Sweet Pandemonium

Chapter 8

Fifty hideous floors later, the three of them approached a far corner in one of Dawaar’s high outcrops, and a thick iron door with no handle. Hanan pressed his hand against it, and the door melted away.


“Nice security measure for your office,” Maria acknowledged.


“Thank you, though it’s mostly for the prisoner I keep here.” Behind the door was a hall that curved left and right, fashioned from headstones caked in graffiti. Glass sconces protruded from them, letting off a strange, pale light. A hunched figure in black body armor fiddled with the tremendous gun in its hand. It turned at the noise of their footsteps, it’s mottled grey skin stretched tightly across a vaguely human skull, its outsize teeth fought for space in a lipless mouth. It stepped towards them, a strange assault rifle held loosely in hand. “Woah buddy,” Maria stepped back, clearly unable to say much else.


“All my personal guard are ghuls,” Hanan assured as the creature straightened up with a discomforted wheeze and snapped into a salute. Hanan returned it and waved the two along to a second room farther down the hall. “I’m fond of the creatures, and their taste in interior design. Macabre, but informal.”


Maria failed to conceal a smile as they approached a second door in the opposite wall. “I get you... I feel like I’m in a ghoul-lag.”


Hanan gave her a deadpan stare for more than a few seconds before unlocking the second door with a touch. Maria looked in and gave a breathless shriek.


There was a man suspended over a great fire in Hanan’s boiler-room like office. His only clothing was an iron mask that smoked slightly with the heat, the metal taking the shape of a warped, grinning demon. His skin cracked and sizzled as his fingers and toes curled and twisted, but his skin seemed to stitch together as fast as it split apart, making his body a shifting topography of pink blisters and charred flesh. His chains were attached to the sides of a great chute over his head, where the smoke billowed up and out through the chimney above. Attendants dressed as janitors fueled the fire with shovels full of books, as fresh books trickled down from chutes against the wall into troughs below. The burning man’s head shifted up, the black holes in his mask made eye contact with Ire. She held it until she was almost knocked aside by a horrified Maria.


The tourist rushed to one trough full of books and began pulling them out. “This is Plato,” she stammered.


“So what if it is?” A stocky, white-bearded attendant pushed past her and filled his shovel with books. “Herodotus, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristotle will all burn alongside it.”


“How could you?”


“It hardly makes any difference,” the man snapped as he yanked the book away. “What are any of us but shadows on the wall? Apply light to us, and we vanish.” Maria stared at the old man as he threw the book into his shovel and stomped back to his work.


“...Plato?”


The man snorted, but said nothing else. “You should leave them alone, Maria,” Ire suggested. But now Maria gawked at all the men who labored to build the fire around the chained man. Kant, Marx, Rousseau, Freud, Voltaire, even Isaac Newton labored in filthy brown jumpsuits to feed their life’s work onto the crackling bonfire.


“Why?” Maria asked loudly to everyone at once.


“Shut up and stay away from me,” Nietzsche barked as he stormed to the trough next to Plato’s to grab a fresh load. The others offered nothing but silence.


“Leave them to their work,” Hanan insisted firmly as he went to his small metal desk in the corner, tucked in between spare filing cabinets and a stained fridge. He winced as he sat in a clearly uncomfortable swivel chair and woke his computer up with a nudge of the wireless mouse. Unlike the rest of his shabby office, the computer screen was sleek and thin.


Maria would not look away from the laboring geniuses even as she maneuvered herself into a chair. “Why are they here?”


“No one knows why anyone is here,” Ire answered as she sat down in her own chair and pulled her phone out again. “Some people ‘know’ just because they’ve done awful shit and it’s obvious. But for everyone of them, there’s a million plumbers, dentists, and soccer moms who know fuck all. No big voice in the sky tells us anything before we’re chucked down here like the garbage of humanity. Shit,” Ire gestured to the men of science and philosophy, “at least these guys are celebrities. Do research and draw your own conclusions.”


Maria looked up to the man suspended over the fire. “Is he a celebrity?”


Hanan snorted a laugh as he went to a cabinet and pulled out an electric kettle. “Do you want to tell her Ire, or shall I?” Ire crossed her arms and bit at a thumbnail, but said nothing. “You’re the one who caught him, you should be the one to tell the story.”


“You caught him? Does that make you a… Fang-thing?”


“I’m not Fangvaktare,” Ire averted her eyes. “Let’s just say I’m freelance.”


“Very well, I’ll tell her.” Hanan began to fill his electric kettle from a dirty sink stashed behind a cupboard. “He goes by the name ‘Praeceptor.’ A little over a century ago, he launched a rebellion against the Lord President of Dis, one of the most powerful mortals down here at the time. He failed and was captured by one of the Lord President’s best.”


Ire crossed both her legs and arms. “I just said I’m freelance.”


“Not at the time, you weren’t.”


“I’ve never heard of a Praeceptor,” Maria mused.


Hanan shrugged and turned the water off. “That alias is all we have to go on. Our best torturers could get nothing else out of him after a century of trying. We can’t even get the mask off - it resets with him. Only a powerful demon could curse someone in such a way, but none have ever claimed responsibility. The current Lord President covers his rent now, in case he ever thinks of a repeat performance. So we have demons as chains renewing him as he burns, so he’ll never reset.”


Maria scratched her head as Hanan plugged in his kettle. “You keep saying ‘reset.’ What does that mean?”


