The Business of Perdition

Chapter 3: The Demimonde

I spent that evening in my office, laboring to accommodate Barbara's many requirements. The peculiar specifics taunted me with each of her many requirements of the proper methods to divine that which remained out of reach. She instructed me where to place chairs, tables, candles, offerings, and a hundred other minute details that required preparation. I was eager to begin the ritual despite my unfamiliarity with such manual labor. My enthusiasm warmed my icy guest as well as my own internal temperature and it was not long before I shed my garments down to my linen shirt.

Barbara, though markedly tight-lipped, grew loquacious as she continuously ordered each rearrangement to my office. Perhaps it was my youthful exuberance or the fact she could direct someone far above her on the societal ladder, but her gruff and stern demeanor withered with each moment she spent as my guest.

"There, that will do. This will need a cloth over it," she stepped closer to the table.

I had drug it away from the corner of the room. It was round and not nearly as large as the table in the common room, but its unapologetic heaviness winded me as I slid it to a more accommodating area of my workroom. My shirt stuck to my sweaty back as though I were coated in honey as I wiped my brow. I could only offer a nod as I struggled to find my breath. It was exhilarating to work my body like the engine it was meant to be in the beginning of time despite my waning stamina, brutish as it was.

Barbara on the other hand, was more akin to a feather floating upon a calm stream. She was direct, ever moving forward with elegant consistence, never veering from the course which the stream took her. She was mesmerizing to watch as she settled into her craft.

She ran her pale, bony fingers along the gaps between the wood of the table. The peculiar intimacy of it hypnotized me, like a lover getting to know the flesh of their partner. Somewhere within I'd wondered if she were learning the story of each plank of wood; which forest it had once called home, and of the birds in its branches before it fell. Silent and serious she was, and methodical as charting a sea course, but every moment she spent in preparation, lightened her. The ancient husk of an aged woman withered away to one who wore time as a mantle.

"That mirror there, that will need to come down." She pointed toward the west wall of the room.

A tall, slender mirror hung there so as I might assess myself before whichever business meeting required a formal appearance.

"Where should I put it?" My voice was hoarse and thin, hardly able to formulate sentences from the exertion of pulling it down.

She shook her head. "Away from here, mirrors do more than show reflections, Jeremiah. We do not want observers, human or otherwise."

"Yes, ma'am." The thought shocked my tired muscles into attention. It was all I could do to not drop the mirror there on the floor. To know that my reflection may not have been my own was startling, if not perhaps a bit superstitious. As such, I obeyed and hauled it over to the wardrobe at the opposite wall.

"No. No, that will not do, Jeremiah. This needs to be away from here. Downstairs or further."

I did not argue, despite the thought of stairs in my present state. I wouldn't dare challenge one who knew these arts like they were their native language. I was not willing to mar her requirements with missteps and laziness, tedious as they were.

"And Jeremiah, be careful. It's a long way down."

'Twas a strange thing to say. A count of eighteen steps was all between the upstairs and down. I hadn't considered that to be a long way down,but she was old after all. Perhaps her twenty was a much greater number than mine. Though a familiar and well-trod path, the stairs were now wholly alien to my aching legs. Each step was the same but somehow different, as though one riser was higher or lower than the last. Each tread seemed a different breadth and angle; sometimes flat and sometimes sloping down or up. The uncertainty of each step burned my ankles and calves as every footstep became less and less like the stairs I had known so well. Although I had walked down them countless times, this particular trip was somehow new to me. One step after the other, it went on and on as though I had descended into the very pits of the Earth. Inches turned to yards as I delved down into a chasm which swallowed what light there was from above.

Black tendrils of shadow wormed about up the walls like a thin smoke, eagerly piercing the dim glow that warmed what little visibility remained. Beyond, a great emptiness; a fissure somewhere in the space 'twixt upstairs and downstairs that I'd somehow entered. It was quiet. Not peaceful or serene, but rather a heavy, intangible mass of silence that was like plunging into the sea. It swallowed me and all other noises that had been there from above. The tapping of rain, the occasional chatter outside my office from passersby, the wailing of the angry wind. All of it failed against the chasm.

Though in that schism I should have been compelled to go back up those strange and unfamiliar stairs, I couldn't. I looked back, and those same old and unremarkable steps to my upstairs office hung above me at great distance and withdrew further away with each moment. Was I falling away from the reality I had been so firmly rooted? I could not tell if it were that or merely a fever dream; a lapse in my own self, somewhere in the back of my mind. It couldn't be that. Everything felt too opaque; too solid to be the constructs of a frantic imagination. No. This was a space between. An otherness. A wholly different place woven into the threads of reality's fabric. Somehow, a comfortable familiarity hung like a memory that dangled just out of reach. An obscure awareness compelled me to continue reminding me of places I perhaps visited as a babe, or only in dreams.

