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Twilight World Volume 4 Issue 3
= TWILIGHT WORLD - Volume 4 Issue 3 (May 18th 1996) =========================
You can do anything with this magazine as long as it remains intact. All
stories in it are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or
character and similarity is coincidental.
This magazine is for free - get it as cheaply as possible. It is also
uncensored - ban any sites/servers/people that hinder freedom of speech.
Please refer to the end of this file for further information.
= LIST OF CONTENTS ==========================================================
EDITORIAL
by Richard Karsmakers
TRACKS
by Michaela Croe
THE SEVEN GATES OF HELL, OR, OBVIOUSLY INFLUENCED BY THE DEVIL TOO
by Richard Karsmakers
= EDITORIAL =================================================================
by Richard Karsmakers
It looks, unfortunately, very much like this might be the penultimate issue
of "Twilight World". I stand to lose Internet access in September, and for
now I can't afford a modem and Internet account outside the one at Utrecht
University, which was for free. That's problem number one, of course, for the
second problem is a lack of submissions. I've got one more submission and a
few stories left from the "Twilight World" mother magazine, "ST News", and
then there'll simply be no more stuff to fill this magazine with. I'd have
thought the supply of ready stories would last longer, but reader passivity
is a lot more persistent than I thought.
If you want to show that you think "Twilight World" is a nice, fresh,
unpretentious, easy read on the Internet, I'd like you to do me a favour. I'd
like all you budding writers to pop out of the woodwork and do some serious
writing. There's always space for another good story! I might lose email
access for a while until I actually have a job and can afford to buy the
necessary hardware and get a commercial email account. After that, "Twilight
World" may well continue, though likely on a less regular basis, depending
entirely on the amount of stories available.
Enough of all these negative vibes. We've got a real nice story by Michaela
Croe for this issue, originally planned for Volume 4 Issue 2 but postponed on
the author's request. You'll also find the most recent story I've written
myself, which is also, incidentally, the last story in the long-running
Cronos Warchild series. What with eMpTyV having had a "Warchild weekend",
that seemed to me reason enough to call it - or, rather, him - a day.
Please spread the word, and the file, and have fun reading!
Richard Karsmakers
(Editor)
= TRACKS ====================================================================
by Michaela Croe - napalm@labyrinth.net.au
Joey Graham was seven years old and had always loved trains. He spent hours
playing next to the train tracks which ran behind his parents' small house,
and was always getting into strife for it. His mother would scream and yell
at him to get off those damn rails. Joey hated it when his mother used those
bad words at him.
He didn't often step onto the rails themselves, anyway - he kept for the
most part to the gravelly edges of the tracks, where the best stones could be
collected, and he could play 'jungle' in the weeds overhanging the trainline.
Today was Sunday, his favourite play day, and he was busily playing army
commander when the whispers came. Joey stopped, his right hand clutching a
stone, poised ready to throw it at the 'enemy' on the other side of the
rails. He listened, but heard nothing. Shrugging, he threw the stone and
yelled heartily, running down a few feet to collect more projectiles.
Suddenly the noise came again - a low murmur, rising up from the tracks a few
metres further down and overcome with curiosity, the boy dropped the stones
and slowly approached the strange sound. The whispers became louder, and Joey
could just make out the sound of his own name. "Hello?" he asked
tentatively, kneeling down to get closer to the sound. At his voice the
whispers abruptly stopped, and Joey put his ear to the gravel between the
sleepers, straining to hear, his mind full of images of fairies and gremlins
he'd heard about at school, the things his mother told him were 'rubbish'.
The sounds of the traffic on the nearby road, a dog barking and the
twittering of the birds seemed to fade as Joey concentrated on listening for
the whispers. They came again, low and soothing, a mixture of children and
adults, persuasive and friendly, and he lay down on the tracks, stretching
out to get his ear as close to the ground as he could. The little boy's
concentration was broken by the sound of his mother's voice, swearing at him
to get off the tracks this minute, and get home. His head jerked up, and he
rubbed the side of it, blinking in the light. The sounds of the birds and
traffic flooded back, and he wondered why everything was so loud, so bright!
His mother called out to him again, and Joey ran back down to the broken-
down fence which separated his backyard and the train tracks, and climbed
over. Janet Martin watched the little boy play on the tracks from her seat on
the train station. She smiled at his antics despite the unease she felt at
the possible danger he was in. She was puzzled by his interest in one spot on
the ground, in between the tracks, where he remained motionless, listening to
the ground, for several minutes. The boy's wavy blond hair reminded her of
her own son. David had been her only child, and was ten when he died. He'd
been playing, much like this boy had, on these very same tracks when he was
struck and killed by an express train. The grief proved too much of a strain,
and Janet's husband Peter left a few months after their son's death. Janet
applied for a job at a local brewery, working night-shift, leaving late at
night and arriving home just after dawn. It was difficult, physically
demanding work, and very different to being a house wife, but the busier she
kept herself the less she thought about David. Janet didn't think of Joey
again that day as she went to the market to pick up the weekly groceries. Her
day was uneventful, and she returned to the small flat, ate and retired for
the night.
David looked up at her and smiled. Janet could see the gentle blue pools of
his eyes glinting in the bright sunlight as he waved to her. She screamed at
him to come to her, but no sound escaped her lips. Her son waved back at her,
and pointed to the ground. He shouted something about people under the ground
- and then the train came. It hurtled past in front of her eyes, and suddenly
Janet could no longer see her son. The roar of the train was ear-splitting
and she screamed again, covering her ears with her hands. As suddenly as it
arrived, the train disappeared, taking its terrifying noise with it. Silence
fell across the tracks, and she moved forward, afraid to look but unable to
stop herself. The gravel was stained black with her son's blood, and a few
tiny pieces of flesh and fabric were scattered on the ground. Her eyes fixed
to the earth, Janet followed the tracks and the trail of gore, until she came
across her son's tiny arm, which had been pulled from its socket by the
impact of the train.
To Janet it seemed that it still held its pose in an obscene wave, and next
to it was a large pool of blood. As she watched, the pool slowly drained into
the gravel, but didn't seep out into the surrounding ground, instead it
seemed to pour deep into the earth under the train tracks. Janet turned, and
was about to walk away, when a whisper from behind caught her attention. She
turned back in time to see a pale hand appear from beneath the tracks,
pushing gravel aside as it strained upwards. It took hold of her son's
severed arm, and Janet woke in a cold sweat, shivering with fear. She'd
suffered from nightmares for almost a year after David's death, and had
thought that they'd finally stopped. Seeing the little boy on the tracks that
morning had triggered her grief again, and she lay for many hours, hugging
herself and crying quiet, painful tears. If only Peter had stayed - at least
they could have dealt with the grief together. Janet was a strong woman, but
losing both a son and a husband had taken their inevitable toll on her,
physically and emotionally. She'd lost a considerable amount of weight and
her previously lustrous and thick blond hair now lay limp and straggly down
her back.
The next night, exhausted from lack of sleep, Janet travelled to work. She
dozed for several minutes, when she was suddenly jerked awake by a noise. It
had sounded just like David's voice - but that was ridiculous, she scolded
herself. She shook her head, and put it down to an echo of the nightmare
she'd suffered the day before. The train reached its destination and Janet
stepped out into the crowd of other late-night commuters and shift workers.
She shuffled up to the bored ticket collector and was about to give him her
ticket, when the whispers came again. Startled, she whipped round, to see
only a sea of puzzled faces waiting for her to pass through the turnstile.
Confused and embarrassed, she turned back to the ticket collector, gave him
her ticket and rushed off the platform.
During that night, Janet was haunted again by the whispers and the vision of
her son. While eating her lunch, she drifted off into a daydream about him.
David was standing on the railway tracks, waving to her again. She screamed
for him to run to her, as she had done in the nightmare, and this time he
heard her, and ran to her side just before the train rushed past. She hugged
him tightly, and smiled to herself.
"Mummy?"
"Yes, David?" she replied, opening her eyes to find herself once more in the
empty lunchroom. She stared down at her sandwich, trembling, her appetite
gone. Why was this happening? Her son's voice had sounded so lifelike, and so
close. Had she fallen asleep? Distracted and upset, she went back to work,
but couldn't get the sound of David's voice out of her mind.
The whispers and nightmares became much more frequent over the following
week. Janet stopped eating almost completely, and couldn't sleep for more
than two or three hours each night. Her nervous and unpredictable behaviour
began to disturb her workmates, and after several complaints and comments her
foreman was forced to tell her to take a few days off. Janet didn't
understand what was happening, and protested, claiming that a good night's
sleep would be enough to set her to rights again. She finished the shift, and
visited her local doctor. He looked at her for a full minute after she
finished telling him about the hallucinations and nightmares, and silently
began to write out a prescription. The tranquillisers were strong, and she
took one as soon as she returned home, and slept for nearly twelve hours.
The next few days were uneventful, as Janet pottered around the flat,
catching up on house work and letter writing. She went for long walks and
spent many hours napping. On that weekend, however, the whispers returned.
She was watching television in the evening when they came, a constant murmur
under the inane babble of the TV show. She curled up on the couch, her hands
over her ears, shaking her head to try to make them go away, but they crept
inside, and she began to cry. Eventually they subsided, and she took another
tranquilliser, but to no avail. The whispers returned later that night, and
this time she understood snatches of what they were saying. The voices were
telling her to go back to the trainline, to join her son and Janet finally
fell asleep, deciding that the next day she would go back to the tracks.
Sunday was a warm, sunny day, and Janet enjoyed her walk to the tracks. She
half expected to see the child she'd watched the previous weekend playing
games beside the rails again, but the area was deserted. She stared down at
the shiny steel lines, and the cracked wooden sleepers between them,
remembering the blood and gore from the nightmare to appear before her eyes.
She checked up and down the line for trains, and stepped between the rails.
She thought about her son, his smiling face and blond hair, as if trying to
conjure up his ghost. Janet waited for the whispers to start, but they
didn't. She waited for almost half an hour, pacing up and down the tracks.
Finally she gave up, and turned to leave when the whispers started up again,
a low murmur rising from beneath the tracks. Janet turned back, knelt down,
and put her ear to the ground. She could hear her son calling her, along with
a mixture of other voices, both adult and child, and listened there,
motionless for several minutes. She was so engrossed in the voices that she
didn't hear the express train approaching. The driver, unable to stop in
time, blew the train's horn several times in a desperate attempt to alert the
form that was hunched in the middle of the tracks. Janet was killed
instantly, her body shattered by the impact.
*****
The people under the ground were talking to Joey Graham again. He loved to
sit on the tracks and listen to them chatter while he played in the gravel
between the sleepers. They told him wonderful things, and he became their
friend. They told him they were lonely, and wanted him to keep visiting them
every day. Janet held David's hand as they whispered up to the small boy
sitting on the tracks above their heads. She was finally with her boy, and
with others like herself. They all lived under the train lines, and coaxed
people from the upper world to join them with their whispers. Suddenly they
hushed, as the faint tremor of a train's approach reached them under the
earth. They clutched each other with excitement and expectation, as they
waited for their next friend to join them under the tracks.
