demon

he was living-dead,

Well…

It wasn’t surprising, really. Nothing living could have endured what he had. So…he was living-dead, then. There were worse things to be. At least he was animate and mobile. At least he had a chance for vengeance.

Best to get the lay of the land. He returned his attentions to the world around him. The sky was blood red, and there seemed to be no sun. Rather, the whole thing glowed in the deepest crimson. Interesting.

Now, the field of the dead . . . he gazed out over it. At first it seemed infinite. A single vast wasteland of arms, legs, shattered bodies, bits of flesh rotting as watched.

But, then, gradually, he realized there was a limit to it. Far, far away, almost beyond the range of his vision, there seemed to be a wall of some sort, rising and containing the spillage of cadavers. Ah.

Just then, some instinct warned him. Without thinking he threw himself to one side.

There was an enormous crash of metal. He whirled about to see a huge metal scoop or claw, like the open mouth of a steam shovel, crashing into the mound of bodies. He watched as it closed around a great mouthful of the dead, and then rose into the air, spilling bits of flesh as it did.

Shai’ol

Lester stood, unthinking, gasping in the air…

He could breathe! He could breathe!

He did not wonder how it was that he’d been able to survive under a mountain of rotting bodies. He did not wonder how long he had been there. He did not wonder what malevolent force had cast him into this hell.

He simply stood and let the air fill his lungs. To breathe!

Gradually, he began to become aware of his surroundings. He stood, he discovered, in a middle of a vast field of the dead. Bodies stretched off in all directions as far as he could see.

Bodies . . . twisted, mutilated, some partly burned. Here was an eyeless head, the scalp half removed so the skull gleamed in the red light. There was a torso, legless, armless, its genitalia ripped away by some savage force.

They were nude. None seemed to have clothing.

Which reminded him. He glanced down at himself. Oh, fucking hell. He was nude as well, but the problem was his body itself. A vast, gapping, hideous wound stretched from his throat to his groin. Heart, lungs, guts. . . all were on display.

He did not bleed. The wound was dry. No blood flowed. He checked his pulse.

There wasn’t any.

Dr. DEM Is Amazed At His Own Powers of True Scholarship

Things Worse Than Anguish

Really angry now, Morris snapped. “I’m not, and it wouldn’t be any business if . . . “

“Take, for example, that book you’re writing,” Lester plowed ahead, as if Morris had said nothing. He tapped a finger on the papers he’d brought, the automatic writing. “You’ll never finish it.”

“I…what?”

“Two reasons for that. First, because you’ve basically realized that you have no talent for that sort of thing. I mean, your first book was all right, but that was really your doctoral dissertation, and you had your major professor to edit it line by line, page by page, until it made sense. Your second book, well, that was a mess. I’ve tried to read it. Sentences go whirling into infinity. Logical connections get tossed out the window.”

Morris felt the fury take him. He meant to say something cutting . . . to yell …even to stand and threaten physical violence.

But he couldn’t move!

Lester continued without seeming to notice his paralysis. “Second, because you don’t give a damn any more. Years ago, you woke up and realized you were just going through the motions. Everyday, every passing day, it’s a gets a little more tedious for you. The papers sent off to ‘Prestigious Journals.’ The snide comments you put on student’s work. The office politics. The way you sit on grant committees and deny funding to all and sundry . . . regardless of the value of the projects . . . simply because you can. And because that’s the way it’s done.”

Why couldn’t he move? Why couldn’t he speak? He tried to move his arms, his head, his body . . . he couldn’t. He felt as though were buried in something. A hot, viscous liquid … like molten glass.

Lester spoke on. He tilted his head, like a dog. “And you’ve begun to hate it all. You hate it the way a man on death row starts to hate the walls of his cell, the calendar, the other prisoners, his guards. Begins to hate even his own lawyers, and the endless appeals that keep him alive. He begins to long for the chair, the chamber, the lethal injection that drips cold death into your veins. It would be a relief.”

He couldn’t breathe! He couldn’t cry out. He felt he was strangling. He had a visions of human bodies piled in great heaps…

“I think it is all rather horrible really. I mean, your life.” Lester spoke from some distant place. “Day in and day out. Sort of Sartre, don’t you think. But I can help you. I’m your gateway, you see. I’m the door out.”

He could move again! He gasped and choked. Dear God. What had happened to him? Dear Christ. He glanced up, found Lester’s red and yellow eyes looking down at him.

He found the breath to curse him. “Why didn’t you help me, damn you?”

“Because you didn’t ask.” The eyes continued their pitiless regard of him. “But, I repeat my offer. If you ever do want to escape . . really escape . . . just call. I’ll do what I can.”

