Wrath James White presents Poisoning Eros I & II (19 page)

His body dissolved into an advanced decay,
liquefying into an ichorous flesh pudding that oozed out of her
mutilated sex and into the cracks of the cave floor. That
overpowering stench of death exuded from her once more as the
demon’s putrescence continued to leak from her bleeding sex.

Gloria lay on the ground for the longest time, until
she was again able to get to her feet, able to at least try to limp
away, knowing she would heal, and wanting to get moving before some
other loathsome thing claimed her for further abuse.

She staggered through the cave entrance, her legs
trembling, blood cascading down her thighs, her nerves singing out
in anguish. She found her discarded rags.

None of this is real! Nothing could be this
terrible. Even in hell there has to be mercy!

She had found mercy in her demon, the one who had
claimed her when she first came to hell. He had pitied her or loved
her—or whatever passed for love in this necropolis of pain and
woe—and had sacrificed himself to reclaim the beauty he’d once had
as an angel of God. He had shown her mercy and that had allowed her
to escape and find her daughter and the pathway to heaven.

But hope and faith are human weaknesses.

Weaknesses that hell viciously and casually
exploits.

Gloria wondered if her entire flight from hell had
been preplanned, orchestrated to cause her even more pain.

And what about Angela? Why isn’t she here? Could she
be part of it too?

Finding her daughter in the endless corridors of
hell had seemed like a miraculous stroke of good luck. Now it
seemed too miraculous, too coincidental. Countless millions of
souls must inhabit these caves…. Yet somehow she’d managed to find
the one thing in all of creation that she gave a fuck about?
Stumbled across her in the dark? It wasn’t possible. It had to have
been a trick. Maybe that wasn’t even her daughter, just as that
grotesque thing that claimed to be her father couldn’t have been.
Maybe Angela had been some incarnation sent to confuse her, to
trick her, to guarantee that she would renounce her one chance at
redemption and turn her back on God.

Gloria staggered through the dark corridors, her
mind reeling, trying to put everything into some coherent
framework. Her thoughts dashed about and tripped through her head
in riotous disorder. And then a new question, one that her father
had sparked in her mind.
Is there a way to become one of them?
One of the torturers instead of the tortured?
Of all the
multifarious torments of inferno this constant state of confusion
was by far the worst.

The further she made her way through the inner
corridors of hell the more the smells of blood and flesh
intensified. Horrific screams of incalculable anguish echoed from
every direction. She had become so used to the constant cries of
torment that she failed to notice the increase in volume and
duration until it was all around her, making her head feel as if it
would split as the piercing cries lanced her skull. It sounded like
thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, being tortured at
once. As if someone had filled a stadium with the damned and was
now burning the whole thing down.

Gloria rounded the corner and her legs collapsed
from under her. Her senses screamed in denial, retreating from the
overload of terrifying imagery.

The Lake of Fire was apparently a mere artery of
this infinite ocean upon whose banks she now stood. Thousands of
miles of twisted flesh and bone seethed and undulated like a living
thing, a vast creature that screamed out in pain from its every
pore. Waves of liquefied meat crashed against the beach, spilling
their shrieking contents onto the rocky earth before the next wave
rolled in to drag them back into the sea. No horror she’d ever been
subjected to in hell or elsewhere compared to the sheer magnitude
of this abomination.

This was the true heart of hell.

There was no flame. No lava. The entire ocean was
composed of boiling blood and fat and tears. Bodies in varying
degrees of degeneration and regeneration crowded every inch of it.
Most of them were screaming and praying and cursing, but it was the
silent ones that Gloria found the most disturbing, the ones staring
out at nothing, with minds empty of everything except their own
unending agony.

It was no different from the lake she’d seen her
demon captive throw himself into, the ocean only shocking due to
its sheer enormity. An endless sea of boiling humanity larger than
all the oceans of the world combined. The concept of eight billion
souls burning in hell was one that the human mind simply could not
fathom, too large for the finite human mind to encapsulate. Seeing
it was more than her mind could bear.

