She didn’t bother answering that, either.
19
THE REVEREND AMOS FLESHER screamed out of unconsciousness.
It was dark. So very dark. Had he been dreaming? The dream itself was gone, but its outlines still clung to his mind: an inky spillage roiling with unseen bodies. He shivered. He was shirtless, his belly spilling over the waistband of his trousers.
He was still here. His father’s room. The house of treasures. He saw a light a dozen yards off. A flashlight lay on the floor, pointing at the wall. The rock met at a perfect ninety-degree angle. Puzzling. His initial sense of this space was of a huge bubble inside the rock. But seeing the way the rock met, his mind reoriented its parameters: not an orb but a cube.
Hell is a box.
He recoiled. The voice had come from his own head—mirthless, a flat, deadened tone—but the words were so powerful that it felt as if they had been whispered into his ear. But when he turned and looked, only the darkness peered back.
His legs were tacky with blood. How? It came back to him. The one-eyed bastard! Amos’s fingers roamed around to his spine. His fingertips touched flayed meat. He cried out in pain. Jesus Lord, merciful provider. The fucker had quartered him like a hog. He would bleed to death! He tried to call out, but his lips were waxy and his vocal cords shredded. Had he been screaming in his sleep?
He tried to stand. Impossible. His legs were numb and useless; they might as well have been made of wood. Had the one-eyed fuck severed a nerve cluster in his spine?
He hauled himself forward, fingers seeking purchase on the rock. One of his fingernails peeled off with a gluey snap, but it didn’t hurt one bit. He laughed again—what’s a fingernail? what’s a finger? what’s a toe?—and hauled his body on, singing an old hymn:
He was near the flashlight when the first rope descended. He could identify it by the thin thread of light running through it, like an electric eel darting in a dark sea cave. The rope danced hypnotically in front of him. He smiled and laughed; he wanted to clap, it was such a neat performance. The rope grazed his shoulder. He gasped. What a wonderful sensation. Indescribably lovely. His mind burst with colors. Flowers holding hues that did not exist in nature bloomed in his head.
This is Heaven, he thought rapturously. I must have died; this is my everlasting reward.
The ropes spooled down from above. Dozens of them alighted on his flesh; his mind expanded with wonderments so massive that he struggled to contain them all. The ropes lifted him up. He had never felt such a profound sense of love and tenderness. They hoisted him effortlessly, his body drawn to a standing position in the center of the chamber—the box. His legs hung under him, useless deadweight; his arms were also immobilized. He could barely move except to wriggle his torso a little, but it hardly mattered. He was safe and warm and loved.
Next: sounds from the far edge of the chamber. The moist shucking of a body across the stone. He stared around blearily, a kittenish smile on his face.
Where was that coming from? What was—?
It crawled through the flashlight beam. A baby…? was the only conception his mind registered. Something determinedly dragging its pulpy pink body across the beam. Flesher blinked, peering closer. Its body shimmered, and he saw a different shape entirely. Something that reminded him of a wet, wadded-up dish towel. Grub-like, but with a lean articulation of limbs up and down its body—the legs of a centipede. Fat and ribbed with skin that was not baby pink but a rotted-banana black, with seeping boils all over. Its eyes were pinned on the Reverend with a malignancy of purpose, a singular hunger, and a hatred deeper than human fathoming.
Then the shimmer ebbed and it was simply a baby again, chubby-cheeked and cute beyond belief. It humped through the flashlight beam, its feet pushing eagerly. He could hear it advancing toward him with a slick suction. A chill broke out over his body. He began to convulse in the harness of ropes, which held him in a gentle but stern embrace. He did not want that thing touching him. There was nothing in the world he could possibly want less. Better to let crows peck out his eyes; better to set wasps loose inside his mouth. Anything would be better than that horrible thing with its ancient shriveling stare.
Hell is a box, hell is a box, hell is a—
Something touched his naked calf. Now that he could feel. He tried to jerk his leg away, but it was useless. He couldn’t move an inch.
Nonononono—
The thing began to mount his leg. It skinned its way up gradually, as if savoring the ascent. Instead of a baby’s slack limbs, the appendages climbing his flesh felt more like a lobster’s spiny legs. Before long, the flashlight’s batteries would die. After that, the darkness would be total.
The thing was at his knee now. It was making loud sucking sounds like an infant hungering for a big fat tit.
Father must fill its belly, spoke a voice in his ear.
Being eaten wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Not in the grand scheme of things. It would be absolutely horrible, of course, to be eaten alive by the thing now licking its way up his inner thigh, pausing to tease the head of his dangling fear-shrunk cock; it would be excruciatingly painful to be eaten piece by piece, and the pain would amplify until he was driven mad with it, in all likelihood… but still, there would be an end to it. There was only so much of him to consume.
I have made the most terrible mistake, the Reverend thought.
Amos Flesher sensed this thing would do something far worse than merely devour him. Something that sat well outside the rational bounds of human pain or madness. Its feasting would be deliriously slow and torturous in a way that would eclipse all taxonomies of pain known to flesh or mind. All he knew was that the suffering would be immense and utterly lonely—trapped in the despairing dark, no way to mark the years as they bled into decades while this thing broke him down piece by relentless piece.
Please, he thought frenziedly. Don’t hurt me I’ll do anything be anything for you just don’t hurt me please God I don’t want you to hurt meeeeeee…
I will not hurt you, came the cooing reply. I will love you. You will be loved deeper than you ever imagined possible.
Love. Never in Amos’s life had a word held such a sinister undertone.
The thing was muscling around his hips now, moving toward the wide slice in his back. The Reverend thrashed madly, his dead legs slapping together to make comical sounds. The ropes held him in place. Their warmth and wonderments had retreated. They had become but dutiful tools of restraint.
The thing slipped inside his opened flesh. Teasingly so—inching just a cunt’s hair inside of him, as if wishing to savor it this first time. The pain was monolithic; his brain shrieked, every synapse shuddering. The Reverend squealed breathlessly; the sound fled up into the darkness to die. The thing was squirming inside of him rather energetically now, a birth in reverse; the Reverend felt his organs being displaced as the thing pushed doggedly inside—
Finally, its little feet sucked through the slit, which then closed over, the lips gumming shut on their own. The thing shuddered contentedly inside of him, its body flexing minutely as it enjoyed its new home.