= THE SEVEN GATES OF HELL, OR, OBVIOUSLY INFLUENCED BY THE DEVIL II =========
by Richard Karsmakers
I - PRELUDE TO MADNESS
The date with the dentist's assistant had been disastrous. At various
instances Cronos Warchild, mercenary annex hired gun, had put his foot in his
mouth and had happily blabbered on about his rather none-too-glorious past
and rather not very illustrious exploits, lethally boring the poor girl to
death. Somehow it had struck him as odd when the girl had found it necessary
to take her coat with her when basically all she'd said she went to do was
powder her nose.
He never saw her again. Feeling blue, he eventually left the restaurant when
the cleaners had assured him all to be found in the ladies' room was a piece
of purple dress caught on an open window, flapping forlornly in the chilly
night breeze.
Warchild felt wretched utterly as he walked home along a small river.
Willows drooped in it disconsoledly, fog flowing slowly off the pastures onto
the water. Autumn's decay made leaves rustle as he moved his feet through
them, not particularly caring where he went. Vegetative death was all around
him, and at times the sky would clear enough for the pale light of the moon
to peep through wanly. Although Cronos would never have admitted it, he was
feeling thoroughly melancholic.
It was in such a mood, feeling really sorry for himself as usual, that he
found himself reading the classifieds in a fairly recent newspaper. He didn't
know what he was looking for, nor whether he actually wanted to find anything
at all. Some of the adverts caused him to raise an eyebrow; a few even caused
him to raise both. He thought it was incredible to which lengths people would
go to get what they wanted. A particular advert, however, got his immediate
and virtually undivided attention.
"Bored?" it read, "Bored, strong and talented? Come and help my nephew to
become a man and make it in this world that he seems unable to cope with.
Martial skills are a prerequisite. Lavish reimbursement to be expected."
Small glowing stars lit up in Cronos' eyes. Had someone bothered to take a
much closer look at the little starlets that glowed in those virtually
measureless depths, he would have seen that in fact they were two almost
infinitely tiny dollar signs.
*****
The driveway looked almost like an interstate. Somewhere near the horizon
was a huge mansion, looming ponderously, speaking real estate's body language
of a man radiating vast wealth, almost right up to and including the Rolly
Royce key hanger. A gardener was mowing the lawn with a nail clipper. When
Cronos moved up the driveway to the house, the garderer looked up as if
apologising for daring to exist.
It took quite a while until he finally arrived at the mansion. Up close it
looked much huger than he had anticipated. The front had a lot of pillars.
Around it were sumptuous lawns that, he now saw, were kept by a veritable
army of gardeners. Someone had a lot of money here, and he guessed rightly
that this particular person was not among those wielding the nail clippers.
He stood before the huge doors, which hung on huge shiny hinges that looked
like - and most likely *were* - gold. The mercenary annex hired gun could not
help but hold his breath for a while, in awe. Beauty and ugliness can be
fascinating, and so can hard-core wealth such as was blatantly on display
right in front of him. Above the doors was a huge, ornately fashioned coat-
of-arms. It consisted of a spear, a ball and a dog, embraced by red branches.
Cronos made to knock on the door when it opened as if on its own accord.
Behind it stood, so Warchild thought, the human equivalent of a penguin. The
man wore tails and a bow tie, and looked as if, freshly pressed and starched,
he'd just been delivered back from the dry cleaner's.
"Sir?" the butler inquired politely.
"No," Warchild said, brushing the man aside, "Warchild. Cronos Warchild. I
am here to see Anthony Hepplewhite Saintjohn Thurny."
"*Sir* Anthony..."
Cronos made a nondescript sign with his left hand, leaving behind him the
butler and stepping inside something like a glossy 'Houses of the Rather
Absurdly Rich' magazine, quite oblivious of the highly polished marble, the
tasteful arches and the countless displays of exorbitantly expensive antiques
that would probably have made many other individuals cause to sweat and
salivate vehemently and simultaneously.
He stepped through a vast hall or two, followed by an embarrassed butler
mumbling humble apologies, before almost walking into a old man that he
rightly reckoned might be the lord of the mansion.
The man had a large, drooping nose and eyes that slanted down to the
outsides. What little hair he had left was combed back to attempt to cover a
huge bald patch, the long strands held in place by what seemed like litres of
gel and which were, in fact, litres of gel. More ample supplies of hair,
however, seemed to sprout forth from the man's nasal cavities.
Behind the man stood a boy no older than twenty. There was a certain family
resemblance, undeniably, although the youth still had more hair on his scalp
and rather less of it protruding from his nose.
Cronos raised an eyebrow and said, "He is your nephew?"
Anthony Hepplewhite Saintjohn Thurny - pardon, *Lord* Anthony Hepplewhite
Saintjohn Thurny - nodded.
"That is the young fellow in question, Mr. Warchild," he said. "Like I said
over the telephone, he has some difficulty coping with the world around him.
He needs to become a man, and methinks you seem pretty much up to the job."
Warchild looked at the boy. Maybe the rough working material was there, but
he'd first have to do some chiselling to get it exposed.
"What's your name, son?" Warchild asked.
"Trom," the boy said, stepping forward. There was a spark of defiance in the
lad's eyes, Cronos saw. No problem. It might, in fact, make this potentially
boring job a more interesting one. He loved children, and not necessarily for
breakfast, even.
"Would you mind stepping into the library with me, Mr. Warchild?" Lord
Anthony Hepplewhite Saintjohn Thurny beckoned, walking past Warchild and
vanishing through a pair of huge swinging doors into semi-darkness. Cronos
followed, to find himself entering a huge library with shelves upon shelves
of books, the upper tiers accessible only by means of a ladder that stood in
a corner. It looked like it hadn't been moved for quite a while, though.
"Mr. Warchild," Lord Anthony said, his voice down to slightly more than a
whisper, "I am worried about my nephew."
"Oh? Why?" Cronos said, "He seems like a strapping young fellow to me."
"Hmm," Lord Anthony hmm-ed, "Hmm. You see, I think something is wrong with
him. You see, we come from a lineage of fine army officers. Trom's father was
actually a general and most of his uncles are colonels at the least. You see,
the boy shows no desire to fight at all. He doesn't want to *command*, he
does not want to *rule*. He does not want to slay natives or something. He is
not the kind of boy that our Great Empire became a Great Empire with in the
first place. You see, on his eighteenth birthday I offered him a hundred
naked women. And you know what, Mr. Warchild?"
"No," Cronos said, after some genuine thought on the matter, "I don't
believe I do." He thought of the dental assistant. Hell, even *one* woman
would be just fine and dandy to him, let alone...
"You see, he simply didn't mind them," the man said, rolling his eyes, "He
never looked at them. Instead, he looked *past* them to discover if perhaps
they were some trick to hide from him some other gift, a chemistry set or
something. I recall he was pretty disappointed. The women, too."
"So what do you want me to do?" Cronos asked.
"I want you to expose him to discipline," Lord Anthony said firmly, looking
around for a handy table to hit with his fist and failing, "teach him the
ropes, nose on the grindstone kind of thing, train him into the martial arts,
get him in touch with the real dog-eat-dog world outside this estate. And
maybe, just *maybe*, get him in touch with, er, the fairer sex, too."
Cronos mulled it over for a while.
"Why me?" Warchild wondered, "And don't tell me Julie Andrews wasn't
available."
"Funny you should mention that..." Lord Anthony mused, trailing off
somewhere within his head and barely remembering to come back. "Er," he
recuperated, "because you have what it takes. Whatever it is, my instincts
tell me you have it. Knew it the very instant I heard your voice on the
telephone. And I always trust my instincts."
Warchild mulled that over for a while, too. "What's the pay?" he inquired.
"The reimbursement, you mean?"
"Yeah, whatever."
"What about having a go at a hundred of my aunts and nieces," an inanely
grinning Trom interrupted, who turned out to have entered the library not too
long after they had, "all of them sexually thwarted not too long ago?"
His uncle gave him a killer look. "No," Lord Anthony said, smiling with the
soft-hearted air of one who will soon be dealing out a good spanking, "I had
a more conventional reward in mind in the shape of a chest of Hepplewhite
Saintjohn Thurny family gold."
"What are we looking at here?" Cronos asked, the little dollar-shaped
starlets in his eyes swelling and throbbing.
"Well," Lord Anthony surmised, "I think it would be safe to assume that
we're looking at perpetual wealth here."
That sounded good.
"Deal," Cronos said, grinning. The boy looked up at him for no particular
reason. A bell tolled in the distance, but that was just coincidence.
*****
The sun had barely dared to show itself above the horizon the next day, when
Cronos and Trom were out already on one of the estate's sumptuous lawns,
preparing for a training session. Warchild had suspended a straw puppet by
means of a primitive gallows, and from somewhere within Lord Anthony's
impressive collection of World War I souvenirs he had retrieved a bajonetted
rifle.
"Today you're going to learn all you wanted to know about *gutting*," Cronos
said with some relish, "but were afraid to ask."
"Yuck," Trom said, with some feeling, "sounds disgusting." He prodded the
straw puppet tentatively with the rifle. It seemed heavy in his hand. He
wasn't sure he was going to like this training stuff that his uncle had
somehow thought necessary. Somehow, however, he felt like this might be a
part of him, or of something that used to be him.
The world began to go all floppy and swirly...he wanted to embrace it, be
one with it and its past, *his* past. He flopped to the ground, limply, and
for a while he dreamt...
The dog ran towards him, aiming to make of him a tasteful dinner of sorts.
He didn't know what to do; the only thing he could think of was grabbing his
playing ball and throwing it at the dog with all the force that was within
him. It entered the dog between its jaws and came out through its tail. Happy
for having accomplished this feat, he threw one of his warrior's fits. His
hair stood out like nails, and his eyes crossed gruesomely. He then picked up
a stick and threw it away as far as he could, then ran like the wind to catch
it himself.
The dog's master - who was now the owner of about 80 pounds of dead meat -
came outside. It was Culann, the smith. He was angry at the boy for having
killed his dog.
"I am sorry, sir Culann," he said, "but the dog attacked me and I didn't
know what else to do. But if you'll let me, I will be your guard dog until I
have made enough money to buy you a new one."
"You OK, son?" Cronos asked, slapping Trom's face, "It seems you had some
kind of fit there."
Trom shook his head, entering reality again.
"I have these dream fits occasionally," he said, rubbing his eyes, "it's
almost as if there is someone else living in me, waiting to escape or
something."
Cronos nodded. He was no psychiatrist, so he reckoned it would be best just
to nod at regular intervals. Always worked. Did this time, too.
"You OK?" Cronos asked again.
"Yeah, sure," Trom said, "Give me that rifle again."
"Wait a minute," Warchild interjected, fumbling in his pocket and retrieving
a red piece of cloth, "I've got to tie a ribbon around your head."
"Why?" Trom asked.
To Cronos Warchild it seemed the most stupid question possible. It simply
wasn't done not to tie a ribbon around your head prior to heroic exploits of
sorts. Preferably a red one.
"Just because it's supposed to be like that," he said.
At that very instant, taking Trom quite by surprise, a cloud of acrid smoke
signalled the entry upon the scene of a demon. Cronos, by now, had met these
so often that it really didn't startle him at all.
It grinned with fangs that had be dontocured perhaps once too often.
Unceremoniously it zipped open Warchild's fly, slid in a warty green hand,
fumbled for a brief instance or three, then came out again, having retrieved
a Battery Pack.
With a sound like a dinosaur's handclap and another cloud of smoke, it - and
the Battery Pack - disappeared. There was a smell of sulphur, like someone
had just lit a match factory.
