Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
• Recollections of an Alternate Past •

Book Three

Escape From Exile
OR
Confusion and Contraction
OR
How To Get Out Of Hell

A Novel by

Teel McClanahan III

Modern Evil Press

Phoenix

ISBN: 978-1-934516-45-4

eBook Edition

Copyright © 2006 by Teel McClanahan III

Some Rights Reserved.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, entities and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Published by Modern Evil Press, Phoenix, AZ

ISBN: 978-1-934516-45-4 (E-Book)

• for love, lost •

“We’ve been expecting you.”

“I’m sure you tell everyone they’re expected down here.” Trevor’s face gave nothing away, and his mind was as closed as he could make it. “Get people thinking about all the things they ever felt guilty about, get them to maybe show you the best tools to torture them with?”

“Oh no, no, no, Trev. We’ve no need for such tricks. Those who find themselves in my realm after death are more than willing to torture themselves more effectively than such brutal techniques could yield. You, Trev, are the first of our kind to lead a life deserving of my...” the figure seemed to be studying a large crystalline globe affixed atop a cane he was holding as he paused in apparent deep thought, “special attentions. I see that one of your traveling companions is quite the troublemaker.”

“We’ve been having a fairly trying day, as I’m sure you’re aware. It’s only natural that his energy is still high. But what harm could he do to your forces in your own realm? Surely he is powerless against them.” Trevor smiled as he spoke, sure that one member or another of his party must be having quite some meaningful effect for it to be brought to their attention - the imagined destruction of unreal creatures and fantasy constructions would be no cause for concern.

The dark figure’s reaction neither denied nor confirmed Trevor’s suspicions. “Of course. Just a lot of noise and fury, meaningless as a summer breeze. Your companions are safe, Trev. Come, let us speak in comfort.”

Suddenly, and with a sensation almost entirely like the inverse of disappearing and reappearing someplace else, Trevor found himself seated comfortably in a large, well-worn highback leather chair which stood before a fireplace large enough to have a nice stroll through. Trevor thought to himself that it had felt quite like he had remained still and the huge room, the pair of chairs - for his host was sitting in a nearly identical chair opposite him, both of them turned to face the fire and each other by half - and the chilly atmosphere that suddenly surrounded him in stark contrast to the sulfurous heat which had been scalding him from head to feet an instant before were all made to appear around them, as though this room were not so much a place or location as it was a conceptual construction of the moment. In the cool air of the room, the rolling waves of heat from the fireplace seemed somehow welcomed, despite the raw pain of heat they had just escaped and the still-too-intense odor of brimstone burning Trevor’s nose and eyes.

“Nice contrast. What’s next, fried ice cream or good-devil bad-devil?”

“Oh no, nothing of the sort, Trev. Nothing so crude. My manipulations will be right out in the open. You will know that what you are doing is what I want and you will know why, but...” The dark eyes examined Trevor from across the room as though seeing some important detail for the first time, “...I see now that you haven’t figured out what your place in this world is yet, or who you really are. What we have in common that brings you to my attention. No trouble, of course. In fact, it may make you an even more valuable asset, now that I consider it.” The sinister face of Trevor’s companion seemed to go unfocused, staring beyond the distance as he calculated the ramifications of his unexplained discovery. Nary half a second later, Trevor’s eyes were locked again in his piercing gaze, but it had been long enough for Trevor to see that something about him had caught the dark stranger by surprise.

“If he can be surprised, he can be beaten,” Trevor thought as silently to himself as he could. “I don’t know what he’s talking about, what we have in common, but for everything he knew before I arrived, he wasn’t aware that I don’t know. He is certainly not as omniscient as I’d feared.” Trevor responded verbally, not pausing long enough to allow the other to resume his rambling or to raise his suspicions. “You consider me an asset already, do you? I have a feeling that I could leave your realm of my own volition at any time, with or without your consent - why should I stay here and allow myself to be used by a man who isn’t even polite enough to introduce himself? That’s not the best foot forward, now is it?”

“I know you’re smarter than that, Trev. Surely you already know who I am. Such trivialities, such pleasantries, are they really necessary between two such as us?”

There was a long pause, as though the figure sitting across from Trevor were actually expecting a response to his question, but Trevor sat silently, holding his gaze steadily. Finally and at once, as though rehearsed or signaled somehow, both men stood up at once and stepped toward each other, arms stretched out ahead of them. When they met before the fire after what may have been the ten paces of a shooting duel played out in reverse, they clasped hands, right in right and over that left in left, four hands gripping for a single up and down motion, a single ‘shake’.

Without any of the four hands’ firm grip relaxing at all, the dark resident of this fiery realm spoke, “I am Satan. That is to say, I am accuser, deceiver, snake, dragon, and pride. There are a thousand thousand other names used to describe me in each of a thousand different tongues in terms so diverse that a thousand times a thousand different beings can each think about me in a personal way that makes sense to their own minds, but there’s no need for me to go into such formality, I hope. You, Trev, may call me Old Scratch, or just Scratch, if you like. Most don’t like the feel of the name Satan rolling off their tongues. At least, not when I’m actually around.” Their hands rose and fell a second time, a second ‘shake’, this time with a brilliant popping flash of light bursting from between their crossed arms like some exaggerated sort of handflash.

“Thank you, Satan. As you’ve already referred to me as Trev several times, I would be glad to have you continue to do so. It’s what most of the people I’ve met in the last year have called me, and I’m quite comfortable with it.” Their hands, still clasped, raised and fell a final time, the handflash-like burst of light coinciding this time with the breaking of contact at the bottom of the ‘shake’ but flashing a light bright enough that Trevor thought he could see through the facade of the room and the false vastness of the scorched landscape outside it to the truth of this place - or at least to the next layer of lies - in that penetrating light. He didn’t pursue it, being sure he would have the time to investigate if it were necessary.

“But that isn’t really your name, is it, Trev?”

“No more than Satan is yours, and no more than the meaningless formality of exchanging names in closed hands would entice me to stay here any longer than I need to.”