One foot after the other, I made my way through the enshrouding depths, and through the hungering dark until finally, I found level ground. I looked back to see the doorway to my office hung above like a sun in a black, boundless, and starless sky. The mirror, once an anvil, pulling and fighting against my grip, was little more than a feather now. Perhaps it was a different thread of laws and principles in this place that had leeched away the mass of it, of that I was not certain, but the burning in my arms and legs shrunk and fell away. The soreness of my labors vanished to light and tender embraces of vigor. Small pinpricks without pain, like the tingle of icy waters on a hot afternoon. The further I pressed through the void, the more the strange panacea caressed my tired limbs until I no longer felt the weight of anything, even myself.

A hollow and lifeless light swelled just beyond, wherein that blanket of heavy silence, distant winds wailed across an expanse I could not see. Snakes of a frigid wind slithered through the unseen corridor that I walked. They licked and slithered about my limbs like vines wrapping around tree branches. The expanse cleared in my vision as the light at the end of the fissure drew closer, until I'd come to the end.

A grand stretch of fields rolled along like gentle waves on the sea before me, blanketed by a peculiar vegetation that rustled through the wind. Pale, ghostly grass rolled and undulated like ripples formed when a stone drops into a pond. It bounded across gentle hills with a pallid gleam like the stifled rays of a full moon behind a veil of thin clouds. It was an ocean of lush, otherworldly plant life that met against the horizon of a deep crimson heaven. Silhouettes of distant structures, taller than any tower in London, loomed against the dark backdrop of the sanguine sky. Darkened further in their shadowy perch on the horizon by what I could only describe as a sun. It oppressed the distant city, hanging low above the spires, embracing them in a pallid, still light. A corona of darkness wisped around its teardrop form like smoke behind the face of a clock.

Weak cries interrupted my bewilderment at the landscape before me. It wasn't a sobbing or anguish, but the sounds of pain. They echoed through a grove of thick, dark trees off to my right. It was then I'd remembered the mirror I'd so ponderously carried all this time, still hanging there in my grip, weightless and thin. It would have been a cumbersome thing to haul through rows of trees despite its lack of mass. Thus, I laid it down in that translucent, white grass.

My reflection looked back at me as though I stared into water. The inverted, familiar visage stood over me like I was an insect beneath my own feet. It was still me, I'd thought, looking back at myself, but the sky above wasn't the deep crimson that hung in the heavens. It was the smoky white of the ceiling of my office. As peculiar and intriguing as it was, another cry interrupted my gaze into the puzzling reflection. It was light, airy, and soft. A feminine cry.

I darted off toward the shadowy grove despite any reasoning or trepidation that I may have felt in the world behind me. The cries grew to a crescendo of pain and anger like that of a cornered and injured feline. They were desperate and worried, but filled with ire. I lumbered through low supple and heavy hanging branches that dangled like ropes. The unnatural boughs swayed and swung like strings blowing in the wind. Their bark wasn't a coarse and firm skin like the trees I knew, but rather soft and leathery and more like the scales of a reptile.

"Please. Help me." A voice called out from the shadows in the trees. I knew not whether it was to me, or to whatever heavenly creator may have ruled this place in the fissure.

Harder and harder I pressed through a thicket of leathery, snakelike saplings into shadows strewn about beneath the carpet of dense leaves above. I had no reason to feel the urgency I felt, but the desperation in the cries sparked alight some inner flame that urged me to find whoever bleated for help. Lashes stung my face and hands as thin sticks snapped and whipped at me from my belligerent rush through the dense and jagged undergrowth. It resisted every step like the current of a river, yet still I pressed through.

A jumble of tattered robes and fabrics sprawled in a pile atop a delicate, near lifeless creature. She leaned against the leathery flesh of a large tree, panting and fighting against involuntary coughs. Her hands pressed firm against a wound in her thigh that despite her enfeebled effort could not staunch the persistent flow of blood. All about her, bits and pieces of some great bird lay scattered about on the forest floor. White feathers stuck to splatters of blood all around her and flecked her dark robes and bare pale skin like ashes against embers.

Her eyes gleamed like emeralds beneath the dark cowl of her cloak. They shimmered 'twixt breaks in the shadows as she stared up at me, wincing and holding back waves of pain.

"You came." Her voice lost the pleading futility, melting away like snow in early spring, as she gently leaned her head against the tree. "Thank God you came."

