The Heartbeat in the Deep
That day the bombs fell.
The city was torn limb from limb, cell from cell. All was chaos and fire, the roars of the bombs drowning out the screams of the people below. The bombs fell on skyscrapers and streets, blasting through the foundations of mighty steel and glass monuments to the ingenuity of man. They collapsed in a maelstrom of dust and flame. Shrapnel from millions of shattered windows shrieked through the air, slicing through the fleeing mass of humanity that choked the streets below. The bombs fell on cars and buses, homes and churches, vaporizing every man, woman, and child. Molten metal dripped from the skeletons of buildings, boiling in the streets below. Every living thing was burning; nothing was left but ash and blood. What was there to do but run?
So I ran. I ran through torn up and blasted streets, littered with the rubble of eviscerated buildings and the broken bodies of the people within; I ran past burning schools and collapsed hospitals, perfect rings of carnage surrounding epicenters of flame; I ran past places I knew, restaurants I had eaten in the day before, the coffee shop I went to every morning. I recognized nothing; I had no time to feel pain, empathy, or loss. There was only me; if anyone else was left alive, I wasn’t looking. All I could hear was my own heartbeat and the rushing of blood in my ears, and it seemed as though each beat of my racing heart was accentuated by the blast of a bomb. The sounds drew closer and closer. How was I to outrun an inferno?
I could not give up. I sucked in air clogged with smoke and the fumes of burning flesh and kept on running. I was crying, but it was from the wind in my face. For what felt like hours, all I could see was grey smoke and rubble, burning buildings – but then, suddenly, I saw a flash of green between the flames. I ran towards it, each stride harder and harder as exhaustion threatened to overcome adrenaline. Somewhere in my mind I recognized that it had to be the park. Even though I knew nowhere was safe from the bombs, the somehow undisturbed green of the park offered some semblance of hope.
Suddenly I was running on grass and the air seemed clearer; the smell of destruction and death no longer filled my lungs. I could hear the bombs in the distance, but here it seemed quieter, safer. I sank to my knees in the grass and sucked in a deep breath. I could not recognize where I was. Not too far from me I saw what looked like a cave, a pit of darkness set in the side of a hill. Was it a crater? It could not have been there before.
A bomb detonated on the street behind me, blasting my back with heat and glass, and another boom filled my ears. I bolted back to my feet and ran towards the darkness. Cool air whispered out from the tunnel, blowing across my face. The fire could not reach me in there. I tripped at the opening, tumbling face-first into the darkness and rolling like a ragdoll down, and down, and down, until at last I stopped and all was silent.
My own labored breathing was the only sound down in the darkness. It took many long deep breaths before my terror began to subside, before I felt safe from the bombs. Eventually I pulled myself up from my stomach and sat there. I knew if I sat and waited too long, the realizations would set in. That everyone I knew was dead. That my world was destroyed. I couldn’t face that. Instead I focused on the darkness that enveloped me, trying to see something, anything – but the pitch black was impenetrable. My heartbeat started to rise again, thumping in my ears. What if I was inches away from falling into the bowels of the Earth? What if there was no way to get back up?
What if I wasn’t alone?
I tried to fight the sudden grip of fear in my lungs. I took deep breaths again. “You just survived a ****ing bombing, you can handle this,” I said, and I was startled by my own voice. Cracked, rasping. I sounded like an old man. A thought flashed through my head, and I fumbled through my pockets, searching, searching – I felt it, an oddly comforting lump in my pocket. My lighter. “Smoking will kill you, they said,” I murmured to myself, laughing nervously. It echoed. I pushed the lid up and flicked once, twice. Finally it lit, blindingly bright compared to the darkness.
I blinked hard until my eyes adjusted, focusing first on the lighter’s flame, then beyond. All I could see around me was dirt; I was in some kind of tunnel that stretched out beyond what I could see in the dim light, sloping downwards. Behind me was a steep rise; I must have fallen harder than I realized. I noticed that my pants felt wet, and I wondered miserably if I had pissed myself when the bombs fell, touching the fabric to be sure; but when I brought my fingers to the light, they were red. The sight of my own blood shocked me for a moment, but I took a deep breath. Now was not the time to be a pussy. I’ll be fine, I thought. I’ll be fine.
I rose to my feet, grateful for the ceiling above my head, and reached back to touch the steep slope behind me. For a moment I tried to pull myself up, but it was impossible; the dirt came away in my hands and I fell back to my feet. “You can either sit here or do something,” I said, the sound of my own voice more comforting than deafening silence. I took a deep breath and walked carefully forward, bent over so that the lighter illuminated the ground. I went like this for a while, hoping that the ground would begin to slope upwards again; but it kept going down. I looked behind me and couldn’t see where I had began.
“Why are you here?”
I shouted and dropped the lighter, plunging the tunnel back into darkness and my heart into my throat. I clawed out for it and tripped, falling heavily onto the hard ground, deaf to anything but the blood rushing in my ears. “Who are you?” I asked, my voice sounding frail and scared, echoing loudly in the confined space.
“I don’t remember,” came the voice again; it was feminine, yet entirely alien to my ears. It had some echo, some strange undercurrent that raised the hairs on the back of my neck and made my teeth grind. There was a pause, and I could not find the courage to speak.
“Why are you here?” the voice repeated, and I rose to my knees, fumbling in the darkness for the lighter.
“I was running, and came down here,” I said after a moment, breathing heavily. The initial shock of her voice was beginning to fade; I took a deep breath, my fingers brushing against something cool and metal on the ground and closing around it.
“Running from what?” she asked.
“The bombing – you didn’t ****ing hear the bombing?” The top of the lighter kept slipping in my fingers; finally it popped open and I pushed down, the tunnel illuminated again, light falling on a slight frame and a pale face–
She let loose an ear-splitting shriek, a fist flashing out and knocking the lighter from my hand before I could see the rest of her, and I was blind again. I grabbed for it again.
“No!” She cried. “He will see you.”
Something in her voice made me fall silent, peering into the darkness. I saw flashes and spots left over from the light of the flame; or maybe the outline of a person. I reached out a hand uncertainly, brushing against something, and I felt her jerk back in surprise. “I’m sorry,” I said, panic rising in my throat again. “I’m just ... I’m lost and I don’t know where I am. I need the light, I have to be able to see...”
“Do you? Do you have to?” The bitterness in her voice surprised me, and silence fell over us both again.
“Who is going to see me?” I finally said.
“I have forgotten everything but Him, so I do not know … how to describe Him to someone like you,” she said, sounding troubled. “But you don’t want Him to see you. Be patient and I will remember the words. Trust me.”
“Obviously I don’t have a ****ing choice,” I said, voice rising again. “Just explain where I am!”
“It is easier to show than to tell,” she said after a moment. I felt her hand brush against me and then slip into my hand. “Follow me. Quietly.”
I felt her hand move away, tugging me slightly, and I took an uncertain step after her, blind in the deep darkness. One small part of me was more afraid of this murky unknown than the bombs above. I followed the faint sound of her footsteps, each taking us deeper and deeper into darkness. The blood rushed in my ears.
Slowly, so slowly I almost didn’t notice, the complete blindness was tempered by an ethereal light that tinged the darkness faint red. It flickered like a candle, rhythmically pulsing darker, brighter, darker, brighter. It illuminated vague shapes in front of me: the woman who led me, our hands, our footsteps.
“Where is the light coming from?” I asked.
“Shh,” she hissed, holding up a hand in front of my face. I was glad I could see it. “Listen.”