“I certainly never thought it would, or wouldn’t I have introduced myself formally as soon as you walked through my doors?” Satan’s smile was sinister, but to someone without experience seeing him it may have seemed to be his normal, relaxed state of being. “You’ve never stood on formality or followed tradition blindly before, so don’t try to tell me you’d see me in any better light if only I’d danced that useless dance for you. You’re swayed by logic, emotions, authority figures, and selfishness and you’d just as soon change the way you think about Satan because of a little handshake as you’d change it because your toast landed butter-side-down.”

“I’ve fought in a butter battle or two in my time, and I’ll probably take on another and another if I believed in my cause enough. But you’re right that this isn’t one of those times, or even close.” Trevor turned and returned to his seat, which seemed to be the cue for Old Scratch to do the same, and then began again, “and while I realize that there’s no way to know from a handshake whether you or any other being of this realm is who they claim to be - at least not while they’re still in this realm, their home, a place not only the source of most of their power, but which is suffused with that power through and through - it is still a comfort to look you in the eye and tell me you’re who I thought you were.”

“If I’m not who I say I am, you’ve just admitted that my guise has worked on you, and maybe I’ll let my guard down to you. If I am the accuser I claim to be, you’ve just revealed a weakness in yourself that I may not be able to resist exploiting - or you’ve pretended a weakness you hope I’ll focus on while you work against me with your other hands. And on top of all that, you’re still complementing me and my realm, buttering me up quite effectively, I might add.”

“A little something you might, too, be lying about.” Trevor continued speaking, but turned his head and gaze to face the fireplace. He had noticed its intricacy as soon as the room had appeared, but he had done what he could to appear unimpressed as well as unobservant, paying it only the attention one might give to a dog curled sleeping in the corner of a room; Trevor kept it always in the corner of his eye lest it wake, charge toward him, and attack in some way. Now that he could do it casually, as the verbal repartee itself had turned to the casual and amusing, Trevor observed the strangeness of that fireplace in detail.

The fireplace itself was vast, larger than the bedroom Trevor had occupied in his parents’ home in every dimension, but taller and wider than its depth, and with no discernible edges or corners beyond the four sharp, straight edges defined by the hearth and mantel which surrounded the outer lip of that gaping maw. The hearth appeared to be as solid and smooth as a single slab of polished stone, but in the shifting light cast from the fire beyond, it gave Trevor the impression he was looking at the surface of a viscous dark fluid flowing constantly into the depths of the fireplace, never dropping off or stopping, merely receding into and under the flames in one smooth flow. That the flames were not fed or drowned by it and did not rock on or sink into this surface were ideas that could not have coexisted in Trevor’s mind with the other visual clues of that hearth’s fluid nature if he had witness that single aspect of the fireplace just a week earlier, perhaps as recently as an hour earlier when he had been utterly joined with the eight chained men in a single archival mind. Trevor was certain that a thoughtful glance at that juxtaposition would be enough to cripple Nirgal or Jurrin’s mind, and while he had certainly not yet grasped but a tiny fraction of what those shared minds had contained, he seemed possessed of a new and natural ability to separate and segment ideas in his mind, keeping conflicting or contrary ideas from confronting each other without losing the ability to know and think of them both simultaneously. It was like a fractaline conceptual corpus callosum had been grafted into his mind, allowing complex and meaningful connections to be made between concepts and thoughts that needed to remain otherwise segregated in order to remain functional and independent, just as the physical corpus callosum of the brain strings the left and right sides of the brain together even as it keeps them separate.

The mantel of the fireplace surrounded the other three sides, framing the opening and meeting the hearth at geometrically perfect right angles. Trevor knew somehow that they were perfect, he could see it at each of the four corners as though his eyes or his mind or whatever was being used to sense the fireplace had a built-in compass. Except that the more attention Trevor paid to the perfection of those angles the more he became aware that any device made by human hands would be inadequate to accurately measure the perfection before him. The thickness of each mark of degree would have to be wide enough for the human eye to detect, and the ninety degrees of each of these corners - Trevor didn’t know how he could know but he knew it was absolutely true - were more accurate than the width of the narrowest line that the human eye could measure by. It required some considerable force of will for Trevor to draw his eyes away from one of those interior corners without landing immediately on another, and another measure of restraint to keep his face and eyes relaxed and casual as he spoke with the devil across the room. Trevor counted himself lucky that the mantel was wide enough along all three edges and in sharp enough an angle from the light of the fire that the four outer corners were draped entirely in dancing and flickering shadows and greasy, blurry light and he was unable to fix his eyes upon them and face eight sticking points instead of four.

Those wide lengths of decorative framing which surrounded the utter deepness of the fireplace appeared to be carved impossibly from a single continuous piece of some wood Trevor had never before seen. He thought at first that it was darker than anything in the room, perhaps darker even than the shadows it seemed to lean outward and into, until he made out the grain of the wood in long, unbroken curving lines which were darker still than the wood appeared as a whole. Those grain lines seemed to Trevor to be positively sucking light from the room; they were not just taking in every last photon that was sent their way, but also drawing others off course to be absorbed into their endless hunger and absolute intensity of an absence of visual character within their borders. Somehow, just as he seemed to be able to measure the accuracy of the angles of the corners of the mantel, Trevor knew from sight alone that the wood was heavy, dense wood the like of which had never been worked by living human hands or tools, and would probably be approaching diamond’s ten thousand on the Vickers Hardness Test. Yet its entire surface, yard after yard of nearly impervious wood, had been carved into a relief of the most intricate detail and delicacy. Trevor’s relief that the fireplace was the room’s only source of light extended beyond the hiding of the outer corners of the mantel, but to the story that would have been laid out for his mind to try to absorb from each careful bite taken from the wood of that grand frame.

Once in a while he made out a figure, grotesque in appearance or apparent action to a level not even dreamt of in his or Sunshine’s memories, and he was glad that the dancing rays of light from the fire did not linger to elucidate the coherence and narrative that Trevor suspected would become horrifyingly clear if the entire panoply of grotesqueries were revealed simultaneously.

Despite all these distractions and details, nothing Trevor could see outside the fireplace - including the room, the mantel, the hearth, and Señor Diablo himself - was as interesting to the eye as what filled the fireplace as its fire.

