Someone was screaming.
It was impossible to tell from how far away. It entered the circular room from the hallway ahead. The hallway turned out of sight after only a few yards. Everything was made of slick, off-white tiles—the floor, walls and ceiling—which carried and amplified the highest pitches of the sound. All Benno could say for certain was that the scream was bloodcurdling. A scream of profound pain.
Then, abruptly, it stopped.
It was humid. There was a smell of bleach, and beneath, barely concealed, stale water, human waste, and mold. Benno glanced up at the lights inset in the tiled ceiling, fluorescent and garish. There was no shadow here. Just endless tiles and grout. In the absence of the screaming: the blips and breathless whisper of moving water.
“It’s a bathroom,” said Holes, scurrying from Benno’s left shoulder to his right. “And bathrooms are only dangerous in movies. You said so.”
“Shhh…” Benno guided Holes into the flap of the raincoat. “Keep your voice down and stay hidden.”
Holes' petals peeked out, unable to contain its curiosity.
Benno took a slow breath and started toward the hallway. The Lonely Son of the Scattered King, Langley had said, is serving out his six-hundred-thousand year sentence in the Bathhouse. Benno didn't know what he'd expected, but it certainly hadn't been an actual bathhouse. His right hand drifted to the waistband of his jeans and settled on the butt of his father’s revolver. He knew it was pointless—in these Realms, a gun was as useful as a glass of water at the bottom of the ocean. Benno himself was far more lethal than a gun. And yet he’d brought it, and he was glad he did. It was useless but for the inexplicable comfort its presence offered. It was not a weapon. It was a talisman. It was—despite every awful memory imbued in it—a lucky charm.
The hallway led into another white-tiled room. This room was lined on one side with shower heads over a low tile bench built directly from the wall. Gathered on the far end of the bench—the only thing in the room—was a pile of rumpled clothes. One of the shower heads dripped directly onto the pile with a squishy, ominous plop.
Benno wiped sweat from the bridge of his nose and continued on.
“Has Onus seen the movie?” Holes asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Has the being whose appetites are conducive to captivity and torment seen it?”
“I’m relatively new to Realm travel,” Benno turned down another hallway. “I don’t know exactly how cultural artifacts from one Realm make it to a…”
He stopped in his tracks, his sneakers sliding on the slick tile, and instinctively folded his hands over Holes.
Ahead was another white tiled room, similar to the last. This one had a glass door standing open on the wall to the left, its pane foggy with condensation. In the room’s middle, vibrant in the otherwise unmarred white room, a deep puddle of blood. And leading from the puddle, into the glass door’s doorway, the blood trailed in a messy smear.
Benno listened. It was quiet, save the ubiquitous blips and hiss of running water through the floors and ceiling. There was another doorway straight ahead, leading to another hallway. He would need to pass the blood and the glass door in order to reach it.
He walked along the wall, giving the puddle of blood wide berth, and craned his neck as his angle aligned with a view into the room. His stomach churned. Sweat ran down his forehead.
“Don’t look,” he said, pulling the hood of his raincoat around Holes.
The smear of blood led to a body. It lay face down in the small tiled room adjacent to this one, nude and ashen from blood-loss. Average sized by Benno’s standards, and possibly male, though it was impossible to say for sure given the pulpy, mutilated state of its crotch—the source of the blood. Benno covered his mouth, unable, for too long, to look away from the frayed thuck of intestines protruding from between the body’s legs. The hip bones gleamed. The tailbone, coiled with blue veins, glinted in the harsh ceiling light, which illuminated the scene with maniacal clarity. Benno had, for seven years—fourteen now?—envied most death he encountered. But whatever had happened to this person, Benno might have passed it up and continued to live, endlessly, if it meant avoiding such…
The body moved. Minutely, as if in sleep. Its head rolled to the side, exposing the face—a man, after all, it seemed—and the man’s eyes looked down the length of his nose, finding Benno’s, and blinked slowly. Aloof, Benno thought at first, though as he stared back at the eyes he realized it was not aloofness. It was a profound, despondent misery.
Benno hurried along the wall and through the doorway into the next hall.
“Is he gonna be okay?” Holes asked, earnest.
The hall buckled left and right, and from ahead, sounds rose up.
CRACK.
SPLOOSH.
“Nooo!!!”
Benno walked slow, his hand flitting near the waistband of his jeans.
CRACK.
