New Hell
by Arón Reinhold
Dan awoke to the ubiquitous sound of rubbing legs, to the
waves of chirping that felt like a phone which refused to go to voicemail. He
knew the weather forecast without checking, but looked at the app anyway as
part of a waking ritual while he enjoyed the last chance at comfort of his worn
blanket. Yup, he was right, a high chance of crickets. Dan sighed and flung
back his covers, then put on his screen harness. He watched ads of crying faces
while stumbling into the bathroom. He shivered at the temperature differential
from the gaze of the shower demon, ignored its stony face and turned on the
faucet, twisting the dial to a moderately warm setting. The pipe gurgled and
shook until it spewed a foul-smelling, viscous, non-potable ooze. Dan jumped in
and yelped at the scalding temperature which seared pink patches of his skin.
The demon laughed and made the water cold. Dan gnashed his teeth but continued
to rub his tender body with the condensed scum of past soap, well aware of his
limited time before work.
In the kitchen he scratched at the yellowed elastic of his
underwear before setting up his coffee maker for the usual fungal brew. He
pricked his thumb on the demonic outlet to pay for the energy and the little
demon approved his purchase. The drip of the coffee comforted Dan, while the
smell energized him to crack open the illuminated manuscript due that day. He
read and edited by the light of the clock just above his percolating device,
whispering admonishments at the hopeful cartoon rabbits scribbled in the
margins. He paused to watch a lengthy ad for a new torture-efficient appliance
which he could not afford. His coffee maker made a desperate, final burble
before shutting off in a slow hiss. Dan packed a travel thermos before he
locked up his home and stood out at the corner to wait for the last legs of
public transportation, out amongst the clouds of refuse and ozone.
A creaking wagon rolled up, weighed down by the weight of
an immense lion who roared at Dan. He placed his thermos in the cupholder on
his screen harness and shouldered the wooden pull handle beside his attractive
neighbor Jol. The lion flicked a whip which licked Dan’s lip, and they took
off, their calves bulging but submerged in the chitinous river. They passed a
wagon mired in a pothole. Dan tried not to watch as the alligator driver
mangled a writhing man held responsible for the delay.
“So, any new comics today?” Jol asked, sweating from their
mutual exertion.
“Yeah, I’ll copy them down for you when I get to the
office.”
“Same time as usual?”
“Yeah.”
Dan imagined the breathless sex they would share that
night, part of a typical numb pact between them, toons for taint. He was
thankful for Jol, even if he felt nothing romantic for her, because otherwise
he could not get laid, or so he told himself. Not that fucking was forbidden in
New Hell, far from it, the pleasure could easily be mixed with pain, and the
after-guilt was a general encouragement, but Dan was too afraid to speak with
strangers; after all, one could never discern a demon from a human. He was not
quite capable of the self-reflection necessary to understand that Jol was his
last link to the old world, to his long since disappeared friends and family.
He also didn’t quite understand what Jol got from the quaint pictures, but he knew
when to keep a good thing going, since good, even just okay, was a rare
commodity on the transformed Earth.
“Well, I’ll see you tonight.” Jol said between her heaving
breaths.
She left at her stop and Dan turned to watch her go but the
pawed hand of the driver slapped him across the back of his head, almost
spilling him onto the ground.
“Move, hu-mon!” The grotesque growled, settling back to
watch torture porn while the wagon lurched onward.
Dan wiped away the blood and smoothed down his
crimson-slicked hair, regretting having lost his only comb a few days before.
He tried to ignore the uncomfortable grunts coming from the driver, so took a
sip from his thermos and looked out on the brown, hazy horizon, saw through the
holes of the cityscape where former skyscrapers had been ripped down for
salvage, saw the emptiness of the world which was disturbed only by the orange
sludge of the Trinity River. Dan looked away from the scars, hurried towards
his work so he wouldn’t have to consider the collective suffering.
High above them, the Reunion Tower, now known as Revelation
Tower, spun about like the head of the possessed, where Obergruppenführer
Astaroth surveilled the whole city from his enormous office, separated wholly
from the damaged world. Although demons derived from a damned realm of sulfur,
radiation and smoke, they nonetheless suffered physically for it like any other
sentient being. When the gates which divided Earth from Hell fell and the whole
planet was poisoned, the demons, at least those capable of gaining power over
their peers, sought to surround themselves with artificial paradise, such as in
the Revelation Tower. Dan had not seen anything approaching the beauty of the
former Earth in a number of years, but hesitated to imagine Astaroth’s sanctuary,
unsure of the limits of that demonic power, whether they could peer into his
mind from such a distance. Dan shuddered at what could result, hoped he would
never meet that visage of death, hoped he exuded enough misery to escape
attention, hoped he no longer hoped.