There were no logs, no wood, no fuel to give rise to the flames. There were no flames either, really. What Trevor saw when he looked into the fireplace, casting its nervous, twitching light and shadows throughout the room, was shaped like a fire, and it moved like a fire, but it was clearly not actually a fire. The fire-that-was-not-a-fire reached into the room in a perfect four-dimensional representation of the shape of a fire, with the bulging, crisscrossing masses at its base which ought to have been logs or some other fuel source - the fireplace seemed of the scale to take entire unprocessed logs as firewood, and the size and shapes of that part of what Trevor saw only supported the idea. Rising up from those log-shaped volumes of not-really-logs were extended volumes of space which leapt and swelled and shrank in all four dimensions including that zero’th dimension, which is not height not width nor depth but time, just as an actual fire would, had there been actual logs actually burning. As Trevor watched and as he and the deceiver spoke at length, it was not that the shape of the thing filling the fireplace was exactly the shape of a fire which most fascinated Trevor’s mind. It was what he saw filling that shape that captivated him, rapt.

Looking into the fire-that-was-not-a-fire was a little like looking through a window. Sometimes Trevor felt that if he were to take a photograph of a single still instant of that fire-not-a-fire, it would look like there was a fire-shaped hole cut clean through the back of the fireplace revealing the fire-swept wastelands beyond that strange and sudden wall. Other times the very voluminous nature of the thing pushed such thoughts aside; he could clearly see that this shifting not-quite-mass was surrounded by - not cut out from - the four solid walls of the fireplace. The fire-not-a-fire was enough not-a-fire that it did not bellow smoke to be swallowed by a chimney, and parallel to the terrible flowing hearth was a solid unedged ceiling; the fireplace held the fire in a box missing only one side, and Trevor suspected rightly that an unseen box-side held the fire-not-a-fire from escaping into the room.

The idea of a fire shaped hole in the wall that seemed implied by what Trevor had first thought was an unmoving perspective of the exact landscape he had been standing in not long before was broken with any one focused look - it was clear that whatever he was seeing through the strange 4D lens of the fire-not-a-fire was a populated landscape, not the starkly empty one he had first seen Satan standing proudly in. The same heat was there, the same flaming, scorched countryside remained, and the same sense of desolation Trevor had felt upon arrival was projected through with startling clarity, but in addition to all that, and nearer because it was the foreground to that background of pain, were what Trevor began to realize must be the tortured, mangled, twisted and broken, burnt, flayed, and desiccated souls of the damned. And their tormentors.

Through the unsteady window of the virtual flames and logs, the light and heat and emotion of the scene playing out somewhere else in Hell fell flickeringly on every surface it could reach. The noise and the odors were not passed on and instead the vision of pain and humiliation Trevor could see just on the other side - the inside - of the shifting surface of the fire-not-a-fire seemed to give off the sounds of an actual fireplace as though the sounds were a part of a fire’s shape, and to give off that same pervasive odor of burning sulfur that seemed to be a part of everything in Hell whether there was any way for it to hold of give off any odor at all.

The tortured souls were almost indescribably tortured, and almost certainly uncountable. Trevor could make out the details of the suffering of any individual he selected even briefly with his eyes even though the view through the fire-not-a-fire seemed to be a wide-angle one which must have shown not less than a million different souls in heaps and heaps on heaps of terror in eternity from one end of the insane fireplace to the other, and yet he knew without whatever new force had been feeding him information lately that what he could see was less than one percent of a thousandth of the number of souls currently residing in Hell in constant agony. He gazed on into the fire, picking out as many of the tortured and their torturers - sometimes with both roles performed by a single player with a captive audience - as he and the snake spoke, and he tried not to make it obvious he was anything more than disinterested in everything around him, keeping his face flat and even. He knew the dragon would want something, and he knew what was at stake. Trevor even knew what a disadvantage he had in this matter, and as he began to speak, to draw out pride’s plan, he studied the fireplace and its fire-not-a-fire with as much disinterest as he could muster.

“A little something you might, too, be lying about. Trying to give me a sense of pride for any small thing I might have done, trying to give yourself a toehold in my being with the pride that brought you to your own fall, so long ago. Don’t you think I’m smart enough to be able to learn from the mistakes of others? From your mistakes? At least as much as is necessary to know when I’m being turned against myself with words that sound like praise.”

“Can you fault me for testing you? For feeling out the edges of your intelligence, the borders of your understanding?”

“No more than I ought reasonably to fault myself for underestimating the breadth and scope of the control you show over everything within your realm. I tried to warn my companions before we opened the door, but my warnings, which went farther than my companions were ready for, did not go nearly far enough.”

“Nor could they have, if your warnings did not keep them from entering my realm altogether.”

“I still do not see a way we could have escaped or even been located after all that had occurred. During the course of events I absorbed quite a bit of history and information about the church whose doors we used to reach Hell, and among them was the sure knowledge of their failsafe systems. In the event of catastrophic destruction of only one half of any of the established mirrored churches, the other half was sealed completely from the physical world, to become a tomb and perfection device for any believers trapped inside. It was believed that such a situation would destroy the balance between each pair, since they could no longer mirror each others’ every action, and following whatever course they were already on, would be on the ‘fast track’ to either Heaven or Hell.”

“Ah, but getting into Hell is much easier than getting into Heaven.”

“As they had realized, I’m sure, when you agreed to open up a door into Hell from each of their dark churches, and Heaven would not even return communication.”

“You make it sound like I installed revolving doors to Hell in all the major cities around the globe, and you know I’ve done no such thing. The closest you can get to having unfettered entrance to Hell from anywhere on Earth is through death’s door, and that’s only a metaphor.”

“I know that, and you know that, so I don’t know why you belabor the point. The doors you agreed to offer were one-way doors which were only available in the event of one of these catastrophic unbalancings. If the dark church were the one to be destroyed rather than the light, those inside had no aethereal door by which they could gain access to Heaven - their only option, being totally cut off from the physical world, was fasting and praying and repenting until they died of natural causes and hopefully got to Heaven by the natural course. Which is why I was glad, when the church really started coming down, that it was the light church coming down - there’s no way out of a sealed light church.”

