ALL CHARACTERS AND EVENTS IN THIS FAN FICTION — EVEN THOSE BASED ON FICTIONAL PEOPLE — ARE ENTIRELY MADE-UP. ALL DANTE REFERENCES ARE RESEARCHED… POORLY. THE FOLLOWING STORY CONTAINS LEWD SEXUAL HUMOR AND DUE TO ITS LONG INTROSPECTIVE MONOLOGUES IT SHOULD NOT BE READ BY ANYONE. _|_|_|
– – –
Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,
And drink to the present before it shall fail;
Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,
For 'tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:
So fill up your glass,
For life will soon pass;
When you're dead, ye'll ne'er drink to your king or your lass!
––H.P. Lovecraft, The Tomb
– – –
Kenny
The book hit the table with a declarative thud, sending up a small cloud of dust, primarily from its own yellowing pages. It was hard-bound, musty, and, despite being at least ninety years old, a very familiar shade of red. It was echoed in the two large rooms below us, in the space being primed for a grand reveal to a selected audience.
I stared at the cover of the book, and cursed my own neglect of a notion that had struck me several days before. Dante Alighieri's The Inferno.
Another copy was then presented, this one newer, sturdier, and bearing a smoky grey binding. I felt an itch in my spine as my shadow tugged on my limbs, attempting to entice me to action. I held firm.
The final pieces were then presented: the Dhol Chants first, by the multi-ringed fingers of our own great Goth liaison, and Wilcox's collected works next, by a curiously stern-faced Stan Marsh, who had insisted upon making this particular call with me, even before I could offer to bring him along.
Henrietta stared down at the four volumes on the table, her eyes hidden under her thick lashes, unblinking as they studied each discovery, from cover to prophetic cover. "Where did you say this Damien guy was from again?" she wondered.
"Seventh layer of Hell," I recalled.
"That's what I remember him saying," Stan confirmed. Not that any of us had quite cared, back in third grade. If ever there were a time for Captain Hindsight…
"Circle," Henrietta corrected us both.
"What?" I asked.
"The Seventh Circle. You could call them layers, sure, but in here," Henrietta tapped the cover of her old copy of Inferno, "they're called Circles, and that's the way the universe accepts it."
"What d'you mean, accepts?" Stan wondered.
Henrietta opened up to the chart in the Dhol Chants, and traced the large outer circle with her quellazaire. As she did, I passed my gaze over the numerous lines connecting one plane of existence to another. On a blink up, I saw that Stan was doing the same thing. "Universe operates on circles, and rejects unnecessary mass," Henrietta explained. "Black holes open up in space where a circle's been rejected." Jesus Christ, Kyle would love this shit. He should have come with; how dare he be working. I mean, I was getting it, but Kyle could analyze the fuck out of what Henrietta was telling us. Stan was soaking it in enough, though… that was good.
"So…" Stan leaned up against the low-to-the-ground coffee table that the three of us sat around, propping his head up in his hands, with his elbows placed on either side of his grey, illustrated school textbook copy of The Inferno. He drummed his fingers against his jawbone and gnawed at his lower lip. I saw his eyes lift to Henrietta's cigarette as she put the quellazaire again to her lips. The guy didn't smoke much; this was a situation that might get him going again, though. I wondered when he'd cave. I was almost there myself.
"What?" Henrietta prompted him, having no patience for waiting.
"Just—so, you said black holes. Does this mean, like, the Spaces Between are like black holes, just… on Earth?"
"I'd buy that," I said. I leaned over the table and, careful not to actually touch the page of the tome itself, pointed out the various lines on the chart. My shadow had a different idea, and began to form its own circle around the illustration. Fuck you, I thought, wishing I could send the message straight to Damien. "The Spaces Between," I said, and I half expected to hear the Shadow whisper a laugh, "don't fit into the circles you were talking about, and they don't fit into Heaven or Hell."
"Right. They're pocket dimensions." Henrietta let smoke ease up from the corner of her slightly-pouted lower lip. It hid her expression for a moment, but I was glad, once the smoke cleared, to see her more or less in agreement with Stan's thought.
"And you can somehow reach them in dreams," Stan pointed out.
"Exactly. But it's not unheard of to get there awake, too. Especially if you know what they look like." I thought back to my previous meeting with her—she had mentioned a lamp, belonging to the madman who had written the Necronomicon. "You guys have been to Purgatory," she noted.
Stan paled, and moved to lean back, shoving his hands now under the large velvet pillow he was using as a coffee table seat. I nodded.
"Purgatory's got rules and circles. Heaven's got rules and circles. Hell…" Henrietta scowled at The Inferno. "I really shoulda figured."
"What?" I had to know.
"Nothing. I didn't want to name this stupid place 'Tenth Circle,' but those two did," Henrietta muttered, casting a truly bone-chilling leer back in the direction of the Goths' bedrooms. "They're gonna fucking get it."
"Why?"
"Stop asking stupid questions. Anyway," said Henrietta, "you guys should probably start writing down any feelings of déjà vu you might be getting from your dreams."
"Yeah…?" Stan said, nervously. "We're not—not seriously going to have to go through that again, are we?"
"No. It's just that you two have a jumping off point the other guys don't. You've both seen Purgatory and R'lyeh, and traveled through pocket dimensions. You," she added, nodding to me, "have seen Heaven and Hell. Devil boy seems to know what he's after, even if we don't."
"Things gonna get crazy again?" I wondered, praying we wouldn't have to deal with the kind of arcane madness Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep had brought forth before.
"I'm not sure. Thing is, there's always going to be disorder. Harmony demands Chaos."
That was about as far as we went, that evening, but the words rang with me for the rest of our few days' wait until the event. Sure, R'lyeh had been the capitol city of chaos if ever there was one. I did worry, though, about just how much things might come back to haunt us.
If my Shadow was a warning, and we were being called out in such personal ways…
Fuck. I didn't want to think about chaos now.
Focus. Primary goal: focus. Get Wilcox to talk, and draw lines from spaces to Hell's circles before we'd have too much disorder on our hands.
– – –
We talked about it for a while, and ultimately decided that in order to do this operation right, we needed to split the team into three, and rope in a fair deal of help from our honorary members as well. This was a new kind of mission for us.
Oh, we'd had more than enough experience spying and gathering information for cases during our daily routines, but none of us had ever gone undercover for the League before. Not like this.
Yes, it was a risk. It had been decided that six of us would be attending the gallery event: wired, wearing under-armor, and packing concealed weapons. 'Covert' really was the name of this particular game, and we needed to play it right. So I put it forward to the group as a volunteer opportunity at first, allowing there to be, primarily, the option to say 'no.' I divided the board into three sections: BASE, INSIDE and OUTSIDE.
Cartman and Craig were both of the no fucking way frame of mind when asked if they wanted to attend the actual event, so they were the first two names under the OUTSIDE bracket. "'Sides," Cartman added haughtily, "Coon's gotta be ready in case that fucking asshole Scott Tenorman shows up."
"Or Damien," I noted. "We've all gotta be ready for him."
I glanced at Craig, who more or less got my drift: keep an eye on the Coon. None of us had to say it, but we all knew that Cartman had to be under heavy watch. Just in case. We never knew what to expect with him, and he still had not returned to confront his mother regarding the Damien issue.
Under BASE, the two usual names went upon their own request: Red Serge and Iron Maiden.
Token offered to leave a second unmarked car parked near the base so that Red Serge could get into town fast if need be. Kyle protested for a moment, pointing out that Ike was only fifteen. "You really think I haven't driven for missions when you guys aren't around?" Ike was quick to mention to his concerned brother. "Really?"
"You're fifteen."
"I also carry a sword. Which one d'you think woulda gotten me arrested by now, buddy?"
Kyle relented, leaning back in his chair. "Good point, I guess."
It was inevitable that I'd be going in. Kenny McCormick, not Mysterion, was going to be present at the event. It was the best way I'd be able to catch Wilcox in conversation. I needed to talk to him, pick his brain. The only way I could do that would be if we found ourselves in a situation during which he had to talk.
Once I'd announced that, Red, present at the meeting at which we started to prepare ourselves for the event, sprang to her feet, took the marker from my hand, and wrote her name down beside mine on the INSIDE section of the whiteboard. When I tried to protest, my girlfriend simply stared me down, and said, "You think I don't want to scope things out myself? I'm going with you."
I gave in, despite my own trepidations about the idea. But, hey, again, we had to do this right: a date was the perfect pretense for us heading in, and honestly, I had no other reason to be attending an event like that. The closest I got to art was my building painting jobs; Red, on the other hand, was in the fashion arts. She'd not only be someone expected to show up, but able to help me look the part, as well.