SPLOOSH.
“Arrrgh!!!”
CRACK.
“No!!! Mommy!!!”
SPLOOSH.
“Arrrghhh!!!”
The hallway gave into yet another white tiled room, and Benno paused at the mouth and peered around the corner.
A man and a woman stood near the far wall. They were nude, their skin glistening in the humidity. The man held a bundle of thin sticks, fastened together with twine, in one hand. The woman held a bucket in both of her, filled with water that boiled and seethed. Tears leaked profusely from their bloodshot eyes.
Before them, fastened belly-first by his wrists to the tiled wall with lengths of chain, a young man, no older than twenty. He was also nude, and the flesh on his exposed back hung in shreds off the muscle and ribcage beneath. He wrestled with the unyielding chains, his shoulders heaving with sobs.
“Please!!!” he implored.
The man—middle aged, his hair graying—raised the bundle of sticks overhead, and then whipped it down onto the young man’s already macerated back.
CRACK!
Hunks of flesh splattered. The young man howled. “Naaaaaa!!!”
The woman—also graying—heaved the bucket, splashing the boiling water onto the young man’s open, bleeding flesh.
SPLOOSH!
“Arrrgghhh!!!”
The flesh sizzled and blistered.
Benno’s breath refused to leave his lungs as he stood at the room’s threshold.
“Plea… plea… please…” the young man choked out through his sobs. “Mommy… Daddy… Please stop…”
The man whipped the stick down.
CRACK!
The woman heaved the bucket—inexplicably full—of scalding water.
SPLOOSH!
“Naaarrrgghh!!!”
CRACK!
SPLOOSH!
“Mommy!!!”
CRACK!
“Daddy!!!”
SPLOOSH!
“Stop!” Benno shouted, involuntary, his teeth clattering.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
The man and woman turned and looked at Benno, their red, watering, slack-lidded eyes betraying only the faintest hint of surprise.
Benno started forward, ready to cast the man and woman aside should they attempt to impede him, though neither moved.
The young man turned, craning his body against his restraints, and looked back at Benno. His eyes had the same bloodshot, deadened expression as the others, tears streaming, but unlike the others, his mouth was twisted into a sick smile.
“Get outta here, little buddy,” he said in a deep voice that didn’t match his pleas.
Benno stopped his approach.
The young man turned his face back to the wall. The older man—his father?—raised the bundle of sticks.
CRACK!
The woman—his mother?—heaved the bucket of boiling water.
SPLOOSH!
The young man screamed, his voice back to its original agonizing tenor. “Mommy, please!!! Daddy, no!!!”
CRACK!
SPLOOSH!
Benno back-stepped, his sneakers scrrrching over hunks of flesh scattered across the tile.
CRACK!
Benno could see the young man’s lungs fluttering through the gaps in the back of his ribs.
SPLOOSH!
“Arrrrrghhhh!!!”
He could see the complicated fractal of the spine, dented and chipped.
CRACK!
Benno sidled to the next doorway.
SPLOOSH!
Benno turned and shuttled himself away.
“Nooo!!! Dadda pleaaaassssse!!!”
CRACK!
“Momma don’t!!!”
SPLOOSH!
Benno wiped sweat from his eyes.
#
This is Hell, Benno thought, passing through room after tiled room.
In one, a young woman sat crying on the floor, a large bowl of frothy soup cradled in her lap, feeding herself with a long wooden spoon. An elderly woman crouched beside her, caressing her hair with a bony hand and offering soft, comforting sounds interspersed with fits of impulsive laughter. The elderly woman defecated into her other hand, and dropped the waste into the bowl. Both women were nude. The younger woman’s chin glistened with the tarrish soup.
In another, a nude man was suspended from the ceiling by his ankles, a funnel protruding from between his legs. Another nude man poured an endless stream of boiling water into the funnel. The upside-down man moaned, his teeth chattering, out of screams.
In a third, a solemn, middle-aged man stood at one end, watching from dead eyes as a younger woman with similar features was set upon by a group of five other men. The woman screamed and pleaded as they tore at her hair and breasts, their fingers rending her skin. The solemn man masturbated—his fist pumping in stark contradiction to his otherwise inert form—his penis raw and bruised, and just before Benno averted his eyes he ejaculated an arc of blood, which spattered on the white tile among countless other drying red stains.
This is Hell.
