Hellbound, p.1
Hellbound, page 1
part #7 of The Crow Series
A demon named Dren is looking for salvation. Satan’s fiery underworld has become a foreign place to him. He feels he is different from the other souls. He’s changed over time. He’s ready for redemption. But getting out of hell is no easy task. Escaping was the easy part. But now, alone in a world unfamiliar to him, Dren must save a single soul in order to pass on to the heavens above.
Billy is a young hoodlum working for a big–time mobster. Like Dren, he has also changed. He wants out of the seedy underworld he calls his home. Just one more run, one more big payday, and he’s finished with it all. He’ll get his cash, grab the woman he loves, and be gone forever. But the mob doesn’t look kindly on deserters.
Satan has sent two rogue demons from hell to stop Dren. The mob has hired a conjurer named Nadja to kill Billy. In the end, the two must call on the powers of the Crow to save them both—waging a full–scale war on the mobsters of Earth above and the lord of darkness below.
A. A. Attanasio
Hellbound
The Crow: 7
ePub r1.0
Titivillus 12.02.2023
Original title: Hellbound
A. A. Attanasio, 2001
Editor digital: Titivillus
ePub base r2.1
Cover
Hellbound
Dedicatory
Proverb
Acknowledgments
Preamble
Prelude: Unclean spirits
The demon reach
Spirits bearing rule
River of milk, river of pity
The fallen of heaven
Punitive angel
Author’s Note
For Satan,
the master unfolded in his fire
A daemonibus docetur de daemonibus docet,
et ad daemoneus ducit.
(It is taught by the demons, it teaches about the demons,
and it leads to the demons.)
Evil does no die easily.
– Yi Jing
“Prelude: Unclean Spirits” first appeared as “Hellbent” in The Crow: Shattered Lives & Broken Dreams, edited by J. O’Barr and Ed Kramer, A Del Rey Book, 1998, and I am grateful to the editors for having invited me to participate in the Further adventures of the Crow—also to Edward R. Pressman for the opportunity to expand that short story into a novel and to Jeff Conner and Josh Behar, my guides on the spiral journey that delivered this book to you.
I am also indebted to those friends
who met me on this side of forever
and who helped me drag the story through the salt gates
to here, where our dreaming outweighs our dying;
writer Bel Atreides, friend of the moon’s you rig;
artist Johrt Bergin, creator in the name of our terror;
physician Harry (Jhaikin, healer with a heart of silk;
scholar David Allen Halse, explorer in the kingdom of unknowing;
poet B. L. Kennedy, lover of what is what we carmor say is:
and author James 0’Barr, who received the dark kiss of the angel
and set free the Crow.
AMY?”
“Billy! Is that you? Turn on the lights.”
“Nah. Nurse’ll see it. Here. I’m here. Take my hand and stop bawling already. I’m here now.”
“How did you get in?”
“Stole the key. What you think? I’m a magician?”
“Billy, they’re here. I hear them scratching on the ceiling. If we turn on the lights, >they’ll go away.”
“Yeah, and Nurse’ll come in and butt-kick me out of here—then turn off the lights. Just hush already. Stop crying.”
“Devils don’t like the light. Do you hear them whispering? I hear them whispering. They know you’re here. I’m scared, Billy.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m not asleep in my bunk. I brought you something. Let go of my hand a minute. Come on. It’s okay. I got something to help you, something to make the devils scared. Come on, let go already.”
“Billy, don’t go away!”
“Calm down. I’m right here. Look what I got for you.”
An orange glow underlit the faces of two ten-year-olds huddled together among the twisted sheets of a hospital bed. Amy’s red hair gleamed like tangled copper wires across her freckled face, her elfin looks a sharp contrast to Billy’s pugnacious features, which held the shadows angularly, the way a cartoon bully’s would. Even when he smiled to see her green eyes widen with curiosity, he looked mean and surly. He moved closer so she could take the orange glow from his hand.