Karen, then, insisted upon leading the outside team. If Mysterion was going to be absent, the Guardian Angel, she argued, needed to be present. When she volunteered, she gave me an encouraging, uplifting smile. Thank God I could count on my sister.
Clyde was next to volunteer to be on the inside, since Bebe, too, was present, and the two decided to go with the same pretense as me and Red. I liked the idea, as well, since if anything came up that would require Red needing to leave (probably at my own request for fear of the GSM coming against her), it would be good to have Bebe around to bring her safely back to the base; we wouldn't lose anyone on the field that way.
While I kept thinking that Token and Wendy would also have looked the part a little more to be inside, I was not surprised or disappointed at all that the two of them, along with Butters, volunteered to be on Karen's team. They were the best guards we had, after all, and a good offense-defense team. Plus, I still had no idea how they were doing on a personal level—can't fake a date if the spark's gone, I guess.
That put Stan and Kyle as the last two we'd have on the inside. Once I brought that up, Kyle admitted, looking a little ashamed, that he'd kind of been waiting for the last minute on that, so that he wouldn't be able to talk himself around not being inside and around those paintings. But when I thought about it: yeah, I did want them inside, if they were the ones more disturbed by what we'd seen of Wilcox's work than anyone. They'd started the work, and I needed them to be able to continue with it.
Plus, Kyle added, if he was there, Red wouldn't be the only redheaded target, and he'd be able to take on opposition easier than my girlfriend could. Stan, meanwhile, was of a like mind with me: he was the one experiencing dream issues. It was better for him to be there than Toolshed.
We took a break once the assignments had been passed out, and Bebe immediately flew over to Red, hugging her and exclaiming, "Ohmigod, we totally get to be like Bond girls for a night!"
"Now that you mention it…" Red laughed.
"Am I Sean Connery Bond or, like, Pierce Brosnan Bond?" Clyde wanted to know.
"I liked Daniel Craig," Bebe grinned. "But we'll see how you do."
Red got right to work, while we were taking the time to break, drafting—with Wendy overseeing—ideas for how best Clyde, Stan, Kyle and I would be able to go in with concealed weapons… and exactly how she and Bebe might have to stay armed as well.
We had had our setbacks on League missions before. This, we all swore, was not going to be one of them. For this, we were over-preparing, and all the while Karen and I continued stressing that there was no such thing as being too ready.
This was Hell and, quite possibly, our own subconscious dreams we were dealing with, here. We ended the meeting after a few hours of passing around possible ways that the evening could throw curve balls at us, making sure that we had a plan for anything and everything that Damien, Tenorman, or the amassed GSM might try to pull. If we didn't rule out anything as a possibility, nothing, we deduced, could surprise us, right? And even if it did, we'd have to treat it as just an occurrence.
Stay one step ahead. That was the general rule. Once that event was upon us, I was convinced (as were we all) that we'd have more of the information we'd been craving in order to infiltrate and work ourselves into control of the situation, rather than be ever so marginally behind. No, this time, we had it. We had eyes everywhere. Maybe Hell was at our heels, but fuck, we were not going to let it get the best of us.
– – –
The entire town was set to be alive with activity that night. Catching the art bug, a few other shops and galleries in town, Tweak Bros. included, had apparently decided to follow The Tenth Circle's lead in hosting events of their own. Which initially disturbed me, since I began to fear for attendees of the other events, but Red Serge and Iron Maiden put my fears at least marginally to rest by heading out on their own mission in the early hours of the morning, setting up security cameras with direct links both to the base and to Murphy's personal scanner.
I did not want to get the fucking cops involved. I trusted Murphy. I didn't trust Yates anymore, or the rest of the force. I advised Murphy to take the night off, since Yates would inevitably be around, and had him on direct call. In that regard, though, I needed to be careful, since there were six of us packing concealed weapons. We were endangering ourselves to be found out, but I believed we had enough combined experience to be able to handle a possibly revealing situation.
Red and Bebe, I figured, would be more or less safe. Karen had stories set up for Angel to tell the cops, about her 'looking out for citizens in danger,' that she had entrusted simple weapons to hand-selected certain people who had seen their way through tough events in the past. Those of us on spy recon for the evening certainly fit that bill—outside of League duties, we'd seen our fair share of odd happenings in South Park—so it was a good cover, if we needed it.
Have I yet written a boyfriend dissertation on why my girlfriend is amazing? Because here we go. The girl knows fashion… and I don't just mean she keeps up with trends and can match colors and can make suggestions for men and women and adults and kids and cross-dressers and you name it. Red can fucking sew. Make alterations that aren't glaring. Make concealed pockets and then get rid of them as if they were never there.
We donated what we could to help her out. Token dipped into the League funds and Red used the discount she got at her dress shop job (not only at her store, but at fabric places as well… and was able to use the excuse of summer homework and practice for the internship she wanted to call the purchases plausible) in order to buy some extra material she'd be using to make inner pockets and arm straps for us. Clyde got out the tux he'd bought for junior prom in high school, and while Red was adding length to the arms, the main part Clyde had outgrown since he was seventeen, she slipped in two loops.
Through those loops went a faux-leather strap that Red whipped up and Token and Wendy spring-loaded one of Mosquito's stunners. One on each wrist, Clyde could be armed in a second; the trigger for the spring was in his cuff links.
Kyle did not want to cave to using guns, so Red stitched strapped holsters that were fitted a little further up on his forearms, and loaded with switchblades. In a hidden pocket on both of his thighs, too, he strapped his butterfly knives. Yes, he and Clyde were a little at risk of being found out due to their choices in weapons, but Clyde's guns looked enough like regular pistols… and the butterfly knives were auxiliary for Kyle.
I mean, okay, so I had a couple of Angel's smoke bombs on me, and though I debated my shuriken, I ultimately went with a couple guns as well. Just plain old .45s for me, though. After all, if we could 'kill' these guys—and Kyle could tell us exactly which ones, thank God—then I didn't have to worry too much.
Stan was the hardest for us to figure out. He himself admitted that anything and everything in Toolshed's arsenal was a dead giveaway, and I could not risk him getting found out as part of the League. Clyde had extra stunners and shockers, though, and while the rest of us were working out other logistics, he took some time with Stan out on the field to teach him the basics of the highly specialized guns.
I was glad for that, too: two guys in there with weapons like Mosquito's would lead suspicion off a little. And besides, the Goths knew and didn't care or spread word, and any regular old patrons who'd be attending the event would probably clear out as soon as anything serious started happening. We were pretty much assuming that it would.
The girls each got switchblades as well, which they strapped under the skirts of their dresses. And here we go again, but Red—God bless her—can walk very fucking well in heels. Stilettos. Stilettos that she sharpened to points in order to use as weapons. Bebe, going a different route, decided to wear her hair up in a bit of a Greek style ("I have to honor Delphi somehow!" she'd said…) with sharpened decorative hairpins. Which got Clyde pretty excited, since the two were now more or less a team that could deliver a good sting.
Since Bebe and Red would each be carrying clutches, we stored extra ammo for the guns in those inner pockets. For throwing together a spy mission in just a few days, we felt like we were doing pretty well for ourselves.
And I was pretty damn glad to have Agent Harmony on the outside, too. Her talent for traps was, I had a feeling, going to come in handy.
I chose Craig—Endgame, still had to get used to that—and Marpesia to be the ones on first call to rush out if the GSM ended up attacking any of the other open venues. Then again, Token pointed out as we were preparing for our own event, it was possible that the more eyes, the less likely a widespread attack.
After all, Tenorman was mostly after Cartman, wasn't he? And while Damien did seem to want to spread the Carnival to the town, it seemed like he'd be riding this particular event at Tenth Circle, more than anything.
TupperWear, the Coon, and Marpesia left first, after we had stocked Token's van with the gear that Stan, Kyle, Clyde and I might very well need in order to make this a full League event. Clyde and Bebe were next to leave, in Bebe's Mini (allowing me and the guys a nice laugh at Clyde about that—no, really, no matter how dire a situation around me can get, Clyde Donovan getting into a motherfucking Mini Cooper will always be funny).
Endgame and Harmony were off next, and once they'd left base grounds, I huddled the five of us who had yet to leave together, along with the two who'd be sticking around, for a final check-in.
"Right," I said, "me and Clyde've already talked about this, but it's you two," I nodded to Stan and Kyle, "that I want really getting on those paintings. If it really gets shitty for either of you, Henrietta's got your backs, okay?"