Hands hung limply, like Cronos' flabbergasted lower jaw. The ribbon flopped
to the ground uselessly.
"What was that, master?" Trom had never laid eyes on a demon in his life
before and, by the grimace on his face, was pretty sure he never wanted to
again.
"That, Trom," Warchild said, deep in thought, "was a demon."
"One of the Dark Lord's minions, you mean?"
"One of those very ones."
"What did it...er...*do* with its hand down your trousers?"
A recollection of intensely nauseous pain raced through Cronos' groin and
belly.
"I am afraid it, er, borrowed," he sighing painfully, "my Mega Absorb Groin
Protector's Battery Pack."
"O," Trom said.
"And," Warchild added in a half-hearted attempt at an ominous voice, "the
bad thing is that it didn't ask."
Cronos looked around to see if perhaps the demon was looking at him from
behind a bush or a conveniently placed tree. There was no sign of any such
thing, however. The world around him had returned once more to a kind of
peaceful tranquility. Still...you never knew where a potential groinal threat
might come from. Not a female in sight, however. He was quite safe. For now,
anyway. He flinched again as if at a particularly painful recollection.
"Er...Mr. Warchild?" Trom ventured carefully.
"Hmm?" hmm-ed Cronos.
"Those Groins...er...are they dangerous?"
*****
"Well done, oh Flattus," Satan grinned.
Flattus moved his feet uncomfortably, causing him to appear very much like a
shy schoolgirl would in front of a school principal wielding a cane.
"It was nothing, oh Dark One," he said, absent-mindedly fumbling a piece of
paper in his pocket.
"You *did* remember to leave the note, didn't you?"
"The note?"
He stopped fumbling, abruptly.
"Er...sure I did, oh Jet-Blackest of Lords."
*****
There was another cloud, yellow-green, smelling even more horribly than the
previous one had. It appeared right in front of Cronos, who just about
panicked and quickly used both his hands to protect his vitals. He was once
more reminded of how many pores he had.
Before him, as the smoke lifted, appeared once more that vilest of the Dark
Lord's Minions. In its warty green hand it now held a crumpled note, which it
deftly rolled up and put into Warchild's mouth, what with it hanging open
conveniently anyway.
Within the few instances that Cronos laid eyes on the demon, he could have
sworn that it looked somehow different. Yes, indeed, he could have
sworn...sworn that it had a black eye.
With another puff of smoke, however, the demon swiftly disappeared back to
whatever dark retreat in the deepest hells it had originated from.
Trom coughed.
Having ascertained that the demon had properly vanished, Cronos relinquished
the protective grip on his gonads and took from his mouth the note. It tasted
like burnt sulphur. He'd never quite tasted that before but he was pretty
sure that, if he'd ever taste it, it would taste like this.
"Yon Batterye Pakke hath been Pilfered," Cronos read, "See thee in Helle
(Dont Bee Late)." There were some numbers on it, too, that didn't make much
sense at all.
"Turn it over," Trom said, "there's stuff on the back, too."
"Conseyled too Alle, Reveyled too Nonne, Lye Helles Infernalle Gaytes,"
Cronos continued after flipping the note, "Heyr the Deymons Calle from the
Crymson Waterfalle...Where the Blod Weepes from the Skye."
Warchild's face spelled thunder and lightning.
"Does that mean..." Trom said.
"Yes," Warchild cut the boy off. "Yes, Trom. It looks like your training
might be a bit more rigorous than expected. We're going to hell."
"*You* are going to hell, certainly," Trom retorted quickly, not quite
wishing to get into situations where his life would be flashing before him,
"there's no reason why *I*..."
Warchild showed Trom the note, pointing out one more short sentence in
somewhat smaller handwriting, apparently scribbled on it as an afterthought.
"Bringe the Boye," Trom read. His heart sank, his knees went all jelly.
"Do you know of a waterfall around here?" Cronos asked, in thought. He had
to shake Trom up a bit; the boy was feeling too sorry for himself to have
heard the question. Instead, Trom was whimpering about fire, dirt, sweat,
heat, fear and functions of the colon.
"Come on," Cronos said, pocketing the note, "get your act together! Do you
know a waterfall here? On the grounds of the estate perhaps?"
In between the pathetic whimpering, there came out a barely discernible
"yes".
"Where?" Cronos insisted.
"To the south of the mansion," Trom said, breathing irregularly, in the
forest where my uncle usually does his hunting."
Cronos considered it apt to lose no more time. What with his Mega Absorb
Groin Protector being useless now, he felt much too volatile, too *exposed*,
for his own good. He felt like he was walking around naked or something. He
simply *had* to find the Battery Pack again; the Protector had been
manufactured on Ambulor Eight and, similarly, the Battery Packs were only
available on that planet and selected of its moons.
"Come on," Cronos said, resolutely, pulling Trom by the arm in the direction
of Lord Anthony's hunting grounds.
It wasn't a big forest or anything, but they were practically falling over
pheasants and constantly running into startled deer. Was Lord Anthony the
kind of person to hunt with an M-60 or something?
"It's in that direction," Trom said, pointing to a particularly dense bit of
forest from behind which the sound of falling water seemed to be coming. He
was beginning to get a feel of elation. Obviously, contact with nature did
him good.
The patch was particularly dense indeed. Cronos had to try his best to tear
away branches and push aside deer that had gathered to see what was
happening. Until, suddenly, shoving aside a natural curtain of leaves and
ivy, they beheld the waterfall.
It was pretty huge, crashing down at least 60 feet into a shallow lake with
rocky sides. It indeed seemed to be the fabled Crymson Waterfalle referred to
on the note: The water was a deep dark red and had a thicker quality, like
blood. Curiously, all that watery torrent did not blank out the sound of
cries, now distinguishable, that seemed to come from whatever lay beyond it.
"That waterfall wasn't red last time *I* looked," Trom shuddered. He was
getting ever more convinced that whatever it was they were getting themselves
into, it would be well over their heads. Needless to say, he didn't like
things one bit.
"Come," Cronos beckoned, stepping into the shallow lake towards the
waterfall.
"I was afraid you might say that," Trom said. He stept in carefully,
horrified.
It wasn't water, no si-ree. It was blood all right. It stuck to their boots
and soaked their trousers, feeling uncomfortably warm as if from a vast
source of the freshly dead.
"The cries," Warchild said, "you hear them?"
Trom nodded miserably. He'd been trying to ignore the soppy sounds his boots
made in the redness, to block out the wailing cries that were indeed quite
clearly audible.
"They come from behind the waterfall," Cronos affirmed, "'Heyr the Deymons
Calle from the Crymson Waterfalle'." He seemed alight with zeal. Trom wasn't.
Cronos had always dreamt of this, standing knee-high in blood, wading
through soft entrails, things like that. This was almost like mercenary's
heaven as far as he was concerned. Had Trom known Warchild's thoughts on the
matter, he would surely have begged to differ.
Warchild halted in front of the waterfall, of which the sound was now close
to deafening but still didn't block out the cries and wails that came from
beyond. He looked up at it, felt dwarfed by it. The warmth radiating from the
cateract of warm blood made his skin glow. Trom, for his part, found he had
to swallow rather a lot. He was beginning to *smell* it too, now. Horrible.
Rather unexpectedly and unceremoniously, Cronos stepped through the
waterfall. Trom panicked. What to do now? Before he could make up his mind to
return to the mansion and face his uncle - and another hundred of his
scantily clad relatives, if need be - Cronos' hand reached out to him from
beyond the warmly red curtain and pulled the boy through.
Trom uttered a terrified cry, which died on his lips when he looked back and
discovered that the waterfall in fact consisted of water and, miraculously,
both the crazy summabitch mercenary annex hired gun and himself were
completely dry. The demonic sounds that had previously been impossible to
ignore had vanished similarly. What the hell was going on here?
"It must have been an enchanted waterfall or something," Trom said, voice
hushed, feeling himself now slowly filling with a sense of adventure. He
breathed in deeply, which was a bad idea. He gagged as the centuries of
collected debris and rotting animal remains that had gathered behind the
waterfall made his olfactory acquaintance.
"Yuck," Trom said, and he meant every word of it.
Cronos, apparently insensitive to the noxious fumes, had in the mean time
discovered a kind of cave. He signalled Trom to come closer to help
investigate. They probed the cave walls for signs of a lever or a button, but
failed to find them.
"We're close," Warchild said, frustrated, "we're close. Damn it, I know
we're close!"
Trom looked around as best he could, but continued to fail to see anything
other than rock and yet more rock. And rats, of course, especially rats. Dead
rats. They lay rotting there, god knows for how long they'd been lying there.
He prodded one with his foot and got scared out of his wits when the creature
sprang up and legged it. It disappeared through a fairly small hole.
"Hey, there's a hole here," Trom pointed.
Cronos immediately investigated it. The rat had vanished completely.
Warchild probed the hole with his hand until he felt something like a button.
He pushed it.
II - THE SEVEN GATES OF HELL
Part of the cave wall, making the awfulest noise, opened up to reveal a
gathering of approximately a dozen human skeletons clad in armour that ranged
in age through a great many centuries. They stepped closer to check the
skeletons - and the means through which they had died - out. Without as much
as a stony warning groan, the cave wall closed behind them smoothly and
soundlessly. They heard and saw nothing.
"I think we can at least guess what they died of," Trom said, pointing
roughly in the pitch darkness at the direction where the skeletons lay. It
was amazing how quickly the air got stale and oppressive when you're in a
confined space with about a dozen dead knights.
"Despair not," Warchild said, fumbling in the utter darkness, "I think I
found a lever."
There was the rusty sound of a lever being pulled, followed by that of
several dozen razor-sharp metal things being rapidly pulled from their
sheaths. Something sliced through a piece of Trom's clothing, and he could
feel the wind of something very cold and very, very sharp flying past his
ear.
The far side of this tomb-like cave now opened up and let a certain degree
of light stream in. As it turned out, several dozen razor-sharp lances had
appeared from holes in the floor and had connected themselves to the ceiling.
One had nearly impaled Trom, who began very much to feel uncomfortable when
that realisation hit him. One of the lances, directly beneath Cronos' genital
area, seemed as yet hesitant to spring forth; probably a rusty mechanism. It
groaned softly, ticking, as if waiting for an inopportune moment to finally
let go.
"I think we should leave this place," Trom said, worming himself through the
lances to the far side where Cronos was sweating like a pig at the prospect
of that one lance colliding with his Mega Absorb Groin Protector without a
Battery Pack inserted.
Trom reached Cronos and pulled at the man. The mercenary annex hired gun was
frozen to the spot, however, totally paralysed with fear (though, of course,
he would never have admitted that).
"CRONOS!!" yelled Trom, tearing the potentially gonad-less mercenary annex
hired gun from his stupor of fear, "JUMP!!"
Before anyone could have asked how high, Cronos took an almost instinctively
giant leap and brought himself and his glockenspiel in safety. Breathlessly,
he looked at the one lance that was still stuck in the floor, battling its
mechanism with silent determination. It stayed put. Cronos let out a deep
sigh.
"Look there," Trom said, pointing, "would that be the First of the Gates of
Hell?"
Cronos looked in the direction where Trom pointed and saw what didn't much
look like a gate at all, really, let alone one of the proverbially famed
Seven Gates. It was, in fact, more like a porch.