Each of Amy’s wrists had been strapped to the chrome railing on either side of her bed. She tugged futilely at her restraints, and Billy placed the object in her right hand. It was a penlight, to which a plastic toy head had been attached with Scotch tape.
“It’s a dog,” she observed and frowned at its grinning snout and large comic-book eyes.
“Not just a dog. Look closer. It’s a devil dog.” He turned her hand so she could see the horns he had inked in above the dog’s eyebrows. “This’ll keep the devils away.”
“It’s just a toy.”
“Yeah, to us. But to the devils it’s trouble.”
“It looks stupid.”
“Sure. It’s supposed to. You can’t scare devils. They’re the scariest things around. You got to make them laugh. They can’t stand laughing. Don’t you know that? It’s like acid to them. So they go away.”
Amy’s frown relented, and she turned the penlight around in her fingers, studying it.
“You try it, you’ll see.” Billy put her fingers on the switch, and she turned it off and on again. “I read about it in a book. It’s called a…a fetish or something. Sure it looks stupid, but witch doctors use these things all the time, and they work. I promise.”
“Thank you, Billy.” She turned the fetish off. “I don’t hear them now.”
“See? Stupid works with devils. Now get some sleep.”
“Don’t go until I’m asleep, okay?”
“Sure, okay.”
“Billy?” Her hand on his arm relaxed, and she let him go. “I love you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Just >don’t tell nobody.”
“…neither its extent nor magnitude could I see, nor could I conjecture. Then I said: ‘How fearful is the place and how terrible to look upon!’ Uriel answered me, one of the holy angels who was with me, and said unto me: ‘Enoch, why hast thou such fear and affright?’ And I answered: ‘Because of this fearful place, and because of the spectacle of the pain.’ And he said unto me: ‘This place is the prison of the angels, and here they will be imprisoned forever.’”
—1 ENOCH 21:7–10
Hell was cold, dark, and loud. Winds shrieked like ripping metal, and souls flew past in tatters of mist. Dren the Liar lay on the jagged and frozen ground under a sky of utter black, his blistered body squeezed tightly against the underside of the ice.
He had crawled into this razor-edged niche to avoid the howling din and the mad flight of the damned. As one of hell’s laborers, the Gog Shekeloh—the Breakers in Pieces—he was responsible for helping to destroy souls. And as a demon of deception, he fulfilled his job by wandering through the raucousness of hell misdirecting souls. When their crawling screams reached him under the tempest of mad sounds, he felt their cravings. Most were insane for silence, for light and warmth, and he touched their ether bodies, inspiring them with the hope of realizing, even for an instant, their desires. And then he sent them hurtling toward the loudest, darkest, and coldest vortex of that moment in hell.
After aeons of playing this deception, Dren was weary of his work and wanted to hide from the tormented souls. He had squeezed himself under the cutting ice, hoping to lie still and feel the stillness in him. But beneath the frozen crust, barbed spider mites seethed. They swarmed over him, puncturing his blisters, laying eggs in his sores, eggs that festered rabidly and burned into every crevice of his body. In moments, the pain would overwhelm him, and he would crash up through the ice and rage blindly across the floor of hell, his loud misery mute in the blare of crazy sounds and ceaseless suffering.
But for an instant, Dren touched stillness.
The tumult of horror and hurt receded for one fraction of that instant. And he felt peace. So tenderly secret in this place of horror, peace opened its horizons—and vomit spewed from him.
He burst out of the ice, bawling with distress. Suffering whipped him into a frenzy of running, as if the searing bile and putrid stink of his own maw could be outrun.
“Liar!” A greasy voice slid into him from out of the clamor. “Liar!”
Dren whirled to a stop, recognizing the voice of a fellow demon. “Flayer!”
Materializing in the numbing dark, a hideous face of spidery tar-drop eyes and lobed brow incandescent, cleft lips fibrillating like a squid’s mouth. “Liar!” Leprous hands fumed with ghost light and reached through the dark for Dren. “Did you crawl under the ice again?” The warped hands seized him with an electric jolt. “Did you?”