Stan let out a sigh. "I am so glad she's being really cool about this," he said.
"Hell's too mainstream for her, remember?" I managed to laugh. "Tonight's all about piecing the rest of this Carnival together. You guys on the paintings, I've got Wilcox, and Clyde's gonna be on the lookout for Damien. Kyle, and Red, babe, sorry, but…"
Kyle shook his head. "I know," he said.
"It'll be all right, Kenny," Red tried to reassure me. "I'm not afraid of that stupid Movement."
"And, hey, at least we know what to look for in the fakes," Kyle added. "The Movement itself isn't the problem. We're there to catch the guys pulling the strings, and I'll be willing to talk to any of those cloned bastards in order to get us closer."
"Same here," Red offered.
"We'll be fine," Kyle finished. He glanced at Stan first when he said that, but gave me an extra little nod, which settled my swirling nerves a little.
Was I concerned for my girlfriend? Of fucking course I was. Did I think she could take care of herself? Hell yes. Was I going to be okay with that knowledge alone? No. And Kyle got that. I swear, I'll always be grateful for having such a close-knit team.
"The key for all of us," said the Guardian Angel, to put a cap on our conversation, "is to use discretion and to stay alert. We have the means to have the full team for backup, and we're all in contact Let's get moving. We're going to stop this nightmare before it can even start."
"I hear that," Stan said strongly. "I'm not all that big a fan of carnivals, anyway."
With that, Angel was off, Red Serge and Iron Maiden confirmed that they were recording, and Stan drove the rest of us down, opting to park his car in a public lot a fair enough distance from The Tenth Circle, just in case he'd be picking it up, oh, say, the following morning.
We entered through the usual door, but found the function to have changed around the interior somewhat. The odd assortment of tables and chairs had been pushed to the sides or in some cases taken away all together in the main room, and fully cleared in the large room to the left of the front door. An area of the floor had been sectioned off for a band—I recognized them a little; they'd played there before. Fucked if I could remember their name (or if they had one), but I was pretty sure the androgynous keyboardist either was currently or at the very least had previously dated the tallest of the Goths. The music choices were, naturally, of the ethereal Goth variety, and seemed to provide the perfect background for the unveiling of the rest of Wilcox's grotesque fever dreams on canvases.
Henrietta wasn't kidding about needing to dress formally for the gallery opening. Oh, she'd mentioned that she and the other two cared very, very little about what the patrons wore… it was in the hands of the guests, really. The crowd was made up almost entirely of those artsy types: women in long, either monochromatic or wildly multicolored dresses with big-ass costume jewelry; men in suits with awful but purportedly witty ties or cufflinks (or, shoot me, both). Dude, I paint buildings. I'm of a totally different crowd. So're my friends.
So thank God we had Red and Bebe.
Especially since, when Red, Stan, Kyle and I arrived, Clyde was already well on his way to embarrassing himself, his fiancée, and just about everyone else around. He and Bebe were already in the adjunct room, where she was trying to take in a large painting of—aha!—a carousel horse, and where he was harassing the talent.
"Yo!" Clyde hollered to the bassist with his hands cupped over his mouth to assure that the sound traveled. "Lemmie hear Smoke on the Water!"
The surly rivethead with the matte black bass shot a scowl at him through the crowd, and I saw Bebe rush over to slap her fiancé on the shoulder for his misconduct. Clyde gave her an innocent shrug in return, then played a bit of air-bass (his hands in the wrong positions, but whatever, it was Clyde). "What?" he could be heard saying. "Dude, if I played bass, that'd be, like, the first thing I'd learn." He then sang out the well-known riff while strumming that air guitar: "Dun-dun-daaaah, dah-dah -dah-daaahhhh…"
"Oh, my God, I am never, ever bringing you to a nice function ever again," Bebe complained.
"That boy does need some culture," Kyle laughed, his eyes going skyward.
"Watch him just be totally holding out on us, and it turns out he's been secretly majoring in Art History this whole time," I added.
"Well, he's certainly not a Music major. He's got the fingering wrong," Stan snickered.
"On an air guitar?" I chastised him.
Stan shrugged, and Kyle shook his head. "Come on," he urged, patting his boyfriend on the back to get him moving, "let's go save Bebe from that. Kenny, man," he added, locking eye contact with me for a couple seconds, "good luck. We'll keep our eyes out and ears open."
"That's the plan," I confirmed. "Thanks, guys."
As Red took hold of my hand, the four of us exchanged a little nod, and we went our separate ways. Sure, we'd only just arrived, but it was already clear that we were about the only locals in attendance. Maybe just from South Park… maybe just from this fucking dimension. Tough to tell. I mean, I wouldn't have put it past some of my friends' parents—Token's especially, or maybe Stan's mom—to show up just for fun, but for now, no faces were recognizable.
Meaning that we could go more or less unrecognized.
Unricognized-ish, anyway. As Stan and Kyle walked on through the gathering crowd, I noticed that Kyle was turning some heads… several of which were red as his own. But I also caught the freckle pattern on a few others besides: either relatives, I assumed, or Gingers in wigs. Their pride was such, though, that I'd doubt the wigs a while, until I was proven wrong.
While Clyde was being pulled out of his lapse into idiocy (we all had our moments… we just couldn't afford to tonight), I myself practiced keeping my shoulders squared and my steps meaningful. Red wore heels on occasion, so she was much more practiced for formal settings than I was. She'd never tacked on as much height when wearing heels as she did that evening, but still, she was a pro. Needless to say, I was a little distracted. Just like Clyde and Bebe—Stan and Kyle, too, come to think of it—my girlfriend and I had been at a recent loss for opportunities in the 'night on the town' area of dating, and a good part of me wished I could just enjoy the night with her. Treat her royally, show her a wonderful time, and cap it all off once I took her home where we could ditch the formal wear and take the beauty of the evening to bed.
The rest of me—the part, you know, kind of synched up to a parasitic Shadow sent to me by the son of the king of Hell—reminded me that I had other things to do.
Oh, I was still certainly hoping that I could finish the night off that way, but the date itself would have to wait. I was going to keep Red right beside me as long as I could, though, and leave her with the others if I managed to catch one of our targets in conversation.
Turns out it started at the bar.
Now, I had no idea the Goths even had their liquor license (hoped they did, anyway… oh, well…), but they had set up a pretty great cash bar on one curve of their circular coffee and espresso station. I couldn't risk drinking a single drop of liquor that evening, so I had the tall Goth tending bar pour me tonic with lime, just so I'd have something convincing in my hand.
"Ooohhh, no dry martini?" Red smirked up at me.
"Saving that for the finale, my dear," I grinned back at her as she collected her own mocked-up tumbler full of soda water and grenadine. For added effect, I caught her around the waist and pressed a kiss into her hair.
"Ugh," the Goth scoffed. "Go take your fairy tale romance to another side of the shop or leave."
"I'm not really interested in fairy tales tonight," I stated. "Got any sins?"
"All over the fucking walls. Move."
"No offense, but I had no idea you guys were able to throw parties like this."
"Parties are for crowd-pleasers like you," the Goth mumbled. "We're hosts, not partiers."
"Well, then. Pardon me," I said, over-enunciating. The Goth simply attempted to ignore me. "Where's the man of the evening?"
"Sulking somewhere over there." He sort of nodded in the direction of the Limbo painting across from the bar. "Stop talking, I can't hear the music."
Red tried to smile and thank the Goth for the simple drink, but, knowing he'd have none of it, I calmly suggested we keep moving. I was going to fucking speak to Wilcox about these paintings and that circle shit no matter what, and the sooner I caught him, the better.
The artist was in conversation with the dog-faced woman I recognized as the one who had overseen the carting in of the Wrath painting. Wilcox seemed to be sweating simply being in her presence, and I mean, he'd always been a nervous guy, but there was plenty in the woman's stern expression telling me that she wanted to be watching him squirm. Whoever she was, I was more than convinced that she was linked to—
…To the man who appeared rather suddenly into my field of vision when Red and I took one step closer. We drew in the same gasp, and Red tried to avert her eyes, while I didn't even dare to blink.
Damien was dressed for the occasion, and quite nearly to Goth standards, at that. All in black and grey but for a red silk tie, he wore a high-collared shirt and old-fashioned waistcoat; his pants tucked in at the shins to thick, high-laced leather boots. On every finger but his thumbs, he wore a silver ring, and he raised up his right hand to toast me with a glass of red wine before he turned and walked into the room I knew was the Goths' office area.