At first I could hear nothing but our breathing; but slowly I could make out a sound underneath it, a heavy rumbling that hung in my head like a bad dream. Thump-thump, it boomed, the ground shaking with each beat. We took a few steps forward and it grew louder and louder, booming and crashing like some primeval drum beating in the bowels of the earth, over and over and over again. It rolled like rhythmic thunder, the light throbbing to match each beat. The hairs rose on the back of my neck. “It’s a heartbeat,” I whispered.
“Yes. It is His heartbeat.”
“What do you mean – who is ‘He’?”
“Listen,” she said, taking a step closer to me. “He is a Demon, and this is His hell. He rules it all, from the maggots wriggling in the dirt to the souls who are trapped here forever.” She pointed to herself. “Everything here is inexorably tied to Him. We are His slaves, condemned eternally to His service by fate, by blood.” My eyes widened, but she held a finger up to my lips. “There are many more than I. We each came down here like you, running away from something, lured into the darkness. But it is a trap.
“Every century, the Demon pulls another soul into His hell. Each soul has one chance to kill Him, and only one chance. Failure is damnation. As His heartbeat continues, so does our slavery; when it ends, if it ends, our souls are released.”
“Bull****,” I finally gasped.
“Hmm.” Her head tilted to the side, but her face was obscured by shadows. “It could be. I could be lying to you, toying with you. But you are here, are you not? What else is there to believe?”
“If you’re His … slave, why are you helping me?”
“It is my duty,” she said after a moment. “A duty I take gladly, for each new soul is a chance, a slight chance to be free. I guide those who have fallen into this trap; I give them what assistance I am allowed; and I hope that they are smart enough to free us all.” She paused, and took a step closer to me. “For years beyond counting, I have been disappointed. Over, and over, and over again. Perhaps you, at last, are the one who will free us all. Or you will be just another disappointment, another century of hopelessness.”
Her words slowly sank in. My disbelief eroded with each heavy beat in the ground below. My heart grew heavier, my shoulders slumped under the weight of inevitability: what she was saying was true. I could feel it. “I can’t run away, can I,” I said numbly, my voice quiet.
“Of course not. It wouldn’t be much of a trap if you could just walk out.” She laughed. I didn’t think it was very funny. “Do not despair,” she said, her voice softening. “It is not an impossible task. Many have tried and all failed, but that does not mean you can‘t succeed. It isn’t hopeless. If it was, it wouldn’t be much of a game.”
I looked up slowly. “A game?”
She laughed again, bitterly. “Yes. A game. Or perhaps a show. This --” she gestured around to the tunnel illuminated by the red light, “it is all for amusement. Not only for His amusement, but for the others. I have never seen one of them, but sometimes … when a new soul fails … you can hear them laughing.”
I swallowed hard and fought back the fear in my throat again.
“But it is a game, a show,” she continued, “and like any good game, it has rules, it has a winner, a loser. It’s fair. If it wasn’t, the audience wouldn’t care.”
Almost as if she could feel my fear, she reached out and took my hand again. Her fingers were as cold as ice. “If you are not confident, you have no chance,” she said bluntly. “Whether you fail or succeed, it is the greatest test you will ever face. You were chosen by fate to do this; it is your destiny, one way or another.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “What do I do?”
She laughed and pulled my hand, taking me further down. The light grew brighter until I could see all around me, clearly make out black hair that spilled almost to dirt. In the light, I could make out another person, and I started.
“It is one of us; he will not hurt you. Slaves we may be, but the Demon cannot make us attack a new soul – it would ruin the game.” She gestured towards him. “We cannot remember our true names, only the names the Demon gives us. Call him whatever you wish. Of course, he can’t answer you,” she said, and then turned around, brushing back her hair. Finally I could see her face under the light. I recoiled, bile rising in my throat.
Her face was pale as ivory and stained with blood. There were two gaping scars where her eyes should have been, criss-crossed by thick black threads up and down her eyelids. With each pulse of the demonic heart, the thread shimmered. “If your eyes displease Him, He sews them shut. If your ears affront Him, He sews them shut.” She gestured to the other figure. “If your mouth offends Him, He sews it shut.”
I covered my mouth, revolted. “I’m so sorry…”
“Why? It’s not as if you did this to us. Right?”
“I … what--”
She laughed again. “You humans are so amusing.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw the other stare at her, then quickly look away, as if he knew that I saw him.
“Aren’t you one too?”
“Too long ago to remember,” she said, shaking her head. “Or to matter. Come, I’ll explain the rest,” she said impatiently. She started walking and I followed her, deeper into the abyss. “The rules of the game are simple. You will ask Him three questions, and He must answer without lying. You will be given a knife that can pierce His flesh, and a torch born from His own soul. He cannot kill you before you ask all of your questions, or until you attack Him yourself. Be warned: everything I say is true, but designed to trick you. You are not supposed to win. Not without being very clever.” She paused and looked straight at me with her empty eyes. “Nothing is as it seems. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ready?”
“What?! No!”
“That’s too bad, because we’re here.”
I took another step and the tunnel widened out into a cavernous room. It was so bright it hurt my eyes; flames burned across the walls, coursing through the cavern like blood through veins. The thunder of His heartbeat echoed through the chamber; with each beat, the flames burned brighter. At the center of the flame, a pulsing mass of burning flesh twitched rhythmically to the heartbeat. It was a swollen black heart, pumping flame with each beat; twisted around it was a corpulent pile of flesh and bone, a face, legs, a mockery of a human.
“What’s this?” A voice like thunder rolled across the cavern, followed by faint echoes, a hiss and a roar in one. My teeth grated. “Has it really been a century again?”
I turned, reaching out for my guide, but she was no longer by my side. She stood across the room with a host of pale-faced, emaciated figures, each with eyes or ears or mouths sewn shut.
“Come here,” the voice boomed, and my feet shuffled me forward closer and closer to the heart.
Two burning eyes regarded me from some twisted skull above the heart. A jaw opened, a booming laugh and tendrils of smoke escaping it. “It’s about time.” One of the figures scurried up behind me and dropped a shimmering knife and a torch on the ground, then ran back. “Come and kill me,” the voice mocked.
I reached down slowly, took a deep breath, and picked up the knife and the torch. I walked towards him, swallowing hard and staring directly into the smoldering eyes. They regarded me curiously.
“You have three questions before you join the damned.” The demon pointed a withered arm towards the deathly silent spectators. “Take your time. I have little else to amuse me for the next century.” He drew in a deep breath and a wheel of flame encircled his withered arm, coursing through the bone and sinew. Instantly it grew, fiery claws bursting from underneath fingernails, flame oozing from his black skin.
I took a deep breath. “What is the capability of these things I‘ve been given?”
“Don’t you know?” He tossed his head, breathing smoke. “Your knife can cut only a small part of my flesh. The flame is mine, and will only make me stronger.”
His eyes watched me, quietly. I took another deep breath. “How do I kill you?”
The demon laughed again, a booming laugh that prickled my spire. “You are not so clever as you think. They have all asked this,” he said, a hand gesturing to the figures. “As you can see, they didn’t like the answer.” He laughed again, the crowd shuddering with each grating sound. “I will give you the answer I gave them: the only thing that can harm me is the flesh of my flesh, the blood of my blood.” I swore I saw a smile, fire dripping from the corner of his mouth.
“I know that you can’t kill me until I ask the final question.”
