Poor guy, you think.
“And though you excelled in university,” Howard states the dim truth, “you might be interested to know that it was understandably forecast that I would surely do the same at Brown University, but—curse Pegana—my shattered nerves—thanks to a mother off her rocker—foreclosed the possibility of my even graduating high school. Lo, I would never be a university man . . .”
This guy really gets off track, you think. “Where are we going?”
“The Humanus Viaduct, which runs from the Dermas District to Corpus Peak, crossing the Styx.”
DERMABURG, reads a skin-toned sign that floats by.
Howard gestures the sign. “This District is made of—as you may have ascertained—skin.” And as Howard speaks the words, your Ocularus eyes remain peeled on the new surroundings. Row houses and squat buildings line the fleshy street, all covered by variously colored cuttings of skin. Some seem papered with dermal sheets as impeccable as the skin of the deaconess, while other edifices suffer from acne and other outbreaks. The car, then, turns right at a perspiry intersection. You glimpse the sign: FASCIA BLVD.
“A whole town made of skin?”
“These days, the majority of it is Hexegenically Engineered, save for the loftier real estate here, south of town, where natural epidermis is procured. Oh, there’s a City Flensing Crew now . . .”
You notice the activities on one corner, where a troop of beastly, slug-skinned things with horns, talons, and terrifying musculatures prepare themselves around a row of Humans pilloried nude. Cuts are made at the back of each victim’s neck, taloned fingers slide in, and then the entire “body suit” of epidermis is sloughed off, leaving the victim skinless from the neck down.
You wince as the beasts go right down the line.
“The attendants are called Ushers, a longtime pure-breed that serve as government workers and police,” Howard explains. “Human skin is much more valuable.”
“Ushers,” you murmur. “So they . . . peel the skin off and then—”
“Stretch it over wall frames.” Then Howard points again.
At the opposing corner, workmen congregate at a corner unit (more of the hunched, implike creatures) to evidently build an addition. But when two of them raise a wall frame, you see that long, banded-together bones comprise each strut rather than two-by-fours. After the frame has been erected, other workmen stretch skin over it.
As for the pilloried “victims,” you see that they’re actually willing participants; when released—skinless now—an Usher hands them some money, then sends them on their way.
“Lucifer prefers Hell’s denizens to choose to sell their skin, rather than merely taking it,” Howard says.
“They sell their own skin?”
“For narcotics. The Department of Addictions has devised delights that make de Quincey’s opiates and Poe’s liquor seem paltry. Few can rehabilitate themselves, but when they do, they’re forced into a Retoxification Center.”
You watch the skinless queues trudge to a nearby fleshy alley, where an overcoated Imp in sunglasses waits to sell them various bags of cryptic powders. When one Human woman—who’d been attractive before her flensing—failed to produce sufficient funds, the Imp said, “A blow job or an ovary. You know the prices, lady,” and then he parts his overcoat to sport a large maroon penis covered with barnacles. “To hell with that,” she says, then sits down, crosses her ankles behind her neck, and sticks a hand into her sex.
You don’t watch the rest.
The Golemess turns onto another road called Scleraderma Street, where some of the structures have hair growing on their roofs; others have collapsed to ramshackle piles from some dermatological disease; one has broken out into shingles, another is covered with warts.
And on another corner, you glimpse another sign: SKINAPLEX.
“What’s that?”
“The motion picture show? They’re rather similar here as in the Living World. And perhaps you’ll be satisfied to know that Fritz Lang and D. W. Griffith are still honing their art.”
Now you can see the marquee, complete with blinking lights: TRIPLE FEATURE! THE SIX COMMANDMENTS—WITHERING HEIGHTS—ALL DOGS GO TO HELL.
“Can we get out of here?” you plead. “I’ve had enough of skin-town.”
Howard chuckles. “Save for the revolting B.O., it’s actually one of the more sedate Districts. You’ll be happy to know, however, that we’re merely passing through.”
The last row of houses, you notice, are actually sweating. As you pass the District gates, more glaze-eyed denizens straggle in and head to the pillories.
Now the road rises through a yellow fog so thick, you can’t make out the endless scarlet sky. “So now it’s the . . .”
“The Humanus Viaduct. It begins at a lofty elevation and provides a spectacular view. Lucifer wants you to be fully aware of the immensity of the Mephistopolis . . .”
Lucifer wants me . . . Your thoughts stall.
“He hopes that you’ll want to return.”
Now your monstrous lips actually laugh. “Fat chance of that! So far I’ve seen a town made of guts and a town made of skin! What, he thinks I want to move in?”
“The immensity, Mr. Hudson, and in that immensity you’ll consider the value to someone of your very privileged status.”
“I still don’t understand what you—”
Howard holds up a pale hand. “Later, Mr. Hudson. There’s still much more for you to envisage . . .”
The car chugs ever upward, and in the fog, you can swear you catch glimpses of horrid, stretched faces showing fangs in vertical mouths.
“Gremlins,” Howard specifies. “Wretched little things. They live in fog, swamp gas, and clouds, and even are said to have cities in the higher noctilucent formations.”
You spy more fangs snapping in a split second. “But-but-but—”
“Nothing can do us harm, so you needn’t fear, Mr. Hudson.” Past the buxom driver’s shoulder, Howard points to a trinket of some kind dangling from the rearview mirror: a small metal Kewpie of a robed man holding a staff in one hand and an upside-down baby in the other. The pewtery detail implies that the baby’s throat has been slit, and its blood is trickling into a bucket. “We’re protected by the St. Exsanguinatius Medallion. It’s quite a potent Totem.”
Great, you think.
The car lumbers on, and Howard slouches back and begins to idly hum a tune, which seems aggravatingly familiar. In time, the name comes to you: “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”
Finally, the fog expels the steam-car onto a high, rough-hewn mountain pass. You yell out loud when you peer over the side and see less than an inch of the cliff-road’s surface sticking out past the outer side of the tire. “There’s no safety rails!” you shout.
Howard frowns. “That would hardly be logical in Hell, Mr. Hudson. Now, if you’ll put your consternation aside, I’ll welcome you to one of our attractions here: Corpus Peak. Corpus Peak is a man-made—er, pardon me—a Demon-made mountain. It is composed, in fact, of exactly one billion Demon corpses . . .”
When the words finally register, you grind your teeth and peer once again over the side, and in a few moments it’s the image that begins to register, however grimly. The vast side of the “mountain” sweeps down hundreds of feet, and in it, you notice the rigor-mortis’d cadavers of Demons.
“A-a-a mountain of dead Demons?”
“That’s correct. The first billion Hellborn, in fact, to die under Lucifer’s initial scourge when he took over. All manner of demonic species: Imps, Trolls, Gargoyles, Griffins, Ghouls, Incubi, Succubi—everything. The Morning Star wanted his first monument to be symbolic. ‘Serve me or die.’ He liked it so much that he ordered the highest echelon Bio-Wizards to put a Pristinization Hex on the entire mountain. The corpses, in other words, will never decompose.”