"Dammit," I whispered, glancing around to see if I could find any of the others. Luckily, Clyde and Bebe had just made their way over to the bar, and as soon as Clyde saw me in mid-search, he sent Bebe over.
The striking blonde maneuvered her way through the crowd, holding her glass of white wine over the shoulders of others as she passed so as not to spill a drop. She winked at me before linking her free arm with Red's, and she said brightly, "Hey! You guys enjoying yourselves?"
"So far," I said, starting to step back.
The girls both smiled, and Red squeezed my hand before letting go. "Let's move up closer," my girlfriend suggested to Bebe, who then angled herself such that a simple white rose pin she wore on her tight black dress could be in full view of the Limbo painting.
"Check," I heard Red Serge say into the wire. "Bebe, move in closer to your target; Stan, got yours, too."
The girls scooted closer so that Bebe's hidden camera could capture the painting's details, and so that Red was next in line to speak to Wilcox. With luck, she could keep him going until I was finished with Damien… or else one of the guys would be able to step in and gather even more from him.
In the clear, I set my glass down on the end of the bar and slipped away toward the office. My shadow shifted against the light, tugging itself under the crack in the door before I'd even put a hand to the knob. Frowning at the fate-mocking shadow, I opened the door and stepped in. I was met, as I was more or less expecting, with utter darkness.
My hand fumbled for the switch on the wall to my left, and as soon as I clicked the light on, I heard the familiar electric buzz of the harsh overhead light. I blinked to adjust to the light, but I saw nothing in the room.
The light snapped itself off, then flickered back on, the dimmer activating itself so that I stood in only half light. My eyes went immediately to the floor, where I saw the shadow of a hand reaching toward the neck of my own; I felt a tickle in my throat when the two shadows connected, and I jerked my head up, to see Damien sitting cross-legged on the large walnut office desk at the center of the room.
"Hey, there, McCormick."
The door behind me breezed shut.
I kept myself facing forward, repeating a mantra of not to give off any indication that I might be surprised. Another quick glance at the floor showed me that our shadows were no longer linked, but mine did seem to be tugging at my feet.
"How good of you to drop in this evening," Damien continued. He took a sip from the glass he held, and drummed the fingers of his other hand on the desk.
"You more or less invited me, remember?" I said sharply.
A grin stretched across Damien's face, showing his perfectly aligned, if slightly sharp, teeth.
"Been sending a lot of letters, lately, haven't you?" I continued.
"Gasp. You caught me."
I scowled, and advanced a few more paces. "I want to know what you're doing here," I said. "Where the fuck are the people you sent all your letters to?"
"One of them is standing right in front of me," said Damien, plainly, not moving. "One is on the roof. Two others are right… out… there." He waggled a ringed finger in the general area of the door, the tip of it making a slightly circular motion.
"Cut the bullshit," I barked, wanting to just grab him and shake him. I knew that that wouldn't work on him the way it might work on someone like Sargeant Yates, or any of the simple mob types I'd dealt with on past League missions, back when work was slightly less chaotic. "Sally Turner, and the other people you've been cloning. Where are they?"
"Turner… Turner… ah, yes!" Damien let out a little laugh, and twisted the ring on his middle finger around with his thumb. "She fit right in, and she is doing exactly what she signed up for."
"What are you offering?" I demanded.
"Opportunity."
Damien stood, his feet hardly making a sound as they touched the floor. My shadow shifted to form a circle around him, and he waved down at it before lifting his head high and stepping around my shadow in order to slowly pace the room.
His voice was chillingly stable.
"I am a very persuasive man, Mr. McCormick. I am also in dire need of a little man-power." He paused, as if to make damn sure I was listening, and added, "It's a tough economy, I understand. And I offer wonderful benefits."
"You're making threats," I corrected him. "You're attacking families. Even your own," I added with a little difficulty.
Damien laughed. "Oh, that one was fun," he commented. Mid-pace, he vanished, only to re-appear standing against the edge of the desk again. I yet again tried not to react.
"Nice parlor trick," I said, folding my arms. "What else can you do, pull Gingers from your magic hat?"
"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Damien said, all too unconcerned. "Speaking of which, have you quite yet met my messenger?"
"I've fuckin' had it up to here with messengers," I grumbled. I leaned up against the end of the wooden chair nearest me, an old Victorian thing that I knew my sister couldn't stand looking at during her shifts but that the Goths obviously wanted to keep around somewhere in their horribly predictable establishment. "You could've done worse than Scott Tenorman. He was insane before insane was a thing around here."
"Funny you should be talking about insanity," said the devil's son wistfully. "This entire town, from what I understand, has insanity flowing through it like a tide."
"Cut the poetics," I snapped. "This shop is melancholy enough. You do realize you're doing the Goths extreme business favors by being here, by the way."
"They aren't Satanists. I don't care."
"Do you care about anything?"
Damien grinned and stuck his nose over the rim of his wine glass. I was doubting more by the second that what was in there was actually Merlot. "I care about the fact that you're wrong."
"What about?" I had to know.
"Tenorman isn't my messenger," said Damien plainly. "He's a vital cog. Emphasis on the vital."
"As in breathing," I guessed. "Just takin' a stab."
"You have good aim."
"Damien, can we cut this out and can you get to the fucking point?"
"The point?" He feigned innocence. He was worse at that than Eric Cartman, and that was saying something. Then again, even Cartman had softened in the last couple years, with a resurgence in his assholery over the past few months (read: once he was around Butters again) (those guys, seriously, they needed to call it or end it for good). Of course, maybe there was a connection in that. Certainly wouldn't be the most surprising thing to learn anymore.
"Yeah, the point of why you're here and why you're doing this."
"Oooooh, just look at you," Damien cooed, wrenching my face around with one hand, his fingers clamped firm as a cold steel vice around my chin. His skin felt tight and had a strange kind of fabricy softness to it, as if it were more of a bone coating than actual skin. "God's favorite asshole. I don't know what Fate ever saw in you."
I smacked his hand away. "Oh, are we bringing Fate into this now?" I chided. "Speaking of which, take my fucking powers away again, Damien. I don't want them and I don't need them."
"So ungrateful." He clicked his tongue and turned away from me, running a pale finger around the rim of his wine glass. "So very ungrateful. No, you will keep them. You never know when they'll become handy. And besides, dear boy, it's a gift."
"Which reminds me of my old curse, so I repeat—"
"Shush, shush, shush," Damien scolded. He whirled on his leather boot heel to face me again, and took three echoing steps in my direction. "You appreciate art, don't you, Mr. McCormick?" he asked me, almost out of nowhere. "Tell me, what do you think of these commissions of mine?"
"Commi—commissions?" I growled. "You fucking prick, you commissioned Wilcox to paint these nightmares?"
"The man is being well-paid." Damien stared at his fingernails to show just how boring conversation with a mortal like me was. Right, and accurate compensation for the artist was clearly my only problem with this whole thing. "I've been using my father's old pseudonym to pay him."
"Going by 'Lucifer,' then, huh?" I snorted. I should have figured. I sure as hell hoped the guys were catching this over the wire, assuming they didn't all have their hands too full back out in the main room. At the very least, Red Serge and Iron Maiden were recording.
"Lucifer Alighieri Thorn," Damien informed me. "Yes."
"Didn't know you'd like Dante that much," I said, trying to sound as monotone as possible in order to get my information.
Damien's thin lips twisted into something that I suppose could be called a smile. He held up his wine to stare up at me through the murky red liquid, and his answer echoed against the glass, sending a crystalline hum out into the already dank air. "That incredulous poet. I'm afraid my father is something of a patron of the arts."
"He has horrible taste in upholstery, though," I scorned Damien for the fuck of it, just to see how far I could push the Anti-Christ's buttons, "if I remember correctly."
Damien scowled, and down came the dramatically raised glass. "You do know how to spoil moments, McCormick."
"And you sure know how to put me to sleep faster than my economics professor," I quipped back, keeping my monotone. "Was there a point to this? You, Wilcox, Dante? Just a refresher?" I spun my hands around each other, indicating that he'd better hurry up because Mysterion does not have all day.
"By all means," Damien said dully, "guess to your beating heart's content."
"What's the POINT?" I snapped. "Why are you here and why are you fucking with us?"
"I suppose you're expecting me to say 'because I can,'" Damien said on an almost whispered tone, that seemed to cling to the air in hisses throughout the room all the same. The hiss of a burning fire: everywhere yet centralized, all at once. "But I have come simply to… shall we say… tie up loose ends. Or, rather, claim them."
"Claim… loose ends?" I repeated, utterly lost.