Up ahead loomed the wide slitted girth of the Demonic
Manuscript News, a print subsidiary of Scox News, Dan’s destination. The
unassuming doors were guarded by huge humans who behaved much like their
benefactors, though dressed in cheaper suits. The lion roared at Dan having
thrown off his yoke, then flicked a switch on the wagon and slumped back, masturbating,
as it rolled down the road autonomously like the automobiles of old. Dan did
not watch the demon leave, instead he braced himself for a grueling search from
the doorbrutes, but they seemed to have had their fill of sadistic pleasure for
the day and allowed him to proceed unmolested.
The lower-level of the building used to be a bright,
wide-open journalistic space, but was bifurcated and desaturated shortly after
the city’s colonization. One section became dedicated to the manufacture of
illuminated manuscripts, from the initial sacrificial rites to the chemical
treatment of the skin to the sizing and splicing, and the other section housed
a handful of scribes bent over the candle-lit parchment, checking for errata or
stray mentions of any celestial
deity. Dan worked in the latter area, destroying his body with the sedentary
work, and his mind with the foul news of hellish events.
The actual illuminators were on a higher floor, a small
space accessible only by the elevator housed in the lower section, their
identity an enigma. Neither scribe nor percamenarius had seen even a single
illuminator cross the elevator threshold, prompting the belief they were simply
demons, though others rebutted they could be humans chained up and tortured
like ecstatic oracles.
Thus, when a disheveled head peaked around the corner of
the elevator and hissed at him, Dan ignored the aberration and continued
towards his desk.
“Get over here!” the being growled.
Dan acquiesced without a second thought: there was no
refusing a demon, or a demon-presenting entity.
“Come here!” the gray-haired man said, waving his thin
hands beneath his full moon eyes.
“Um, how can I…uh, help you?” Dan asked, bracing for the
answer.
“Be you percamenarius?”
“Nay, I am but scribe.”
“Satan’s sandblasted ass! Of all the luck!”
“W-what are you?”
“I’m an illuminator, but I need a blank parchment.”
“Don’t they send you those?”
“Yes, but- Hey, cover that little demon’s ears!”
Dan looked down at his screen harness where the little
demon squatted in a chair, projecting the mandatory ads, ads which filled him
with sadness and loathing, ads that were just part of his cost of living.
Dan covered its ears amid angry squeals and the illuminator
continued. “Listen, as a scribe you’ve seen the manuscripts, which means you’ve
probably noticed those funny-looking scribbles along the margins?”
He winced at this mention of his last good thing and the
knowledge that he lacked sufficient strength to exit the conversation. “Yeah,
so?”
The illuminator leaned around the corner, searching. “I’m
trying to figure out who’s doing them.”
“Huh? I thought you ill-”
“Well, not me! I just illuminate the X’s and 6’s. By the
time the manuscript gets to me, those pictures already exist.”
“So you think the perc-”
“Exactly! At least, it’s one possibility. But I won’t know
unless you check. Look, I’ve got to get back. I’ll meet you here just after the
pledge of obedience.”
“But, wait!”
The illuminator paused.
“How do you know I’m not a demon?”
“You look too miserable to be a prince of darkness, they
just can’t fake that level of pathetic.” He said, then disappeared.
-
Dan sat at his desk alone in his thoughts, pretending to
work on the ceaseless pile of manuscripts. The world burned while he numbly
turned a few pages in an open book, shuffled the order of the precarious stack,
then split it into two, changed his mind, and restacked the piles into one.
“There.”
Dan leaned back in his creaking chair but stopped at a pang
of pain from his lumbar. He stood and winced, but quickly stifled his
expression, trying not to telegraph the attempt at ‘suffering relief’, an
action forbidden in polite society. He scoped out his co-scribes, but they were
buried in tombs of writing and had no time for an unauthorized look at their
surroundings. He got up and opened a window, but the smoke from outside
irritated Dan’s eyes, so he hurried out of the room and into the hall, gazing
at the percamenarius area, a void in the map of his awareness. He hesitated at
the threshold of the other wing, considered to himself that technically he had
the freedom to choose his suffering, a fundamental right in New Hell, but
continued through at the realization he had always submitted to the higher
authority. Behind him someone shouted amidst the scuffling of chairs, asked
what idiot left a window open with such weather.