They opened it and walked through.
"That wasn't half as bad as I thought," Cronos said, "It's probably not the
First of the Gates at all."
Trom, wiping some perspiration off his brow, was about to tell Warchild to
knock wood when a man with quite a long beard and a staff of lapis lazuli in
his hand appeared as if materialising from the very darkness around them.
"It is I, Nanna, guardian of the First of the Seven Gates of Hell," the man
intoned, in a manner of voice that made them realise that, no matter how
countlessly often he had repeated these exact words, they were not to take
whatever he said lightly.
"I possess the secret of the tides of blood," the bearded man continued,
completely ignoring the sound of the last of the lances boring itself into
the ceiling behind them, which startled hell out of Cronos, "my colour is
Silver and I am also known to mortals as Sin. What is my number?"
The man looked as if he would take offense at them not knowing whatever his
number might be. Trom had the impression that the man would not simply slap
them on the cheek and tell them to head back home, no, this was definitely
the kind of man to use that lapis lazuli staff of his and hit them on the
head with it until they would voluntarily take the shortcut, one-way route to
hell. Although the man as a whole looked friendly enough - like a leaner
version of Santa Claus with different clothing - his eyes looked the exact
opposite. They were "don't fuck with me" eyes.
Cronos was racking his brain. There wasn't much to rack, so he looked at
Trom hopefully. Trom looked back, exasperatingly.
"How the hell should *I* know?" he said.
The bearded man named Nanna - what a silly name for a guardian of the First
Gate of Hell - was becoming impatient. All adventurers and questers alike had
at least had the courtesy to know his bloody *number* when they had the
audacity to come here. He was thinking of something particularly cruel to do
to these poor bastards - it had been quite a while since he'd been visited
and he'd thought long and hard of what to do next time someone came - when
the chunky dude suddenly looked up.
"Wait a sec'," Cronos suddenly said, as if some subliminal hand had brushed
by him and had awarded him with one of his traditionally rare moments of True
Lucidity. He took the demon's note out of his pocket. There were several
numbers on it, numbers that had initially not made much sense at all but now
suddenly just might.
Trom looked at Cronos. He hoped he may have misjudged the mercenary annex
hired gun. He wished the hastily scribbled numbers indeed bore some relevance
to the situation at hand, for this Nanna character seemed not too keen on
letting them guess more than once.
Warchild scanned the note. There were Seven Gates but only six numbers. He'd
have to take the chance, however. The first number was thirty.
"Thirty," Cronos said.
There was a pause, during which time could have passed and tipped its hat,
but didn't.
"Thirty is my number indeed," the guardian named Nanna enunciated, nodding
solemnly, "you have spoken rightly."
"Cool," Trom said, suddenly again more confident and courageous. The sense
of adventure came flowing back into his veins.
"There is no reason for relief yet, I can assure you, young man," Nanna
said, condescending, "for now there is the Test."
Somehow, the way in which the guardian made the word "Test" actually sound
as if it started with a capital made Trom feel queasy.
"A test?" Cronos asked.
"Indeed, noble adventurer," the guardian said, somewhat smugly, "a Test." He
clicked his fingers.
A broad-shouldered Gorilla, Warchild's even more primitive alter ego so it
seemed, appeared from behind a bush as if it had been hidden there all along.
It licked its lower lip as if it was craving for a banana, and in its hands
it held a knife that looked very sharp indeed.
The Gorilla grinned. A knife flashed. An upper lip was licked.
At around that instant, it became no longer apparent what happened. A
cartoonesque cloud of sand evolved around the human and the primate, grass
flinging off in several directions. The occasional sounds along the lines of
"BASH", "WHACK" and, indeed, "THUD", were hurled at the guardian and Trom.
Few moments later the dust settled upon the unconscious form of the Gorilla.
Its fur was wrinkled, it had a black eye and its nose seemed broken with a
tiny stream of blood pouring out of one nostril.
It was dead, too.
Cronos brushed off some grass and sand, then snorted derisively. He had just
been hit by a Gorilla and the most acute sense of *deja vu* he had ever
experienced. He could have sworn he had been through this virtually exact
experience before. He suddenly had to think of a white kangaroo wearing a
clock, a guy called Cranium and a most nauseatingly terrible smell.
He shook the memories off and looked at the guardian, who was impressed. It
was clear that he was the kind of man that would have liked to place bets on
this sort of thing. You could see he didn't like the fact that there had not
been another hellish inhabitant to place bets with.
"The second gate," Nanna said, "is due south. Have a nice day."
Trom and Cronos walked off in the direction that the guardian of the First
Gate of Hell had pointed out. It was not until after an hour's walking or
thereabouts when they spotted it.
They stood before the second Gate of Hell. It looked a lot more like a gate
this time. It had wrought-iron hinges and looked made of some kind of really
solid wood, aged by many, many centuries. In it was a peephole, below which
hung a formidable door knocker in the shape of a goat's skull with some
ancient inscriptions neither of them could ever hope to decipher.
Cronos lifted the knocker. It was black, heavy, and really cold. He knocked
the door with it once, twice, thrice, four times. A twisted sound, almost
embodying darkness, reverberated off the door and echoed beyond and before
them, forming the eerie words "In...Madness...You...Dwell" that seemed to
echoe for an unnaturally long time in their minds.
Trom shivered. This was seriously scary stuff. His nanny had never told him
things like this happened in the world outside the Hepplewhite Saintjohn
Thurny estate.
The door opened slowly, and out of it stepped a man wearing a long priestly
robe and a crown of thorns. Although he had no beard, he appeared ancient on
every account. He was bent, had an unhealthy-looking complexion, hollow
cheeks, and leaned on a cane that looked as if it was bought as a souvenir
from the Mull of Kintyre.
"It is I, Nebo, guardian of the Second of the Seven Gates of Hell," the man
said, his voice sounding like a broom going through a porcelain store that a
rabid elephant had just been in.
"I am the keeper of the knowledge of Science," Nebo continued, "my colour is
Blue and I bear the sign of Mercury. What is my number?"
Cronos hoped the list of numbers would continue to be correct. He took out
the note again, uncrumpling it. He knew there were only six numbers on the
note, yet seven Hellish Gates. He fervently hoped the one missing would not
be that of one of the earlier gates. Not this one, at any rate. He wondered
who in hell was helping them, who actually *wanted* him and Trom to succeed
this quest and enter Hell itself.
Nebo was a man of infinitely more patience than Nanna, maybe on account of
his name not being half as silly as that of the previous guardian. Still,
Trom reckoned Cronos should not wait too long with the revelation of the
number, because you never knew. It's best to be on the safe side, especially
on your way to Hell.
"Twelve," Warchild said, holding his breath until Nebo nodded slowly, the
joints of the ancient man's neck creaking sickeningly.
Trom let go a sigh of relief, but caught himself.
"Of course," the old man revealed, "there shall have to be a Test."
Another one of those capitalised words, Trom noticed. Dratted drat.
Nebo took from a pocket a stopwatch. He flicked a switch that had so far
been quite invisible, upon which a couple of spotlights went on. The
spotlights shone on an audience stand on which sat about a hundred demons and
other assorted minions of hell. They were all cackling, making ghastly noises
and waving at where they supposed had to be a camera.
"You have one minute..." the guardian said, smiling, "...to get 10
toothbrushes from our esteemed audience!" He pressed something on the
stopwatch. A hand began to rotate.
Trom and Cronos both ran up the audience stand. From somewhere there came
music, the kind of music that makes you ever more nervous, it ever gaining
more speed, ever becoming infinitely more irritable. Some of the demons
fumbled in their handbags, looking if they had perhaps brought a toothbrush
with them. Miraculously, quite a few of them actually had. Some other demons
found the tooth brushes and ate them before Trom or Cronos could come close
enough to attempt to snatch them from their ugly, warted paws.
"30 seconds..." Nebo said in the tone of one with all the time in the world.
Trom had found a couple of tooth brushes already. Some of them were shaped
like bones, some others like bat's wings.
"Look, Trom," Cronos said, showing a toothbrush, "this has a really clever
eye-of-newt design!"
Trom signalled him to hurry and not to bullshit. He saved a toothbrush from
a demon's fangs, almost losing a finger or two in the process. The music was
becoming louder; the tuba started humphing ever faster.
"10 seconds..." Nebo said, appearing bored.
Cronos grabbed a last toothbrush on his way out. This particular one had a
pair of artificial fangs hanging onto it. He shook them off. "Sorry ma'm," he
apologised.
Right in the nick of time they arrived back at where Nebo stood, waiting
patiently.
"Zero," the guardian said. "Let's count those toothbrushes." The demonic
audience applauded.
Trom and Cronos handed the assorted oral hygiene devices to Nebo. They both
wondered why in hell demons needed toothbrushes, but the fact that apparently
they did *had* saved the day.
Nebo finished counting them.
"Eleven," he said. "Strictly taken, that means you've handed me one too
many..."
Trom and Cronos looked at each other. So this was where it would end.
Well...
"...but I'm in a good mood today! Haven't had this much fun since Aleister
Crowley came here, a century or two ago." The demonic audience clapped,
whistled, woo-woo-ed, yelled and generally made a lot of noise, like some
sitcom audiences tend to do.
"So we may pass?" Trom asked, hopefully.
Nebo nodded, "Sure, son, you and your friend may pass."
Cronos and Trom both shook his hand gratefully.
"If you walk south-east for approximately an hour," the guardian said,
switching off the spotlights, "you will find the third of the Seven Gates of
Hell. Now go."
So, after another hour's walking, they found themselves standing in front of
the third Gate of Hell. This particular one again didn't at all look like a
gate. It looked, rather, like the entrance of an Eastern boudoir of sorts,
the kind made of bead-stringed curtains that really only serve to keep out
flies. It wasn't located in a wall, at least not one to be seen. Everything
around it was just darkness, a darkness so intense you could bump into it.
>From through the beady curtain came inviting light, though, soft to the eyes
and enluring.
Trom held it open to allow Warchild in. "After you," he said, a smirk on his
face.
"After *you*," Cronos said, grinning, simply shoving Trom inside. Trom was
sick to the back teeth of Warchild telling him what to do, but felt powerless
to do anything about it.
They found themselves enveloped by the scent of a thousand sticks of
incense. There were candles and tea lights everywhere, casting a beautiful
glow over the room, which was large and, well, *cosy*. Pillows lay
everywhere, and drapes of priceless damask lay all about the place and hung
off the ceiling. It seemed like they had entered a place straight out of some
ancient Eastern faerytale.
Fantasies about huge amounts of available women, such as those invariably
featured in those Eastern faerytales, were put on hold by a huge, heavy-maned
lion that introduced itself into the room from a shadowy corner. It walked
gracefully, a true king among beasts, sniffing the air.
"Don't sweat," Trom said, who was trying to keep his pores shut himself,
too, "for it may smell it if you are afraid."
"That's *dogs*, silly," a woman's voice came from that same shadowy corner.
Into the light stepped a woman of insurpassable beauty, with long curly black
hair, a voice like an aural sprinkle of silk and a skin tanned like some
California beach goddess who had insisted upon there not being any bikini
lines.
Trom thought he had seen her - or something pretty damn much like her -
before, though he couldn't for the life of him put a finger on it. Again he
felt a really peculiar sense of *deja vu*, strong and omniscient, taking
control of his body as if lead was being poured in his veins and directed
from some other plane of reality.