“Is a one-way door into Hell any better? Have you ever heard of anyone coming back from eternal damnation?”

“One or two, but that’s irrelevant, because none of my party was sent to Hell for eternal damnation.”

“Well, have you ever heard of anyone who wasn’t damned intentionally going to Hell? Other than yourself and your traveling companions, of course.”

“Of course, of course, and ...” Trevor paused, and it was unclear whether he was trying to think of someone who fit the dark one’s description or he was simply trapped in the perfection of a real ninety degree angle, “No. Not off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone else. A few to Hades, but we both know Hell and Hades are different realms entirely.”

“True, true. And Hades is a snap to get out of, and might be better run by the dog at the door. At least Cerberus can’t offer to let you and your already-dead friends leave if you just don’t look back or just pass some other simple test; all Cerberus can do is bark, bark, bark.”

Trevor didn’t laugh at the demon’s weak joke or look away from the fireplace, but continued speaking. “Being crushed by falling stone or trapped in a cathedral cum coffin as the alternatives, walking live and ready to fight into Hell is certainly a preferred option. Especially considering the value you let me know you placed on me, not a moment into my stay here. If I have or can do or be something you want or need, I’ve got a place to stand while we negotiate my terms.” Trevor didn’t need to mention that he’d noticed a moment of surprise as well, but he knew deep down that it might be possible to out-maneuver the deceiver at his own game, and that thought added a healthy dose of confidence to his voice as he spoke.

“Of course. Your terms. I’ve had some time to consider what you would ask for and what you would consider fair, and I’d like to make you an offer before you say anything at all. If it pleases you, fine, and if you want to make revisions, negotiations will begin. I suspect though, that you’ll be pleased with all the terms.”

“I’m listening.” Trevor was still staring into the fire, almost through it, tallying and memorizing every face and essence he witnessed there as they palavered.

“I would like to challenge you to a duel of sorts, the details of which I will discuss in a moment. The important part is the wager over the duel. It will all be drawn out in the contract, but the gist of it is this: If you win the duel, you’ll be granted the power to release your traveling companions from Hell, along with anyone else you’d like. If I win the duel, you will not be allowed to leave Hell, and will be forced to remain here for an unspecified period of servitude.”

“My companions aren’t of any value to you. One of them isn’t even really a person. If I am forced to stay here, you must let them go.”

“You’re being unreasonable! You’re asking me to reward you for losing the duel.” Satan sounded playfully exasperated at this, “But that isn’t how duels work, you see, the winner is rewarded and the loser is not. If I am the winner, I am rewarded with your staying in Hell. If you are the winner, you are rewarded with the power to free your companions.”

“Ah, but I have not agreed to duel at all.”

“And yet I know that you will, because there is no other way for you to free your companions from Hell. Hell is mine, and they are here. If you want to buy them a get out of Hell free card, you’ve got to go through me.”

“I could leave right now, gather information, reinforcements, and come back through one of the many other passages into Hell to rescue them.”

“If you leave and come back to Hell with a raiding party you’ll only make my position stronger, putting more people you care about and were responsible for into my grip.” The seven-headed dragon who would one day perch before the womb of the Sun Woman to try to eat her child before it could enter the world chuckled from where he sat. “If, on the other hand, you agree to the duel now, you’ll at least have a chance of winning, and losing will only trap the four of you in Hell.” He had stopped, but then seemed to remember something pleasant, a smile stretching out over his teeth, “For now.”

“How can I trust you, deceiver? How can I trust your contract? How can I trust that the duel will be fair? How can I trust that when I win, you will do as you have promised? You, who created all forms of magic and witchcraft and cosmetics. You, who lied to Eve in the garden, who has been lying to the world ever since. You are the greatest deceiver in the history of the Universe, for you even convinced God that you loved Him before you turned on Him.”

