"My glory awaits, and so does yours..." Colin's voice grew darker and darker, as most of the candles in the room began to sputter out. Walter craned his neck to look up. Did his brother's barely visible shadow have horns sprouting from its head? "I know it all sounds crazy, but, believe me, Lucifer's plan is totally sane. You can't be the one who commits suicide. It's got to be me." Colin looked down. "We're both geeks, Walter. But in the place we're going, we'll be kings. Your destiny awaits. Embrace your destiny."

Walter's eyes felt pulled open by fingers as he watched. He didn't want to watch but something seemed to be making him.

From behind the bar, Colin grabbed the Remington shotgun and racked a round one-handed into the chamber, a slick move like Linda Hamilton in T2: CLACK!.

"Now this, Buddy-bro, is how you kill yourself with a pumpkin-ball!" He put the end of the barrel into his mouth, at an upward angle, and instantly pulled the trigger.

The room shook with the weapon's deafening report. Colin's head essentially vaporized as the single 12-gauge slug blew through his skull.

A second later, red mist and tiny bits of bone floated down, dotting Walter's face and the white bandage wrapped around his head. He moaned on the floor. The sound of the shot had been the loudest thing he'd ever heard in his life; he trembled in the after-shock.

He sensed figures around him, but he didn't look up. He didn't want to open his eyes because if he did he'd see his twin brother's headless corpse lying somewhere near him. Urgent, callused hands were on him: several of the girls from the other room. They were picking Walter up.

They put him back in the chair and were wheeling him back into the room with the tables.

The smoke from the crucible had gone out. On the tables lay several of the yellow pads, neatly stacked. Walter still couldn't think very concretely; he was still getting over the shock of 1) seeing his brother kill himself and 2) finding Candice's head in a box. Madness reigned supreme now, which seemed logical.

The girls-the naked drug-addicts-all stood in a line now before Walter, like an Army squad awaiting inspection, and Walter was the drill sergeant. He looked at the rail-thin creatures, their soulless eyes and deadpan faces. Malnutrition had sucked them down to stick-figures; in most cases their b.r.e.a.s.t.s were but flaps of skin, and nests of needlemarks could be seen at the insides of their elbows. The girl on the end broke the queer formation and approached Walter, her hair the color of dirty dishwater and the texture of straw.

"We're done now," she peeped to him.

Walter didn't know what to say in response. "We'd like to go now. Can we?"

Walter nodded.

The girls who remained standing in the line were all holding knives. They just looked straight ahead as they all raised their knives to their throats and began to cut. None of them uttered a sound. Blood sprayed. They all collapsed to a twitching pile at once.

The straw-haired one offered a knife to Walter. "Would you kill me please? It would be the holiest honor."

"If you give me that knife, I'll kill myself," Walter managed.

"Don't do that. If you do that, then you'll lose all your power. You want to have your power, don't you? When you go to reclaim your Candice?"

Candice, Walter thought. Her head was in the hot tub. Here she was dead, but Colin had implied that she was alive, in some other place.

Madness not withstanding, Walter knew that he had to go to that other place.

"Tell me," he asked the girl.

"It's all here." She grunted as she turned his wheelchair toward the table. Her scabbed, bony hand touched a stack of the notepads. "Read this and you'll know everything."

Walter looked at the pads. Could such secrets really exist in them?

She handed him a slip of paper on which someone had written an intersection address that appeared to be in the south side of the city. There was also something else: a thin piece of black stone, the size of a dime. Onyx, Walter felt sure.

"It's from your brother," she said, her voice husky from years of crack and crystal-meth fumes.

"What is it?"

"You'll know later." And for the faintest moment, the soiled, naked street urchin looked vibrant, an impossibly dark radiance glittering around the outline of her body, her eyes alight.

She smiled in ecstasy, and whispered: "Etherean ..."

Very slowly Walter asked, "What does that word mean?"

Her light was out. She was back to her ruined self, skin the color of curdled milk and pasty in junkie sweat. Her shaking hand patted the stack of notepads.

She raised her hands as if to solicit the stars. She leaned her head back and moaned: "Hail, Etherean ... Hail ..."

Then she cut her throat and collapsed, sullied blood pumping over the corpse-pile like cherry syrup over a pallid-white dessert.

The candles flickered. For some reason the presiding silence seemed very comforting, along with the shifting, dark room.

Walter turned the wheelchair back around.

He slid the first notepad over and began to read.

Chapter Nine.

(I).