“No, Nergal!” Dren shouted above the booming, whining frenzy, his words steaming in the frigid dark. “No!”
“Then you did!” A black split tongue slithered across the rippling pleats of Nergal’s mouth. “Good! Then, you heard them again? They spoke with you?”
“Of course they spoke with me!”
The twisted hands released him, and Nergal the Flayer stepped back, dimming to a vague scarlet glimmer in the loud darkness. “Silence? Silence under the ice?” Only the frosted smoke of the Flayer’s disappointment shone f
“Yes, more agony, more torture.” Dren dropped to his knees under a pall of vomitous stink. “The divine would never send messengers into hell. There is no way out. Not ever. Not ever.”
“Oh, good! Oh, good, Dren!” Nergal loomed out of the dark, worms of steam squirming from the fluted creases of his mouth and wriggling over his noseless countenance. “Then you believe the messengers have come—and you will hear them again!”
At that moment, a gust of souls whisked by, and Nergal’s knobbed hands seized one and began to peel the wispy light from it with his mouth, all the while muttering the horrid reality of the soul’s life that had earned it damnation. And though Dren could not hear the demon’s voice for the mad uproar, he knew just what was said. But the words themselves did not matter—for in hell, only pain is truthful.
For uncountable instants of eternity, Dren reeled through the icy darkness listening to the cravings of souls—the yearning for warmth, the longing for light, the pining for silence. And he reached out and touched them with his pustuled hands. The souls felt soft and warm. Yet, their psychotic raving for comfort forced him to shove them quickly away, instilling them with misdirection.
And off they flew, believing they knew the way to a moment’s relief but soon finding themselves in colder, darker depths of fetor and stunning noise.
Often enough, a soul flew across the black ranges yelling for God. The demons loved torturing these souls the most, because there was more hope to kill and thus more distraction for the evil spirits from their own anguish. In moments, flocks of demons descended, and the supplicant vanished among the tormentors.
The few times that Dren had been the first to seize upon such aspiring damned, he had sent them crawling into the ice, telling them God was there: “Look! Look! God is there under the cutting edges of ice! Get down to show your humility! Be humble and crawl in there! That’s it! Crawl in!”
The keen blades of ice cut, the spider mites attacked, and the soul’s ether body bled pain in many colors. But, strangely, as Dren himself wedged under the honed ice plates to witness the soul’s shock, he had experienced a moment of stillness.
Time and again after that, when none of the other demons were about, he had dared to wiggle into the narrow crevices and pry open the red world of pain. He had found traumatic spasms of suffering as the ice sliced him and the spider mites burrowed into his wounds. Yet also there had been instants of stillness. The ceaseless racket from above had dimmed, just for a splinter of a moment—and then pain and nausea wracked him again.
Over how many epochs did he seek out those brutal slivers of stillness? Time meant nothing in hell. Not until he heard the voices did he realize that time could touch him. And every touch in hell was torment.
Dren—why do you want the stillness?
The very sound of that voice had flung him over the panes of ice, lacerating him with shards. He had feared the voice was Satan’s. Though it had been a long, long time since he had heard the master’s voice, he remembered it as quiet and as beautiful as the voice that had spoken to him in the ice.
He did not want to hear Satan’s voice. Those called by him were found later embedded in the ground, locked in epoxy, their bodies disfigured almost beyond recognition, yet exquisitely alive, eyeballs roving insanely in lidless sockets, small lightnings tangled in their wide pupils.
Gradually, Dren had realized that the voice was not Satan’s, Satan would not have spared him suffering for daring to listen to the angels. With trepidation, Dren had returned to the slicing crawl spaces under the ice and had found again the stillness before the toxin of the barbed mites had twisted his insides and heaved him back into the cataclysmic darkness. Each time, before the raging nausea defeated him, he had cried to the stillness, “I want out of hell!”
