House Infernal by Edward Lee (8 page)

"How ... bizarre."

The priest unconsciously raised a finger. "But there's
no real telling how long Tessorio was secretly participating in such things."

Venetia thought further. No telling how long? A secret double life? "So it might not have just been toward the end of
his life? He could have been doing things like that for-"

"For decades, sure. Who knows? But it hardly matters."

She knew he was right but she was still intrigued. Venetia followed Father Driscoll on his quick tour of the prior
house, and as her eyes took in the building's features she
couldn't quell the macabre fascination.

The house I'm walking through now was built by a
Satanist....

"You fuckin' gotta be motherfucking shitting me, man,"
Ruth grumbled.

She sat huddled next to Father Alexander's torso. The
small boat rose on each swell of blood. Everywhere she
looked, she saw red: the sea, the sky. She was snow-blind
by blood.

.You really have terrible language, Ruth, not that I'm
one to talk," the priest remarked.

Ruth barely heard him. "Aw, fuck it. I know. I've always
said the F word. Can't fucking help it."

"Sure you can. I was the same way. Even when I was a
priest I used profane language, and that's just not cool
for a priest but I did it anyway. It's actually kind of
funny: Several times I got reprimanded by monsignors
for cussing. I got reassigned from cushy counseling
posts in nice cities, got transferred, got kicked out of
quality clerical jobs-all for cussing. I guess I was trying
to be a 'hip' priest, I was trying to be real-world, but it
was all a sham. Foul language defames God-that's why
we shouldn't use it. Foul language separates us from
Grace."

"Who's Grace? Some chick you had the hots for?"

"Never mind..."

He's giving me shit about cussing. I'm in fucking Hell ... It
was ridiculous. She squinted hard, shielding her eyes
from the scarlet glare.

More quiet words came. "I have a lot to tell you. Might
as well start now. I'll try not to overwhelm you."

"I'm already fuckin' overwhelmed."

The boat swayed on another swell of blood. The torso
turned his head to her. "Something's in the works, Ruththat's the best way to look at it. And we need your help."

"We?"

"I told you earlier, I have an intelligence source that's
very powerful. And don't worry, you're not expected to
work for free. There's something in this for both of us."

"What's in it for you?" she said sarcastically. "New
arms and legs, I hope."

"Not quite. But if we succeed, my sentence to Purgatory
gets revoked, and I'll be transferred to Heaven."

"Oh yeah? And what's in it for me?"

"You own Condemnation to Hell gets commuted to a
Condemnation to Purgatory."

Her eyes snapped to him. "Purgatory's, like, not
Heaven but-"

"But a lot better than this, trust me."

Her trashy yet pretty face beamed. "That fuckin' rocks,
man! I'm in!"

"I mean, well," he stumbled on something. "There's a
little bit of a catch."

Ruth's happy smile turned to a knife-sharp frown.
"There always fuckin' is."

"Yes, you get to go to Purgatory but-"

"But what!" she yelled.

"But you have to wait a thousand years first...

Ruth wanted to dump the human torso overboard. "A
thousand fuckin' years!"

"It's not that bad, Ruth, considering the alternative," he
added hastily.

"And how long do you have to wait to get transferred to
Heaven?"

"Well, what I mean is, if you and I succeed with this
mission, I get commuted to Heaven ... instantly."

"Oh, that's real fair!" Ruth started to get up. "I'm pushing your ass overboard, you fucker! Fuck this shit! Spent
my whole life on earth getting shit on by men, and now
I'm still getting shit on! By you!"

"Ruth!- to what you're saying! Don't blow your
only chance to ever get out of here. You've been offered
something that no one else ever gets down here: hope."

That prospect simmered her down. "A square deal-no
bullshit, no snow jobs?"

"A square deal, Ruth. And these folks never BS."

Ruth thought on that one. Maybe the reason she'd
never been a good person was because she'd never gotten a square deal. I guess it's better than a poke in the eye with a
sharp stick, she thought.

"We've quite a journey ahead of us. First and foremost,
we'll have to be very careful," he said. "I wasn't and ...
well, you can see what happened to me."

Again, she looked at his chopped stumps. "What did
happen to you?"