Even as he spoke these accusations evenly but forcefully into the cool air of the room, Trevor’s eyes did not blink or shift from the fire-not-a-fire, did not face the one he was now himself accusing. Except that as soon as the monosyllable ‘God’ slipped Trevor’s lips, Old Scratch’s cool, dark eyes locked him in their gaze, a floating pair in the foreground of the foreground of the fire-not-a-fire, blazing out their fury. It was hard to think of this denizen and lord of the Lake of Fire as having a cool to keep, but as he responded accuser to accuser, his voice conveying a calmness even as it seethed, it became clear that the Fallen One had lost his cool. Trevor had felt a slight brush of contact made with his carefully guarded mind as the eyes had appeared, but the contact seemed much more casual than the vision of anger floating before him could have been, and was blasted from his thoughts as soon as the voice began bellowing: “You’ve gone too far, you impudent little brat. You may have been taught a story or two about the way things came to be as they are, but you’ve stepped out of bounds now, you’ve crossed the line into unfamiliar territory.” Satan’s voice was coming from where his body still sat, tense, across the space of the fire from Trevor, but it also seemed to be conveyed in the modulation of the crackling and roaring sounds of the fire around those disembodied eyes, and in increasing volume from the air that filled all the space around every inch of Trevor’s being. As the volume of the voice rose and surrounded him, Trevor knew that this voice was getting deep into his bones, where it would linger and corrupt. “I do love God! I’ve always loved God! I never lied to Him, I never turned on Him. I just did what needed to be done, what He wouldn’t or couldn’t do on His own; I was trying to help! It was never my vision, it was always, always what God wanted, even when He wasn’t around to ask! Even when He wasn’t around to give orders, I loved Him and served Him.” Satan’s voice was beginning to recede, and Trevor couldn’t be sure whether he was hearing the devil’s voice cracking, or just crackling as it receded - but still projected - from the fire, and as his eyes faded from visibility there as well. “When the others stopped getting orders, when He stopped showing up for longer than He’d ever been gone before, they turned to me for guidance. I was so close to Him, I loved him so deeply and so well, so much more than any of the others. They came to me, and all they wanted was to know how to serve Him, what He wanted them to do.” The snake’s voice was now barely above a whisper, sourced only from the crumpling body in the chair opposite Trevor, and he finally turned from the fire to look at the one he was listening to so carefully, to see the down-turned face and strain to hear him speak over the roar of the fire-not-a-fire. “I didn’t raise an army up and try to take over Heaven, I never thought I was better than Him, not to this day. All I ever did was love Him. All I did was try to help the others to love Him, and in his absence, when they came and begged me, asked me how they could serve Him, I told them what was in His heart, and they knew what to do. One after another, again and again they came to me and I did what I could to share my understanding of God with them, to show them how they could know God’s Will without receiving a direct order from Him.” The voice of this Old Scratch now fell well below a whisper, his lips no longer parted and his lungs no longer pushed air, but somehow Trevor could still understand him as he finished his tale. “When God returned, when He revealed Himself I should say, for He can never really be gone, everything changed. God is proud and vengeful and stubborn. I love Him, and I love His pride, and I love His vengeance, and I love His stubbornness. When He decided that I was trying to take His place, when He decided that I had learned too well of Him, had become too proud of myself and had turned the others to follow my own command, I didn’t deny it. I love Him. When He decided to cast me into the Lake of Fire, this pit of damnation, I didn’t complain. I love Him. When He learned later on that He’d leapt to conclusions, when He saw that I had only been teaching the others to love Him as I do, and He was too stubborn to admit He had made a mistake, I didn’t say a word, I didn’t fault Him. I love Him. I never tried to convince Him of my love, and I never turned on Him. You...” The Prince of Darkness now appeared to be weeping into his own hands as though he had suddenly found himself with the first being in all these thousands of years who he could open up in front of, and even as he cried out with his mouth, his words continued into Trevor’s mind. “...you and I... I can’t say... I mustn’t tell you, but you and I and He have something in common, and... somehow I couldn’t stand to have you... to have one of us... believing the lie, the propaganda... I can trust you. I know I can. And after a while, I guess it won’t really matter how much I told you, not after the duel... but you must know that I loved Him, I love Him, and I’ve always served Him as best I could. And now you’re here, and I...” Now even the mental voice broke down crying, and Trevor turned back to the fireplace, giving Satan time and space to let it all out, not even knowing where to begin, whether to comfort or scold him. Worse, Trevor wasn’t even sure whether this was all just a trick, an act, meant to get his sympathies and fool him into agreeing to the duel, the contract, and whatever horrible loopholes and snares had been lain down in it. Everything Trevor had read from Old Scratch had seemed to indicate that he was genuinely feeling the way he appeared to be feeling, and there was no trace of falsehood that Trevor had been able to detect during his story. Still, the deceiver had been playing this old game for millennia, and might be more convincing than even the twins had been before he’d discovered the wicked truth about them. Trevor took advantage of the time the accuser was sobbing to try to weigh his options and decide a course of action.

* * *

From the moment Trevor had put his hand on the door leading to Hell, Jurrin had been ready for a fight. Watching the other three disappear before his eyes even as he was surrounded by an empty and desolate, burning and twisted Hellscape only put him more on his guard. He stood, sword at the ready, listening intently to the rolling silence of heat rising blisteringly up from the near-molten surface of this place. He turned his head side to side and peered with his mind’s eye behind him and even though he could not see or sense a single point of actual movement between himself and the horizon in every direction, his muscles remained tense, his sword raised to strike.

Slowly, everywhere around him, among the deformed and twisted spikes and jagged peaks and rocks and crevasses and all of them glowing between red-hot and white-hot and the air slithering upwards with heat distortion, the demonic hordes began to come out of hiding. They were just as glowing-hot, and perhaps more twisted, more jagged, more hard and horrible than the environment they were naturally camouflaged to disappear into, and each and every one that began to move towards Jurrin’s battle-ready stance moved with a calculated and deliberate speed of near-stillness. They could see immediately that this new one was a danger, not to be feasted upon greedily like most that appeared before them, dazed and without understanding or defense, but to be approached with deliberate stealth and caution, en masse. If you had been looking at it happening all around him, you might think that Jurrin’s presence in this accursed place (or perhaps his still-shining armor or his gleaming sword) was causing it to curl up at the edges and peel apart. Every outcropping of rock and every other horrible feature of this landscape appeared to be lifting and moving and slowly curling and shifting inward, all drawn improbably towards the place where Jurrin was standing as though by some strong magnetic field.

Except they each moved slower than the heat-ripples rising all around them and distorting what Jurrin could see, and he wasn’t able to detect any motion at all. Thousands upon thousands of grisly beasts with only the worst of intentions gradually worked their ways closer and closer and closer to Jurrin’s battle-hardened blood-thirsty form. They were so unlike any living or moving thing that Jurrin had ever witnessed that they were invisible in their land simply by holding a comparable color in their own hides like giant, evil, carnivorous chameleons. As they drew nearer and nearer, Jurrin was holding his breath to try to hear them, to hear anything, and in that still silence they finally pounced, dozens at once in the air and hundreds more running along the ground close behind, signaled by the sudden rapid motion, trying to get their own taste of this new, shiny thing before it was gobbled up completely by the others.

They moved as much faster than fast as they had moved slower than slow on approach, and in nary an instant Jurrin’s upright form was replaced by a blurring, roiling mountain of swarming creatures the same color as the landscape. If someone had not seen Jurrin standing there before and glimpsed this sight during the three full seconds it was sustained, they might not be able to discern that there were individual creatures at all, but instead see a literal mountain with a reversed flow of molten stone working its way towards the peak of the deformed hill from every direction, as far as the eye could see. After those three seconds, however, the illusion of order and incongruous peaceful flowing would be shattered.

A muffled scream broke through the nearly-silent chattering and hard-slapping of tough hide on tough hide and bony protrusion against spiny outgrowth that was the only noise the clamoring beasts made at the height of their fury, and a rippling outward wave swept across the surface of the reverse-volcano of heaped and crawling monsters. Then another ripple of back-forced bodies arced across from the opposite face of the dogpile, and another, and then the would-be mountain became a time-lapse-photography movie of a mountain of sugar melting in the rain.