“Regrettably.” I saw another grin, black teeth outlined by embers. The claws scratched along the ground again. I looked at those black talons, at the flame that coursed around them, flame that coursed over black skin that shimmered to the beat of his heart. In that moment, a strange hope glimmered in me. I knew I what to do.
I looked into the Demon’s eyes and smiled.
I turned and ran towards the crowd of spectators. I grabbed one of the figures, pulling him closer to me and raising the knife quickly, hellfire shining down its blade. His eyes flashed between its point and me, lips trying to move but held shut by the thread. Thick, black thread that shimmered with every thundering beat of the Demon’s heart.
The knife flashed quickly against one stitch, slicing cleanly through it. The figure’s eyes widened and I saw in them a reflection of flame. Quickly, I fell to the ground, rolling.
The flaming claws flashed through the air where I had just stood, leaving behind a trail of smoke and ash. “I don’t have to kill you,” the Demon snarled, flashing the claws out at me again. I ducked out of the way, slipping behind the figure and holding him in front of me, quickly slicing through the threads until I could pull one free, a long, black coil that burned my skin.
The claws flashed at me again and I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough, the torch flying from my hands. I fell hard, face-first into the ground, but I still had the knife and the coil of thread clutched in my hands. I rolled out of the way of His claws, staring into His eyes again.
“Well done,” the Demon bellowed, laughing. “But do you think you can kill me with one tiny little piece of me? You think a thread can fell a Demon?”
“No,” I said. The claws flashed towards me again and this time I rolled out of the way, slamming the knife down into the ground and pinning the flaming arm into the dirt. Instantly, more flame coursed around it, strengthening the arm and slowly forcing the dagger out of it as his flesh grew.
I ran to where the torch lay, still burning. I thrust my fist into the flame, wrapped in the thread. The fire coursed through my veins and devoured my skin, but the thread grew instantly. It fed off the fire, growing thicker and thicker in my hand, bursting into a black spire coursing with flame.
“Flesh of your flesh,” I said, laughing, the pain forgotten as the thread grew stronger. The claws flashed at me again, but this time I lifted the spine; they crashed together with a horrendous shriek and crack of bone, and one claw fell to the ground. The Demon shrieked and recoiled, bellowing something in a language that burned in my ears.
I ran towards Him, the spine clutched between both of my hands. “My last question, Demon,” I roared. “Are you afraid?”
The spine sank deep into the black heart. The Demon roared, bleeding fire, enveloping me, boiling my skin away -- but when the flame touched the spine it grew, splitting the heart in two.
An ear-splitting shriek escaped the Demon as the fire within faded. The cavern was enveloped in brilliant blood red flame, which pulsed with one last thundering heartbeat and then went out. I collapsed to the ground as the heart withered to ash, receding into the sunken chest of a broken beast that might have once been a man.
“Thank you,” a voice whispered from the ashes. Then all was silent.
The threads blinding, muting and silencing the crowd dissolved and slipped away. A chorus of gratitude filled my ears as each tortured soul was released. One by one they crumbled into dust and withered away, until all were gone. All but one.
My guide walked up to me and laughed. She was stunningly beautiful, long black hair cascading around a perfect face, full lips curved into a wonderful smile. She had eyes now, brilliant blue eyes that bathed the entire cavern in soft light. I had never seen a more beautiful sight in all my life.
“Well that certainly was amusing!” she said, clapping her hands together joyfully, the words spilling out of her mouth like music. “I didn’t expect you to get that far! They‘re usually so very disappointing, but you…”
“W… what? Why didn’t you disappear with the rest of them?” I asked, groaning in pain from the burns that covered my body. She laid a cold hand against my shoulder, and the pain all over me numbed and faded, calm filling my aching bones.
“Why would I have? They’ve all been dead for a long, long time. Only their souls have been trapped here by the Demon, tortured for millenia. You have finally released them from their bonds, released their souls to heaven or hell or wherever they’re supposed to be.” She smiled, her eyes so bright I could see nothing else. “You really ought to be proud. No one‘s done it in two thousand years, you know. I‘ve lost a lot of bets.”
“I don’t understand,” I coughed, staring into her eyes.
She shook her head and sighed. “It really is a shame,” she said, patting me on the head. “You did so well. Ah, well, it‘s not like you‘re the first one.” She bent down and kissed me on the lips, and a tingling warmth spread from my lips throughout my entire body. Then she stood and walked away.
“No! Where are you going!?” I screamed, reaching after her. “Don’t leave me!” My eyes widened as the tips of my fingers began to peel and crack, the skin fading away to ash gray and then to black, my bones crumpling as crippling pain erupted from my chest. I screamed, clawing at my ribs, as the warmth from her kiss turned to flame beneath my skin. A sound began to fill my ears, a sound that reverberated in the cavern around me from deep beneath my chest, a familiar sound...
She turned and blew me a kiss. “The show must go on!”
My chest burst into flames and then split open, my burning heart shattering my ribcage, my body withering around it as it twitched and grew and pumped fire through my veins. A cacophony of shrieking laughs filled my ears.
Then the only sound was the constant beating of my heart. The Heartbeat in the Deep
That day the bombs fell.
The city was torn limb from limb, cell from cell. All was chaos and fire, the roars of the bombs drowning out the screams of the people below. The bombs fell on skyscrapers and streets, blasting through the foundations of mighty steel and glass monuments to the ingenuity of man. They collapsed in a maelstrom of dust and flame. Shrapnel from millions of shattered windows shrieked through the air, slicing through the fleeing mass of humanity that choked the streets below. The bombs fell on cars and buses, homes and churches, vaporizing every man, woman, and child. Molten metal dripped from the skeletons of buildings, boiling in the streets below. Every living thing was burning; nothing was left but ash and blood. What was there to do but run?
So I ran. I ran through torn up and blasted streets, littered with the rubble of eviscerated buildings and the broken bodies of the people within; I ran past burning schools and collapsed hospitals, perfect rings of carnage surrounding epicenters of flame; I ran past places I knew, restaurants I had eaten in the day before, the coffee shop I went to every morning. I recognized nothing; I had no time to feel pain, empathy, or loss. There was only me; if anyone else was left alive, I wasn’t looking. All I could hear was my own heartbeat and the rushing of blood in my ears, and it seemed as though each beat of my racing heart was accentuated by the blast of a bomb. The sounds drew closer and closer. How was I to outrun an inferno?
I could not give up. I sucked in air clogged with smoke and the fumes of burning flesh and kept on running. I was crying, but it was from the wind in my face. For what felt like hours, all I could see was grey smoke and rubble, burning buildings – but then, suddenly, I saw a flash of green between the flames. I ran towards it, each stride harder and harder as exhaustion threatened to overcome adrenaline. Somewhere in my mind I recognized that it had to be the park. Even though I knew nowhere was safe from the bombs, the somehow undisturbed green of the park offered some semblance of hope.
Suddenly I was running on grass and the air seemed clearer; the smell of destruction and death no longer filled my lungs. I could hear the bombs in the distance, but here it seemed quieter, safer. I sank to my knees in the grass and sucked in a deep breath. I could not recognize where I was. Not too far from me I saw what looked like a cave, a pit of darkness set in the side of a hill. Was it a crater? It could not have been there before.
A bomb detonated on the street behind me, blasting my back with heat and glass, and another boom filled my ears. I bolted back to my feet and ran towards the darkness. Cool air whispered out from the tunnel, blowing across my face. The fire could not reach me in there. I tripped at the opening, tumbling face-first into the darkness and rolling like a ragdoll down, and down, and down, until at last I stopped and all was silent.