"Gosh," he said, his voice dreamy and far-off, "that is surely one *hell* of
a babe..."
With those words, he embraced the swirlingly twirling earth and threw
another dreaming fit...
She had black hair. She wore a vari-coloured cloak with a golden pin in it
and a hooded tunic with red embroidery. She had shoes with golden fastenings.
Her face was oval, narrow below, broad above. Her eyebrows were dark and
black. Her beautiful black eyelashes cast a shadow on to the middle of her
cheeks. Her lips seemed to be made of partaing. Her teeth were like a shower
of pearls between her lips. She had three plaits of hair: Two plaits wound
around her head, the third hanging down her back, touching her calves behind.
In her hand she carried a weaver's beam of white bronze, with golden inlay.
There were three pupils in each of her eyes. The maiden was armed and her
chariot was drawn by two black horses.
Trom woke up with Cronos slapping his face again. He realised he had dreamt,
the same dreams he'd had before. It was almost as if he was remembering bits
of a life that had happened before him. It was all seriously surreal but in a
way like it was part of himself, unmistakably. He now noticed the beautiful
lady again, who sat by him to see if he was recovering from his fainting fit.
It struck him how much she looked like the girl from which he had dreamt,
invariably, ever since he could remember. When Trom turned out to have
recovered sufficiently to erect himself, she, too, got up and spoke.
"It is I, Inanna, guardian to the Third of the Seven Gates of Hell," the
insurpassably beautiful woman said, "I am the Goddess of Passion, both of
Love and War", she continued, "my colour is Purest White and in my armour no
Priest need fear to tread in the Underworld. What is my number?"
Trom reckoned this woman had been using plenty Oil of Olaz if she was aged
anything close to the other guardians they had met so far. He was virtually
struck breathless. Just imagine...a woman with such an amazingly young body
yet the experience of someone aged by centuries or even millenia... He
couldn't believe she would do either of them harm, but the thing was that she
*was* one of the guardians of the dread Seven Gates. He decided he'd rather
not put it to the test.
Trom grabbed the crumpled note from Cronos' hands, and said the next number
in line.
"Twenty!"
Inanna's face darkened. The lion lifted its nose and bared a few fangs that
Trom decided he'd prefer looking at through solid steel bars in a zoo, if at
all. He suddenly felt extremely nauseous. Even Cronos cringed, though he'd
never have admitted it.
"Gimme that note," Inanna said, walking up to Trom and snatching it away
from him. She looked it over.
"They left out my number," she said, sounding hurt, giving the note back,
"they left out my number. Twenty is the *next* guardian's number." The lion
looked up at her, brushing against one of her godly legs and purring
reassuringly. Her hand stroked the beast's mighty manes.
"Oh, well," she said, "it can't be helped, I suppose. Where would I be
without you, my dear Kittecat?" The lion purred a bit louder, sounding like a
distant avalanche.
"I'll cut you some slack," Innana said, pacing her boudoir, addressing both
intrepid adventurers, but particularly Trom. She came closer to them now, and
Trom noticed that she smelled more heavenly than any of the women he had ever
come into contact with, most certainly his aunts. It was a heady fragrance
that conjured up visions of beds soft, pastures green, flowers ablooming and
passion immeasurable. Weirdly, it also had a faint tinge of weapon oil and
gunsmoke, which in turn slightly enraptured Cronos.
"I can't tell you my number," she told them, "but it is..." She mouthed it.
"Fitting?" Trom said.
She shook her head.
"Flitting?" Cronos guessed.
She shook her head once more.
"Vivideen?" Cronos conjured.
Innana gesticulated wildly now, pressing her index finger against the side
of her nose, then making rotating gestures with her hand.
"Er...erm...fifteen!" Trom shouted gleefully.
"Yes!" the raven-haired beauty said, her face lighting up with joy, "You
guessed it right, young master!"
"And I suppose now," Cronos interposed, getting kind of irritated at the
attention Trom was getting and he wasn't, "we have to do some sort of Test,
right?"
The lady Innana appeared to be in thought about that.
"Yes," the said, solemnly, "there shall be a Test indeed."
Trom and Cronos waited for the lady to utter the words, for her to formulate
what further dreadful ordeal would lay immediately ahead of them on their way
to a place where, frankly, neither of them would otherwise ever have wanted
to go.
"I shall require the young master to kiss me," she breathed, rather huskily.
The lion looked at her accusingly, "you've gone all soft, Innana" readily
readable in its large black eyes. Innana didn't see it, though, for all she
had eyes for was Trom, who couldn't believe his ears and stood rooted to the
spot.
"Well?" Cronos said, "Come on, Trom, let's get this over with." How come he
always got the short end of the stick? He was beginning to dislike all of
this very much.
After a few seconds, during which there was an almost audible crackle of
lightning between Trom and the Passion Goddess and a lot of chemistry to top
if off, Trom regained the principle of motion. Feeling on top of the world
and not minding the lion, which was growling indignantly, he strode forward
the few steps that were needed...and kissed her.
They both turned away and blushed heavily, like they'd just found out they'd
been sucking in the same strand of spaghetti.
"Come on, Trom," Cronos said, not at all pleased and sounding it, "we
haven't got time for all this dilly-dally and stuff. We have four gates ahead
of us, need I remind you?"
Trom and the lady Innana were torn from their moments of Complete Bliss.
"He's right, you know," she said, "you two *do* have to go." Trom nodded,
but didn't like the way reality had checked in again.
"Remember," Innana said just before she released Trom's hand, "the next
guardian's number is twenty...and remember, too, Trom...remember the warrior
inside you!"
They left her boudoir - Trom with a sense of loss - and walked in whatever
direction seemed most fit. Sometimes you have to consult your brain, but some
other times you have to listen to your heart. Trom's heart felt there would
be but one direction to walk into, so that's what he did. Cronos followed,
cursing and muttering below his breath about the way things had gone so far
and how he wasn't happy with them at all.
So, after another short stroll, they found themselves facing the fourth of
the Gates of Hell. This time it looked most impressive once more; it was a
huge portcullis that Warchild wouldn't be able to lift nor Trom would be able
to crawl through. Far above them, barely discernible above the blackened
portcullis from beyond which no light reached them, was a plaque that read,
curiously, "Zapfest". Under it, even harder to read, were two initials, "J"
and "M".
Just as they were about to give up their search for something to press or
pull in order to get the guardian's attention, they heard a faint humming
sound to their right. They turned.
Into view floated a giant throne of gold, upon which sat a man wearing a
crown of two horns, holding a sceptre aloft in his right hand and a flame
disc in his left. The flame disc sent off rays in every direction.
"It is I, Shammash, guardian of the Fourth of the Seven Gates of Hell," the
Lord said, "I am..."
"And your number is twenty," Trom interrupted, grinning, thinking back of
the lovely lady Innana, "Stop beating around the bush and lay the Test on
us."
The Lord Shammash, who had just been about to impress hell out of the
adventurers by telling them he was also sometimes referred to as Uddo, was
taken unawares by the young man's boldness. So was Cronos, actually, who had
not expected Trom suddenly to go courageous after a mere kiss from a Passion
Goddess. Well, he had to agree that she'd been *quite* a babe...
The guardian grinned back at Trom - an icy cold grin in which there was no
pleasure. He liked a challenge. For centuries - What?! Millenia! - people had
been seeking him out and only the smartest among them had ever passed his
test. These two didn't look smart enough at all. The young man was just an
insolent youth, and the sq
uarely built guy looked like he'd been standing
last in line where god had been dishing out the brains.
"Yes, young man," the Lord Shammash spoke, "there is a test. It is a test of
tremendous mental skill."
"Yeah, come on, come on," Trom said, impatiently.
"Well," Lord Shammash said, "it is a question. And the question is...name 10
song titles with 'hell' in it, as well as the bands who recorded them."
There was a moment of profound silence.
"Hell," Cronos said, "I'm not into music."
"Neither am I, particularly," said Trom, "but a cousin of mine is." He was
thinking hard.
"*And*..." the Lord Shammash said, "at least four of the bands must have had
Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 hits, though not necessarily with the specific
'hell' song!"
Trom looked at the guardian, wishing the nasty old man would vanish or
something. They would probably be having difficulty enough with this question
without this extra condition.
"Is that all?" Trom asked, tersely.
The guardian nodded. He grinned; that last modification usually cooked their
goose.
"Lemmesee," Trom said, thinking harder than he could ever recall, in his
mind leafing through his cousin's album collection.
"'Alison Hell'," he said, "by Annihilator."
The guardian nodded.
"Three of the top 10 hit bands are easy, too," Trom continued, "Black
Sabbath's 'Heaven and Hell', Kiss' 'Hotter than Hell' and Pink Floyd's 'Run
Like Hell', right?"
The guardian just nodded. Still six to go.
There was another silence. Cronos felt pretty useless. He realised he'd
spent his life totally devoid of culture whatsoever. Maybe that ought to
change. He only knew a few songs by the Beatles, really.
"'My Hell'," Trom said, a sense of triumph gleaming in his eyes as he
reached half of the test, "by Nokturnel."
"That's a pretty obscure one," the Lord Shammash said, "well done, young
man."
"'Gates to Hell'," Trom added, "by Obituary."
He's actually alphabetically browsing through his cousin's metal CD
collection, the guardian thought. Any minute now he'll arrive at...
"'Cowboys from Hell' and 'Holy Hell'," Trom said, "by, er, Pantera and
Possessed respectively."
The guardian nodded. Two to go. And they'd never guess the fourth Top 10 hit
one. It was too outright devious. He was actually quite proud of it himself.
He couldn't wait to see the look on their faces when he'd have to tell it to
them.
"'Hell Awaits'," Trom sighed, "by Slayer".
"Well done indeed, young man," the guardian grinned, "but now the fourth one
by a band good enough to have had a Top 10 hit."
"Damn, triple damn," Trom grunted. Here they were, up pop trivia creek
lacking the necessary theoretical background to paddle with.
Cronos was reciting Beatles songs that occurred to him, "Lucy in the Sky
With Diamonds, I Wanna Hold your Hand, Michelle, A Hard Day's Night, The
Yellow Submarine, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band..."
Trom looked at Cronos, grinning the grin of the triumphant.
"What did you say?" he asked Cronos, "Just now?"
"Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," Warchild repeated, which was quite a feat
in itself, "I Wanna Hold your Hand, Mi..."
"MICHELLE!" Trom cried, "MICHELLE! That has 'hell' in it." He looked around
at the guardian, who was not having a good time any more. The Lord Shammash
nodded. He felt he had to lie down for a bit. He signalled them to pass
through his gate. Had he left the gas on at home?
They wiped sweat off their brows. They'd pulled it off again; four down,
three to go.
"We sure showed him, didn't we?" Cronos said.
Trom nodded. He wondered how long their luck would hold. So far, though,
they seemed to be a pretty good team.
Feeling quite good and chatting almost merrily despite what they know was
still ahead of them, they nearly walked into a chest.
It was a fairly large chest that, Cronos guessed, might contain a stupendous
treasure. Trom reckoned it would not, because it was a luggage chest, the
kind that people used to drag aboard ships in the older days. As a matter of
fact, he pointed out, there was even a label attached to it. "Anything but
Ankh-Morpork," it read.