The monsters on the surface couldn’t tell what was going wrong, they just knew that no matter how quickly they crawled across the backs of their kind, they weren’t making progress towards the prey they had lost sight of anyway. The ones in between hadn’t been too pleased with their place in the great and deepening hill of crushing, clawing, hungry beasts all seeking the same meal, smashed, as it were, between a horrifying monster and a demonic Hellspawn, but now they found themselves being nearly torn apart as the beasts below them disappeared or slipped backwards or both and the crawling things above them just kept trying to head forward. Every one of them had jutting herring-bone-like extrusions as hard as petrified antlers coming out of their limbs and bodies in a seemingly random way, extraneous dangling limbs that did nothing but get in the way and cause pain, and rough, bumpy, bulging, hides with ridges and holes and crevasses in patterns as unique as the lives that had led to them, and in a situation like this, they all got caught on each other. They all got caught on each other, and with the bodies working above and below in opposite directions, the ones in between were torn apart, some losing their skeletal outgrowths with wet snapopping sounds and lightning strikes of pain rippling through their bodies while others were less fortunate, literally being ripped limb from limb or being exploded out over every other being in their crushed vicinity in a putrefied, oozing mess.

Then there were the most immediately unfortunate - though perhaps the most fortunate, in the end - of the creatures who attacked Jurrin, those closest to him. As soon as the first wave leapt at him, he flicked the facial shield of his armor down with a strong but rapid motion of his neck, covering the only exposed part of his flesh before the brimstone-fire-hot beasts coalesced on his body. The first to reach him had either terrifically terrible aim, or a terribly terrific self-sacrificing intelligence, for it managed to self impale on Jurrin’s backwards-extended sword with the full length of its body a mere fraction of a second before Jurrin would have swung it wide through the bodies approaching from his front, and only another fraction of a second more before the rest of the leaping monsters reached him. Their claws and oversized mandibles and extruding, antler-like bones and growths clanged and grasped at Jurrin, trying to tear into his strange shiny exoskeleton, and dozens of arms and legs and tails and a few unidentifiable limbs worked to wrap themselves around him to hold on, to hold their place next to the fresh meat so they wouldn’t be brushed aside by the others trying to do the same.

The limbs, the bony bits, the claws, the mouths, and even a few of the monstrosities’ heads unfortunate enough to come in contact with Jurrin’s armor began to dissolve. Exoskeletons and spiny extrusions that had been strong and sharp enough to be used to gore and eviscerate victims for all their long and violent memory were turned to soup just for clanging against Jurrin’s armor. Limbs, the limp and useless and the unbelievably strong and limber alike, dissolved from a solid to a runny liquid of nearly the same glowing amber color of the rest of the monsters and the landscape they had trod upon and now melted onto. The liquefaction seemed to be rapid and spreading, not from creature to creature, but within a creature touched so that even the lightest contact with the furthest and least useful twisted, horned, spiny bone outgrowth against the armor first liquefied the outgrowth, then whatever part of their misshapen body it had been connected to, and spread out and up and down and in and out from there until the thing was nothing more than a snot-like, runny mess working its way over and in between and under the beasts which had not yet reached Jurrin’s armor. The entire process from first contact to total dissolution seemed to take about a second.

The one that had got onto Jurrin’s sword had somehow not quite had enough force to slide all the way down the blade to brush against Jurrin’s armor, and even as the entire first wave of attacking things turned to goo all around him, Jurrin’s sword remained encumbered and useless. Luck was not working entirely against him in this crazy place though; at least he was still standing. If the creatures on one side of him had jumped a half-second sooner than those on the opposite side or if he’d relaxed his battle-ready stance even an iota or if he’d swung his sword out in front of him, stopping even just part of the force of those flying in from that direction, he would have been knocked off balance in that first instant, knocked as flat as the jagged ground would have allowed, and defenseless. He may even have drowned in the rush of liquefied monsters that would surely have flowed down all around him. Luckily for Jurrin, he was not knocked down, and the melting monsters were running down and away from his face and mouth instead of up and over them. He knew his armor had been enchanted to carry an ethical charge of its own long ago, and that it had been worn by his own great-great-grandfather Phelleea the Righteous during every step of his knighthood, but he had never suspected that such a powerful residual righteousness as this might cling to its frame after all this time. For a second or two, Jurrin just stood there, marveling at how efficiently the armor destroyed his attackers and trying to imagine how it might have been possible for every tale of do-gooding he had heard ascribed to Phelleea the Righteous might have actually been true - it would take at least as much positive ethical charge as was rumored to have extended Phelleea’s life to so blaspheme these Hellspawn monsters with such finality.

He wanted to just stand there a while, let them come, let them feel the righteous justice his armor would deal out merely by touching each horrible thing in turn, but before long he realized he was completely buried in monsters, couldn’t see a light other than the monsters’ glow, and the weight above him was threatening to crush him, armor and all. The ones that reached him turned quickly to liquid, but there seemed to be more and more clambering across the backs of those nearest to him all the time, replacing the melted monsters faster than they could slip slick out of the way. Jurrin finally snapped out of his frozen stance, and tried to swing his sword to cut through the amassing beasts, but it hardly budged, stuck in that first leaping creature. He inched his sword down to pull the encumbering corpse towards his shoulder plate, hoping that its effects remained effective on the dead, and then suddenly he could move his sword with ease.

Jurrin swung the weapon in a long, strong arc, his sword easily dissecting everything in its path, slicing them into pieces ahead of him, brushing the arms of his armor against those collapsing in from above, and driving outward against the crush. At the end of the sweep, Jurrin was just about where he’d started, but he turned and raised his sword through the clawing, clanking, and otherwise noiseless creatures, then swept the sword again across in front of him, this time in the opposite direction, with a similar effect. He was destroying them faster than he could have expected to with his sword alone, but there were so many of them so feverishly fighting to get to him that they could not see the decimation he was creating and he still couldn’t see the light beyond the crush. He just kept swinging and turning and trying to keep his footing in the liquid remains of his kills, now shin deep. For what seemed like too long a time he kept this up; liquefying those that came close enough to reach him, slicing up those that came within range of his sword before they got too close, and hoping that he would be able to get a little ahead of this cavalcade of enemies.