Something in her eyes and her tone was so familiar, like the cordialities between friendly acquaintances. I hadn't realized it, but I'd tore away the sleeves of my shirt as I looked down at the ghastly wound in her leg. I was no doctor, but the flow of blood was steady enough to warrant an immediate need for attention.

"I don't know what you mean," I said, as I knelt down before her.

"We've been calling to you, Jeremiah." She whimpered. "We've been calling to you for so long."

She knew me. This familiar stranger, in a place between, somehow knew me. The imploring desire to help her overwhelmed the shock of revelation that somehow, I was supposed to be there, strange as it was. I balled one sleeve and lifted her hands away from the wound. It was a vicious thing. Not gaping, but thin and the length of my hand. Straight as a razor, and every bit as clean in its division of flesh and fabric. I pressed the balled sleeve against it and her soft voice sharpened as she yelped. Fire burned in her flesh at the wound and around it like coals that had burnt out. Her blood soaked the fabric and wetted my palm before I could pull it away. She replaced her hands over the wound as her delicate, fearful face twisted and winced.

"They're coming back, Jeremiah. You're not safe here."

"Who is coming back?" I asked as I slid the other sleeve beneath her thigh and wrapped it 'round, twisting it through itself and knotting as firm and tight as I could over the balled up red of the makeshift packing.

"The Ygg." She pushed further back against the tree. Her wounded leg drug behind like a dead animal, gouging into the blood-soaked leaves where she laid. Her right hand fumbled and raked through the leaves of the forest floor, blindly patting the ground beside her, searching in the shadows.

The name was razors against the back of my neck. The utterance of the word seemed to drive back even the encroaching shadows of the grove. The Ygg. Whatever it meant was far from anything wholesome or welcoming, and sickened my heart when she'd said it.

She continued scraping at the leaves and dirt until her thin fingers curled around something buried beneath the leaves. Her emerald eyes darted about through the treetops as she freed a glimmering, curved blade from beneath its blood-soaked shroud. The frantic fluttering of wings above stirred her into an awareness that was altogether unsettling. The trees, the air, even the wind dwindled away at the sound of those wings as they drew closer. Her eyes narrowed and her grip tightened on the blade as she waved at me to hide.

Leaves rustled as whatever it was made its descent. I'd crept away opposite of where she propped herself, behind the trunk of another large, leathery tree. I hunkered low as it drew closer from above. Only peering out with barely one eye. An iciness took hold of my limbs, its wicked tendrils wrapped around slow and malevolent up my arms and legs. It was the nervous razors in my spine however that disturbed me most. There in that forest, in that world between worlds, fear wasn't something obscure, it had a breath; it had a soul, and it smelled old. It smelled ancient, like the scent a thousand discarded tomes, left to rot in the bowels of a forgotten catacomb. Earth, mold, and death. Not fresh death like that of a decaying corpse, but that of the embalmed, dry rotted husks confined to their coffins.

Its armored boots crashed into the dirt with an angry thud, and before me, I beheld the figure of something monstrous. Human, but not. A silhouette of a great man stood behind the cloak of two enormous, blazingly white wings, clutching the handle of a shimmering blade nearly as tall as me. As angelic as it may have been, it impaled my greatest fears with icy spikes and laid foundations into my heart of a malice and malevolence that would make the devil himself tremble.

It sniffed the air, over and over again as its head turned back and forth like a blind serpent, paying no mind to the injured, emerald-eyed woman before it.

"You have a smell I have not smelled in generations." Its voice was low and wasn't smooth like that of the air behind normal words, but rather a guttural rattling, as though its lungs were filled with liquid.

It turned 'round to face my tree. "The smell of a man, and the smell of spirits - the smell of something much older," it said as it took one menacing step after the other through broken shadows.

It stopped in a pale ray of light that broke through the boughs, and what I saw, sickened my heart. It was markedly humanoid, but the humanity was gone. It was naked of clothes aside from the armor on its hands and feet. The skin, however, was flayed away in places; pulled back revealing hot, wet flesh beneath that pulsed and rippled as it moved. Every inch of its flesh was manipulated in such a way, that its skin was anything but a skin, but like that of ornate robes. It was sliced away in strips, woven in and out of themselves like lattice. The gory vestment ran up its chest, through the rib bones, and pinned at its shoulders with gem studded nails. All that remained of the perception of humanity was its milky white eyes that sat sunken into a raw, red, skinless head. A painful, grotesque halo was the centerpiece of its macabre mutilation. A shimmering silver crescent sliced through the middle of its neck, its points nearly meeting at the apex a few inches above its head.