My own labored breathing was the only sound down in the darkness. It took many long deep breaths before my terror began to subside, before I felt safe from the bombs. Eventually I pulled myself up from my stomach and sat there. I knew if I sat and waited too long, the realizations would set in. That everyone I knew was dead. That my world was destroyed. I couldn’t face that. Instead I focused on the darkness that enveloped me, trying to see something, anything – but the pitch black was impenetrable. My heartbeat started to rise again, thumping in my ears. What if I was inches away from falling into the bowels of the Earth? What if there was no way to get back up?
What if I wasn’t alone?
I tried to fight the sudden grip of fear in my lungs. I took deep breaths again. “You just survived a ****ing bombing, you can handle this,” I said, and I was startled by my own voice. Cracked, rasping. I sounded like an old man. A thought flashed through my head, and I fumbled through my pockets, searching, searching – I felt it, an oddly comforting lump in my pocket. My lighter. “Smoking will kill you, they said,” I murmured to myself, laughing nervously. It echoed. I pushed the lid up and flicked once, twice. Finally it lit, blindingly bright compared to the darkness.
I blinked hard until my eyes adjusted, focusing first on the lighter’s flame, then beyond. All I could see around me was dirt; I was in some kind of tunnel that stretched out beyond what I could see in the dim light, sloping downwards. Behind me was a steep rise; I must have fallen harder than I realized. I noticed that my pants felt wet, and I wondered miserably if I had pissed myself when the bombs fell, touching the fabric to be sure; but when I brought my fingers to the light, they were red. The sight of my own blood shocked me for a moment, but I took a deep breath. Now was not the time to be a pussy. I’ll be fine, I thought. I’ll be fine.
I rose to my feet, grateful for the ceiling above my head, and reached back to touch the steep slope behind me. For a moment I tried to pull myself up, but it was impossible; the dirt came away in my hands and I fell back to my feet. “You can either sit here or do something,” I said, the sound of my own voice more comforting than deafening silence. I took a deep breath and walked carefully forward, bent over so that the lighter illuminated the ground. I went like this for a while, hoping that the ground would begin to slope upwards again; but it kept going down. I looked behind me and couldn’t see where I had began.
“Why are you here?”
I shouted and dropped the lighter, plunging the tunnel back into darkness and my heart into my throat. I clawed out for it and tripped, falling heavily onto the hard ground, deaf to anything but the blood rushing in my ears. “Who are you?” I asked, my voice sounding frail and scared, echoing loudly in the confined space.
“I don’t remember,” came the voice again; it was feminine, yet entirely alien to my ears. It had some echo, some strange undercurrent that raised the hairs on the back of my neck and made my teeth grind. There was a pause, and I could not find the courage to speak.
“Why are you here?” the voice repeated, and I rose to my knees, fumbling in the darkness for the lighter.
“I was running, and came down here,” I said after a moment, breathing heavily. The initial shock of her voice was beginning to fade; I took a deep breath, my fingers brushing against something cool and metal on the ground and closing around it.
“Running from what?” she asked.
“The bombing – you didn’t ****ing hear the bombing?” The top of the lighter kept slipping in my fingers; finally it popped open and I pushed down, the tunnel illuminated again, light falling on a slight frame and a pale face–
She let loose an ear-splitting shriek, a fist flashing out and knocking the lighter from my hand before I could see the rest of her, and I was blind again. I grabbed for it again.
“No!” She cried. “He will see you.”
Something in her voice made me fall silent, peering into the darkness. I saw flashes and spots left over from the light of the flame; or maybe the outline of a person. I reached out a hand uncertainly, brushing against something, and I felt her jerk back in surprise. “I’m sorry,” I said, panic rising in my throat again. “I’m just ... I’m lost and I don’t know where I am. I need the light, I have to be able to see...”
“Do you? Do you have to?” The bitterness in her voice surprised me, and silence fell over us both again.
“Who is going to see me?” I finally said.
“I have forgotten everything but Him, so I do not know … how to describe Him to someone like you,” she said, sounding troubled. “But you don’t want Him to see you. Be patient and I will remember the words. Trust me.”
“Obviously I don’t have a ****ing choice,” I said, voice rising again. “Just explain where I am!”
“It is easier to show than to tell,” she said after a moment. I felt her hand brush against me and then slip into my hand. “Follow me. Quietly.”
I felt her hand move away, tugging me slightly, and I took an uncertain step after her, blind in the deep darkness. One small part of me was more afraid of this murky unknown than the bombs above. I followed the faint sound of her footsteps, each taking us deeper and deeper into darkness. The blood rushed in my ears.
Slowly, so slowly I almost didn’t notice, the complete blindness was tempered by an ethereal light that tinged the darkness faint red. It flickered like a candle, rhythmically pulsing darker, brighter, darker, brighter. It illuminated vague shapes in front of me: the woman who led me, our hands, our footsteps.
“Where is the light coming from?” I asked.
“Shh,” she hissed, holding up a hand in front of my face. I was glad I could see it. “Listen.”
At first I could hear nothing but our breathing; but slowly I could make out a sound underneath it, a heavy rumbling that hung in my head like a bad dream. Thump-thump, it boomed, the ground shaking with each beat. We took a few steps forward and it grew louder and louder, booming and crashing like some primeval drum beating in the bowels of the earth, over and over and over again. It rolled like rhythmic thunder, the light throbbing to match each beat. The hairs rose on the back of my neck. “It’s a heartbeat,” I whispered.
“Yes. It is His heartbeat.”
“What do you mean – who is ‘He’?”
“Listen,” she said, taking a step closer to me. “He is a Demon, and this is His hell. He rules it all, from the maggots wriggling in the dirt to the souls who are trapped here forever.” She pointed to herself. “Everything here is inexorably tied to Him. We are His slaves, condemned eternally to His service by fate, by blood.” My eyes widened, but she held a finger up to my lips. “There are many more than I. We each came down here like you, running away from something, lured into the darkness. But it is a trap.
“Every century, the Demon pulls another soul into His hell. Each soul has one chance to kill Him, and only one chance. Failure is damnation. As His heartbeat continues, so does our slavery; when it ends, if it ends, our souls are released.”
“Bull****,” I finally gasped.
“Hmm.” Her head tilted to the side, but her face was obscured by shadows. “It could be. I could be lying to you, toying with you. But you are here, are you not? What else is there to believe?”
“If you’re His … slave, why are you helping me?”
“It is my duty,” she said after a moment. “A duty I take gladly, for each new soul is a chance, a slight chance to be free. I guide those who have fallen into this trap; I give them what assistance I am allowed; and I hope that they are smart enough to free us all.” She paused, and took a step closer to me. “For years beyond counting, I have been disappointed. Over, and over, and over again. Perhaps you, at last, are the one who will free us all. Or you will be just another disappointment, another century of hopelessness.”
Her words slowly sank in. My disbelief eroded with each heavy beat in the ground below. My heart grew heavier, my shoulders slumped under the weight of inevitability: what she was saying was true. I could feel it. “I can’t run away, can I,” I said numbly, my voice quiet.
“Of course not. It wouldn’t be much of a trap if you could just walk out.” She laughed. I didn’t think it was very funny. “Do not despair,” she said, her voice softening. “It is not an impossible task. Many have tried and all failed, but that does not mean you can‘t succeed. It isn’t hopeless. If it was, it wouldn’t be much of a game.”
I looked up slowly. “A game?”