Then, almost all at once, he could see the light. Not the light of day, but the ambient yellow-orange glow that Hell seemed to have radiating out of the emptiness that passed for sky here, and that was almost as good. The monsters seemed almost to be swept away from him on a receding wave or fast-moving tide and Jurrin realized that in a way, they actually were - the downward force of the ones that had crawled up and up and up had only worked to slide those underneath them out and away on the slick goo that had been their own kind only moments before but that now pooled to above Jurrin’s knee where he stood. The slimy residue of the destroyed creatures was now chunky and thicker all around him as though a psychotic butcher/warlord had made a battlefield stew with the sliced-up bodies and strewn organs of those truly unfortunate beings which Jurrin had rendered inert with his blade.

The tide of melted monsters was receding from his legs and he was uncovered, but what he saw now did not please him at all; there were thousands of thousands of the creatures rushing towards him. They filled all the space he could see in every direction in what seemed like an infinite garishly deformed and burning-hot plain of pain and suffering, points of motion, a sea of motion, excited and hungry creatures stretching from horizon to horizon, three hundred and sixty degrees around him, all the motion working its way toward center. The things closest to him were just regaining their feet - or whatever they had to move along on - and seemed ready to lunge back towards this strangely still-untouched shiny visitor, pressed upon by hordes of encircling mob-members which appeared identical to Jurrin in such numbers despite their unique features, just as a large enough crowd of people begins to make everyone look quite the same. He raised his sword again and was about to scream out a traditional battlecry of Phelleea the Righteous when suddenly, everything stopped.

Perhaps not everything, but when one was outnumbered literally a million to one and the million stop all at once like the frozen frame of video on the TV screen when you pause a DVD, it’s statistically insignificant that the one happens to remain mobile. Jurrin looked around, checking for some sort of trick, some sign that they had only slowed down to the speed slower than the ripples of heat in the air - but the air was no longer rippling! Jurrin could see the wavering distortions between himself and distant points of interest, but the distortions were totally unmoving, as though fixed in space. Air and Fire behaving like Earth. He stood in wonder, trying to understand what he was seeing without diverting his attention from his own safety and the sword in his hands, should everything return to speed without warning.

On the heels of whatever had stopped the rampaging creatures, quickly following, Jurrin heard a voice that seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, “...special attentions. I see that one of your traveling companions is quite the troublemaker.” The voice seemed to come from inside his head about pounded on his ears all at the same, and then stopped just as suddenly as the hordes of monsters just beyond arms’ reach. He didn’t understand it at all; not why it had come to him, whose voice it was, or what it had to do with the mess at his feet, now seeping well within his armor and soaking hot and wet into his pants and filling his boots and socks, liquefied creatures squishing in between his toes.

He didn’t need to understand it. The next thing he knew, the tortured and blisteringly hot landscape which had been filled with equally tortured but easily slain terrorizers as far as the eye could see in every direction was replaced with what appeared to be a cell designed for solitary imprisonment of magically adept criminals. The space was nearly eight feet along each edge, a cube of smooth surfaces with rounded edges and corners, a single unbroken surface of pillow-soft material that Jurrin didn’t have to test to know would not be penetrated or even scratched by the sword he still carried. There was no apparent light source, no furniture, no fixtures, nothing in the room but Jurrin, the clothes and armor on his body, and the sword still clutched tightly in his hands. He reached out with his mind and with his magic and confirmed that he could not effect anything beyond the edges of that pale, soft, singular surface surrounding him. He lowered himself to the pale, soft floor, relaxing against one of the lower too-round-to-really-be-a-corner corners without taking off a single piece of armor or releasing his sword. He did lift the visor of his helmet after he sat, revealing his face as he muttered to himself, “At least my socks are dry.”

* * *

When Trevor had knocked on the big double doors that he said would lead to Hell, Nirgal, Trevor’s Gollum, and Jurrin were standing several paces behind him, but as the doors opened - like blast doors opening on a fiery furnace, even the first slim crack of opening gave way to a hard burst of hot, expanding air - they opened into the church, towards them, and Trevor stepped backwards into line beside the other three, waiting for the slow, heavy barricades to finish their nearly casual-seeming grinding to openness. The windswept contents of that other world had begun to spill out through the opening as though they had been eager to escape Hell, then rattled quickly to a halt still within the grand arcs described by the path of the doors as they realized that the world on the other side of those doors was now a part of Hell as well.

The four remaining members of the botched or irrelevant rescue party stepped forward at the same time and pace, and while they certainly did not hook their elbows together and sing and dance their way into the yellow-hot realm before them, neither did Trevor try to exert his leadership by staying in the lead or giving instructions as they crossed over into what had always been Hell. As soon as they were through the doorway, Nirgal turned to see whether it had simply disappeared, and was shocked by what he saw for only a second before he began half-stumbling backwards across unfamiliar and precarious terrain to try to get a better view. The entire dark church was standing there, its front doors blocked open.

Nirgal had never seen this church from the outside before - none of their party had seen it, coming in though the fulcrum point of the magical protection that ought to have kept anyone from appearing inside the double church, and only then because of the strong link of sex magic between Trevor and Hannah, not to mention their shared labor pains. He’d had some clue of its size from the interior, but the idea of seeing the entire building at once, if only he had the right vantage, suddenly drove Nirgal to turn away from it and run in the other direction, looking for higher ground. The other three, who had stood transfixed by the church which had been transported as wholly as its remains allowed to wherever in Hell they now found themselves, did not think to move until they saw and felt Nirgal running away from the dark, evil structure. They were running away from the huge, dark building not to seek a better vantage from which to admire the church, they were running away from something that frightened them in a way they would not have believed was possible if it were not churning away in their guts as they turned tail and ran, and they happened to go in the same direction as Nirgal in pursuit of a more defensible position.

To get an idea of what they were feeling, imagine you’ve just stepped intentionally into Hell, the flaming furnace, the lake of fire, the pit of eternal damnation, filled to the brim and overflowing with every evil thing in creation that ever lived, plus all those evil beings who gave them the idea in the first place. Now imagine that an ancient-looking gothic cathedral was the place you’d considered more safe than Hell before stepping into Hell itself, and that the gothic cathedral in question, when held up as such against the raw, elemental, pervasive evil that permeated every square inch of Hell, appeared to be the more dark, evil, and malevolent of the two options. Hell, which threatens to combust the clothes right off your back in an instant but somehow staves off this destruction, that same Hell which represents the dumping ground of every cosmically evil noun that ever existed, seems like a welcoming hearth and home next to this dark church.