"There's no point in hiding behind that tree," it gurgled, "I know you're there. Come out and die while I offer the option of doing it quickly."

"Leave him be, or I will carve you like I did your companions," the woman shouted at it as she labored to stand.

She steadied herself against the tree, keeping weight off her injured leg, as she caressed the edge of her own gleaming blade. White feathers fell away from her robes and skin like snow, and I'd realized it wasn't bits and pieces of a bird. It was the remains of a Ygg. Though she was bleeding and markedly disadvantaged, she held about her, the threat of an army.

The Ygg turned round to face her, as its armored hands clinked and scraped against one another on the hilt of its sword. It looked around on the ground at the feathers and blood and growled. "Lilith, You traiterous whore! There will be nothing left of you for the devourers or the surgeons."

It steps shook the ground as it came upon her. Wings outstretched like an osprey diving into a lake, it leapt the many strides in one bound, forcing away a torrent of air and leaves in its wake. Steel rang and screamed against steel as their blades met. She did not buckle from the weight of the thing crashing upon her despite her injury. It backed away, removing its left hand from the grip of its sword before striking again. A lightning bolt of a thrust as it turned its stance sideways. She parried the blade away and drove her free hand into the side of its ribs. The Ygg stumbled back from the force but was upon her again. She'd returned its stumble with her own riposte, but the Ygg was faster. It swatted the thrust away and brought its full weight against her, slamming its body into her. The force was so hard the very tree she leaned against swayed and buckled as she sunk into its leathery bark. Branches swung and cracked away, swaying there like nooses in a breeze. She slid down the trunk, her breath taken from her as she choked for air. It straddled over her raising its blade for a downward cleave, but she drove the heel of her boot into its bare genitals.

It stumbled back as she continued to choke for her breath. Despite its demonic anatomy, its male genitalia held the same weaknesses of my own. It doubled over, gurgling and gripping its lower abdomen. Both of them were locked there, fighting for air. Her eyes met mine as she hauled in a deep, long breath and despite the fear, an imploring need to help her clawed at my nerves. I darted from behind the tree at the hunkered and stunned Ygg. I slammed all of my weight into its winged back, knocking it face down into the dirt, as she crawled atop it, driving her blade through the back of its head.

"Jermiah, get it's sword!" She fought against the frantic flailing of its wings.

The touch of its steel burned my hand as though I'd plunged it into fire. It rolled and coursed through my arm as I pulled the great sword up from the dirt. Razors of flames raked and dug into my muscles as I fought to keep hold of the blade.

"It's wings, Jermiah!" She drove her blade through its skull all the way to the hilt and crawled down to its flailing legs. They slid and thrashed in the dirt and leaves as she clutched its ankles.

A frenzy of white feathers exploded as it fought to free itself from the impalement and her grip. It gurgled and roared as it thrashed about, leaves and dirt sticking to its exposed wet flesh. The fire in my arm roared and screamed as I brought the blade down hard at the first wing. A spray of warm, noxious blood spattered my face as a bone cracked and the wing fell free to the ground.

The wailing it made was enough to bring down mountains and push away clouds in the sky as I struck a second time. Digging through flesh and bone as its other wing broke away into the dirt. Then, silence. Stillness. Interrupted only by the singing of steel as I dropped the fiery great sword into the dirt.

Its motionless, eviscerated body laid there like a slug in the rain, wet and sticky. Leaves stuck to its exposed flesh as she moved to its side and rolled it over. Its wing stumps dug into the dirt like fence posts as it rolled to its back.

The air, the trees, even the sky lowered oppressively upon the dead Ygg as broken light rays waned into a dimmer, colder gleam through the trees. Soft, wet sounds clicked and slid along the entirety of its corpse as threads of tissue bonded to one another like worms tangling around each other. Breaks in the skin sewed themselves shut and the grotesque mutilation from head to foot, unmade itself. It had a face. Eyelids, unblemished skin, and the rouge of a lively visage that clung to its cheeks as the only semblance of life drained away into a paleness of a fresh cadaver. Its hair sprouted from its scalp like grass, swerving this way and that as it grew to its shoulders. Radiant blonde it was, like freshly polished gold.

The man that laid there in the cold, bloody earth, was nothing of the thing he was. He was stoic, and austere, like a carving by a great sculptor. What sickened my heart before, had left me as I looked upon the man's lifeless body. Pangs of guilt, and sorrow washed through me as though what I had done was a terrible trespass.