She laughed again, bitterly. “Yes. A game. Or perhaps a show. This --” she gestured around to the tunnel illuminated by the red light, “it is all for amusement. Not only for His amusement, but for the others. I have never seen one of them, but sometimes … when a new soul fails … you can hear them laughing.”
I swallowed hard and fought back the fear in my throat again.
“But it is a game, a show,” she continued, “and like any good game, it has rules, it has a winner, a loser. It’s fair. If it wasn’t, the audience wouldn’t care.”
Almost as if she could feel my fear, she reached out and took my hand again. Her fingers were as cold as ice. “If you are not confident, you have no chance,” she said bluntly. “Whether you fail or succeed, it is the greatest test you will ever face. You were chosen by fate to do this; it is your destiny, one way or another.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “What do I do?”
She laughed and pulled my hand, taking me further down. The light grew brighter until I could see all around me, clearly make out black hair that spilled almost to dirt. In the light, I could make out another person, and I started.
“It is one of us; he will not hurt you. Slaves we may be, but the Demon cannot make us attack a new soul – it would ruin the game.” She gestured towards him. “We cannot remember our true names, only the names the Demon gives us. Call him whatever you wish. Of course, he can’t answer you,” she said, and then turned around, brushing back her hair. Finally I could see her face under the light. I recoiled, bile rising in my throat.
Her face was pale as ivory and stained with blood. There were two gaping scars where her eyes should have been, criss-crossed by thick black threads up and down her eyelids. With each pulse of the demonic heart, the thread shimmered. “If your eyes displease Him, He sews them shut. If your ears affront Him, He sews them shut.” She gestured to the other figure. “If your mouth offends Him, He sews it shut.”
I covered my mouth, revolted. “I’m so sorry…”
“Why? It’s not as if you did this to us. Right?”
“I … what--”
She laughed again. “You humans are so amusing.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw the other stare at her, then quickly look away, as if he knew that I saw him.
“Aren’t you one too?”
“Too long ago to remember,” she said, shaking her head. “Or to matter. Come, I’ll explain the rest,” she said impatiently. She started walking and I followed her, deeper into the abyss. “The rules of the game are simple. You will ask Him three questions, and He must answer without lying. You will be given a knife that can pierce His flesh, and a torch born from His own soul. He cannot kill you before you ask all of your questions, or until you attack Him yourself. Be warned: everything I say is true, but designed to trick you. You are not supposed to win. Not without being very clever.” She paused and looked straight at me with her empty eyes. “Nothing is as it seems. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ready?”
“What?! No!”
“That’s too bad, because we’re here.”
I took another step and the tunnel widened out into a cavernous room. It was so bright it hurt my eyes; flames burned across the walls, coursing through the cavern like blood through veins. The thunder of His heartbeat echoed through the chamber; with each beat, the flames burned brighter. At the center of the flame, a pulsing mass of burning flesh twitched rhythmically to the heartbeat. It was a swollen black heart, pumping flame with each beat; twisted around it was a corpulent pile of flesh and bone, a face, legs, a mockery of a human.
“What’s this?” A voice like thunder rolled across the cavern, followed by faint echoes, a hiss and a roar in one. My teeth grated. “Has it really been a century again?”
I turned, reaching out for my guide, but she was no longer by my side. She stood across the room with a host of pale-faced, emaciated figures, each with eyes or ears or mouths sewn shut.
“Come here,” the voice boomed, and my feet shuffled me forward closer and closer to the heart.
Two burning eyes regarded me from some twisted skull above the heart. A jaw opened, a booming laugh and tendrils of smoke escaping it. “It’s about time.” One of the figures scurried up behind me and dropped a shimmering knife and a torch on the ground, then ran back. “Come and kill me,” the voice mocked.
I reached down slowly, took a deep breath, and picked up the knife and the torch. I walked towards him, swallowing hard and staring directly into the smoldering eyes. They regarded me curiously.
“You have three questions before you join the damned.” The demon pointed a withered arm towards the deathly silent spectators. “Take your time. I have little else to amuse me for the next century.” He drew in a deep breath and a wheel of flame encircled his withered arm, coursing through the bone and sinew. Instantly it grew, fiery claws bursting from underneath fingernails, flame oozing from his black skin.
I took a deep breath. “What is the capability of these things I‘ve been given?”
“Don’t you know?” He tossed his head, breathing smoke. “Your knife can cut only a small part of my flesh. The flame is mine, and will only make me stronger.”
His eyes watched me, quietly. I took another deep breath. “How do I kill you?”
The demon laughed again, a booming laugh that prickled my spire. “You are not so clever as you think. They have all asked this,” he said, a hand gesturing to the figures. “As you can see, they didn’t like the answer.” He laughed again, the crowd shuddering with each grating sound. “I will give you the answer I gave them: the only thing that can harm me is the flesh of my flesh, the blood of my blood.” I swore I saw a smile, fire dripping from the corner of his mouth.
“I know that you can’t kill me until I ask the final question.”
“Regrettably.” I saw another grin, black teeth outlined by embers. The claws scratched along the ground again. I looked at those black talons, at the flame that coursed around them, flame that coursed over black skin that shimmered to the beat of his heart. In that moment, a strange hope glimmered in me. I knew I what to do.
I looked into the Demon’s eyes and smiled.
I turned and ran towards the crowd of spectators. I grabbed one of the figures, pulling him closer to me and raising the knife quickly, hellfire shining down its blade. His eyes flashed between its point and me, lips trying to move but held shut by the thread. Thick, black thread that shimmered with every thundering beat of the Demon’s heart.
The knife flashed quickly against one stitch, slicing cleanly through it. The figure’s eyes widened and I saw in them a reflection of flame. Quickly, I fell to the ground, rolling.
The flaming claws flashed through the air where I had just stood, leaving behind a trail of smoke and ash. “I don’t have to kill you,” the Demon snarled, flashing the claws out at me again. I ducked out of the way, slipping behind the figure and holding him in front of me, quickly slicing through the threads until I could pull one free, a long, black coil that burned my skin.
The claws flashed at me again and I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough, the torch flying from my hands. I fell hard, face-first into the ground, but I still had the knife and the coil of thread clutched in my hands. I rolled out of the way of His claws, staring into His eyes again.
“Well done,” the Demon bellowed, laughing. “But do you think you can kill me with one tiny little piece of me? You think a thread can fell a Demon?”
“No,” I said. The claws flashed towards me again and this time I rolled out of the way, slamming the knife down into the ground and pinning the flaming arm into the dirt. Instantly, more flame coursed around it, strengthening the arm and slowly forcing the dagger out of it as his flesh grew.
I ran to where the torch lay, still burning. I thrust my fist into the flame, wrapped in the thread. The fire coursed through my veins and devoured my skin, but the thread grew instantly. It fed off the fire, growing thicker and thicker in my hand, bursting into a black spire coursing with flame.
“Flesh of your flesh,” I said, laughing, the pain forgotten as the thread grew stronger. The claws flashed at me again, but this time I lifted the spine; they crashed together with a horrendous shriek and crack of bone, and one claw fell to the ground. The Demon shrieked and recoiled, bellowing something in a language that burned in my ears.
I ran towards Him, the spine clutched between both of my hands. “My last question, Demon,” I roared. “Are you afraid?”
The spine sank deep into the black heart. The Demon roared, bleeding fire, enveloping me, boiling my skin away -- but when the flame touched the spine it grew, splitting the heart in two.
