on the magnified but gritty, pixelated appearance of one of the great powerful demons Prin had impersonated and the two in the flying beetle machine had at first seemed to be. The image flickered off. He threw the lengths of wire away. “Disappointing.” The word cracked and rolled over her, seemed to press her into the earth with its vast, despondent force.

He held his cock and sprayed her with fluid salts at the same time as the pain came flooding back. The gushing waters pummelled her and their fire-bright stinging made her shriek once more.

The pain was turned right down again, just long enough for her to hear him say, “You should have had religion, child, that in it you might have found the hope that could then be crushed.”

He raised one massive iron foot the size of a truck high above her then brought it down fast and hard from twenty metres up, killing her.