Something like a toad with leathery wings flapped
overhead. "My source did foresee your arrival at the Sea
of Cagliostro, but unfortunately she didn't foresee me being dismembered."

Ruth caught that. "She?"

The priest ignored the query. "It's not foolproof, not
even with the most powerful Celestial Magic. There are
pockets of Hex-Fluxes all over the Mephistopolis. It's like
an electromagnetic field in the Living World that interferes with radio waves. These Hex-Flexes interfere with
telepathic wavelengths. We have to take what we can get."

"You still didn't tell me what happened to your arms
and legs!" she yelled.

"Sorry, I ramble sometimes. I'd been staking out an
area on the mainland for several months-a place called
Pogrom Park, as well as some other places. I was preparing for your arrival. But as my lousy luck would have it, I
walked right into the middle of a Municipal Mutilation
Zone and a Scyther Detachment got me. Remember, here
everything is opposite. In the Living World, they have
street cleaners to clear dirt and garbage from the roads,
right? Well, here they have Mutilation Zones. Government
agencies clean people from the streets. They butcher anything that moves, and it's legal."

Ruth stared at him.

"Ordinarily they shovel the corpses and body parts
into wheeled hoppers when the exercise is over, then take
it all to a District Pulping Station, but they made an exception for me."

"Why?" she asked, wide-eyed and in a very low voice.

"Because they saw my Roman collar. They knew I was a priest, and seeing that I'm one of the Human Damnedor so they thought-they knew that my Spirit Body
couldn't be killed by mere dismemberment. So they threw
me into the Sea of Cagliostro to further my torments."

The boat rocked. Ruth looked down in the blood ... and
could swear she saw things swimming in the red murk.

"It's best not to look, Ruth," Alexander advised.
"There's stuff down there that you don't want to see.
Fifty-foot lampreys, Phleboto-Fish, marine Gigapedes ...
Just ... don't look."

Ruth shuddered and shot her gaze away.

"There's what I want you to look at instead." He mistakenly raised his stump as if to point off the port side.
"We're closer now. Put on the Abyss-Eye and look toward
the shore till you see the port."

Ruth brought the hideous thing to her eye again and
looked.

She stared in breathless silence as she beheld a strange
cityscape rimming the edge of the sea. Before it, there
were myriad docks full of boats in slips, and larger ships
moored there. In the background, things like condo buildings rose, but they looked ...

'What is that place?"

"It's called the Port of the Vulgaressa, the priciest sector
of the Rot-Port District. See all those condos? If you
thought there was a real estate boom in Florida, that's
nothing compared to this place. Rot-Port is the most expensive bloodfront property in all of Hell."

Ruth zoomed the Eye. The high balconied condos
seemed ... fuzzy in some way. No clean edges or lines
like normal buildings.

"The place looks really fucked-up," she articulated as best
she could. "Like the whole town is made of something ...
spongy."

"The town is made of rot, Ruth," the priest clarified.
"That's why they call it Rot-Port. Every primary district
has something unique about it, to distinguish it from
the others. You know. Maryland's the Crab State, New Jersey's the Garden State. Same thing here. Rot-Port's
made of all manner of rot, every square inch of it. Mold,
fungus, putrefaction, slime, muck, etcetera. It's all cultured onto every beam, block, and plank in the District."

Ruth slowly lowered the visual aid. "I'd rather drown
in this-this ... sea of fuckin' blood than go to that town!"

Alexander gave a patient nod. "But, see, you can't
drown, Ruth. You can't die. You need to remember everything I tell you. Your soul will continue to live in Hell-it
can never die. And as for your Spirit Body, it can cease to
function but only if it's damaged to the point of total destruction. Then your soul moves on to something else."

Ruth's face fell into her hands again. "Fuck that shit,
man!"

"It's our mission, Ruth. And it all starts by getting ourselves to Rot-Port."

Ruth rocked back and forth in silence.

"Your clothes are the first matter," the priest said next.

Teary-eyed, Ruth looked down at herself. What the fuck
is he talking about now? My clothes? Her physique remained garbed in the last apparel she remembered putting on: the tight pink YUcx Poo T-shirt, thread-rimmed
cutoff jeans that weren't much bigger than bikini bottoms,
and pink flip-flops. "There's nothing wrong with my
clothes. I look good, don't I?"