She folded his hands over his chest, as she sat beside him on her knees. Glimmering tears fell from her eyes, as she lamented before him with her head low. They fell upon his cold flesh and rolled away, warming the skin beneath before disappearing in the bloody dirt. Why? Why was there sorrow for this thing that tried to kill us? I couldn't place it but for both of us, there was a hideous sinking of the soul to look upon the remarkable man that lay there naked and still.

She sobbed and wiped away the sorrow from her eyes and nose as she placed her fingertip against the blood-soaked bandage on her leg. She dipped it as though dipping a quill in an inkwell. A somber motion of her hand came over his chest as she traced sanguine lines on his bare skin.

"Whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence. If I ascend up into Heaven, thou art there."

The sobbing stutters in her voice gave way to a fiery conviction.

"If I make my bed in Hell, behold, thou art there," her voice trailed as she shut her eyes.


Her finger traced circles within circles only stopping to wet it once more with blood. The lines she inscribed were a delicate, mesmerizing dance. They tangled and bisected one another. With each new stroke of blood, the sorrow in her motions melted away, until her finger slowed and stopped at the last segment of her inscription. She looked up to the sky, and her hood fell backward. Her ghostly pale face warmed in the cold glow of the hollow light as a gentle tear caressed her cheek. Long black hair cascaded out like a waterfall of obsidian. She clasped her hands at her breast as she stared through the boughs into the red heavens above.

"Psalm 139," I said. I knew not why I had to recite the book and verse, but something within required closure. Perhaps it was the many years in the pews, chanting and reciting, it had become something of an instinct. Of that I could not tell, but upon its recital, waves of absolution warmed my heart.

"If only it were that simple, Jeremiah." Her gaze returned to the dead, wingless man on the ground and she leaned and kissed his forehead.

I was enthralled by the strange ritual. It was bitter, yet curiously beautiful. The light remains of color in his skin cascaded away to the pale corpse-white of the recently deceased. I'd thought it rather normal, but the rapid change from the pale to a dull gray and blue, and all the hues of decay and rot that might befall a dead man had come in moments. Lilith leaned back, and the cold white of her skin seemed somehow warmed. She stood without effort or the wincing of pain, before removing the bloodied bandages around her thigh. The wound was gone. Not healed. Gone as though it were never there at all. Other than the slice in her leggings and the bloodstains, no evidence of her injury remained. It was clear to me then. She had taken some essence from the dead man before her.

He continued to decay in front of us. Skin sunk through the bones, and eyes disintegrated to dust. All over, hundreds of years passed over him in seconds until all that remained was dirt and bone dust. What struck me, however, was her blood inscription still coursed through the pile of decay like she had just drawn it.

Haunting and mesmerizing it was. She had drawn letters on the outside between the rings, though it took me a moment, I soon was able to read the etching as it was meant to be read.

L.U.C.I.F.E.R.

"If only he were here, Jeremiah. Hardly any of them are here. God, Satan, Lucifer, Michael and all the others - all gone. The lords go without thrones." She lowered her head in silent lament.

"They are real?"

I couldn't believe such a thing, but then given all I had just witnessed, it seemed quite stupid of me to question any manner of reality, divine or not.

"Of course they are, Jeremiah! How do you think you're here in the first place?"

"Where is here?"

"Hell," she said. As she stepped closer to me. Her emerald eyes stared hard into mine as she clasped her soft hands on my shoulders.

"You're in Hell, Jeremiah. Thank God you made it." She smiled at me as though somehow I was a prodigal son, returning from some errant expedition through the unknowns.

"Is this my punishment for that business at Saint Paul's?" Now it seemed apparent that perhaps my great spectacle in church, my self-righteous apostasy was my own undoing. Here I was, delivered to eternity on the back of some old woman who was supposed to be the start of a new Genesis.

She shook her head, fighting back a snark giggle. "No. That is just coincidence, but I'm glad I found you there at the church."

Found me? When had she found me? All that was there was a crow. The crow.

"You were the-"

"Crow, yes. There were many of us searching for you." She pulled me into an embrace so tight I thought she might suffocate me as she spoke into my ear. "I'm glad it was me that found you."

Her dark hair tickled my cheeks. It was soft and enchanting, carried to my senses on the wings of lavendar and vanilla perfumes. The embrace warmed my soul, and there, in Hell of all places, I felt for the first time in my life, affection.

She pulled away. "There's so much you don't understand, but I'm not the one to tell you."

She pulled her cowl back over her head, and her haunting eyes were all I could see of her face. She turned toward the city on the horizon. Peals of bells rung in the distance like the chiming of a hundred churches. Highs, lows, lengths and breadths all different in their melody yet combining into the same enchanting chorus, like some great celebration.

"When Lucifer fell," she said, staring off into the distance, "he did not fall alone."