Gloria tumbled to the cave floor, staring up at an
endless sky of blue and brown and green, swirling like a vast
kaleidoscope above that boiling ocean of flesh. It was not a sky of
clouds and stars but a revolving world hovering miles above hell.
It looked like pictures she’d seen of the earth from space and it
rained an unending torrent of bodies into the cauldron of flesh and
blood beneath it, as if Earth were defecating its human waste. A
relentless deluge of the damned flooded the sky, hurtling toward
hell a thousand souls a second.

Angels with skin like untouched snow, with eyes like
starlit night, hairless and sexless with wings three times the
length of a human body swooped down among them, dodging in between
the cascade of hurtling bodies, catching some before they plunged
into the sea and carting them away. Tears spilled from Gloria’s
eyes as she watched, wishing they would take her away as well, but
there had never been an angel for her. No one to lift her up and
fly her away from the horrors of the world. The only angel she’d
ever known had been the demon who’d tortured and imprisoned her
when she’d first arrived. Briefly she wondered what had become of
him. What terrors he was being subjected to now that he walked
damnation, undisguised, as a living example of God’s fickle
mercy.

She remembered him as she’d seen him last. Those
midnight eyes that somehow still cast light, that seemed to swirl
with every color of the rainbow and burned like exploding stars,
skin like morning light, unmarred despite eons imprisoned in that
tomb of disfigured flesh. He had been beautiful, the most beautiful
creature she’d ever seen. Now he was being tortured because of her.
She tried not to think about him being cut and burned and sodomized
and whipped, his wings torn from their sockets over and over again
as they regenerated. Being defecated on and pissed on as she had
been at his hands. All the things they would do to him to shame and
degrade him, to vent their rage and frustration at being trapped in
inferno.

Gloria tried to push these thoughts out of her mind,
to concentrate on finding Angela. Angela was her priority. Still,
her thoughts kept drifting back to her beautiful angel. She wanted
to see him again.

Perhaps he could help her escape. Even take her to
heaven with him. Surely he has suffered enough. God would have to
take him back. God has to have mercy for one of his own.

But Gloria wasn’t so sure. She looked back out over
the Lake of Fire, watching as more bodies fell into its scalding
waters, trying to count how many the angels rescued. It was maybe
one in a thousand. The odds weren’t good. She looked down at the
souls boiling in that sea of liquefied flesh and wondered if God
had any mercy at all.

Then her mind shut down.

She dreamt of her life before hell. Even in her
current surroundings her life still seemed like a nightmare. She
remembered the height of her porn career. The fame. The money. The
sex. The drugs. At the time it had seemed like paradise. She had
thought she had everything she could ever want. Now it all seemed
like one great tragedy. She awoke screaming, the remnants of her
last dream fading from her mind too slowly. The image of Vlad’s fat
leering face still fresh in her mind, and the taste of worm semen
haunting her tongue. She sat staring at the Lake of Fire for a long
moment, her will diminishing more and more the longer she watched
the ceaseless influx of the damned. It took all her remaining
resolve to peel her eyes away from it and turn her mind back to her
task.
Find Angela. Find a way out of hell.

She rose slowly and turned to the nearest tunnel,
walking toward whatever fate awaited her. Now even more determined
to find Angela and her angel. In one or both of them she was sure
her salvation would be found.

Before she’d taken more than a few steps, she
spotted the old man she’d met in the tunnel, the father who’d been
trying to rescue his family from hell. He was alone now, and his
face had fallen, as if all the vitality had been leeched from his
soul. He stared longingly out across the Lake of Fire as tears ran
the maze of wrinkles and worry lines down his face. Gloria
recognized the expression: defeat, resignation. He was walking
toward the boiling lake in a trance. Gloria was certain that he was
seconds from throwing himself in.

“Hey!” Gloria called out, getting no response. Her
voice was swallowed in the ceaseless din of tortured souls
screaming out for a release that would never come.