“Go to hell.”

The man in dark leather smiled again. “Now there’s an interesting concept. All that nonsense about eternal suffering. As if.” He laughed. “As if there aren't things much, much worse than mere anguish."

Then, with a last “good night,” he turned on his heel and was gone.

The Professor Again

The last few shreds of poor little Lester

At that moment, some part of Morris softened. He looked at the man before him and felt real pity. Here was an individual who had aspired to some kind of accomplishment, only to discover that it was as beyond his reach as the stars themselves. “Are you really leaving the program?”

He got a laugh by way of reply, and then, “Have a choice? After the performance I gave today?”

Morris tried to save him. “I could intervene. If you apologized to them, maybe I could talk to Professor Putridrine and …”

Lester raised his hands, revealing more gristly fake stitches at the wrists. “Please don’t bother. I’m leaving.”

“I’m …” Morris considered his words, then plunged ahead. “I’m very sorry.”

“Yes,” for once Lester wasn’t smiling. “Yes, I believe you really are. Unfortunate, really. There is a part of you that is, I think, genuinely decent. Problematic for me. It would make my life so much easier if you were rotten to the core.”

Morris said nothing that. He wasn’t sure what he could have said.

So, Lester continued. “You all are, actually. You, the others. A touch of humanity in all of you. You are complex creatures, you know.”

“Thank you. I think.”

“I wish you were more like me. I’m pretty much the same right through. Cut me open and you’d find I was sort of like a plant. A pine. All the same right through, except for a few tree rings.” Another laugh. “And, of course, the rind. That’s different, too. The last few shreds of poor little Lester.”

Morris regarded him warily from behind his mustache. This was the talk of madness. Lester was clearly disturbed. Was he also dangerous?

“Don’t worry,” Lester gave his former professor a grin. “I speak … metaphorically. If it makes you more comfortable, pretend I said ‘the former Lester,’ or the ‘previous me.’ It isn’t true, but it makes conversation easier.”

In spite or because of Lester’s assurances, Morris found himself becoming tense. “Well, it’s been nice talking to you, but . . .”

“But you think I ought to be getting along, yes.” Lester seemed almost tender. “But, before I go, I do want to repeat my offer of help.” He stood.

Irritated, Morris “I don’t need your aid.”

“Ah, but you do. You see, you are desperately unhappy.”

The Professor Regards The World

So Much Promise...

“I thought I’d find you here.”

He jumped, then, embarrassed, turned to find Lester standing beside him. The fool was still dressed in his Halloween get up. All black leather and queer eyes.

Why hadn’t he noticed him come in? Ah well, didn’t matter. “Good evening,” he said icily, watching the little idiot standing beside him, a cheery smile on his stupid face.

“Yes, lovely evening.” And, without for an invitation, he slid into the seat opposite Morris. “Enjoying the show?” He waved airily at the street beyond the plate glass window.

“I would hardly refer to this as a show,” Morris said, though that’s exactly what he’d been thinking. “This a tragic event. A human being has lost his …or her . . . life out there.”

“Well, that’s way it looks.” Lester seemed unfazed by the rebuke. He gazed dreamily out the window. “But, I’d bet you a donut that they’ll discover the murder took place somewhere else. Then the body was dropped here. For some reason.”

Morris felt a little chill.

Lester seemed to remember where he was. “Anyway, I wanted to track you down before I left the campus. I have something for you.”

“What . . . do you have?”

“This.” He produced a bundle of papers. “This is the material you were paying me to collect from the archive. I thought I’d pass it on.”

Morris took the documents gingerly. “What are they?”

“Copies of originals and my transcriptions.”

“Original what?” Morris was feeling more than little mystified.

“Decuir . . . your mass murderer, remember him? . . . well, it turns out he did automatic writing. Ever hear of automatic writing?”

“Of course.”

“Well, Decuir turned out scads of it. He’s got pages and pages of the stuff in his files. I copied a bunch and, well, sort of translated it for you. The originals aren’t easy to read.”

Morris put the papers down on the table in front of him and started to read. “What is all this?”

“Mostly quotes from famous literary works. It seems your good Doctor Decuir had a taste for the gothic. There’s stuff from Marlow’s Faustus, Poe stories, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner . . . you know, the part where the dead sailors get up and walk.

Morris made some vague disgusted sound and put the papers aside. “Anything else? I mean, of genuine value?”

“Nope. Not a bit. Your Decuir was one boring boy, I’m afraid to say. Not a single blood stained scalpel or pickled eyeball to be found in any of the boxes. Sad, really.”