They looked at it, not quite daring to open it, while it stood there,
simply, not moving, like luggage is supposed to do. Then, quite suddenly and
to considerably dropping of jaws, it acted very much unlike luggage. It
sprouted a couple of dozen chubby legs, lifted itself up and gently trudged
off in the distance before either Cronos or Trom knew what was happening.
They both shook their heads in disbelief. Instead of pondering over it for a
long while, however, they quickly realised why they were actually here and
went about their business again.
And so it happened that, before they knew it, they encountered what they
assumed must be the next guardian, the guardian of the Fifth of the Seven
Gates of Hell. It was a lion - which made Trom once more reminisce fleetingly
of the beauteous lady Innana - a lion with a man's head, bearing a sword and
a flail.
"It is I, mighty Nergal, guardian to the Fifth of the Seven Gates of Hell,"
the wingless gryphon said, interrupted quickly by Cronos.
"We haven't even discovered your gate yet," Warchild said, "aren't you
supposed to introduce yourself until after we've found it?"
Nergal thought about that for a while.
"Yes, ho-hum, yes, indeed," he muttered, embarrassed, retreating somewhat,
"indeed, dear adventurers, it seems like that is in fact, ho-hum, standard
procedure, as it were."
Cronos and Trom looked around for the mystic Fifth Gate. The problem was
that it was nowhere to be seen. Around them was just impenetrable darkness.
"Ho-hum, dear sirs, if I may be so bold as to venture," mighty Nergal said,
"I think I've gone for my afternoon stroll and wandered a bit too far off,
actually."
"Are you saying," Trom said, chuckling, "that you are actually, well,
*lost*?"
"Ho-hum, well," the wingless gryphon replied hesitantly, "I wouldn't quite
put it like that, er, ho-hum, but, not too put too fine a point to it, yes, I
think I am." He shuffled his paws insecurely.
"Some guardian," Warchild muttered below his breath, derisively.
"What does the gate look like?" Trom asked.
"Promise you won't laugh?" Nergal said.
Both adventurers nodded in a kind of noncommittal way. That sufficed for
Nergal.
"Ho-hum, well," he explained, "it's actually, ho-hum, a hole in the ground.
Quite embarrassing, really, but it was all they hadn't yet assigned when I
applied for the job. I was too late, you see; got lost somewhere between the
Styx and Hades, upper East Side, ho-hum."
It was really too pathetic to be laughed at, so both Cronos and Trom
refrained from doing so, or at least tried to. They looked around instead,
Trom biting his tongue with some vigour, searching for what looked like a
hole in the ground.
"Oh, ho-hum," Nergal suddenly said, grinning embarrassedly, "there it is,
ho-hum, seems like I never wandered too far off in the first place. Mayhap I
should put a flag on a stick in it next time, ho-hum."
Standing next to his Gate - well, the hole in the ground at any rate -
Nergal took a deep breath.
"It is I, mighty Nergal, guardian of the Fifth of the Seven Gates of Hell,"
Nergal said to the slightly bemused questers, "I am sometimes thought to be
the agent of the, erm, Ancient Ones, ho-hum. I dwelt in Puta...er...no,
*Cutha* for a time and my colour is, ho-hum, deep purple? No, ho-hum, Dark
Red, I am pretty certain about that, ho-hum. Er...what was that last question
again?"
"What's your number?" Trom ventured, sighing.
"Eight," Nergal said, immediately covering his mouth, "Grmmbll."
They left the absent-minded guardian, this mighty Nergal, to his musings and
mutterings - which mainly involved the topic of early retirement, and what
the hell that test was supposed to be - and jumped in the hole.
After a rather long sliding experience down a rather claustrophobic length
of almost gut-like tunnel they dropped onto a large mound of sand that looked
like some kind of dune. It cushioned the impact sufficiently, though Trom was
surely glad he had jumped in second; "Made it beyond the Fifth Gate of Hell
but then died because a dimwit mercenary flattened him" would not quite have
made too satisfactory an epitaph to his taste.
Whereas so far the stretches of wasteland between the Gates of Hell had been
primarily dark and ravished, this time they had appeared to arrive in what
was definitely a desert. Sand stretched out in all directions, and the only
thing other than a black starlit desert night sky and dark grey sand to be
seen around them was the thing from which they had just fallen. It mostly
resembled a black hole sun.
They decided they had to rest for the night. They had no sleeping bags or
tents, so the desert sand would have to do. Even if they had had something
with which to light a fire, they wouldn't have done so. You never knew which
creatures might be attracted by the light, creatures which might somehow find
it comfortable to roam in the domain between the Fifth and Sixth Gates of
Hell. Now Cronos came to think of it, he *did* have a hunch, which was all
the more reason to keep things as dark as possible.
They slept like logs. Trom woke up, somewhere way past what he reckoned must
have been midnight, to the sounds of an insanely witty person shouting "Oh
Beth! Beth!", but didn't heed it any more than Cronos, who continued to snore
peacefully.
They woke up to the sound of steps in the desert sand and the heat of the
sun on their faces. There was no telling how long they had slept and it
wasn't important either, for in a true Mohammed-and-the-Mountain fashion it
seemed that the Sixth Gate and its guardian had found them during the night.
"It is I, Marduk Kurios, guardian of the Sixth of the Seven Gates of Hell",
said the guardian, not even waiting until Cronos and Trom had rubbed their
eyes clean, "bestowed on me were Fifty Names and Powers by the Council of
Elders, and I have put the Queen of the Ancient Ones beneath my foot, though
she is not dead yet dreams. My colour is Purple. What is my number?"
They both looked up at the Gate. It was a most formidable construction
although, granted, they had both seen better and less dated ones. It was a
tremendously large, round stone, of the kind that were used in ancient
Palestine to close cave graves off with. It was, basically, a big wheel made
of rock. There was a name tag attached to it, which read "University of
Turin".
The guardian looked exceedingly grim and moody, as if it hadn't been him who
had awoken the others from their slumbers but vice versa. He had been waiting
for aeons upon aeons for the occasion to arise, for no mortals had actually
ever made it this far. He'd been rolling around this stone through the desert
for an endless time. He had repeated his lines dutifully every morning,
hoping that some day someone would actually arrive to have them recited to.
He had had millenia to think of a really nasty Test, too, and now there were
not *one* but *two* mortals to toy with! He'd be a having a field day...
Well, OK...a desert day, for the pedants among you.
But for now they would first have to know his number. There were preciously
few who knew it: Satan, of course, who knew all those things, and the Mad
Arab, of course. But the Mad Arab lived no more on earth, and last thing he
heard the Arab's writings had been lost forever. Granted, he hadn't been in
touch with reality a lot of late, so as far as he knew the whole world might
be in the know with regard to his number. However, if they didn't know it
he'd have a really interesting thing waiting for them, involving flying
chains and fluked hooks and rather a lot of pain.
"Ten," Cronos said after consulting the ever more crumpled note, confirming
Marduk's worst suspicions about the world and the time he had not been in
touch with it. He who put the Dark Queen beneath his foot was suddenly no
longer so convinced that the Test he had concocted was all too brilliant nor
too impossible to solve.
"You have spoken rightly," Marduk said, a bit unsure of himself, beginning
to feel really silly and as dated as his Gate, "and now, as you probably now,
there shall have to be a Test."
The adventurers nodded. Although they'd been lucky a few times so far, there
was no way they would continue to be. They knew the numbers for all the
Gates' guardians now, but all luck has to end some day. They both had a
distinctly nagging feeling that today, like any other, might be it.
"My test is particularly difficult," Marduk said smugly, adopting a somewhat
friendlier tone of voice out of sympathy with these people that, in little
more than a minute, would be burning forever in the effervescent fires of
hell.
"You see," Marduk continued, "I have been assigned to this post thousands of
years ago. Hells, I lost track of the time, to tell you the truth. On the
brighter side of things, that means I've had all that time to use my
philosopher's mind to think of what is conceivably the most difficult
question ever to be posed in the history of the universe." He could help but
chortle.
"Well, it's been nice so far," Cronos said, "get on with it." He had
committed suicide once and lived to tell about it. This could hardly be more
difficult.
Trom just thought of that passionate flame in his life that he would have to
leave behind, the Passion Goddess Innana. In his mind he once more smelled
her delicate perfume and beheld her beautifully tanned skin and her
eyes...damn, he'd never even know what colour her eyes had been. Still, he'd
go out like a man. He'd make her proud of him. Or proud of his memory,
anyway.
Marduk was regaining his previously dented confidence when he looked at the
positively despondent faces of the adventurers before him. For not much of an
apparent reason, Trom had found it necessary to bare his chest, as if
expecting a sword to be thrust into it.
"This is not a test of physical skill," Marduk said, "rather an intellectual
one. The question is..."
Marduk waited a bit. Trom hated guardians with a sense of dramatic impact.
Cronos began to hate guardians in general - barring Innana, of course, who
somehow he found quite impossible to hate.
"Come on, man," Trom said, "say it!"
"OK, at your behest," Marduk said, still taking his time, "here is the
question..."
Trom felt his heart beating in his temples. Cronos felt every of his pores
opening and excreting that most natural of scents.
*"What is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything?"*
There was a silence broken only by the sound of molecules adhering to the
Brownian motion. The guardian nor the two questers dared breathe. Suspense
was so thick you would have needed a blowtorch to cut it.
So heavy was the weight upon their shoulders that it took almost a full
minute before Trom's mind in some weird and possibly arcane way started to
function again, connecting a few simple facts. Cronos had already given up
and was wondering if perhaps there was a way he could apply his carefully
trained pain-blocking skills to somehow live through the eternal fires of his
hellish destiny. He ought never have allowed that demon to steal anything in
the first place. Maybe this was fate telling him to retire. Well, this time
he'd listen to its inaudible voice. But first he had to shut up this rich kid
who was vigorously nudging him in one of his floating ribs.
"I think I know it," Trom whispered enthusiastically below his breath,
nudging the mercenary annex hired gun once more.
"Er?" Cronos said. He had accepted forthcoming death with such abandon that
his body temperature had already been dropping slowly.
"I know it, I know it! The answer!" Trom insisted. He looked at the
guardian, who was looking any way but theirs, whistling some Ditty From Hell.
"Sure?" Cronos asked. Already he felt his body temperature rising again. The
boy had better know it for sure, for else all hope would be shattered once
more. There are only so many things a man can take, even when it concerned
such an indisputably manly man such as himself.
Trom just nodded. Cronos couldn't recall ever having seen such a smug grin
plastered on anyone's face. Then again, Cronos in generally didn't remember
much. Nonetheless, it can be said that Trom grinned pret-ty smugly. As a
matter of fact, he was having a pretty hard time to not burst out in almost
uncontrollable peals of laughter. Biting his tongue did the job, though.
"Come on then," Cronos said, nudging the boy back in return, "say it."
"Er, Mr. Marduk, sir?" Trom ventured, sniggering. He clicked his fingers to
get the required attention.
The guardian turned around slowly to look at them, pity in his eyes. The
mortals were going to give it a try. Well, you couldn't blame them, really.
Humans could sometimes indeed be a fairly courageous breed, you'd have to
hand them that. They'd give it their best shot - of course they'd not know
the right answer - and then he would deal with them swiftly and surely.