Ire uncrossed her limbs and leaned forward in her chair. “Remember what I said about death here? A soul is just tossed back into the ether between Circles, a demon grabs them and takes them to a new Circle. Since it doesn’t kill you more than you are, we don’t call it death. We call it—”


“Ire.” Hanan interrupted just loudly enough to be heard over Praeceptor’s pyre. He glanced meaningfully down to where his hand rested on the cabinet handle. The little door rustled and shuddered, as though something within were trying to get out.


Maria began to ask about it, but Ire hushed her with a raised finger as she and Hanan drew blades. Maria slowly stood and tugged at her shirt, dripping with sweat as she crouched on the other side of Hanan’s desk.


The colonel yanked the drawer open. A grey Failure squealed at them with an all too human mouth as chitinous legs scuttled sideways. Both Ire and Hanan stabbed it through, and its many legs kicked as it gurgled. Hanan pulled his blade out as Ire lifted the creature from the drawer. Maria looked up from behind the desk. Ire couldn’t resist. “Catch.” She flipped the creature, still in its death throws, at Maria’s head.


Maria shrieked and ducked as the ashen creature bounced across the floor, leaving small stains in a line. “What is wrong with you?” Hanan chided as he stormed past her.


“C’mon, that was a little funny!” Ire giggled. “Admit it.”


“Jesus, what is that?” Maria pressed against the desk as the thing wobbled on its hard shelled back, its many legs kicking up towards the ceiling.


“It is called a Failure,” Hanan griped. “And I don’t want to talk about it.”


“If you’re going to throw it at my face, you can at least tell me what it is!”


Ire was still chuckling as she wiped her dagger. “No, we should ease you into the whole ‘being in Hell’ thing. Baby steps, right Hanan?”


“It’s a wonder that I can stand you. Tea, anyone?”


“I’d love some!” Maria said excitedly.


Ire held a hand out in caution. “Heads-up: Everything here tastes like old cheese and burnt ass. You’ll get used to it, but it takes time.”


The still-living tourist flashed a toothy smile in response. “That’s all right. I eat just about anything. That hardtack wasn’t too bad once I could actually bite it. ” She glanced sideways and pointed at Praeceptor, dangling over the great book fire. “It is really hot in here. Um… could someone turn that down?”


Hanan bellowed with laughter for the second time that day. “You’re hilarious. Where did Terry find you?”


“I didn’t mean that as a… why do you have such a dangerous criminal over a book fire in your office?”


Hanan shrugged. “I like the smell.”


Just as he said this, the lights in the room went black. The soft ambient sound of motors cut out, leaving only the crackling of the bonfire. Hanan looked almost cross-eyed as he stared up at the ceiling. Some spare emergency lights came on. Maria glanced at them both. “...is this normal?”


“No, it’s not.” Hanan pulled out his phone and stared at it, jaw working in anger. “My phone is still running updates.”


Ire rolled her eyes. “You have a radio, right?”


“One I loath using. No one told you to stop!” Hanan yelled at the philosophers, who stared about at each other. The slow stream of books had halted, and they shifted their shovels from hand to hand. He pulled a small black radio from his belt and pressed a button. “Captain, this is Hanan. Do you copy?”


A small burst of static. “Yes Colonel?”


“Why are we running on the backup generator?”


“I was just trying to figure that out. I’ll call—” the distant whump of a bomb going off coincided with a burst of static from the radio. The emergency lights went out, leaving only the fire for illumination. “Captain? Captain!” Hanan swore loudly and tried two more officers in rapid succession, but each one only reached static. “Something is jamming all frequencies.”


The flickering book fire etched odd colors into Ire’s sight. “All of this while your phone is running updates?”


“It is terribly suspicious,” Hanan agreed, “but what demon would dare?” As he spoke, Nietzsche crept closer, brandishing his shovel.


Ire’s snapped her gun out of it’s concealed pouch and pointed it at the philosopher. “Don’t even think about it, you fucking walrus.”


Nietzsche’s mustache bristled, but he lowered the shovel.


“Is this a thing only demons could do?” Maria ventured, looking very out of her depth, but willing to do anything to help. “There’s a goddess named Ishtar, so maybe another god could pull it off. Or a wizard or something!”


“I’m far too modest for titles like that,” a reedy voice declared only a few paces away. They had been so preoccupied with Nietzsche, that they hadn’t noticed Freud reveal a hefty revolver. “Now, my dear Colonel, do me the favor of cutting Praeceptor down. If you so much as whisper for your guard, I’ll reset you to Satan only knows where.”


Ire spun around, aware that the other men were forming a ring. Freud was the only one with a gun, but the shovels were dense steel, and could do plenty of damage on their own. Still, none of them broke rank.  “This is almost cute. Seven dusty old windbags versus the three biggest badasses in all of Hell.”


Maria put on what was likely supposed to be a war face, but more closely resembled constipation. “Yeah!”


“You’re not helping…” Ire muttered.


“Our existence has been far too quiet.” Nietzsche’s outline was hunched and black against the bonfire. “We rot to nothing in want of struggle.”


“Time for a bit of revolution,” Marx chuckled. As he said this, Hanan slowly eased his hands behind his back.


“Keep your hands where I can see them,” Freud commanded.


“What if we say no?” Hanan asked. “What hope do you have then?”


“If my timing is correct, the only hope I need should be arriving… now.”


There was a great boom that knocked everyone off their feet, as a massive crater opened up below the pile of burning books.