"I want to see it. I'd ... love to see it ..."

His name was Ernst Rohm. In life he'd organized a private army in Bavaria called the Strumabteilung which existed to beat, terrorize, rape, and murder Jews. It was Rohm, too, who'd propagandized that German Jews secretly supported local communist fronts, which wasn't true at all, but the perpetuation of that belief won Rohm the popular support he needed to keep killing Jews. Rohm himself liked to rape young boys and would often shoot them when he was done, "for posterity," he'd laugh to his peers. His barbaric deeds eventually brainwashed enough voters into believing that the Jews sought to destroy Germany, and it was this sentiment that helped install as Chancellor a man named Adolf Hitler.

That was Rohm in life. In death, he was a Chancellor himself, of Occult Energy Operations. His ultimate superior considered him a very important man.

He and his aide, a former Roman castrator and standard-bearer named Flarius, watched from the observation post atop the immense Atrocidome.

"We'll see it soon," Flarius a.s.sured him in a less-than-enthused tone. He had four arms, two added surgically by the Holy Transfigurists, to make him able to do more things at once. He adjusted some k.n.o.bs on a panel made of mica. "One-point-three million," he said. "That was the final count. I can't believe we got that many into the dome."

"Nothing is impossible," Rohm enlightened, still looking out over the crowded field. "Not to me. And there are lots of children this time. Demon or human, it doesn't matter. The younger they are, the more innocent. Innocence is just more raw power we can suck."

Flarius was too busy to listen to his taskmaster's pompous words. It was his job to calibrate the various fluxes of Deathforce from the Killing Plate at the precise time. One misjudgment would throw the stream off and send it down somewhere into the city. That wouldn't bode well for Flarius's immortal career, no. Destroying an entire district in h.e.l.l? He'd be grilled over phosphor coals for time immemorial.

It was a high-stress job to say the least.

Rohm's Reclamation Squads were working non-stop now that the system had been perfected. They'd achieved two successful Merges already, but tonight's would be the most crucial. The Squads had hand-picked over a million inhabitants and packed them all into the 'dome where they now stood shoulder to shoulder, entranced and staring up at the Killing Plate.

"I can't wait to see them all die in the same half-second," Rohm whispered.

Shut up, Flarius thought. He could feel the dead static all around them, he could even hear it crackling on the skin of his four arms. The Stasis Trance kept everyone on the field perfectly still and perfectly silent, and he could see the glowing black auras burning off the heads of the Archlocks as they tensed to keep the Killing Plate levitating over the field. The Archlocks were a particularized cla.s.s of Biowizard-and an honored cla.s.s. Their mental conditioning encompa.s.sed hundreds of years; physical training was required as well, including physical alterations. They were blinded and deafened, for instance, and their bodies were covered with anaesthetic balms. Shutting down their major senses only heightened their powers as mystics. Six hundred and sixty-six of them stood around the 'dome's upper rim tonight, staring blindly upward and focusing the power of their conditioned minds on the Killing Plate.

Below, the oval field extended like a small sea, only this sea was filled with people, not water. Smoke of different colors eddied from thuribles, from different Incantation Posts, as prayers, intercessions, and spells were chanted. Below, at the Ingress Gates, still more residents were forced onto the field by battalions of horned Constabularies and Reclamation troops. Chancellor Rohm smiled down upon it all.

"What have you heard, my dear Flarius?" he asked.

"Heard about what, sir?"

"About the Merge."

"Nothing, sir," the underling replied, when actually he'd heard plenty. He'd heard, for instance, that the Merge would take place tonight, and he'd heard that the Anthropomancers and Extipicists had seen very positive readings in their most recent divinations. And he'd heard that other occult sciences had been perfected recently, sciences that could change everything.

Flarius had heard a lot of things.

"Our lot is merely to serve, though, isn't it?" Rohm asked. He was fat, bulbous, and he looked stuffed in his scarlet tunic and armor. Rohm still lived in his Spirit-Body but he hoped that soon his master would Transfigure him into a Grand Duke-the ultimate reward in the Mephistopolis. And if this next Spatial Merge succeeded, perhaps that would happen sooner than he thought. "We ask no questions, we simply serve."

"Yes, sir."

Rohm's cheesy yellow eyes returned to the field below. Soon, he thought. Please, Lord Lucifer, let it be soon ...

(II).