"Claim them, conquer them, stick my flag into the soil. Do I make myself clear?"
"Nope."
"Simplistic little mind in that once-Immortal head of yours," Damien said, clicking his tongue. "Loose ends, boy, loose ends."
Henrietta, Stan and I had been onto something. Oh, fuck it, we all had. Damien had access to the Dreamlands. He had to have a working knowledge of Henrietta's chart as well. And he'd probably been watching our entire plight against the Old Ones, laughing the entire time. "The Spaces Between—" I realized.
"They do not abide by the universal laws," Damien said disapprovingly. "But my father is a resourceful man, and Hell has been getting rather full lately…"
Oh, no. No, no: he really was trying to claim the Between.
WE SHALL BUILD THE NEW BETWEEN, Scott Tenorman had written on his asylum wall.
They were moving in. Moving Hell closer. Expanding the circles into the pocket dimensions on Earth and into people's dreams… starting with the army Tenorman had already amassed, and moving on to attack those of us in the League, and those that we loved or knew closely. If Damien succeeded, assuming that was his mission, they would be able to acquisition people into the legions of the dead by killing silently and at random. Death by dreams, death by sleep. Simple, easy.
Untraceable.
"Luckily, that madman gave me all the opportunity I needed," Damien went on. "He may not be my messenger, but, dear boy, he is very crucial to my work. I do enjoy the networking he's done for me thus far."
"Networking," I scoffed. "You mean Liane Cartman."
"I mean Eric Cartman."
"You don't say," I growled.
"I mean you as well, don't worry," Damien sneered.
"What the fuck? Is this about one of your Divine Threesomes or what the fuck ever?" I shouted. "Okay, so I was born into a curse, and Cartman was born with something to do with both you and the Old Ones—"
"And I was never born," said Damien. I half expected him to feign a yawn, he was projecting such an air of being bored. "Are we here to discuss childhoods, or may I continue?"
"YOU TELL ME," I roared.
"Careful, boy," Damien said in a sing-song tone, holding out his free hand to stop me from moving forward. "You do have a very interesting group of friends. I'd like to introduce you to mine."
"Not interested."
"No choice. The Carnival is coming to town, McCormick!" Damien outstretched his arms invitingly as he stepped away from me again. "Show some excitement, won't you! Carnivals are meant to be fun, aren't they? Food, festivities… and oh, you just wait until you see our attractions. We just have a little more recruiting to do."
Cartman.
Possibly all of us, but definitely Cartman. Not on my watch, though. That annoying asshole was sticking with us, no matter what.
"I do have my father to thank for the funding, of course, though the mission is entirely mine," Damien went on. He sure was spilling a lot. Something told me he was enjoying it. He did roll his eyes, though—red globes circled in ghostly white as he expressed one ounce of disdain. "The poet was given some creative input, of course."
"Dante," I guessed. "So you've met the guy."
"I meet many people in Hell. Are you kidding me? My father used to make me throw him parties on the anniversary of his book's release. Him and that other mad author." Other…? Alhazred? "Dante Alighieri, you see, is a soul that we allow to wander the levels of Hell freely," Damien told me. "He chronicled them, after all. No man more fit than he who penned the Book of the Inferno."
"I always just heard it as The Inferno," I noted aloud. "And then, what…"—shit, what had Kyle and Stan been reading in class (…and, furthermore, was that just coincidence)?—"The Purgatorio, and The Paradisio?"
"The other two were boring reads society wanted." Damien waved a hand in front of him to indicate that they were no big deal. "The Book of the Inferno is my father's greatest commission. He took a liking to that poet and…"
I laughed. "Fuck, man, your dad is a slut."
"Do not cheapen my father's great name by doling out such indecencies!" Damien screamed at me. "Do you want to hear these words or don't you, Shadow?"
I wanted to spit back at him that nobody should ever fucking call me that anymore, but I held my tongue. Honestly. Cthulhu was dead, R'lyeh was gone; that was all behind me. The resurgence of my abilities and Damien's taunting nickname were too much for me to handle.
"Just tell me why you call it that," I asked.
"It is our text. That is all I care to tell you now."
"Your text?" I scoffed. "What, so, like, he was your prophet? You're telling me Dante is to this Book of the Inferno as Joseph Smith was to the Book of Mor—"
"HOLD YOUR IDOLATROUS TONGUE!" Damien shrieked. The wine glass was dropped, then shattered on the floor. He flew across the room in a fit of rage, clamped both of his hands around my mouth, and continued running until he had me slammed up against a file cabinet shaped like a coffin. Those motherfucking Goths, I swear. Some things I understood, but shit like that was just tacky. Yes, I'm a straight dude using the word tacky in terms of room décor, but you did not see that fucking file cabinet. Jesus Christ.
(And yes I'm aware of the irony or what the fuck ever of the Anti-Christ holding me, an ex-Immortal, against it.)
"You—that does it," sputtered that black-haired sub-demon, eyes aflame and lips curled back over his too-white teeth. "I need to get back out there to keep up appearances with my dear artist friend, but I have not finished with you, McCormick, oh, no. Hell wants you back, boy. We're waiting."
"Hell can suck it," I muffled into his hands. His palms didn't feel like they even had creases to them, his skin was so wrong. Like someone had just ironed him right out. I supposed that made sense, though: no distinguishing marks. No fingerprints. "R'lyeh couldn't have me, and you can't, either."
"Perhaps," was all Damien said, having understood my every word. He stepped back. "Keep those friends in your sights, Shadow," he scowled as he straightened his funeral home suit and prepared to take his leave. "You'd be better to join me on this mission, though. Either that, or be prepared to watch one or two of them simply hand themselves over."
I knew exactly who he was talking about. Given the situation, how could I not? But as far as I was concerned at that moment in time, Damien was most certainly not claiming Kyle and had no fucking chance in any perceivable lifetime or dimension of taking Red.
After he left, I waited a good twenty seconds, mostly preoccupied with staring at the liquid that had spilled out of the broken wine glass, before leaving for the storefront proper myself. A scattered few of the invited guests were still mingling about. Henrietta was stuck at the bar, looking ready to kill someone or something (if she absolutely had to, I hoped she'd go for the rat I kept seeing poke its head out of the corner of the room every now and then), and her companion with the two-toned hair was sucking down a clove and nodding blankly while he listened to Henrietta talk about a painting I'd not yet seen entitled Heresy.
Damien was nowhere to be seen. Keep up appearances, my pasty white ass. Fucker was just trying to play me around for an idiot.
But I knew his weakness. I could not fucking wait to share it.
And not only did I know his weakness, but I knew plenty of people who knew just how to keep me in the loop about it. Plus, there were the Harrisons to consider, now. Already targets, we knew, but we'd need to keep them protected with an even more watchful eye now, if Damien had reeled that much at the mention of their Book. In addition, I was sure that other texts about and from the highest plane of certain circles would send Damien into similar fits. Maybe Damien had dismissed Dante's other two texts, but I had a feeling we'd find some comfort in the Paradisio at least…
Time to start literally counting blessings, I guess.
And, hey, I'd commanded the forces of Heaven once before, as a kid… during a coma and later death. If I was going to rise against Hell again, we'd need to learn as much as we could about its primary opposition.
When I found myself in the thick of the gala again, Wilcox was nowhere to be seen. Not in the main room, anyway. I did catch sight of Stan and Kyle, though, both of whom were studying—and most likely sending information back to the base on—a painting entitled Fraud, its female, Greek-inspired subject looking just familiar enough…
Wendy?
No way; no way could Wilcox have painted Wendy. Wait—no doubting, no doubting, Kenny McCormick; anything was possible with that man.
"Got it," I heard Red Serge say through the wire. My heart skipped a beat when he spoke… I realized that, the entire time I'd been in conversation with Damien, I hadn't heard a thing. Not a word, not even a crackle. As if I'd just been taken away from the world for those few minutes. "We just need visuals of three more and we've got our set."
I made my way over to the two, who looked a little shocked to see me.
"Dude, where the hell have you been?" Stan asked, keeping his tone low.
"Got talking to Damien," I whispered back, hoping not to attract any attention from the multitudes of cloned subjects and apparent GSM allies throughout the establishment. "How long've I been away?"
"I dunno, twenty minutes? Half an hour?" Kyle guessed.
"No fucking way, that long?" My shadow yanked at my limbs, and I gazed up at the painting. "Anyway," I muttered, dismissing my apparently lengthy absence as yet another of Damien's parlor tricks. "What've we got so far?"