“Sad?”

“Tragic. So much promise. So few slaughtered.”

The Professor Feasts

At the Greek's

He glanced up and down the street. To the right, cars stretched off as far as he could see. To the left . . . police vehicles! Cop cars with the lights flashing, an ambulance, rescue vans, even a fire engine.

Hell! The traffic blocked the entrance to the parking lot. No one would be able to get out for hours. Hell. Hell. Hell.

Still, it could be worse. If he had to be late, tonight wasn’t a bad time for it. His wife would be teaching her six-to-ten class at State. His son, well, his son would be doing whatever it was his son did these days. His daughter . . . he knew what she was doing. He just preferred not to think about it. So long as she didn’t get pregnant.

He might as well grab supper. There was a sub shop down the way. He frequently went there for lunch. Why not dinner as well?

Feeling almost jaunty, he headed down the street. The sub shop was actually in the direction of the emergency vehicles, so he soon found himself approaching the scence of whatever it was that had happened. There were police everywhere. Their attentions seemed to be focused on an aged hatchback parked across the street. Yellow tape sealed off the area, and, strangely, the EMTs had draped a tarp over the parked car.

He came to his sub shop and entered. It was empty of customers, which was a good thing. He hated to eat where his students might see him. Not befitting the dignity of the office, and all that.

The Greek behind the counter took his order for a meatball sub without comment. Morris realized the man was staring over his shoulder and out the front windows of the shop. He turned. The ambulance had driven up beside the parked car. Police were removing something from the car, wrapped in some kind of bag. They put it on a wheeled stretcher. The loaded it on the ambulance, which, in turn, drove away in a fury of red lights.

“Say,” he asked the man behind the counter. “What happened out there?”

The Greek shrugged uneasily. “Donno. They found a body.”

“A body?”

“Dead man, yeah. They found him. Kid tried to steal the car and he found the body.”

Morris couldn’t help smiling. It was terrible, of course, but there was something funny about it. The thief making a clean getaway, only to find something rotting in the back. “Did they say what the body . . um . . died of?”

Again the man shrugged. “No one told me. Here’s your sandwich.”

He took it and a can of soda to a window table. Not bad, he thought, watching the police and crime scene investigators do their thing outside. Not bad at all. A good sandwich, and a free floor show. What more could you ask?

The sandwich went down easily. Then, he sipped his soda while he watched men in uniform removing things in transparent bags from the parked car. All very interesting.

“I thought I’d find you here.”
d

Professor Morris Within

Professor Morris

Professor Morris exited the Hall and made his way down the stairs. It wasn’t easy for him. He had been overweight since childhood, and, despite the best efforts of nutritionists, a private trainer, his wife, and, even, now and then, himself . . . he remained heavy.

But he wasn’t morbidly obese. He needed to lose a lot of weight, yes, but he wasn’t any 500-pound side show attraction either. He was only, well, sixty or seventy pounds over the limit.

The strange thing was that women didn’t find him unattractive. He had never quite figured that out. It seemed perfectly logical that they should avoid him. Yet, for reasons that he didn’t pretend to understand, many women seemed to find him “cute.” He had rather frequently found himself in the arms of willowy blondes—other professors, a neighbor, graduate students.

Not his own graduate students, of course. He was no cliché. And, besides, in this day and age of sexual harassment suits, it wasn’t safe. But, other people’s graduate students, well, they were another matter entirely. He preferred sociologists.

But, truth be told, it wasn’t exactly sex he was after these days. In fact, he was reasonably faithful to his wife. No. What he wanted most from them was support. Young women, graduate students, these could be molded, positioned, trained. He could coach them ahead of conferences and then point them at his rivals, and say, “kill.” They’d do the work for him.

In fact, he had two such women prepared for today—Rosellen, who was leaving next year for study in Ireland, and Paula, the girl from the Gold Coast of Connecticut. He had primed them to attack Lester Smith Graham. Not that Lester was a particularly important target. On some level he was indifferent to the little man’s failure. But, it was always good to practice.

Which was why he was a little disappointed that Lester had behaved so strangely. Walking out like that . . .? Well, it made no sense at all, and besides, it spoiled the little drama he’d been planning. Rosellen coming in from the left flank, Ivy closing for the kill from behind.

Well, no use crying over spilt milk. He was certain that his girls would have a crack at someone else in the near future.

He came to the doors and eased out into the dying light. And so to home . . .

That was when he saw the traffic. Out in front of the Hall, on the main street that bordered the campus and the faculty-staff parking lot, was a long, slowly, crawling mass of cars . . . bumper to bumper.