Many times he had uttered that wretched cry before the voice of quiet beauty returned: Will you atone?
“Yes! Yes! I will atone!” he had wept. “I will atone!”
Again, throes of nausea had exploded him back into the loud cold. He had spun insanely among the rampageous noise of hell, flogged by the cold, sick with the stink of himself. And then he had stopped, struck still by the realization that he, Dren the Liar, had spoken truth. He had said yes. He had answered the voice truthfully. Never before in the blind pit of suffering had he been faithless to his mission and able to say anything but a lie.
After that, he had returned ever more frequently to the tight, hurting spaces under the ice, and he had mewled with utter sincerity, “Yes, I will atone! I will atone! Anything! Ask anything of me!”
But the calm voice had not returned. Only its memory remained with him, a silent thunder in the vehement roaring of the bitter and fierce dark.
Finding Dren bleeding and infested with mites, shuddering under a plate of ice, Nergal had wanted to know everything, and it was impossible to withhold knowledge from the Flayer. Dren had lied furiously, yet Nergal had seen past his deceptions. Fearing that the demon would inform the others and that soon the Qlippotic masters, the archdemons themselves, would find out and punish him, Dren had hurled himself across the pit of the damned and had avoided everyone but the souls he was meant to deceive.
Eventually, Nergal had found him again, and in the weltering noise and wrenching cold convinced him, “I’ve told no one! No one else must know—if we have any hope of escaping!”
“You will atone?” Dren had asked, stunned that another of the unholy would admit that freedom from perdition was possible. Until that moment, Dren had secretly believed that he the Liar had been lying to himself, believing he could flee damnation. “You really think we can get out of here?”
“You heard the voices!” Nergal had yelled above the chaos.
“It is a trick of the masters!” Dren had shouted back. “A trick of the Qlippotic masters!”
“You lie!” Nergal had seized Dren in his necrotic hands and shaken him violently. “You lie! If the masters had done this, you would be glued to the floor of the pit by now and trampled under behemoths and leviathans!”
That was true. There was no patience among the masters for lengthy deceptions in hell. In the blithering darkness, everything happened quickly and ceaselessly. Nergal’s perception helped Dren believe that there was the chance of a future for him that was not a lie, a destiny for him beyond the cold, sightless racket of hell.
After that, Dren looked forward to his chance collisions with Nergal the Flayer as they pushed mindlessly through the booming void.
“Have you heard the voices?” Nergal asked when next they slammed into each other. “Have they told you how to atone?”
“I’ve heard no voices!” Dren shouted back, and plunged into the loud night. “No voices!”
“Liar!” Nergal rushed after Dren, seized him in his large and gruesome hands, and dragged him to the serrated ground, painfully stabbing him into place among the spiked rocks. “Liar! You’ve heard a voice! I feel it in the pain I flay from you! I feel it! A voice! One voice! He speaks in the solitude! A voice! One voice!”
“I hear nothing!” Dren screamed, unable to control his lying.
“Crawl under the ice!” Nergal shouted against the bellowing wind. “Crawl under the sharp ice and listen!”
Metallic thunder reverberated, so loud that not even Dren could hear his own lie as he replied. Out of the screeching darkness, a slinky figure appeared glossed in slimy green fire, an eel-shape with sinuous limbs, slit eyes, adder’s grin, and needle teeth. “S-s-s-t! What are you two doing?” a sibilant voice asked above the uproar.
“Succoth!” Nergal yelped. “Succoth the Burner!”
“What voice are you yapping about?” Succoth slithered between them, his reek of sewage gagging their replies. “You have heard a voice? S-s-s-t! Whose voice?”
“I’ve heard nothing!” Dren brayed. “Nothing!”
Succoth’s thousand teeth shone like pins. “What does-s the Liar hide, Nergal the Flayer? What voice has-s he heard?”