"Pretty crazy shit, but no less than what we were expecting," said Stan, ticking his head up at the painting.
"Is that Wendy?" I had to ask.
"Okay, so we're not the only ones who think that," Kyle said on a short breath. "And, dude, you're not even going to—just… look at one of the ones in the other room. Clyde about snapped when he saw it."
"Why, what about it?"
"Just—just go in there, you'll see."
I glanced around again. "Where's Red? And—"
"She and Bebe followed that weird curator lady into the women's bathroom," Stan told me, "and Clyde's waiting for them till he, uh… heads out."
"Already?"
"Just look at that painting," Kyle stressed through clenched teeth.
I nodded, knowing that there was little else the guys could actually tell me. "How're you two doing, anyway?" I managed to get in before I left to browse more of the gallery and attempt to catch Wilcox again. "That one with the mirrors…"
"Is still the worst thing I've ever seen," said Kyle.
"And I'm really not fond of that one with the urns," Stan added. "Lust, was it? Noooot a fan."
It seemed that each of us was having troubles with one specific work of Wilcox's art. I hadn't found one yet that really made me jump the way those two had at Wrath and Lust, but I began preparing myself for the moment I would.
My shadow tugged along at me, as if to greet every member of the crowd, while I dodged the apparent sea of not-quite-alive bodies that made up the bulk of the gala patrons. More sets of eyes were focused on Kyle, I noticed. How many of them were out for my girlfriend, as well…?
I made it a point to take a look at the paintings in the main room one last time before heading into the adjunct room where the band was playing. The hazy lake of Limbo first, then Lust, bearing the two urns, Wrath and its mirrors, Fraud's odd likeness to one of our own and her scale showing the highest and lowest respective rolls of a set of red dice.
Once I was in the other room, it was impossible not to notice the canvas directly beside the band's guitar amp. Heart pounding, I made my way over to it, if only to take in the title of the painting. After all, I'd seen the image before. I was half-expecting to see that motif show up as it was.
Violence was the title. And it was a very simple painting, red on black: the GSM symbol, three rows of three dots, together under a large broken circle.
The band's vocalist stepped up to a microphone the moment I read the title, and began to sing:
"Circle up, now, step right in
It's a bargain, really, just a penny and a sin
Be the first in line to feed the fire
Nine full circles and a brand new pyre—"
I looked only once at the vocalist before I noticed that he was wearing a black hood over his face. He wasn't very tall, nor did he have a singer's voice. It was a voice I was sure I'd heard before, though. Recently.
"Now the Carnival is waiting, and we're ready to begin."
That was it.
The young man who'd delivered my letter. Which, of course, got me wondering if I was the only one hearing the lyrics. A glance over in the direction of the restrooms, where I did indeed find Clyde stationed outside the women's room, got that thought out of me pretty quick.
Clyde looked haunted. Pissed, even, but definitely haunted, disgusted. He wanted to get out of there and go active. I thought for a second about going over to speak with him, but he caught sight of me. He shifted his eyes to the vocalist, gave me a what the fuck? shrug, then glanced back at the bathroom door again.
I didn't have to wonder long what had gotten him into that state. Directly across the room from him, on the wall to my right as I walked further away from the band, was the very painting that Kyle and Stan had insisted I see. The first painting on that wall was the carousel horse I had earlier seen, its pole red and its title Gluttony, but beside that was one entitled Greed.
It was a small painting, compared to most of the others, and had a very direct subject. A mask, covered in blood. The mask itself was done in light grey, but it was pretty obvious what and whose it was. Clyde had been wearing a Mardi Gras-inspired 'mosquito' half mask for years, changing its design every now and then… so while it was one thing to see a face slightly reminiscent of Wendy's in one painting, it hit even closer to home to see Mosquito's own mask in another.
The pattern on the mask was different, though: it bore an odd web of lines, as if the mask had been cut out of a section of the chart in Henrietta's tome of Dhol Chants. The string that kept the mask in place around Clyde's head on missions had been replaced with black and grey ribbons, ripped and frayed.
Greed?
Why the fuck would anything ever depict Clyde as an avaricious person? I knew the guy; I mean, sure, he and I had similar lapses in judgment, but we were fucking human and humans fuck up and covet and whatever, but he was not covetous in any kind of sinful way. In fact, he was one of the most lionhearted people I knew, especially when it came to taking care of Bebe.
He was not greedy. He was protective, and dutiful.
I really, really needed to talk to Wilcox.
Other heads were turned, as well, and the crowd gave into the pleasure of listening to the music. With Damien's scraped together army distracted by what could only be a sort of call to arms for them, I was free to slip on through, and find, singled out away from the crowd, the artist. At last.
Wilcox stood in front of a good-sized painting that showed a figure descending from a goldish white light and into a pit of swirling shadows. Red wings were affixed to her back.
"So," I said, making Wilcox jump at the mere sound of my voice. "Jeez, skittish?"
"When you've lived a life of nightmares," said the man, sheepishly, "you grow used to things like this." No kidding. The guy looked like a weathered sheet of paper. His skin seemed to be turning grey along with his hair… and not just grey in many places, but bone white, as if he just could not ask for death fast enough. I had to applaud him for not taking his own life this far in, but a morbid part of me wondered why he hadn't.
"I kinda hear you on that," I told him. He eyed me oddly; of course, he'd had plenty of conversations about R'lyeh with Mysterion, but tonight I didn't quite look the hero type. I was just another college kid who only looked good in what he was wearing because his girlfriend could rent things out from the store she worked at. True-ass story of my current life.
"You have nightmares, Mr…?"
"McCormick. And yeah, kind of. Who doesn't?"
Wilcox shook his brittle head, and I saw out of the corner of my eye that he had one hand in his suit coat pocket; he was fiddling it around as neurotically as Butters Stotch had always kneaded his knuckles, but I couldn't remember seeing this as a tick before in the artist. With Cthulhu and the other Old Ones gone for four years, though, something else was bound to creep into that poor man's haunted mind. Maybe not fits of insanity, as had been Their game, but something a little more time-tested.
It took no stretch of the imagination to realize that he was fiddling with a rosary.
I used to go to Catholic mass with my parents. They'd clean me and Kevin and Karen up, get us dressed in the only sets of nice clothes we had, and sit us down to listen to Father Maxi warn us about Hell for a couple hours. I'd always tuned him out, since I'd known more than he did about Hell but could never really speak up about it, so in the days after I became too old for Sunday School, I just started watching people.
At first, it was all about checking out the girls and wondering if a single one of them still believed in staying a virgin till she got married (and, if so, if she was okay with oral), but then it just became about people, and the way they projected themselves. I saw so much rosary-fiddling going on in the pews during those days. I saw the way men would rub their thumbs over the crucifix, the way the women would count the beads. It was so interesting to me.
Growing up the way I had, not being able to die, religion had kind of been a fascination for me. I wondered a couple of times if anything would change my Immortality if I changed religions, but I deduced that since it was a curse the answer was no. So I went on living and dying and watching people and wishing it were easier to choose to go to Heaven or Hell, and wonder if I'd ever get to talk to God, and wonder if Karen was doing all right and if she still believed in her Angel.
Wilcox was not one of those people who just fiddled with a rosary out of habit. He did it with purpose. This wasn't just bead counting or tracing the cross or anything usual. This was, Someone save me.
But I had to pretend I didn't know that, and just play 'ignorant college guy' for a little while longer. "So, what's up with this piece?" I asked the artist, finally getting around to posing the question I'd been meaning to state from the start of our unusual conversation.
"Oh. Yes. This," he said. Forcing his hand to go still, Wilcox looked over the painting with me, in order to explain the symbolism in further detail. "Heresy is the Sixth Circle of Hell," he continued. "After Wrath, and before Violence."
"Who's this woman?" I wondered, indicating the celestial being at the center, engulfed in shadows.
"You can tell she's a woman?" Wilcox laughed nervously. "A lot of people I've spoken to are unsure."
My stomach flipped, but I held myself together. "Lucky guess," I shrugged. "I just figured she's important. Is she, what's her name, there, Beatrice?" I had to scour my brain, but I could vaguely remember the name of Dante's muse, from Kyle complaining about it for a test.
"You've read The Inferno," the artist complimented me.
"My roommates did."
"I see. I suggest you read it. This woman is the Voice of Divine Reason. Beatrice, yes, for Dante, but a different woman for every traveler."
"Is she always a woman?"
"As far as… as far as the nightmares go, yes. Doesn't have to be a lover. A mother is a common interpretation. Or a sister."
Wait.