Benno thought he’d known Hell. He thought the seven years he’d spent in his trailer, desperate to die but unable even to bleed—even to hurt himself for a moment of balance between his mind and body—had been Hell. Maybe it’s own kind, he conceded. A kind of quiet Hell. A Hell of his own condition. But this…
Langley had been right. Benno didn’t want to be here. He’d grown arrogant. His ordeal in D’doak’s shed, he thought, had changed him, hardened him. He thought he’d embraced his infallibility as a weapon. But he had forgotten—somehow—that there were other ways to hurt.
He came to a room that was different than the others: The walls were papered baby blue, the floor carpeted in the kind of coarse wall-to-wall carpet found in kindergarten classrooms, and the ceiling painted a shade of blue darker than the walls, along with fluffy white clouds and a cartoonish sun, smiling down.
There was a single doorway, bracketed by two conspicuously fake potted ferns, that led to a carpeted stairwell, which descended into darkness. From deep in the darkness: a distant cacophony of howls and shrieks, and a smell of excrement, spoiled meat and vomit.
Over the doorway, written in childish, rainbow lettering:
PAIN ITSELF
Benno swallowed a hard lump. His teeth felt sharp in his own mouth.
“Do you know what Onus looks like?” Holes asked, startling Benno who had, for a moment, forgotten the flower was with him.
“No.”
“How will we know when we find him?”
“If he looks anything like his sisters,” Benno said. “We’ll know.”
“Do you think he’s down there?”
Benno eyed the doorway—Pain Itself—and the dark stairs beyond. The smell alone stirred in Benno a primordial instinct to flee. The distant chorus of screams pitched up into yet unheralded frenzy.
“I guess we’re about to find out.” Benno nudged Holes back into the collar of the raincoat and pulled the hood low over his eyes. Then he stepped through the doorway and onto the dark stairs.
#
The screams melded into something like endless thunder.
Benno held Gemma against his lips in the pitch black stairwell. The smell was so atrocious that his eyes itched.
“Gemma,” he whispered, one foot feeling for the next step. “Are you there?”
YES, BENNO.
“And you can get us out of here, right? Like, the, uh… the boundaries aren’t… scrambled, or whatever?”
…RHIZOME PERMEABLE. LOCUS RECALIBRATION ACCESSIBLE.
Benno exhaled, nodding slowly. “Alright,” he said. “It’s time for some light.”
White light spilled from Benno’s hand. The stairwell was narrow. The steps were lined with the same scratchy carpet—and the walls painted the same baby blue—as the room above. Benno extended his arm ahead, but even Gemma’s powerful light could not breach the darkness, and the stairs disappeared into nothing.
“Hey Gemma, let’s try something,” Benno said, using his elbow to rudder himself against the wall as he descended one shaky foot at a time. “If I say the word… let’s see… If I say the word Freud, will you take us right back to the Inn? Me and Holes?”
…SURROGATE APPELLATION INVENTORIED.
“Just in case…” Benno grimaced as the screams worsened.
“What’s Freud?” asked Holes, peering out of the raincoat.
“Hush, Holes.”
After another forty steps, Benno could see the bottom. The stairs ended abruptly at a concrete floor, and the baby blue wallpaper gave to matching concrete walls. Benno thought about the Haruspex’s room. He thought about the interior of the Everson Family’s mansion. He thought about the chasm over which the bridge in Luridia spanned. Dark, sooty concrete. Is this how all Realms really are? he wondered. Is this what everything looks like underneath?
He hesitated on the bottom step, shining the light ahead into the concrete hallway, looking for signs of life. But only the screams and the putrid odor came forth from the additional stifling darkness.
“Here goes nothing?” asked Holes from inside Benno’s raincoat.
Benno nodded, and stepped down off the stairs.
Instantly, the screaming stopped. It was so abrupt that for a moment Benno thought he might have lost his hearing. But that would require some kind of injury or illness, and he wasn’t going to get that lucky.
And it wasn’t total silence that filled the concrete hallway. There was a whisper, or many whispers all at once. A single word, Benno thought, though he couldn’t make it out.
He walked softly, doing his best to alleviate the scrrrch of his footfalls. He held Gemma outstretched in one hand, the fingers of his other pattering on the butt of the revolver. The smell—like walking into a sewer or morgue—gave him every reason to turn around. He squinted to try and better hear the word being whispered in a hundred voices—as if that would help—and thought maybe he was just starting to—perfected? tournament?—when the texture of the floor changed beneath his feet, and before he could come to stop he had waded into an ankle deep mess of dark red sludge.