Painlessly, even. No need for useless violence, no matter how long he had
waited for this, no matter how *alone* he had been, alone and *bitter*, in
these long, long millenia. Maybe, some day, someone else would come along and
he'd treat them like real shit, the way he had intended to treat these two.
"You think you know the answer?" Marduk inquired.
"Yep, Mr. Marduk, sir."
They couldn't, could they? The boy did seem pretty sure of himself. No, they
couldn't. Marduk was pretty confident of that. Still..
"Well, boy?" Marduk said.
"Forty-two, Mr. Marduk, sir," Trom said, smiling the smile of a saintly
little angel.
For a moment, the guardian felt as if the earth had disappeared from under
his feet and he was now floating amid a vast wealth of nothingness, without
oxygene and doomed to die of suffocation.
*How the hell had the little brat known that?!* There was a virtually
limitless range of answers to his question, varying from "your cousin's left
sock" and "wednesday next" to "a darker shade of dark" and "E minor", but no,
no, they, they had to come up with the right answer! He promised himself to
be particularly violent on the next mortals that would - hopefully - come his
way in what would likely be another four millenia or so. Suddenly feeling
very tired, he leaned on his Gate.
Cronos was hugging Trom. Not a very manly man thing to do, he reckoned, but
nobody would ever know about it and Marduk was too busy feeling wretched and
would, incidentally, most likely never meet anyone of Warchild's
acquaintance.
When the general merriment of the two adventurers had ceased, Warchild
cleared his throat.
"Say, Marduk," Cronos said, "might you be inclined to tell us whereabouts
the Seventh Gate can be found?"
"Inclined, no," replied Marduk, "Obliged by honour, yes." He pointed
somewhere behind them. They turned around.
"If you look carefully," Marduk said, still baffled by the disappointing
fact that these two mere mortals could so easily have solved that most
difficult of questions, "you will see the Seventh Gate *there*."
Trom and Cronos stared in the distance, where lay a huge mountain shaped
like a goat's skull with the horns knocked off. From its top vomited forth
thick, black, bulging, genuinely evil-looking smoke. It looked like one of
those "look what's happening to the environment" warning adverts by
Greenpeace.
"Thanks, Marduk," Cronos said. Trom and him walked in the direction of the
mountain, in pretty high spirits despite their hellish destination.
Marduk was not feeling really happy with himself. Now he had to find an even
more difficult question for whoever would next arrive at the Sixth Gate of
Hell. He hoped he'd be in time, for, now he came to think of it, if lucky
morons like these two could get so far he was pretty convinced so could
almost anyone else.
When Trom and Cronos came closer to the mountain shaped like a goat's skull
with the horns knocked off, looming ever higher before them until at a
certain moment it almost blocked out all the light from that side, they could
see that before the mountain there was the largest of the Gates they had seen
so and by far.
So this was it, then, the Seventh Gate. The Mother of all the Gates of Hell,
as it were. It sure looked it. It was almost an exact replica of those large
"Jurassic Park" gates, only now even much bigger and a pair of giant stag's
horns instead of the "JP" logo. The actual doors were made from a material
unlike wood or metal, or anything else they knew. When Warchild knocked on
them once, there arose a curiously resonant "boom" sound that carried far and
lasted uncannily long. For a moment he cowered, fearing that he might have
announced their arrival to every single of hell's cursed inhabitants.
Not so, apparently, because the only person who eventually reacted was a man
wearing a crown of thorns and a long sword, clad in a cloak of lion's skin.
He seemed to have appeared from *through* the Seventh Gate. He looked very
old, too, which is what they had expected. He must have been very patient,
what with them being the first people ever to come here. Nonetheless, no
anger or frustration seemed to radiate from him.
"It is I, Ninib called Adar, guardian of the Final of the Seven Gates of
Hell," he said, "I am the one whose essence is found in burnt embers and
things of death or antiquity, whose symbol are the horns of a stag. My colour
is black. What is my number?"
For the last time, Cronos took out the note. It was now crumpled to such
extent that the numbers were difficult to make out. Nonetheless, the last in
line was clearly a 4. Or was it a 9 with the top not properly closed? Damn.
He'd just have to chance it, trusting his initial instinct.
"Four," he said.
"You have spoken rightly, noble adventurer," Ninib called Adar proclaimed,
"my number is four, as in the quarters of the earth."
A silence ensued in which Cronos and Trom waited for the inevitable - the
last and probably truly most difficult of the Tests. None, however, seemed
forthcoming. The guard merely seemed a trifle bemused and volunteered no
further remarks.
"What about the Test?" Trom eventually asked, hoping for the best. They had
come this far, so it would be a most extreme bummer if they'd fail this last
one. Close but no cigar and all that stuff. An extreme bummer indeed.
"Test?" Ninib called Adar asked, frowning.
"Yes, sure," Cronos fell in, "all the other guardians had tests. Surely you
have one, too?"
"Actually," the guardian said, "I don't think any of us are supposed to have
tests." He seemed genuinely disconcerted.
"They surely had 'em," Warchild said.
"Be that as it may," Ninib called Adar said, "I have none. I suppose the
others did it quite of their own accord. I shall have to take this up with my
superiors some day." He sounded ominous.
"Innana had no test, though," Trom hastened to add, at which Ninib called
Adar's face broke in a smile.
"I will make sure to pass that information on to my superiors, young man,"
the guardian said.
"When will that meeting with your superiors be, if I may be so curious as to
ask?" Cronos inquired.
"On August 28th 1997," the guardian replied, pressing a button that had
hitherto been totally invisible, "the day before Judgement Day."
The huge gates swung open soundlessly, almost sucking them in due to the
differences in air pressure on either sides. They now had an unobscured sight
of that ghastly blackest of foul mountains.
They stepped through.
"Godspeed," Ninib called Adar said, which was an odd thing indeed to hear so
far down in the bowels of the earth, so close to hell that it almost singed
your hair. Before they could reply, though, the doors closed and Ninib called
Adar had disappeared.
III - INTO THE LUNGS OF HELL
They found themselves now at the beginning of a tunnel that was hewn out of
rock in a most crude manner. A flickering orange light could be seen at the
end of it, and a variety of sounds emanated from there - evil laughter
accompanying the anguished cries of tortured souls. Bats flew towards them,
flitting around their heads and disappearing in the sudden darkness they had
left behind. The bats seemed impervious to the force fields of Hell. Some of
them, Cronos could see in short flashes, had faces like ugly fat babies with
moustaches.
In front of the tunnel entrance was a doormat that had "Welcome" on it.
Welcome to Hell. Yeah, right.
Cronos almost tiptoed through the tunnel, that was gradually becoming hotter
and lighter. Trom followed him, which Warchild reckoned was a brave thing to
do. The sounds became louder, and genuinely sliced through Warchild's bones,
so he guessed it might be even worse for the boy. What in all the Netherhells
were they doing to those from whom wailed those anguished, long-wound cries?
And which creatures could utter such profoundly evil laughter in the face of
such agony?
Cronos had an idea of what the answers to those questions would be, but
blocked out their implications. He found himself shivering despite the ever
mounting heat.
Before them, the tunnel now opened into a wide hall that seemed the setting
of some weird and diabolic rite. There were hideously ugly creatures jumping
left and right, with their winged counterparts bobbing in the air above them,
spitting and cursing. There was, as it were, not a very friendly atmosphere.
Amidst these ghastly creatures of hell and flickering flames of glowing fire
there was a large black throne that seemed made from bones - human bones.
Several blackened skulls gaped at Cronos and Trom lifelessly from the back of
the throne, the flames of life quenched from them and replaced by those of
purgatory.
Someone sat on the throne, laughing evilly along with those around the
throne. Whoever it was, he had to be impervious to the flames that seemed to
lick and consume, caressing the throne and everything around it.
Cronos should have kept his head low, for a demon spotted him, immediately
pointing at the mercenary annex hired gun with a warty, long-nailed claw. It
opened its jaws and let go a drawling sound that almost seemed to *ooze* from
between its fangs. Cronos was pinpointed by dozens of pairs of red eyes, red
eyes gleaming with unholy joy. Trom hid quickly behind the mercenary's huge
square form, liking all of this even less than he had liked the whole stuff
of going down to hell through its Seven Gates in the first place (though, of
course, he had liked making acquaintance with the spitting image of the girl
of his dreams in the form of the lady Innana of the Third Gate).
An intricate mechanism set to work to turn the Darkest of Thrones around
with agonizing slowness. The demons hushed up while their master's throne
turned to face the damned intruder.
This was it. He had bested the Seven Gates of Hell, had ridden Hell's
Stallions and had had a Disagreement with Death. Now he would face Satan,
Baphomet, the Fallen Angel, Azagtoth, *the Dark One*. He closed his eyes. He
wasn't actually afraid as such, but wasn't feeling too confidently secure
either. The ground throbbed from the inner workings of whatever mechanism it
was that turned the vast, blackened, skeletal throne around.
When the throbbing stopped, around him was a virtually complete silence. The
tortured souls, wherever they might be, seemed to have turned mute. The evil
demons seemed no longer to have the urge to utter their cursed laughter, nor
even a chuckly guffaw.
There was only one person - *creature* - who made - *dared make* - sound,
and did - a deep kind of restrained chuckle. Cronos opened his eyes; he'd
have to face this sooner or later anyway.
His eyes instantly opened a lot wider, and his jaw dropped deeper than it
ever had. Nobody had ever mentioned to him the fact that Satan might not be
like the way he is commonly described. Well...she was quite different indeed.
"You are...er...are...a...a...*woman*?" Warchild stammered.
He looked at her extremely tight leather outfit with the sexy tail and
perhaps rather too high heels that, somehow, she must be able to balance on.
How the hell did people get into those clothes? It seemed like a physical
impossibility to him, especially because there was not a zip in sight
anywhere.
"Now let's not get all male chauvinist pig on me, my dearest Cronos," she
tut-tutted, wagging a finger, "I am not known to take too kindly to that sort
of thing."
Within his mind, Cronos suddenly had irrepressable visions of being strapped
to a bed, this woman towering above him, about to do to him very unspeakable
things indeed. He swallowed. His eyes crossed.
Satan smiled. It wasn't her usual grin, no, it was a true smile. One of her
minions, standing by her, couldn't believe its eyes. It blinked them and
shook its head, only to discover that the smile was still there when it
looked again. Actually, though you wouldn't normally think these kind of
things, Satan was a distinctly attractive...
Her head abruptly twisted around to face her minion. *It twisted the wrong
way around*. All thoughts vanished from the demon's mind entirely. It felt
very small indeed, exceedingly insignificant and altogether more
uncomfortable than it'd ever felt before in its almost eternal life.
It expected her to vomit.
She continued turning her head, completing the 360 degree turn, facing
Cronos again.
"Cronos, baby," Satan purred, wagging her tail enluringly, "I shall cut to
the chase. I need you. I want you. I need a man without a conscience. In the
day-time you can reap souls; tempt people to sell them, promise anything, and
then, well, kill them." Her eyes flashed; she licked her lips almost as if
subconsciously. "And when night falls, well..."
Warchild thought he was going to faint. Not a very manly thing to do, but
every muscle in his body told him it might be a good idea anyway. Satan ought
not to be looking at him like that, woman or not. It made him feel strange,
insecure, *vulnerable*. It also made his scrotum contract.