She walked toward him and called out again, now so
close she could have spit on him. Still, he gave no indication that
he’d heard her. Odd behavior for a longtime citizen of hell, she
thought, where constant wariness and vigilance was the only defense
against victimization.

Gloria reached out and grabbed his shoulder. He
glanced at her with a look devoid of all recognition.

“It’s me. I met you in the tunnel. You were trying
to get to heaven with your family. What happened?”

His eyes focused on hers and his mind slowly
returned from wherever dark place it had been. “They made it. God
took them back. But he wouldn’t take me.”

“Why?”

“Because I was the one who convinced my wife to turn
her back on him. I was the one who decided our children would be
raised as atheists. I was the one who damned them. It was my fault.
I’m the one who should be punished.”

His eyes swam away from hers and his face once again
began to take up that vacuous expression.

“Then why did he send them here in the first
place?”

“What?” His eyes focused on hers again.

“If it was your fault, if you were the cause of
their sins, then why did he send them to hell at all? Why make them
suffer for more than half a century in this place for something you
did?”

The old man stared at her for a long moment and then
laughed. “You’re new here.”

“What the fuck does that have to do with—”

“I’ve sat on this beach many times, for decades. Do
you know what I see?”

“What?” Gloria stood beside him and looked out at
the lake.

“Chaos. There’s no order here. There’s no order
anywhere—here or in heaven.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those angels out there—how do you think they know
which souls to rescue from those that fall? How do you think they
identify the sinners from the saved?”

“I don’t know. God tells them or something?”

The old man laughed again. “They don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“They don’t know. They don’t pick out the good ones.
It’s random. I’ve seen the worst of sinners whisked away to heaven,
men I knew and recognized, famous men. I have heard of serial
killers and mass murderers in heaven. Now how does that make you
feel? That’s supposed to be the grand example of God’s mercy, that
a sinner can get into heaven. I’m sure they have to repent their
sins or some such bullshit before they’re allowed in, but who
wouldn’t to escape this? And I have seen many an honest man wind up
here instead. It’s all random.”

“But that can’t be!”

“And why not? He’s the Almighty. In his mind he owes
us nothing, no explanation,
nothing
. And we owe him
everything. We have to accept that it all makes sense from his
infinite perspective. I have seen hundreds sit on these banks
trying to make sense of it, trying to understand God’s logic. Why
they’re in hell when the worst thing they’d ever done was worship
the wrong God or have premarital sex or cheat on their wives. Then
they see some famous criminal whisked off to paradise. They wander
down that tunnel, thinking their sins will surely be forgiven. If
Albert De
Salvo
can get into heaven after strangling all
those women … but they come walking back down that tunnel more
confused and disheartened than ever when they’re rejected.”

“That doesn’t make sense!” Gloria could feel herself
starting to panic. Of all the lies and curses and insults and
threats hurled her way since coming to hell, this was by far the
most horrible thing she’d heard.

“Why do you think that tunnel’s there? In case a
truly honest soul winds up here? There are thousands, millions of
honest souls here. But some do make it out. If they can find it.
And if they have the guts to try. Most just figure they must have
done something to deserve damnation. Who can’t look over the vast
experiences of an entire lifetime and find at least one sin for
which they believe they should be damned? So they just stay here
forever with the child-molesters and murderers. The afterlife is
just like life. Lightning bolts strike churches as often as bars
and strip joints on earth. Good befalls the bad and bad befalls the
good. Why would you think things would be different here when the
same god invented it all?”

The old man shook his head and turned his back on
the flaming sea of flesh and spirit. He looked long into Gloria
eyes then dropped his head and began to shuffle away, casting one
last longing gaze back at the Lake of Fire and at the sky
above.

“Maybe God has a plan,” he said. “Maybe it all makes
sense to him and our limited, finite minds are just too weak to
grasp it all. Or maybe it’s all just as senseless and random as it
appears, and we are all just deluding ourselves.”