What the hell?

her hunger

to Feed

Then, she was walking again. She had no idea what her direction was. She had no goal. She had no memory of her return.

But, just as twilight merged into night . . . she was back at the campus. She found herself in her car in the parking lot down the hill from the library.

She discovered that she was sitting at wheel, motionless, staring though the windshield into the dark of the lot, and trembling . . . shaking uncontrollable . . . unable to move.

It was not fear that made her tremble. Not terror. Not weakness. Not horror at having seen the dead man.

It was desire. An intense, fierce, utterly insatiable, desire. A desire that beyond the merely sexual, beyond the longing for family and success, even beyond her furious need for the approval of her mother and her professors.

Desire.

The desire to be at the gray car of the crime scene, to walk past the cop who had tried to stop her, to lift the tarp, to open the passenger side door, to reveal the gristly corpse, to open her mouth…

And feed.

The Professor's Soul In Flight

...like gaping wounds in their brick skins.

Somehow she found herself walking away from the campus. The street grew increasingly tough. Where before there had been some shops and open stores, now it was all empty buildings, broken glass, and boarded up windows. Small groups of dangerous-looking men lounged at corners and along curbs.

Once, two thuggish teenagers detached themselves from such a group and followed. They called out after her. She continued walking without hearing them. They rushed after her and one reached out to catch her shoulder. “I’m talking to you, bitch…” But, then, at the sight of her face, her blank expression and great staring eyes, they fell back, fearing her for reasons they could not explain.

She went on her way.

The streets more empty still. Finally, even the loungers, the thugs, and the street people mumbling to themselves were gone. She was now among the abandoned mills and shuttered factories down by the river. Around her, they loomed empty and terrible, with black windows and vanished door like gaping wounds in their brick skins.

She could hear the water of the river. The river itself had been long ago covered over. It flowed now through a tunnel under the city, only emerging polluted and lifeless a dozen miles to the east. She could feel it! Cold, wet, black . . . dead. Under the streets. Under her feet. At the roots of the factories that had, long ago, channeled its energies into wheels and rotors, turning machines that produced rifles and pounded the skins of slaughtered pigs into shoes.

I’m home. The words came to her. I’m home.

hanging

Butchered Meat

She started. “What?”

“There’s been an . . . an accident.”

She glanced at the street behind him. There was a parked car. Police were swarming over it. Paramedics had draped it with a white tarpaulin as if they were trying to shield the street from whatever was inside it.

For a moment she bristled. How dare they try to prevent her from …

There was a gust of wind from behind her. It was hot, and odd, and unexpected. The tarp on the car fluttered, then fell.

And she saw.

The rear passenger’s side was open. On the seat inside was . . . blood, and a body. A body so mutilated that at first she thought it was butchered meat. Then, she realized that that was a leg, that was a torso, that was a human head, skinned like an animal brought to slaughter.

“Oh, Christ!” the cop said, and hurried away to help wrestle the tarp back into place.

For a moment, she stood where she was. Then she turned and walked away . . . hurriedly . . .unthinkingly. She had no idea where she was going.

Hellflight

The Standards Of Genuine Scholarship

Well, time to go. She collected her possessions, locked the door of her office, and headed down the stairs. She continued her meditations as she walked. Yes, it was best that Lester left. Indeed, she had wondered if he ever was going to get the message that he wasn’t wanted. She had sent his dissertation back a dozen times, now. And he still kept turning in re-writes. Was he really so dense as to not get the message? At least, not until now?

Apparently. He was a dim sort of a man, it seemed. She made the inevitable Women’s Studies joke about all men being dim. But, then, there was still something . . . troubling … about the whole affair.

She felt no guilt about her role in the business. If anything, she was proud. It was the distasteful but necessary duty of a genuine scholar to Maintain The Standards Of Genuine Scholarship.

But, still, she felt a little bewildered by Lester’s failure to submit to her directives, and to understand her . . . well . . . her intellectual dominance. She had explained to him, again and again, that his work wasn’t good. That he did things wrong. That “We Don’t Do Things That Way In the Academy.”

It never occurred that her that what she actually meant was We didn’t do things that way at my college back in New York. It never occurred to her that anyone existed outside the tiny circle around Spitter-Cane, a few of her colleagues, and the group of privileged graduate students who fought (ruthlessly) for her attention. It was a war that Putridrine had, herself, consistently won. No one was more grimly determined, more energetic, more willing to use any means to gain her professor’s approval. Even if, as it frequently did, it meant sabotaging the efforts . . . destroying the careers! . . . of others.

