The aperture closes silently behind, leaving you to peer around the unevenly walled room of smooth black planes. It looks like something born of science fiction, save for the sputtering torches that light the chamber. Then—
Whoa!
A shadow moves. When the Golemess shuts down the steam-car, you see the hulking shape approach: a sinewy Demon with meat cleavers for hands and a helmet fashioned from the jaws of some outrageous beast. Below the forward rim of teeth like Indian arrowheads, two tiny eyes bulge, and there are two rimmed holes for nostrils but no mouth. No ears can be seen either but only plugs of lead that seem to fill two holes where the ears should be. Some manner of cured hide covered with plates make up the Demon’s armor. Reddish brown muscles throb when it regards the car.
“What the HELL is that?”
Howard answers. “The Keeper of the Turnstile, Mr. Hudson—an Imperial Truncator, of the genus Bellicosus Silere. It can’t hear or speak; it can only observe and act. The Imperial Conditioning is self-evident; note the spread jaws of a Ghor-Hound which suffice for the helm.”
You notice it, all right, but don’t like the way it approaches the car.
“Should the Truncator entertain even a single anti-Luciferic thought? Those jaws slam shut and bite off the top of its head.”
Hard-core, you think. “And its his job is to—”
“Anyone or thing who enters the Turnstile without authority,” Howard says, “will be diced into bits, tittles, and orts.”
Just as the sentinel’s cleaverlike hands raise, the Golemess lithely leaves the car and shows it a sheet of yellowed parchment.
The guard nods, steps back, yet oddly beckons the Golemess with one of its hooks. In the torchlight, you wince at the stark beauty of the clay-made creature, the flawless curves, the high, tumescent breasts and jutting gray-plug nipples. The Golemess follows the Demon to a cozy corner, and drops to its knees.
“What’s that all about?”
“It’s customary for authorized guests to give succor to the sentinel,” Howard says with some relief. “Another toll, so to speak. I can only thank the Fates that this particular Truncator is of the heterosexual variety.”
You get the gist as you watch the Golemess unbutton a front flap on the Demon’s armor, revealing its penis, if it could be called that.
“You gotta be kidding me!” you exclaim. “That’s it’s-it’s-it’s—”
Howard sees fit to not respond.
The limp shaft of the Truncator’s penis looks like six red arteries grouped together, perhaps as thin as six-foot-long lengths of aquarium tube. You wince worse at the scrotum, which looks more like a cluster of Concord grapes, but even more appalling is the Demon’s glans: a pink, lopsided sphere of shining flesh at the end of the corded shaft, tennis ball–size, with not one but half a dozen urethral ducts.
You look away when the Golemess begins to . . . render oral “succor.”
Howard grabs the stick on which your head is affixed and climbs out of the car.
“So . . . what now?”
“Time to charge the Turnstile,” Howard says. “It’s quite a fascinating apparatus which harnesses cabalistic energy lines that exist in the Hex-Flux—Hell’s version of electromagnetics—and effects what we refer to as Spatial Displacement—one of Lucifer’s favorite cosmological sciences.” And with that—which you understand none of—Howard approaches a black-plane wall. There, you see a circle of engraved notches; at each notch there’s a small geometric etching.
“So this is a revolving door through space and time?”
“Just space,” Howard corrects. “There is no time in Hell. The use of this facility will give you the opportunity to see a variety of the Mephistopolis’s landmarks, which we hope will impress you.”
Impress me, you ponder, enough to stay? Is that what he’s talking about?
Howard touches one of the etchings, then—
A great, nearly electronic hum fills the black room.
How do you like that jazz? you think.
The configuration increases in size until it’s as large as a typical doorway. Yet a sheet of black static is all you see beyond the threshold. That’s all you see, but what you hear is something else altogether:
Screams.
“Shall we go, Mr. Hudson?” Howard asks, holding your head-stick like an umbrella.
You feel stunned, half by curiosity and half by dread. “What about the Golemess? Shouldn’t she go with us?”
Howard veers the stick aside, to show you the corner. “As you can observe, Mr. Hudson. The Golemess is . . . detained.”
“Oh.”
Howard smiles and adjusts his spectacles. He steps through the uneven doorway of black static and takes you through . . .
Even though you don’t have a stomach, a nauseating sensation rises up. Stepping through the egress feels like stepping off a high window ledge; you expect a deadly impact but none arrives. Instead you hear a crackling that sounds more organic than electric. Fear seals your eyes and you scream, plummeting . . .
“We haven’t fallen even a millimeter, Mr. Hudson,” Howard chuckles. “It’s merely the nature of the concentrated Flux we’ve just traversed.”
Your head feels overly buoyant when you open your eyes. You leave them open only long enough to see that you are on a cacophonic street clogged with monsters, steam-cars, and carriages drawn by horned horses that look leprous. Flies the size of finches buzz around sundry corpse-piles on corners, a sign stuck in each pile: RECYCLE BY FEDERAL ORDER. You notice the sidewalk as well as the walls of most buildings are made of roughly crushed bones and teeth hardened within pale mortar. One storefront window boasts TORSOS: HUMAN & HELLBORN—ON SALE, and another window has been streaked on the inside with blood: OUT OF BUSINESS.
The sheer noise prevents you from ordering your thoughts: the clang of metal, the sound of hammer to stone, shouts—“Come back with my ears, you Imp fuck!”—vehicular horns that sound more like the brays of tortured animals.
“Pandemonium in sound and vision,” Howard says, wending down the stained sidewalk with your head-stick in his hand. “Take the opportunity to look around.”
This is the mistake.
As far as “looking around” goes, there’s nothing to see save for horror and revulsion. In no time, you find that when you dare look at something, your psyche is arrested by some adrenaline-packed inner scream—perhaps the sound of your soul rebelling at the wrongness of this place.
A city, a city, you keep thinking in a panic. Hell is a city . . .
You can only look for a second at a time, in grueling snatches that demand an alternating surcease. Each “snatch” shows you something either horrific or impossible:
—blood-streaked skyscrapers rising higher than any building on Earth, each leaning this way or that. When one collapses in the distance, before the churning bloodred sky, hundreds leap off corroded balconies with wizened shrieks—
—street gutters gushing with lumpy muck over which dilapidated Demons and Humans—obviously homeless—hunt for tidbits, while packs of cackling Broodren—Hell’s children—stalk through the sidewalk horde hunting for the elderly or the defenseless to quickly eviscerate so to make off with their organs—
—Arachni-Watchers, like spiders the size of box turtles, crawling up walls and across high ledges. A cluster of eyeballs form the body, ever watching from all directions for citizen behavior in violation of current Luciferic Laws. Psychic nerve sacs at the body’s core immediately transmit real-time hectographs of infractions to the nearest Constabulary Stations—