An ear-splitting shriek escaped the Demon as the fire within faded. The cavern was enveloped in brilliant blood red flame, which pulsed with one last thundering heartbeat and then went out. I collapsed to the ground as the heart withered to ash, receding into the sunken chest of a broken beast that might have once been a man.
“Thank you,” a voice whispered from the ashes. Then all was silent.
The threads blinding, muting and silencing the crowd dissolved and slipped away. A chorus of gratitude filled my ears as each tortured soul was released. One by one they crumbled into dust and withered away, until all were gone. All but one.
My guide walked up to me and laughed. She was stunningly beautiful, long black hair cascading around a perfect face, full lips curved into a wonderful smile. She had eyes now, brilliant blue eyes that bathed the entire cavern in soft light. I had never seen a more beautiful sight in all my life.
“Well that certainly was amusing!” she said, clapping her hands together joyfully, the words spilling out of her mouth like music. “I didn’t expect you to get that far! They‘re usually so very disappointing, but you…”
“W… what? Why didn’t you disappear with the rest of them?” I asked, groaning in pain from the burns that covered my body. She laid a cold hand against my shoulder, and the pain all over me numbed and faded, calm filling my aching bones.
“Why would I have? They’ve all been dead for a long, long time. Only their souls have been trapped here by the Demon, tortured for millenia. You have finally released them from their bonds, released their souls to heaven or hell or wherever they’re supposed to be.” She smiled, her eyes so bright I could see nothing else. “You really ought to be proud. No one‘s done it in two thousand years, you know. I‘ve lost a lot of bets.”
“I don’t understand,” I coughed, staring into her eyes.
She shook her head and sighed. “It really is a shame,” she said, patting me on the head. “You did so well. Ah, well, it‘s not like you‘re the first one.” She bent down and kissed me on the lips, and a tingling warmth spread from my lips throughout my entire body. Then she stood and walked away.
“No! Where are you going!?” I screamed, reaching after her. “Don’t leave me!” My eyes widened as the tips of my fingers began to peel and crack, the skin fading away to ash gray and then to black, my bones crumpling as crippling pain erupted from my chest. I screamed, clawing at my ribs, as the warmth from her kiss turned to flame beneath my skin. A sound began to fill my ears, a sound that reverberated in the cavern around me from deep beneath my chest, a familiar sound...
She turned and blew me a kiss. “The show must go on!”
My chest burst into flames and then split open, my burning heart shattering my ribcage, my body withering around it as it twitched and grew and pumped fire through my veins. A cacophony of shrieking laughs filled my ears.
Then the only sound was the constant beating of my heart. The Heartbeat in the Deep
That day the bombs fell.
The city was torn limb from limb, cell from cell. All was chaos and fire, the roars of the bombs drowning out the screams of the people below. The bombs fell on skyscrapers and streets, blasting through the foundations of mighty steel and glass monuments to the ingenuity of man. They collapsed in a maelstrom of dust and flame. Shrapnel from millions of shattered windows shrieked through the air, slicing through the fleeing mass of humanity that choked the streets below. The bombs fell on cars and buses, homes and churches, vaporizing every man, woman, and child. Molten metal dripped from the skeletons of buildings, boiling in the streets below. Every living thing was burning; nothing was left but ash and blood. What was there to do but run?
So I ran. I ran through torn up and blasted streets, littered with the rubble of eviscerated buildings and the broken bodies of the people within; I ran past burning schools and collapsed hospitals, perfect rings of carnage surrounding epicenters of flame; I ran past places I knew, restaurants I had eaten in the day before, the coffee shop I went to every morning. I recognized nothing; I had no time to feel pain, empathy, or loss. There was only me; if anyone else was left alive, I wasn’t looking. All I could hear was my own heartbeat and the rushing of blood in my ears, and it seemed as though each beat of my racing heart was accentuated by the blast of a bomb. The sounds drew closer and closer. How was I to outrun an inferno?
I could not give up. I sucked in air clogged with smoke and the fumes of burning flesh and kept on running. I was crying, but it was from the wind in my face. For what felt like hours, all I could see was grey smoke and rubble, burning buildings – but then, suddenly, I saw a flash of green between the flames. I ran towards it, each stride harder and harder as exhaustion threatened to overcome adrenaline. Somewhere in my mind I recognized that it had to be the park. Even though I knew nowhere was safe from the bombs, the somehow undisturbed green of the park offered some semblance of hope.
Suddenly I was running on grass and the air seemed clearer; the smell of destruction and death no longer filled my lungs. I could hear the bombs in the distance, but here it seemed quieter, safer. I sank to my knees in the grass and sucked in a deep breath. I could not recognize where I was. Not too far from me I saw what looked like a cave, a pit of darkness set in the side of a hill. Was it a crater? It could not have been there before.
A bomb detonated on the street behind me, blasting my back with heat and glass, and another boom filled my ears. I bolted back to my feet and ran towards the darkness. Cool air whispered out from the tunnel, blowing across my face. The fire could not reach me in there. I tripped at the opening, tumbling face-first into the darkness and rolling like a ragdoll down, and down, and down, until at last I stopped and all was silent.
My own labored breathing was the only sound down in the darkness. It took many long deep breaths before my terror began to subside, before I felt safe from the bombs. Eventually I pulled myself up from my stomach and sat there. I knew if I sat and waited too long, the realizations would set in. That everyone I knew was dead. That my world was destroyed. I couldn’t face that. Instead I focused on the darkness that enveloped me, trying to see something, anything – but the pitch black was impenetrable. My heartbeat started to rise again, thumping in my ears. What if I was inches away from falling into the bowels of the Earth? What if there was no way to get back up?
What if I wasn’t alone?
I tried to fight the sudden grip of fear in my lungs. I took deep breaths again. “You just survived a ****ing bombing, you can handle this,” I said, and I was startled by my own voice. Cracked, rasping. I sounded like an old man. A thought flashed through my head, and I fumbled through my pockets, searching, searching – I felt it, an oddly comforting lump in my pocket. My lighter. “Smoking will kill you, they said,” I murmured to myself, laughing nervously. It echoed. I pushed the lid up and flicked once, twice. Finally it lit, blindingly bright compared to the darkness.
I blinked hard until my eyes adjusted, focusing first on the lighter’s flame, then beyond. All I could see around me was dirt; I was in some kind of tunnel that stretched out beyond what I could see in the dim light, sloping downwards. Behind me was a steep rise; I must have fallen harder than I realized. I noticed that my pants felt wet, and I wondered miserably if I had pissed myself when the bombs fell, touching the fabric to be sure; but when I brought my fingers to the light, they were red. The sight of my own blood shocked me for a moment, but I took a deep breath. Now was not the time to be a pussy. I’ll be fine, I thought. I’ll be fine.
I rose to my feet, grateful for the ceiling above my head, and reached back to touch the steep slope behind me. For a moment I tried to pull myself up, but it was impossible; the dirt came away in my hands and I fell back to my feet. “You can either sit here or do something,” I said, the sound of my own voice more comforting than deafening silence. I took a deep breath and walked carefully forward, bent over so that the lighter illuminated the ground. I went like this for a while, hoping that the ground would begin to slope upwards again; but it kept going down. I looked behind me and couldn’t see where I had began.
“Why are you here?”
I shouted and dropped the lighter, plunging the tunnel back into darkness and my heart into my throat. I clawed out for it and tripped, falling heavily onto the hard ground, deaf to anything but the blood rushing in my ears. “Who are you?” I asked, my voice sounding frail and scared, echoing loudly in the confined space.