But . . . Lester . . .

She walked along the sidewalk to where she’d parked her car. Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t notice the police cars and the ambulance until she was almost on them. Then, abruptly, she was facing the yellow tape and the brown uniforms of the police. What the hell?

A policeman was standing in front of her. “Please, ma’am, go back around the other way.”

Her Secret Self

her intellectual superiority

Linda Putridrine, Ph.D., associate professor (tenure track), winner of the Dickens-Luz Prize for Advanced Scholarship, and The Darling of the Department, was in the women’s toilet on the third floor. The Faculty Only one. That locked. So students wouldn’t go in.

She finished, listening to the rush of urine into the bowl. For some reason, that sound had always pleased her. It made her feel she had Done Something. If she had thought about it—which she hadn’t—she might have wondered at the satisfaction she felt at such moments. She might have realized that her pleasure came from the days of her extreme youth, from when her mother would glow with pride and sing her praises for having tinkled in the little pot rather than in her pants.

She finished and cleaned herself, using the last of the paper to do so. It never occurred to her to replace the roll with a fresh one from the cabinet under the sink. Such things were for lesser people. When she left, too, she declined to wash her hands. If her son had done the same, she would have punished him without mercy. But, her own flesh . . . that was inevitably pure.

Returning to her office, she sat behind her desk and wondered. What a bizarre day! With Lester Graham, she meant. That weird, weird confrontation at the defense . . . the way he’d walked out like that . . . the bizarre offer of “help.”

On some level, if course, it was a good thing. She had long ago decided that he was not intelligent enough to be a real academic. He didn’t deserve a Ph.D. He didn’t have the driving, burning, critical intelligence necessary to be a rigorous scholar. Not like herself, for instance. Why, during her own stint at graduate school, her major professor . . . Dr. Grace Sptter-Cane … had said, “You know, you are the sharpest graduate student I’ve ever had.” She felt warm and pleased at the memory. Dear, dear professor Spitter-Cane.

She gathered up books and papers, her laptop, and prepared to leave. Yet, if it was best that Lester had elected to leave the program, what a strange way to do it. That costume! Those contact lenses! The seeming indifference to his committee’s intellectual superiority. Well, to her intellectual superiority.

That was the important part.

The professor's secret soul...

A Blood Red Sky

There was another quake. The infinite weight that crushed him into the mass was . . . less! He could squirm about! He could use one hand to free the other!

And . . . there! He heard something! A deep rumbling . . . a cranking sound. A machine?

Another quake . . . and light!

There was a crack in the mass of corpses above him, and a tiny, glorious spark of red light.

He threw himself into action. He clawed at the bodies around him. He felt their blood streaming beneath his nails.

And . . . then . . .

He burst to the surface!

He forced himself out of the blackness, out from the blood and bodies, between the skulls and the rotting flesh.

He stood on a mountain of the dead.

But he didn’t look at them. He only stared upward, into a blood red sky, and felt the icy air fill his desperately working lungs…

He was free.

hate...

He found new strength in hate

He found new strength in hate.

He’d born to absent parents who’d been too busy with the careers to give a shit about him. He’d grown up bullied and beaten on playgrounds and in classrooms. And then, as an adult, he’d gone from the failure to failure. He’d had no friends, no family . . . known no gentle touch. And then . . . the dissertation committee.

Bastards! Stinking pompous bastards.

And finally . . . finally . . . he was Here.

That’s quite enough, thank you very much.

The hate grew in him. The hate saved him. It filled him. It gave him new energy.

He would be avenged. He would find out who put him here. He would track them down and destroy them.

Hellgate

Sometimes there were corpse-quakes

Sometimes there were earthquakes. Or were they corpse-quakes?

Whatever . . . suddenly, the pile of death would move, quiver. Sometimes, heartbreakingly, the space he had been so carefully digging with his fingernails would fill again after such a quake.

But, he found it was easier to claw the space out again. And each time there was a quake, the weight on his chest was a little less. He redoubled his efforts.

Why was he here?

Was he in hell?

What had he done to deserve this?

Nothing. Somehow he knew. He was guilty of nothing. At least nothing so hideous as to be consigned here. No. He was simply in the hands of something with a capacity for infinite sadism.

Just then the mountain of the dead around him trembled again. For a moment, it seemed that the space he’d been so carefully constructing would collapse once again. But, then it held.

Another quake shook the mass. He worked harder.

Then . . . slowly . . . the hatred came to him.

Hellgate will return!

Hello, Everyone,

Sorry for the long, long, LONG delay...(three years? Oy!)

But, look for future additions real soon. Hellgate will return.