Where was she? Ranks of Gargoyles gazed down at her from levels of stone ledges which seemed to never end. Black tongues licked steel-sharp beaks. Then one of the hideous things jumped from the lowest ledge, landing just ten feet away from where Ca.s.sie stood on the street. It lunged, extending talons, but Ca.s.sie merely looked at it and thought, Incinerate, and the Gargoyle exploded into flames. A ball of black smoke unfurled. It was dead before it could even shriek, and a second later even the flames were out, leaving only ashes.

Green fog rolled down the narrow street. Through it she saw headlights, and then a steam-car clattered by, its side door reading CONSTABULARY FLENSING UNIT. From chains fixed to the vehicle's rear hitches, two naked Humans and a naked Troll were being dragged. They'd be let go once the coa.r.s.e sandstone bricks of the street had abraded off most of their skin. In a doorway, two little gray-skinned Broodren chuckled as they cut off strips of their skin with a rusty straight razor; the sign over the doorway's transom read EPIDEROMOMANCER: WE BUY SKIN HERE.

Ca.s.sie moved on, the fog parting around her legs as she walked. She'd been here before but she hadn't seen the entire street as she was now. She knew this was a dream but she also knew that as an Etheress, her dreams of the Mephistopolis would blend with reality, part dream, part psychic channel. A Bapho-Rat ran across the street; she could see the wave it made beneath the fog, and she thought: Squish.

Next came the expected wet squishing sound, and the fog-wave stopped, brownish blood flying up in a loop. Clear, she thought next, looking at the street. Fog go away. In an instant, the fog was sucked off the street as if by a sudden blast of wind, but there was no wind at all. It was just the force of her mind, her Power as an Etheress.

More Broodren played near a garbage can filled with body parts; they had a length of intestine and were jumping rope. A curvy Lycanymph tried to turn tricks at the next corner, her champagne-blond fur shining. "Come on, lover," she cooed to a stout, runnel-faced Imp. "Fifty h.e.l.lnotes for a half and half."

"h.e.l.l, no!" the Imp a.s.serted. "You'll eat me when you're done! Crazy Werewolf b.i.t.c.hes!"

In a window, a man covered with Leeches groaned in relief as he used a back-scratcher on his back. Oh, nice, Ca.s.sie thought, wincing. The back-scratcher was a severed hand tied to a stick.

"Man-Burgers?" a Troll asked when she pa.s.sed his vending stand. Pale patties sizzled on a foul-smelling grill. Each time the heat evicted a parasitic worm, the vendor drove it back into the meat with his dirty finger. "Stay in there, ya little b.u.g.g.e.rs. You're the best part." His eyes looked like a hard-boiled egg cut in half. "How about some Ghoul-Spleen Hash? It's really great, tastes just like scrambled eggs."

"I'm a vegetarian!" Ca.s.sie yelled back and strutted away.

But what was she doing here? Oh, that's right-she wasn't really here, she was just channeling through a dream. But even in her dream, she didn't forget her purpose. She was not an Etheress by choice; it was a power given to her against her will, initiated by her sister's suicide. That was the only reason Ca.s.sie wanted to return to the Mephistopolis.

I have to find Lissa ...

But all she'd found instead was just more horror, more exploitation, sadism, and cruelty. Next she pa.s.sed a brick church with an inverted cross at its steeple. Its stained-gla.s.s windows depicted pastoral landscapes in which screaming pregnant women disbirthed demons as smiling peasants looked on. At the doorway stood a bowl on a stand as would be found in a church for holy water but this one was filled with vexed blood. A peek through the arched door showed Ca.s.sie a sacrifice taking place on the altar as chants fluttered through the air.

"If I cut off my foot, would you buy it?" a tiny voice peeped. Ca.s.sie looked into an alley crevice and saw a young demon girl in rags sitting there. She was wasted, one eye socket empty, both of her horns and one pointed ear already cut off. "You can sell it to a diviner," the girl said with hope in her voice. Then she looked forlorn and held up a syringe. Her hand was missing some digits. "I'm down to my last bang of Zap."

"I'm sorry," Ca.s.sie said sadly. "I don't have any money and even if I did, I couldn't let you cut off your foot."

A tear glistened in the demon-girl's good eye. She began to stick the syringe needle into her nostril, but then Ca.s.sie said: "Hot. Real hot," and the girl dropped the syringe. It turned red-hot on the pavement, then poofed into flame.

"Why did you do that!" the girl sobbed. "That was my last slam! I sold my finger for that!"

Ca.s.sie stared down at her. You don't need it anymore. You're cured...