"You actually look great, Ruth ... in a trashy kind of
way."

"Thanks a fuck of a lot, you fuck."

Alexander smiled at the profanity. "What I mean is
your body will work to our advantage. And as for your
clothes, when you come here you only arrive with what
you're wearing, along with any adornments, such as jewelry, tattoos ... breast implants ..." Alexander winked.

Ruth's hands defiantly rose to her 38D mammarian carriage. "Fuck you! These are real."

Alexander tsked. "Ruth, it's pointless to he to me. Why
bother? Abandon your vanity-look what it did for Lucifer. I know everything pertinent about you, via my intelligence source."

"Fuck your intelligence source," she muttered, disgusted.

"For instance, I happen to know that you received
those implants absolutely free: gratis from a plastic surgeon you were shacking up with in Miami. Ultimately my
point is, your trashy good looks are something we can exploit, because the Mephistopolis is quite a trashy city. But
your current wardrobe-at the right time and place-will
have to go."

"I don't know what the fuck-"

"Just listen." The priest staved a burst of impatience.
"We have to get busy. We'll be at the port soon. What you
have to do right now is search those two bodies at the
front of the boat. Check them for implements of value."

Ruth's weepy stare moved forward, to the two corpses
that shared the skiff. "What the hell are they? They don't
even look Human."

"They're not. They're Demon Conscripts from the Satanic
Naval Infantry. Sort of like the Marine corps but in Hell. By
the looks of them, they're probably the Pudendae Grosse
species, and they're tough customers. The name on this life
boat says S.S. Nefarious, and that makes sense because I
heard on the news recently that the Nefarious sank in an accident. It was one of the biggest prison frigates in the navy."

"How did it sink?" Ruth asked, hoping curiosity would
cauterize some of the lingering horror.

"A thing called a Gorge-Worm capsized it."

"How can a worm sink a ship?"

"These worms are a mile long. They'll wrap around a
ship and turn it over, then suck all the Demons and Humans into their feeding gills."

"Fuck!" Ruth's not-so-calculative brain whirred. "Then
one of them might get us!"

"No, this skiff's too small, they only pursue big prey."
The priest's eyes gestured to the corpses in the boat. "But
if you don't get those things off the skiff right now, the
scent of their decay might attract a Griffin or Dentata-
Vulture. We don't want to have to deal with that. Now get
over to those Conscripts. Get their belts. We'll need them."

"Why do I have to do it?" Ruth screamed.

"Because I've got no arms or legs!" the priest snapped
back. "Hurry! Time's wasting!"

Ruth winced as she kneed her way to the bodies. Their
ridged faces were running with slime; worms milled in
empty eye sockets. She held her breath against the stench,
then slipped off their belts. Two belts were ringed with
supply cases and tools; a third had a holster housing a
crude pistol.

"Better than nothing. A sulphur flintlock. That guy
must've been an officer. The other one's probably a deckhand. Now check their pockets for money."

Ruth was revolted. "I'm not putting my hands in dead
guys' pockets!"

"Not dead guys, Ruth. Dead Demons."

"That makes it better?"

"They'll have money. Get it."

Pus glimmered on the corpses' faces. "I-I ... can't!"

Alexander shot her a chiding scowl. "You've picked
pockets before, Ruth. You'd rip off johns all the time
when you were turning tricks, and whenever those scumbag boyfriends of yours would mug some innocent guyor even kill him-you'd be the one to go through their
pockets."

"That sucks that you know shit about me! You're trying
to make me feel bad."

"You should feel bad, Ruth, 'cos you were a pretty bad
person. But now you've been given the chance to redeem
a little bit of yourself ... so do it!"

At last, the former grifter, drughead, sexpot, and party
animal from Collier County, Florida, emboldened herself.
She slithered her fingers into the rot-damp sailors' pants.
She pulled several bills and coins from each. "Shit. That's
all they had on them."

"Every little bit helps."

After a moment's rest, she was able to contemplate.
Three belts, an old gun, and a couple of dollars were all
the reward she'd received for rooting through the clothes
of dead monsters. "That gun looks like a piece of shit,"
she snapped.