The next wing was even more grim and leathered than the
outside. Blazing torches and sacrifices filled up the closed space with a harsh
cloud while screams permeated the room. Dan regretted peeking past the dark
curtains of one closed-off area, where beyond several people removed large
sections of skin from a squirming person. The vellum of other unfortunate souls
stretched out on large racks, while hooded figures lathered them in chemicals
which corroded their hands, each bleached like bone. Dan continued past all of
this activity without making a sound, until he came across not only a blank
parchment, but an entire manuscript. He made sure none of the humans operating
the guillotine noticed him grab the thick bound parchment. He returned to his
work station, which was slick in a swamp of crushed crickets.
He counted ten seconds after the completion of the pledge
of obedience before standing up with what he hoped was a confident movement. He
nearly ran to the elevator, slipping on the gore, but was overjoyed to see the
illuminator waiting with frazzled hair.
“Look what I found!” Dan
said, proud
for once.
“Jesus, that’s far better
than I could
have hoped.”
“Thank you, I-”
“But I have to disclose something,
I
lied.”
“What do you mean?” Dan
felt ill, his
stomach bulged with regrets.
“I wasn’t trying to confirm
who
designed the margins, I simply wanted to draw cartoons of my own, from
scratch.”
Dan
wilted with disappointment. “But, why?
Boredom?”
“Yes, that, too. Really because
I’ve
been modifying every picture, lacing in messages of hope for any humans who
come across them. The darkscript is unaltered, of course, otherwise the demons
would catch onto me.”
A vision of Jol splayed out sprung
unbidden into Dan’s mind and he immediately became erect. The illuminator
thanked him again and turned to leave with an unnatural speed.
“Wait! In return, I want you
to send
me a copy of the margins, I’ve always enjoyed reading them each evening.”
“That’s a deal.”
The illuminator shook his hand and
left. Dan returned to his desk, worked earnestly for the remainder of the day
until being disturbed by a messenger imp barely aloft between the thick tome
and its little wings.
“Delivery, you impotent piece
of dog
shit.” The thing squeaked.
Dan paid the blood price and cracked
it open, amazed at the degree of divine inspiration the painted panels granted
him. He blew out the door and past the guards. They shouted after him but did
not move an iota. He ran towards Jol’s stop and intercepted her just before she
could take the wagon, then swooped her up in his arms before a befuddled
basilisk. So fervent was the energy of his new hope in the possibility of
change that he carried her and the manuscript all the way to his bed, where he
showed her everything.
Her face filled with a radiant light
and her laugh was sublime. Her clothes fell like leaves from a tree. Dan laid
back and moaned as she gave him head. Just before he came she climbed up onto
him and rode him hard, guffawing again, louder and gruffer than before. He
almost finished but her thighs swelled up and hardened into a rough hide, her
smile twisted into a hideous smear of teeth.
“You’ve done well, Dan.
We’ve been
trying to find the source of that hope leak for years.”
“The illumin-”
“He was a demon operating under
a
mistaken policy frowned upon by the devil herself. He believed that in order to
gain pleasure from crushing the human spirit, the demonic world had to first
instill hope. That is verboten! Hope
must be exterminated, the people cowed!”
“B-but, Jol?”
“Has been dead since your first
day at
DMN.” The last shreds of Jol’s skin sloughed off the crimson entity’s hide,
staining Dan’s sheets. “I am Astaroth, Obergruppenführer of the United States.”
Dan wept at the demon’s ugly
glee.
Astaroth continued to ride Dan, though the man’s desire had diminished
entirely, rode to a growling, seizing completion on his wilted dick. Dan’s
meager life flashed before his eyes, memories reflected in the bloody tears
which flowed down Death’s demeanor without end.
“What about me?” He asked,
supposing
that death would be preferable.
“What about you? How could you matter? You lifted neither a finger nor a sword
when we invaded, even before, you tolerated our agents voicing decrees from
their crude flesh masks, why would we fear you to do otherwise?”
Dan stared slack-jawed into Astaroth’s
spiral pupils.
“No, you can continue to exist as you
have, though now without the one good thing in your life.”