He spotted the Battery Pack on one of the arms of Satan's blackened throne.
Maybe, just maybe, if he leapt for it he just might be able to grab it,
quickly slip it inside where it ought to be, and then beat them all silly. He
had a vague hunch that there might be one or two flaws in this theory, the
most important of which was that there were rather a lot of demons in the
direct vicinity, including a few between him and the Battery Pack.
"Your timing is a bit off, er, Mrs Satan," Warchild said.
"*Do* call me Lucy, *please*," Satan said, then asked, "Why? I do hope
you're not, er, *spoken for*, as it were?"
"Well," Cronos said, "not as such, but, you see, I've got an apprentice to
train."
He stepped aside and pointed at Trom. Trom wished he didn't, and prepared to
cower to the best of his ability. Not a very heroic thing to do, he reckoned,
but that would just be, as they say, tough titties.
Satan threw back her head and laughed loudly. The minion who had previously
observed her smiling now felt reassured again: It was one of those typically
evil, echoing bouts of laughter, the kind that made the inhabitants of hell
cringe, that could impale people due to stalactites spontaneously tearing
loose from ceilings.
"The boy?" she said, sneeringly, "The boy will no longer need you."
Trom had not the slightest reason whatsoever to like that tone of voice.
Instead of waiting for whatever was going to happen, he took matters in his
own hand. Displaying a skill he had not been taught by anyone in his life, he
dashed for Satan's throne, agile like water, cleverly dodging demons that
slashed at him with daggers, wanted to impale him on their lances and strove
to run him through with their swords. He had love in his heart and in his
head, which gave him the strength he had never known was somewhere within
him.
He seemed made for this kind of thing. Something in his mind had gone "snap"
and he now finally felt *in touch* with whatever it was that ruled his dream
fits, whoever the hero was that sometimes gave him glances of a distant past
but that had so far refused to come out. Trom barked like a dog, fending off
whatever weapons threatened him with his bare hands. Just to see if he could,
he took from one particularly surprised demon a lance and threw it away with
all the power that was in him. He then ran, faster than the wind, to catch it
himself.
"Ha!" he cried, triumphantly, "Ha!"
"Are you crazy?!" Cronos shouted.
"Provided I be famous," Trom cried, pride and deep emotion throbbing in his
voice, "I am content to be only one day on earth!"
Trom - or whoever he was now - again pursued his way to Satan's throne. More
and more of the Dark One's minions joined in the fray, and some of them were
getting seriously injured. Young Trom seemed invincible and, indeed, as it
would later go down in the Hellish Annals, he was.
He reached the throne. Satan warded the young boy off, afraid that she had
now finally met someone who was clever and quick enough to assassinate her,
like so many creatures of Heaven and Hell had attempted in vain in those many
millenia that had gone before. It was not her, however, that Trom was
interested in. Instead, he snatched Cronos' Mega Absorb Groin Protector
Battery Pack off the arm of Satan's throne where it has been standing, and
tossed it to the mercenary annex hired gun. Warchild quickly slipped it into
the designated cavity.
Trom's hair looked all funny now, like nails, just like in his dream fits.
His eyes crossed and he looked around wildly for more hostility to quench.
Satan could but sit back and watch. With a subtle sign of a professionally
manicured, red-nailed hand she told her servants to allow this boy, this
*hero*, to live. She had for him a worthy reward in store, a worthy reward
indeed to praise one of such heroic stature.
"Be still, young Trom," Satan intoned in as much a voice of authority as she
could muster. Trom looked around at her, feeling relaxed but not devoid of
the tremendous strength that he had discovered within, the well of force that
he had learned to sip from.
"That's better," Satan now said, almost purring, "because I have in store
for you something befitting a hero like you." She signalled to somewhere
behind the throne, from which now stepped Innana, his Passion Goddess and now
former guardian of the Third Gate.
Trom felt his heart pounding in his chest, and now he felt his eyes cross
and his stomach knot, not from one of his warrior's fits but from the most
sincere feelings of love that any man could ever feel for a woman. Sometimes
you meet someone that is really meant for you, someone that is *your person*.
Innana was his person, and to Innana he was hers.
And they called each other by different names henceforth, *Cu Chulainn* and
*Fedelm*, and they walked off in the wings, started a life of love down there
in the very wombs of Hades. And the last words he uttered before disappearing
with her forever to a distant outpost of the Dark One's domain, as recorded
in the Hellish Annals, were, "Leave me in Hell".
All the excitement having abated somewhat, Satan stepped down from her
throne and strutted up to Cronos. She was wearing a really weird kind of
perfume, he noticed, something he'd never smelled before. *Was* it perfume
actually? He now also saw that she was actually rather a tall woman, standing
almost half a foot higher than him.
She bent over, her infernal breath tickling his ear.
"Spank me," she whispered under it.
"What?!" Warchild said, incredulously. Obviously, the phrase must have
meanings he was quite unaware of.
"You heard me," Satan continued, taking one of Cronos' hands and laying it
on the patch of leather that covered one of her buns, "spank me, loverboy!"
Her breath is his ear, her raspy voice in his mind, her scent in his
nostrils and one of his hands on what he had to admit was a particularly
gorgeous and very tight pair of buns, he could only but succumb to her
wishes. Reluctantly, of course.
*****
Satan was smoking a low-tar cigarette, blowing pentagrams to the ceiling.
Cronos was exhausted. His hands ached and throbbed. And not just his hands.
"Darling?" Satan purred.
"Hmmm?"
"I heard on the grapevine that you're thinking of retiring?"
Cronos thought about it for a bit. He'd had a fruitful life. Had his share
of fun, his share of violence. Now it was time to settle down. Lead a quiet
life. Devote himself to a more peaceful hobby or two. What's more, he'd like
to disappear from public life, as it were.
"I will," he said, a bit drowsy, "and I think I already have."
"Hmmmm," Satan crooned, "I like the sound of that."
"I do, too."
"Darling?"
"Hmmm?"
"Kiss me...*there*."
Cronos did.
"Now kiss me...*there*."
Cronos did.
"And now I'd like you to kiss me...*there*."
Cronos did.
*"Oh, Croney-baby!"*
AND THAT IS, AS THEY SAY,
*THE END*
OF THE LAST OF THE CRONOS WARCHILD STORIES
Written on February 21st and November 25th-27th 1995, just for the hell
(pun!) of it. Based on an idea written down May 27th 1991. Inspiration was
partly supplied by the legend of Cu Chulain, ancient Irish hero.
= THE NEXT ISSUE ============================================================
The next issue of "Twilight World", Volume 4 Issue 4, is to be released mid
July 1996. It will be uploaded to the FTP sites mentioned further down.
The next issue will feature, probably, the following stories.
THE ASSASSINS
by Guilford Barton
FLYING SHARK
by Stefan Posthuma
UIS III (working title)
by Richard Karsmakers
GAUNTLET II
by Richard Karsmakers
BARBARIAN II
by Stefan Posthuma
MULTIFACE (working title)
by Richard Karsmakers
And more, most likely.
= SOME GENERAL REMARKS ======================================================
DESCRIPTION
"Twilight World" is an on-line magazine aimed at everybody who is interested
in any sort of fiction - although it usually tends to concentrate on fantasy-
and science-fiction, often with the odd bit of humour thrown in.
Its main source is an Atari ST/TT/Falcon disk magazine by the name of "ST
NEWS" which publishes computer-related articles as well as fiction. "Twilight
World" mostly consists of fiction featured in "ST NEWS" so far, with added
stories submitted by "Twilight World" readers.
SUBMISSIONS
If you've written some good fiction and you wouldn't mind it being published
world-wide, you can mail it to me either electronically or by standard mail.
At all times do I reserve the right not to publish submissions. Do note that
submissions on disk will have to use the MS-DOS or Atari ST/TT/Falcon disk
format on 3.5" Double-or High-Density floppy disk. Provided sufficient IRCs
are supplied (see below), you will get your disk back with the issue of
"Twilight World" on it that features your fiction. Electronic submittees will
get an electronic subscription if so requested.
At all times, please submit straight ASCII texts without any special control
codes whatsoever, nor right justify or ASCII characters above 128. Please use
*asterisks* to emphasise text if needed, start each paragraph with a one-
space indent, don't include empty lines between each paragraph, don't use an
extra space after a period, and use "-" instead of "--" (that's the "Twilight
World" house style). Also remember the difference between possessives and
contractions, only use multiple question marks when absolutely necessary (!!)
and never use other than one (.) or three (...) periods in sequence.
COPYRIGHT
Unless specified along with the individual stories, all "Twilight World"
stories are copyrighted by the individual authors but may be spread wholly or
separately to any place - and indeed into any other magazine - provided
credit is given both to the original author and "Twilight World".
CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS
I prefer electronic correspondence, but regular stuff (such as postcards!)
can be sent to my regular address. If you expect a reply please supply one
International Reply Coupon (available at your post office), *two* if you live
outside Europe. If you want your disk(s) (if any) returned, add 2
International Reply Coupons per disk (and one extra if you live outside
Europe). Correspondence failing these guidelines will be read (and perused)
but not replied to.
The address:
Richard Karsmakers
P.O. Box 67
NL-3500 AB Utrecht
The Netherlands
Email r.c.karsmakers@stud.let.ruu.nl
(This should be valid up to the summer of 1996 at least)
WHERE TO GET "TWILIGHT WORLD"
The current list of FTP sites where "Twilight World" may be obtained is:
Server www.hials.no
Directory pub/twilight.world/
ftp://www.hials.no/pub/twilight.world/
Server etext.archive.umich.edu
Directory pub/Zines/Twilight_World/
ftp://etext.archive.umich.edu/pub/Zines/Twilight_World/
Server ftp.southwind.net
Directory users/p/python/tworld/
ftp://ftp.southwind.net/users/p/python/tworld/
And the following html page can be referred to, too:
http://arrogant.itc.icl.ie/TwilightWorld/
The latest three issues can be requested with me personally if you email and
ask.
PHILANTROPY
If you like "Twilight World", a spontaneous burst of philantropy aimed at
the postal address mentioned above would be very much appreciated! Please
send cash only; any regular currency will do. Apart from keeping "Twilight
World" happily afloat, it will also help me to keep my head above water as a
student of the English Teacher's Course at Utrecht University. If donations
reach sufficient height they will secure the existence of "Twilight World"
after my studies have been concluded. If not...then all I can do is hope for
the best.
Thanks!
DISCLAIMER
All authors are responsible for the views they express. Also, The individual
authors are the ones you should sue in case of copyright infringements!
OTHER ON-LINE MAGAZINE BLURBS
INTERTEXT is an electronically-distributed fiction magazine which reaches
over a thousand readers on five continents. It publishes fiction from all
genres, from "mainstream" to Science Fiction, and everywhere in between.
It is published in both ASCII and PostScript (laser printer) formats. To
subscribe, send mail to jsnell@ocf.berkeley.edu. Back issues are available
via anonymous FTP at network.ucsd.edu.
ESCENE is a yearly electronic anthology of the Internet's best short fiction
and authors from existing electronic magazines. It is available via the World
Wide Web and in ASCII, PDF and PostScript formats via anonymous FTP at
ftp.etext.org/pub/Zines/eScene/>. Contact series editor J. Carlson at email
address kepi@halcyon.com. The URL is http://www.etext.org/Zines/eScene/.
EOF