"What's the Voice of Divine Reason doing in that pit of shadows?" I had to know.
"Oh." Wilcox looked like he was sweating with anxiety. "Because this is the Sixth Circle. She is a heretic, and must fall with the rest."
Oh.
Shit.
Romans 3:23, I could almost hear Karen's voice whispering into my mind.
My attention was doubly distracted, then, by the painting I then noticed directly beside Heresy. It moved me in a way that the first painting had not… in the way that the others must have felt when discovering that one image that truly set them off.
It was an image I knew would be burned into my mind for some time to come. Something that, indeed, was to appear in dreams here and there. It was a painting of a forest. A forest of dead, sinewy trees, creating a thicket over a path which at first I theorized as a possible extension of the watery path already depicted in the Limbo painting.
Hanging from every single tree—and this must have taken Wilcox quite some time to move from mind to canvas, since the trees seemed to have no end—was a noose.
Nine of them were red.
The nine red ropes hung directly over the path at varying heights, and in various states of decay. Some seemed to be clinging sturdily to the branches, while others were decrepit, worn, on branches about to snap. It felt like death.
My blood churned, and my shadow shifted so that I saw a full silhouetted outline of myself directly against the canvas, as if it were meant to be one final addition to the work itself. The hands of my shadow went to the throat, and I copied the action, remembering the sensation of not being able to breathe.
I had been decapitated before. Hanged, even. I had undergone numerous deaths that had cut off my air supply or broken my neck. My very first death had been a form of asphyxiation.
Yet something was telling me, once my shadow slithered back down to the floor, that my deaths were not necessarily the ones represented in full in the painting.
The title was Treachery.
The band had stopped playing, I realized. And the lights went out.
I felt a pair of arms wrap around my shoulders, but I was now too shocked to even cry out.
"Where's that jaw drop I was hoping for, McCormick?"
Cold fingers grabbed my chin and forced me to release my jaw. I let out the startled breath I'd been holding in.
"There we are," Damien said, satisfied.
I slapped his hand off of my face and spun to face him. We were the only ones in the room, as if time had stopped and the world had gone away again. This time I did grab him, by the lapel of his waistcoat. Raising a fist to strike, I demanded, "What do you want from me?"
Damien grinned.
"Know who your friends are, Mysterion," his voice hissed out into the air when the room went so dark I could no longer see him.
The lights came back on.
I found myself holding Wilcox instead of the devil's son, and the artist's eyes went wide. I released him quickly and brushed off his shoulders. "I'm sorry," I said hurriedly. "I'm sorry, so sorry, I didn't mean—"
"That's… that's all right," said the skittish man. "That isn't the first time seeing one of my works has done that to a person."
"What?"
"Did you dream?"
I glanced back at the painting, and began to doubt every sense I had. Where there had been two, now there were three. But the third, situated in the middle, between Treachery and Heresy was nothing but a blank white canvas inside a red frame.
Its title was Pride—Work In Progress.
Damien's. Not the painter's.
Damien was building upon the nine circles that already composed the layers of Hell. He had been sent to Earth, traveling through the Dreamlands and collecting an army, to create the tenth circle.
Hell wants you back, he had told me. Oh, but he wasn't intending on dragging me down.
He was bringing it to me.
Death is immortal. While men cannot live forever, their creations can. The commissions were a formality. Hell's text, the Book of the Inferno, was immortal, the creation of a poet. Wilcox's works, then…? And dreams…?
"I'm… I'm not sure," I said.
"Best begin keeping track," the artist cautioned me. He was shaking, and started fiddling with his rosary again.
It was impossible not to notice that the shadows in the room began gravitating toward mine at that point. Wilcox shook his head, and stared at the blank canvas. The canvas reflected no light, and cast no shadow of its own. It existed out of space and out of time. It was a work in progress, a blank slate; it was nothing, it did not yet exist. It was the highest tier of every warning we had thus far been dealt.
"Especially since you seem to have a nightmare following you right now."
I refused to stare at the floor when Wilcox spoke those words.
Of fucking course Damien would attack me with a literal nightmare. Attack me, affix it to me, taunt me with it, destroy me with it. As long as my shadow had the ability to move on its own, I would share a connection with the Hell that Damien was trying to build upon.
It got worse, too, when I heard the lead singer, the hooded young man, speak into the microphone, "You have been a most attentive audience this evening, my brothers and sisters. Do turn your attention to the side of the stage for our latest attraction. Not one but two new acts have graciously allowed us the pleasure of their audience."
Two new—shit, shit, shit.
I hated to leave that conversation with Wilcox hanging, but I had to push back to the front of the crowd, where I then heard a scream.
"RED!"
Red cut off her own scream, and it was echoed by a barking, hoarse yelp. I shoved a man and woman apart at the front of the crowd in order to find a scene in front of me that, had this been any other function, would have sent any crowd scattering. As it stood, however, the hungry crowd were waiting like vultures for their own turn to move.
The dog-faced old woman was letting my girlfriend out of what looked like an already desperate grasp of her upper arms: the bitch stood behind Red, who was balanced forward on her right foot—the sharp heel of her left shoe she had just jabbed in self defense into the woman's stomach.
The woman was surrounded, too: Stan had entered the room and held one of his stunners on her left, while Clyde had done the same on her right; Kyle, too, had entered the sudden fray and stood behind the woman, a switchblade pressed against her collarbone.
I rushed forward, and took hold of Red's hands when she held them out to me. Kyle kneed the old woman in the back, causing her to release the rest of her grip and collapse onto the floor. When Red yanked her shoe out of the woman's gut, there was no blood. Once standing with more stability, Red pulled her shoes off and tossed both of them down at the woman.
"She's a fucking demon!" Red alerted me.
"It's okay, it's okay," I assured her, tightening my grip. "I'm sorry I wasn't right here—"
Red shook her head. "I'm fine, I swear I'm fine, but…"
"I'm sorry."
"It appears," said the vocalist, "that the reception is over. Shall we continue with our recruitment efforts for the evening?"
"I've got you," I whispered to Red, pulling her close with my right arm so that she was pressed right up against me, and I had free movement of my left hand. I flicked my wrist to activate my hidden gun, and the second it snapped into my hand, I fired, aiming to knock back the young man's hood.
He moved his head to the side, and the bullet hit directly to the right of the Violence painting behind the band. That was the action that propelled the room into motion, then, as well.
In an instant, the room erupted into mayhem. Some crowd members cleared out—band members included—but we found ourselves suddenly stacked against the currently countless clones from those Damien had somehow convinced to join the Carnival ranks.
"Kyle," Clyde said sternly, snapping out the gun for his other hand, so that he could maneuver both weapons. "You getting anything?"
"Open fire, dude," Kyle said, as the four of us guys started instinctively forming a shield around Red and Bebe. It wasn't that they couldn't take care of themselves… far from it; it was just that the four of us had a lot more experience than the two of them did. And if Red was a target, it was Bebe's job to get her as far the fuck away from danger as possible. Kyle could hold his own. Red couldn't hold hers, not at the level we'd found ourselves at anyway. But I loved her deeply for so much as keeping her head up. She was wonderful in the face of adversity. I just didn't want her getting in deeper than she could handle. "Every one of these guys is reading as inanimate. Except her for some reason," Kyle added, ticking his head over at the crumpled dog-faced woman.
Oh, I had a feeling she wasn't down for the count.
But I couldn't be too awful concerned about that right now. The vocalist, the only member of the band still onstage, grabbed the mic and shouted the command, "Do not lose the potential recruits! The order is out, my friends! This is our moment!"
"Would someone shut him up?!" Stan shouted. "Not helping my concentration."
"Gladly," I growled. I shot again, and this time my bullet knocked the mic right out of the guy's hands.
"Clearin' a path, folks, pardon me!" Clyde called through the crowd.
That hollered out, he broke formation and opened fire, as Kyle had suggested; Clyde had probably the best aim of our three active marksmen, and he put that eye to good use, wasting not a single tranq bullet in the process of shooting his way in a clear path through the crowd and toward the front door. "Ladies first!"
Bebe wriggled out from formation as well, and used the straps of her stiletto heels to tie the shoes together. Strung out, they were the most unconventional pair of nunchaku I had ever seen, but probably also among the most deadly, so I gave the girl some super high credit for the move. Especially when, just before she could say a word, she spun her improvised weapon out and cut a man in the back of his neck. When he fell forward, she pushed him off, but another rushed up to grab her from the side.
Bebe then pulled a hairpin out from her up-do and stabbed it into the man's back, momentarily crippling his spinal column. "Damn, babe!" Clyde grinned over at her.