“I don’t remember,” came the voice again; it was feminine, yet entirely alien to my ears. It had some echo, some strange undercurrent that raised the hairs on the back of my neck and made my teeth grind. There was a pause, and I could not find the courage to speak.
“Why are you here?” the voice repeated, and I rose to my knees, fumbling in the darkness for the lighter.
“I was running, and came down here,” I said after a moment, breathing heavily. The initial shock of her voice was beginning to fade; I took a deep breath, my fingers brushing against something cool and metal on the ground and closing around it.
“Running from what?” she asked.
“The bombing – you didn’t ****ing hear the bombing?” The top of the lighter kept slipping in my fingers; finally it popped open and I pushed down, the tunnel illuminated again, light falling on a slight frame and a pale face–
She let loose an ear-splitting shriek, a fist flashing out and knocking the lighter from my hand before I could see the rest of her, and I was blind again. I grabbed for it again.
“No!” She cried. “He will see you.”
Something in her voice made me fall silent, peering into the darkness. I saw flashes and spots left over from the light of the flame; or maybe the outline of a person. I reached out a hand uncertainly, brushing against something, and I felt her jerk back in surprise. “I’m sorry,” I said, panic rising in my throat again. “I’m just ... I’m lost and I don’t know where I am. I need the light, I have to be able to see...”
“Do you? Do you have to?” The bitterness in her voice surprised me, and silence fell over us both again.
“Who is going to see me?” I finally said.
“I have forgotten everything but Him, so I do not know … how to describe Him to someone like you,” she said, sounding troubled. “But you don’t want Him to see you. Be patient and I will remember the words. Trust me.”
“Obviously I don’t have a ****ing choice,” I said, voice rising again. “Just explain where I am!”
“It is easier to show than to tell,” she said after a moment. I felt her hand brush against me and then slip into my hand. “Follow me. Quietly.”
I felt her hand move away, tugging me slightly, and I took an uncertain step after her, blind in the deep darkness. One small part of me was more afraid of this murky unknown than the bombs above. I followed the faint sound of her footsteps, each taking us deeper and deeper into darkness. The blood rushed in my ears.
Slowly, so slowly I almost didn’t notice, the complete blindness was tempered by an ethereal light that tinged the darkness faint red. It flickered like a candle, rhythmically pulsing darker, brighter, darker, brighter. It illuminated vague shapes in front of me: the woman who led me, our hands, our footsteps.
“Where is the light coming from?” I asked.
“Shh,” she hissed, holding up a hand in front of my face. I was glad I could see it. “Listen.”
At first I could hear nothing but our breathing; but slowly I could make out a sound underneath it, a heavy rumbling that hung in my head like a bad dream. Thump-thump, it boomed, the ground shaking with each beat. We took a few steps forward and it grew louder and louder, booming and crashing like some primeval drum beating in the bowels of the earth, over and over and over again. It rolled like rhythmic thunder, the light throbbing to match each beat. The hairs rose on the back of my neck. “It’s a heartbeat,” I whispered.
“Yes. It is His heartbeat.”
“What do you mean – who is ‘He’?”
“Listen,” she said, taking a step closer to me. “He is a Demon, and this is His hell. He rules it all, from the maggots wriggling in the dirt to the souls who are trapped here forever.” She pointed to herself. “Everything here is inexorably tied to Him. We are His slaves, condemned eternally to His service by fate, by blood.” My eyes widened, but she held a finger up to my lips. “There are many more than I. We each came down here like you, running away from something, lured into the darkness. But it is a trap.
“Every century, the Demon pulls another soul into His hell. Each soul has one chance to kill Him, and only one chance. Failure is damnation. As His heartbeat continues, so does our slavery; when it ends, if it ends, our souls are released.”
“Bull****,” I finally gasped.
“Hmm.” Her head tilted to the side, but her face was obscured by shadows. “It could be. I could be lying to you, toying with you. But you are here, are you not? What else is there to believe?”
“If you’re His … slave, why are you helping me?”
“It is my duty,” she said after a moment. “A duty I take gladly, for each new soul is a chance, a slight chance to be free. I guide those who have fallen into this trap; I give them what assistance I am allowed; and I hope that they are smart enough to free us all.” She paused, and took a step closer to me. “For years beyond counting, I have been disappointed. Over, and over, and over again. Perhaps you, at last, are the one who will free us all. Or you will be just another disappointment, another century of hopelessness.”
Her words slowly sank in. My disbelief eroded with each heavy beat in the ground below. My heart grew heavier, my shoulders slumped under the weight of inevitability: what she was saying was true. I could feel it. “I can’t run away, can I,” I said numbly, my voice quiet.
“Of course not. It wouldn’t be much of a trap if you could just walk out.” She laughed. I didn’t think it was very funny. “Do not despair,” she said, her voice softening. “It is not an impossible task. Many have tried and all failed, but that does not mean you can‘t succeed. It isn’t hopeless. If it was, it wouldn’t be much of a game.”
I looked up slowly. “A game?”
She laughed again, bitterly. “Yes. A game. Or perhaps a show. This --” she gestured around to the tunnel illuminated by the red light, “it is all for amusement. Not only for His amusement, but for the others. I have never seen one of them, but sometimes … when a new soul fails … you can hear them laughing.”
I swallowed hard and fought back the fear in my throat again.
“But it is a game, a show,” she continued, “and like any good game, it has rules, it has a winner, a loser. It’s fair. If it wasn’t, the audience wouldn’t care.”
Almost as if she could feel my fear, she reached out and took my hand again. Her fingers were as cold as ice. “If you are not confident, you have no chance,” she said bluntly. “Whether you fail or succeed, it is the greatest test you will ever face. You were chosen by fate to do this; it is your destiny, one way or another.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “What do I do?”
She laughed and pulled my hand, taking me further down. The light grew brighter until I could see all around me, clearly make out black hair that spilled almost to dirt. In the light, I could make out another person, and I started.
“It is one of us; he will not hurt you. Slaves we may be, but the Demon cannot make us attack a new soul – it would ruin the game.” She gestured towards him. “We cannot remember our true names, only the names the Demon gives us. Call him whatever you wish. Of course, he can’t answer you,” she said, and then turned around, brushing back her hair. Finally I could see her face under the light. I recoiled, bile rising in my throat.
Her face was pale as ivory and stained with blood. There were two gaping scars where her eyes should have been, criss-crossed by thick black threads up and down her eyelids. With each pulse of the demonic heart, the thread shimmered. “If your eyes displease Him, He sews them shut. If your ears affront Him, He sews them shut.” She gestured to the other figure. “If your mouth offends Him, He sews it shut.”
I covered my mouth, revolted. “I’m so sorry…”
“Why? It’s not as if you did this to us. Right?”
“I … what--”
She laughed again. “You humans are so amusing.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw the other stare at her, then quickly look away, as if he knew that I saw him.
“Aren’t you one too?”
“Too long ago to remember,” she said, shaking her head. “Or to matter. Come, I’ll explain the rest,” she said impatiently. She started walking and I followed her, deeper into the abyss. “The rules of the game are simple. You will ask Him three questions, and He must answer without lying. You will be given a knife that can pierce His flesh, and a torch born from His own soul. He cannot kill you before you ask all of your questions, or until you attack Him yourself. Be warned: everything I say is true, but designed to trick you. You are not supposed to win. Not without being very clever.” She paused and looked straight at me with her empty eyes. “Nothing is as it seems. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ready?”
“What?! No!”