The demon-girl shivered as if suddenly chilled. Her good eye and her socket opened wide. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" she rejoiced, jumped up, and ran away with her hands upraised.

Ca.s.sie, over time, had honed her Etheric Powers, but she knew this was just a parlor trick, and what did it matter anyway? She knew a Re-Tox Unit would pick the girl up shortly and re-addict her to the drug. But at least she'll be free for a little while. At least she'll get to know what it's like to be free...

Ca.s.sie wasn't free, though, was she? The notion put her at odds. Most would say she'd been given great gifts but she'd never wanted that in the first place. She just wanted to live her little life and mind her own business, and that only intensified the crux. Ca.s.sie didn't have to use her Etheric Powers, she didn't have to come into the Mephistopolis. She very well could live her life and mind her own business. But if she did that ...

I'd never see Lissa again, she realized.

Yes, a curse, fueled by her own guilt. And though this was just a dream-channel, she had Angelese back in her room telling her that she knew where another Deadpa.s.s was, an opportunity ro re-enter h.e.l.l in the flesh and search for Lissa. But everybody wants something, came the regret. Nothing's free. There's always a catch ...

On the street, she felt something like static, then everything fell silent and still. Bats and Ghor-Birds lifted off from leaning building ledges and the malformed trees in the park. By now she knew what was coming-she'd learned to sense it-and before she could even take cover- Smzuswss=-ONKI In the center of the street, the green blob of light wavered, then grew, then delineated into a moving oval shape. The street shimmered in eerie green light. A Nectoport, Ca.s.sie recognized at once. Lucifer's intra-district transport system powered by diabolical energy and Warlock spells. Ca.s.sie stood unflinching before the opening oval, this arcane doorway, expecting a Mutilation Squad to charge out, or some manner of Monster. She wasn't afraid, though. She was ready because here her thoughts were weapons more savage than any Usher's claws or Constabulary's scytheblade. Come and get it, you ugly a.s.sholes, she thought, but it never happened.

A voice. It was Angelese : "No Mutilation Squad this time, Ca.s.sie. No raging demons. It's just me. We stole Lucifer's Nectoport technology a while ago. It's great, isn't it?"

"Yeah, I ... guess."

"We've also learned how to manipulate convergences in Spectral-Wave Emissions-same way magnetic fields can be manipulated in the Living World. We can fly these things around like planes, and keep the Egress open all the time."

It was too much information too soon. Ca.s.sie didn't know what was going on, much less why Angelese was here in her dream-channel. She'd always thought that a Nectoport was just an occult transportation device that brought two distant points together in a few seconds, like the transporter on Star Trek. But now it was something much more versatile, a magic carpet, a magic doorway.

She stood warily, until Angelese, her white gown and hair tinted green by the light, leaned out of the Port's opening. She held out her hand. "Come on, let me take you someplace. Your REM sleep's almost over and you'll wake up soon, so come on!"

Ca.s.sie didn't move. She'd learned not to trust any ent.i.ty in this place. "You could be a Blood Mirage. You could be a Hex-Clone ..."

"It's good that you don't trust me here," Angelese smiled. "But it's me, angels can't lie."

"Demons can."

"Sure, but you're just dream-channeling, so even if I am a Clone, you can't really be hurt. Come on, I want to show you something. You've done a lot for me so I want to do something for you."

Ca.s.sie still didn't know what to think. But it was just a dream-channel. And she was a very adventurous girl by nature.

"All right ..."

She got into the Nectoport with Angelese and-Sssssssssssssssss-ONK!

-they were off.

Angelese kept the Egress open as they soared through the smoke-streaked sky. In no time they were miles up but when Ca.s.sie peered down, she gasped. The glowing city below extended seemingly without physical limit. It was a terrifying vision on its own but the motive was even more unnerving: that Lucifer had built this city-a city bigger than every city on earth put together-just to serve as an abode for every conceivable corruption, a city that existed solely to revile G.o.d.

Ca.s.sie's bright yellow-and-red hair danced in the wind. She could not avert her eyes from the intricate sprawl below. "It looks ... endless."

"It pretty much is, Ca.s.sie. Satan's been very busy for a long time."

Even this high up, the soaring air stank. She focused now, noticing something as the rim of the Nectoport rose higher. The jammed-together districts of the Mephistopolis formed patchwork-like designs-an endless urban mural that glowed. The districts formed pentagram-shapes, triangles, demonic faces, and inverted crosses. It was diabolical art.