Benno gagged and scrambled back. But it was too late, and his sneakers, socks, and the bottom of his jeans—and worse, the tip of his beard—were already sopping with the disgusting ooze, and he gagged again as his mind pieced together what it might be: Blood. Shit. Vomit. Chunks of viscera. Nests of hair. Frothy piss. Who knew what else, all blended into a warm, fetid stew. The stench that wafted from it boggled his mind.
“Gemma…” he sputtered. His lips traced the next word—Freud—but only air came out. Part of it was the bile flooding his esophagus and his lungs refusal to hold too long onto the rotten air. But the other part was that if he left now, if he ran away now—even to regroup, to come back prepared with galoshes and a gas mask—it would be a kind of unreformable failure. What kind of coward fled from something that couldn’t kill him? Was he ready to be just as useless as he was afraid?
Besides, was this really worse than any of the heinousness he’d encountered in his life?
Yeah, actually. Yeah it was.
He lifted his beard and tossed it back over his shoulder, deciding he could at least salvage that, waited until the bile settled, then started forward again.
The stew of waste deepened as he went, then plateaued around the middle of his shins. Soon the hallway opened into a room. It was impossible to tell exactly how large it was—Gemma’s light petered out at twenty feet or so—but he could not see the walls or ceiling.
What he could see were eyes.
Dozens, maybe hundreds, peering out at him from the dark periphery outside of the light. They glinted with tears, and as Benno brandished Gemma—his heart pounding and his sneakers dragging strips of entrails through the mush—he could make out the flayed, bleeding visages of the eyes’ keepers: People, huddled away from the light, their skin gone, the exposed muscle rended and raw, tendons torn and dangling, teeth long in receded gums, all squatting and crouching in the rancid stew. All watching Benno and all whispering the same word:
“Permanent…”
“Permanent…”
“Permanent…”
Benno waded through the room, turning Gemma this way and that. The throng of skinless people recoiled, and scurried to the room’s perimeter when the light even remotely touched them, and in this fashion Benno pressed deeper.
“Permanent…”
“Permanent…”
Benno had heard that word not long ago—at least not long ago discounting the seven years he spent in the shed, which, down here in the dark stench of this horrid place, felt as distant and porous as a dream.
Mother had said it to him. Mother had called him it. Permanent.
The skinless people in this pitch black room were talking about him.
Benno took a shaky breath. “I’m looking for Onus,” he said, too quiet.
“Permanent…”
“Permanent…”
Benno cleared his throat and stood still in the festering murk. “Onus,” he repeated, his voice finding an approximation of authority. “The Lonely Son of the Scattered King.”
“Permanent…”
“Permanent…”
“Is he here?” Benno turned in a circle, Gemma raised overhead, and the skinless masses drew back.
“Permanent…”
“Permanent…”
“Permanent…”
The whispering accelerated into something like a chant, breathy and panicked.
“Onus!” Benno spun. “Onus! Are you here?”
“Permanent.”
The chant grew faster still.
“Permanent.”
“Permanent.”
“Permanent.”
“Permanent.”
“Shut yer traps!” a voice boomed.
At once, the frenzied whispering stopped.
Benno froze, shining Gemma into the room’s dark reaches from where the voice had come.
There was a shape, towering over the skinless throng. Benno walked toward it, the light stuttering with his trembling hand.
A person, grotesquely obese, seated on a throne of leathered flesh. A man, it seemed—nude like everyone else—with an abundant penis draped over one rotund thigh, but also with a pair of massive breasts and erect nipple that leaked a yellowish liquid down his tremendous gut. His waxy skin oozed with oily sweat. His face was draped with folds of skin, so much so that no features could be discerned save a pair of shiny, bulbous lips. A smattering of thick hairs protruded from his scalp. He sat with his bulky hands on his thighs.
He lifted a hand, slowly as if in sleep, and there was a bucket in it that had not been there a moment ago. He raised it over his head and poured a cascade of the bloody shit fluid across his face and body, which sizzled as it touched his skin and burst instantly into vapor. He groaned—bassy and slow like an avalanche—and tossed the bucket aside, and Benno was not exactly shocked as it disappeared before landing.
“Alright, little buddy,” the huge man said, grinning a lippy grin at Benno. “Let’s talk.”