“That’s too bad, because we’re here.”
I took another step and the tunnel widened out into a cavernous room. It was so bright it hurt my eyes; flames burned across the walls, coursing through the cavern like blood through veins. The thunder of His heartbeat echoed through the chamber; with each beat, the flames burned brighter. At the center of the flame, a pulsing mass of burning flesh twitched rhythmically to the heartbeat. It was a swollen black heart, pumping flame with each beat; twisted around it was a corpulent pile of flesh and bone, a face, legs, a mockery of a human.
“What’s this?” A voice like thunder rolled across the cavern, followed by faint echoes, a hiss and a roar in one. My teeth grated. “Has it really been a century again?”
I turned, reaching out for my guide, but she was no longer by my side. She stood across the room with a host of pale-faced, emaciated figures, each with eyes or ears or mouths sewn shut.
“Come here,” the voice boomed, and my feet shuffled me forward closer and closer to the heart.
Two burning eyes regarded me from some twisted skull above the heart. A jaw opened, a booming laugh and tendrils of smoke escaping it. “It’s about time.” One of the figures scurried up behind me and dropped a shimmering knife and a torch on the ground, then ran back. “Come and kill me,” the voice mocked.
I reached down slowly, took a deep breath, and picked up the knife and the torch. I walked towards him, swallowing hard and staring directly into the smoldering eyes. They regarded me curiously.
“You have three questions before you join the damned.” The demon pointed a withered arm towards the deathly silent spectators. “Take your time. I have little else to amuse me for the next century.” He drew in a deep breath and a wheel of flame encircled his withered arm, coursing through the bone and sinew. Instantly it grew, fiery claws bursting from underneath fingernails, flame oozing from his black skin.
I took a deep breath. “What is the capability of these things I‘ve been given?”
“Don’t you know?” He tossed his head, breathing smoke. “Your knife can cut only a small part of my flesh. The flame is mine, and will only make me stronger.”
His eyes watched me, quietly. I took another deep breath. “How do I kill you?”
The demon laughed again, a booming laugh that prickled my spire. “You are not so clever as you think. They have all asked this,” he said, a hand gesturing to the figures. “As you can see, they didn’t like the answer.” He laughed again, the crowd shuddering with each grating sound. “I will give you the answer I gave them: the only thing that can harm me is the flesh of my flesh, the blood of my blood.” I swore I saw a smile, fire dripping from the corner of his mouth.
“I know that you can’t kill me until I ask the final question.”
“Regrettably.” I saw another grin, black teeth outlined by embers. The claws scratched along the ground again. I looked at those black talons, at the flame that coursed around them, flame that coursed over black skin that shimmered to the beat of his heart. In that moment, a strange hope glimmered in me. I knew I what to do.
I looked into the Demon’s eyes and smiled.
I turned and ran towards the crowd of spectators. I grabbed one of the figures, pulling him closer to me and raising the knife quickly, hellfire shining down its blade. His eyes flashed between its point and me, lips trying to move but held shut by the thread. Thick, black thread that shimmered with every thundering beat of the Demon’s heart.
The knife flashed quickly against one stitch, slicing cleanly through it. The figure’s eyes widened and I saw in them a reflection of flame. Quickly, I fell to the ground, rolling.
The flaming claws flashed through the air where I had just stood, leaving behind a trail of smoke and ash. “I don’t have to kill you,” the Demon snarled, flashing the claws out at me again. I ducked out of the way, slipping behind the figure and holding him in front of me, quickly slicing through the threads until I could pull one free, a long, black coil that burned my skin.
The claws flashed at me again and I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough, the torch flying from my hands. I fell hard, face-first into the ground, but I still had the knife and the coil of thread clutched in my hands. I rolled out of the way of His claws, staring into His eyes again.
“Well done,” the Demon bellowed, laughing. “But do you think you can kill me with one tiny little piece of me? You think a thread can fell a Demon?”
“No,” I said. The claws flashed towards me again and this time I rolled out of the way, slamming the knife down into the ground and pinning the flaming arm into the dirt. Instantly, more flame coursed around it, strengthening the arm and slowly forcing the dagger out of it as his flesh grew.
I ran to where the torch lay, still burning. I thrust my fist into the flame, wrapped in the thread. The fire coursed through my veins and devoured my skin, but the thread grew instantly. It fed off the fire, growing thicker and thicker in my hand, bursting into a black spire coursing with flame.
“Flesh of your flesh,” I said, laughing, the pain forgotten as the thread grew stronger. The claws flashed at me again, but this time I lifted the spine; they crashed together with a horrendous shriek and crack of bone, and one claw fell to the ground. The Demon shrieked and recoiled, bellowing something in a language that burned in my ears.
I ran towards Him, the spine clutched between both of my hands. “My last question, Demon,” I roared. “Are you afraid?”
The spine sank deep into the black heart. The Demon roared, bleeding fire, enveloping me, boiling my skin away -- but when the flame touched the spine it grew, splitting the heart in two.
An ear-splitting shriek escaped the Demon as the fire within faded. The cavern was enveloped in brilliant blood red flame, which pulsed with one last thundering heartbeat and then went out. I collapsed to the ground as the heart withered to ash, receding into the sunken chest of a broken beast that might have once been a man.
“Thank you,” a voice whispered from the ashes. Then all was silent.
The threads blinding, muting and silencing the crowd dissolved and slipped away. A chorus of gratitude filled my ears as each tortured soul was released. One by one they crumbled into dust and withered away, until all were gone. All but one.
My guide walked up to me and laughed. She was stunningly beautiful, long black hair cascading around a perfect face, full lips curved into a wonderful smile. She had eyes now, brilliant blue eyes that bathed the entire cavern in soft light. I had never seen a more beautiful sight in all my life.
“Well that certainly was amusing!” she said, clapping her hands together joyfully, the words spilling out of her mouth like music. “I didn’t expect you to get that far! They‘re usually so very disappointing, but you…”
“W… what? Why didn’t you disappear with the rest of them?” I asked, groaning in pain from the burns that covered my body. She laid a cold hand against my shoulder, and the pain all over me numbed and faded, calm filling my aching bones.
“Why would I have? They’ve all been dead for a long, long time. Only their souls have been trapped here by the Demon, tortured for millenia. You have finally released them from their bonds, released their souls to heaven or hell or wherever they’re supposed to be.” She smiled, her eyes so bright I could see nothing else. “You really ought to be proud. No one‘s done it in two thousand years, you know. I‘ve lost a lot of bets.”
“I don’t understand,” I coughed, staring into her eyes.
She shook her head and sighed. “It really is a shame,” she said, patting me on the head. “You did so well. Ah, well, it‘s not like you‘re the first one.” She bent down and kissed me on the lips, and a tingling warmth spread from my lips throughout my entire body. Then she stood and walked away.
“No! Where are you going!?” I screamed, reaching after her. “Don’t leave me!” My eyes widened as the tips of my fingers began to peel and crack, the skin fading away to ash gray and then to black, my bones crumpling as crippling pain erupted from my chest. I screamed, clawing at my ribs, as the warmth from her kiss turned to flame beneath my skin. A sound began to fill my ears, a sound that reverberated in the cavern around me from deep beneath my chest, a familiar sound...
She turned and blew me a kiss. “The show must go on!”
My chest burst into flames and then split open, my burning heart shattering my ribcage, my body withering around it as it twitched and grew and pumped fire through my veins. A cacophony of shrieking laughs filled my ears.
Then the only sound was the constant beating of my heart.