An idea occurred to the Gollum as he caught up with Nirgal on an elevated cluster of glowing-hot stones, and he muttered it under his breath, “Perhaps the church wasn’t transported here just to move us, but because it somehow deserves to be here on its own.”

“What was that?” Trevor asked the Gollum, but the Gollum just shook its head and smiled quietly to itself, and Trevor didn’t pursue the thought.

They all gathered on the slightly raised area that Nirgal was enjoying the view of the church from, and tried to take in their surroundings. “So this is Hell, eh?” They nodded all around. “Can any of you sense anyone out there? Not just with your mind, but visually or any other way?” They shook their heads and made dissenting noises back to the group. “What now?” The Gollum put its back to the church so it could stand in Nirgal’s line of sight and face him, had an expectant look on its face.

Trevor turned slowly to face it and said “I don’t know. I thought we’d be greeted immediately or find ourselves plunged into chaos, fear, and pain. Maybe both. But walking into an empty space, I did not expect.”

Nirgal spoke softly, not even taking his eyes off the church to see whether he spoke the truth until after he’d said it, saying “If this is Hell, where are all the damned souls? Shouldn’t it be crowded here?”

The Gollum nodded to Nirgal, whose eyes had flicked directly from the church to meet its eyes as he finished asking. “If Hell is finite and physical in space, then yes, it ought to be quite crowded, considering the number of dead who never met even a single religion’s guidelines for escaping it.” Trevor continued where the Gollum had stopped.

“But if Hell has at least one dimension which is not finite in nature, then it could only ever seem crowded if those in charge wanted it to. I have the feeling that there are many different layers of existence here, one overlapping another and another in a boundless succession so that a smallish space of, say, thirty-five thousand two hundred and ninety seven square miles, when given infinite latitude in a higher-order dimension, seems both vast and is actually infinite.”

Nirgal frowned at the Gollum that wore Trevor’s face, not turning around to frown at the original Trevor. “First of all, we haven’t studied higher-order dimensions yet, so I don’t know anything about them, and everything you’re saying is coming out gibberish to me. Second, since when is thirty-five thousand however many miles a small space?”

The Gollum responded, instead of Trevor. “Consider that the surface area of the Earth is somewhat larger than one hundred and eighty-three million square miles. Even if you remove the approximately three quarters of that which is covered by ocean, there are about forty-six million square miles of surface area above water on Earth.”

“Most of that has never been occupied by sapient beings, in all our history. It’s mostly empty. Life bunches up together. Did you know that nearly half of of all humans live within less than one hundred miles of an ocean?”

The Gollum continued speaking, almost ignoring Trevor’s questionable statistic, aware that it was more like 120 miles for the first 50%. “Regardless of population density, the surface area above water on Earth right now is almost one thousand three hundred times as spacious as the thirty-five thousand two hundred and ninety-seven square miles Trevor suggested. Quite small, indeed.”

“I suppose it’s just a matter of perspective, but ... if we were in a land that large, could we see the edges of it from the middle, or would it stretch beyond the horizon?”

“The horizon is an artificial barrier created by the curvature of the surface you’re viewing. If Hell’s thirty-five thousand plus square miles were wrapped around a sphere and you stood on it... you’re what, about six feet tall?”

“I had a growth spurt.”

“But six feet, right?”

“A little over that.”

“Fine, if you were standing up on this supposed sphere with a surface area of thirty-five thousand two hundred and ninety-seven square miles at a height of six feet, you’d probably only be able to see about ... a third of a mile, maybe eighteen hundred feet before the rest was obscured by Hell’s curvature.”

“A third of a mile? That sounds way too small.”

Trevor cut in to answer, “No, I think he’s right... I mean, I’m not the best at running square roots in my head, but a sphere that small, yeah. About a third of a mile.”

“Well what is it on Earth? How far am I used to seeing?”

“About three miles at sea level. That’s roughly ... eight and two thirds times farther.”

“Really only three miles?”

“It varies all over the planet, depending on local features, altitude, irregularities in the curvature of the Earth, and perhaps most troublesome of all is pollution. If the air is clear, you can see farther than if it’s dirty. All my math is based on relatively clear air.”

“Does Hell even have air?”

“We’ll assume it does, since we’re all in Hell now, and we’re all breathing.” The Gollum paused, pointing out towards the edge of where the yellow-orange glow of the sky met the crags and crannies and jutting outcropping land features. “Also, look across there, straight out. Do you see the way everything ripples and waves in your vision?” Nirgal nodded, seeing the distortion as if for the first time. “That’s an effect in the air caused by the heat rising off the surface of Hell. The light gets distorted by the currents of hot air, you see?”

“Yeah, alright, air. What else would I be breathing? But that distortion, would it have the same effect as pollution on our ability to see farther?” Nirgal seemed to be beginning to grasp all these concepts in a meaningful way at last.

“That’s definitely a possibility, and it relates to my next question. How far do you suppose you can see, in any direction from where we are now?”

“At least as far as I can on Earth. Maybe farther.”

Jurrin spoke up, briefly adding his two cents to the discussion instead of just standing silent as they babbled nonsense. “A lot further. I’d guess at least twice as far.”

Trevor agreed, and the Gollum continued the discussion, “So if you know you can see at least three miles, and perhaps as far as six or more, and if we assume for a moment that the surface area of Hell is the thirty-five thousand two hundred and ninety-seven square miles we’ve been using in all our examples, would you say Hell, like Earth, is a spheroid shape?”

“If that surface area is correct, no. It couldn’t be. Plus...” Nirgal was looking across the edge of the horizon from left to right and back again, examining it carefully before he spoke, “Plus, I don’t see any curvature. I’ve been places near as wide and flat as this one on Earth, and you can see the curvature at the horizon. Well,” Nirgal laughed nervously, correcting himself