"Compliments later, sweetheart," she said back on a huff of breath. Reclaiming her strung-together stilettos, Bebe rushed up to me and Red.
As she was catching her breath, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, Henrietta appearing on the scene. As the crowd of GSM clone-activists continued to keep their attention on those of us bent on going against them, the Goth slunk against the wall until she had reached Mr. Wilcox, who himself stood paralyzed in the shadows of his own two disturbing paintings. His silhouette was framed by Heresy and Treachery, though I had the distinct feeling that Pride had nothing to do with the artist's own semblance of self-worth. Wilcox had none. That was the commissioned work meant to truly haunt every single one of us. Because it had no precedent.
But of that later. For now, I was glad to see Henrietta grab the man out of the room, and I hoped she'd devise some way to keep him in the fucking building until we could all sit down and have a nice talk. Assuming the coffee shop stayed standing through the night.
I remembered just as Bebe started whispering something to Red that the rest of the town was celebrating various artworks that evening, and that even put my mind to rest a little. The girls would be able to make a fairly easy escape, if there were crowds to work through. I had no idea where Bebe and Clyde had parked, but it almost didn't matter. Those two would stay safe.
Which was exactly Bebe's next promise. "Kenny," she said hurriedly, "I've got Clyde's keys and I'm going to get us the fuck out of here. We'll get on the wire once we're safe, okay? I swear."
"Sure thing," I said. "Take care, guys, okay?" I added, tugging Red in one last time before she could go. "We'll sort this shit out."
"I know you will, Kenny," Red smiled up at me.
I shot back at two men and a woman who were advancing on me. They fell to the ground once hit by my bullets and, just as Kyle had reported from the mission outside the Harrisons', their bodies burst into momentary flames before quite literally giving up the ghost—or, in this case, shadow, which then flitted up into the air or down into the floor and then were seen no further.
"Good luck, Red," I then wished my girlfriend, slipping her a warm, protective kiss. "See you soon, babe, okay?"
She pressed her soft lips to my cheek and kissed my skin after saying, "Give these guys a real taste of Hell, Mysterion."
"Endgame and Marpesia are gonna help us with the getaway," Bebe said in a rushed whisper, cutting off the moment, "but we've gotta move now."
Red nodded, kissed my cheek again, then slipped back, linked elbows with Bebe, and drew the knife at her thigh. I couldn't help but give into a proud grin as I watched her start making her escape through the crowds. I couldn't watch for long, though, since I heard Stan shout out, "On your six, dude!"
I spun around and fired—my bullet found home right at the gathering of freckles on a man's forehead, and he went down before I could even catch the rest of his features. No time for that, though, since he combusted and was reduced to ash and a flitting shadow upon contact with the bullet.
The vocalist, still onstage but without his microphone, was not looking very happy. And I couldn't even see the fucker's face, he was projecting worse than anyone I'd ever seen give off bad vibes before. "Sorry to fuck with your stupid nightmare sideshow," I hollered over at the young man.
"Music didn't quite do it for our tastes," Stan added, snapping out his second gun and keeping it trained on the hooded figure.
"I see," said the current primary opposition. "Tastes do not matter much to us, though. I do hope you understand that. There is also one thing more to understand."
"Oh?" I scoffed.
The young man lifted his hood back just enough to show a twisted smile. It was off, somehow. I couldn't quite explain how. Off, and terrifying. "Chaos," he said, "can manifest in even the brightest of human dreams."
And with that, he tore through the room, making a break for the front door with such speed and accuracy that he surpassed the girls as they still were fighting their way through.
"Stan! Kyle! Stay on him!" I shouted over.
"Done," the two answered in unison. As the two ran, Kyle slipped Red and Bebe his switchblades, and the four then made their way through the crowd. Once the girls were out onto the street, I still had enough of a view out the window to see that Kyle then flicked out his butterfly knives, letting one fly at the young man as they chased him out of view.
Clyde had cleared a pretty clean path, which would allow him and myself a good break at some point, but neither of us seemed quite keen on leaving just yet. "Henrietta's gone upstairs," he informed me when he rushed back to my immediate aid.
"Good. The other two?"
"I don't know. Hair guy's in the office, I think, tall guy's off somewhere, maybe outside." Clyde and I, now faced against the remaining GSM forces, numbering at least a couple dozen, if not somewhere into the low forties, pressed up back to back, he with his two tranquilizer guns drawn, I with my two .45s. A quick maneuver over the shoulder saw my left gun getting traded for his left tranq, so that the two of us had equal aim when it came to knocking out or making kill shots. I didn't quite count them as kill shots, though, since, as Kyle had confirmed for us, none of these high-end-looking men and women was actually alive. At least not in any conventional interpretation of the term.
"They're safe, then," I deduced.
"Safe bet." Clyde fired twice with both guns; I did the same. Neither of us missed. "We making a break?"
"Let's clean house," I suggested. I was so close to wanting to snap down into my gruff Mysterion tone, but I had to continually remind myself that the night had started out under the assumption of simple reconnaissance. Others could handle the hero duties. Right now I was just Kenny, the spy. With firepower. "And then we can—"
"What the FUCK."
"What?"
I hardly had to ask. It was mostly just an involuntary outburst after Clyde's own startled shout. After firing a few more times across the room and bringing down a few other non-living activists, I turned to follow Clyde's current field of vision.
He was staring down at where the dog-faced woman had gone down, and while I was anticipating that she, too, might burst into flames or singe into dust before releasing the impish shadow that kept her body animated, what I got was another vision of a nightmare.
It was the sound that grated at me, mostly, though the sight was nothing to marvel at. The woman's bones began to crunch and grind together. It sounded like a symphonic din of hand saws clawing through layers and layers of unbreakable rock. Panting, the woman then rolled up onto all fours.
Clyde and I were then frozen as we watched her body shift. Her angular body shifted and creaked until it rejected a human shape in favor of one more canine-like. And then entirely dogish. Her knotted fingers curved in to form large paws which then in turn sprouted hardened black claws that grabbed into the creaking hardwood floor. Her stretchy skin turned a charred but rock-like grey as she dismissed her human shape.
Within seconds, I could hardly even remember that anyone vaguely representing a woman had been lying there, since Clyde and I now found ourselves face to face with a large grey dog with pitted black eyes, roughly half the length of our enormous meeting table at the base and about four inches taller than the two of us, putting her at about six-foot-two from paw to shoulder. Her head was lowered, and she showed no sign of injury other than a small black hole ripped into her stomach where Red had kicked the woman earlier.
"Oh, fuck," I muttered under my breath.
"Oh, fuck," Red Serge echoed into my earpiece.
"Yo, guys, quit gawking and look this shit up for us!" Clyde suggested, as he and I began backing away from the enormous dog.
I didn't need Red Serge or Iron Maiden to run any kind of search for us, though. No stretching the imagination on this one. The bitch was a Hellhound. I had seen one of those creatures maybe once or twice during one of my early deaths… just enough of a glimpse to know that Hell had some pretty strange natural fauna, but hadn't really thought of them since.
They were guarders of the inner parts of Hell, where Satan abided (with one of his boy toys du jour, generally), and where I had spotted Damien a few times when we were merely kids. I a child of curses and poor circumstances and he a devil in the making.
The cloned Gingers and their ilk finished clearing out, leaving me and Clyde alone against the beast. She snarled, and put one taloned paw in front of the other, advancing us back, step by step, toward the empty Pride canvas. Neither of us could spare a split second to think. I could hardly even tell if Clyde was breathing… let alone tell if my own damn heart was beating.
Luckily, I had one conscious thought within me, left over from the moment I first began studying the dog as she was re-claiming her true form.
"Hey, Angel?" I whispered into my wire.
"Standing by," my sister said.
"We're gonna need some backup."
She laughed a little. "A bit of divine intervention always helps."
So long as it did not lose its way.
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Authors' Notes:
South Park is -c- Matt Stone and Trey Parker!
And here we go! I've been excited to start getting into this part. :3 Sorry for the lateish posting time, though, ahh!
I've been enjoying writing Damien. And those paintings… this is a part we're both having a lot of fun with… ^^
Next time: the fight continues! Hell and the stuff of dreams are starting to weave together, and we'll be indulging in some fights and struggles here soon… BUT. We're taking next week off, and will make the call on whether or not we switch to an every-other week schedule from there (we've been running some odd schedules lately). So we shall see you again on Wednesday, August 22nd! :3
Thank you so much for reading! ^^
~Jizena, and Rosie Denn
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