Hellsent
#7 of Hellraiser: Hellsent
To Everything there is a Season, a Time for every Purpose under Heaven. Or Hell. We stand before the Gate to our salvation, damnation, my paw in yours. It has been a thousand pleasures to have you at my side through this insufferable journey, Sprocket, and I know of no other I would rather languish with for all eternity, than You ...
All characters, living, dead, possessed, or undead, are copyright Eldyran. Hellraiser and its intellectual properties are the rights of Clive Barker. For those who seek to Taunt Happy Fun Ball (tm), Hell will know thy Flesh ...
Hellraiser: Hellsent
7th piece: Hellsent
The Final Chapter
2006 by Eldyran
England, 1584
As flickering, mute shadows danced along framed cartographer's maps and dusty bookcases filled with innumerable volumes, Steven Borough leaned back into his cushioned high chair and gave a final, weary sigh. The distinguished explorer and master of the Queen's armada in the White Sea glanced about the musty office, empty now, but normally bustling with mass of yeoman's delivering updates on the entire fleet's coordinates, reports on Spain's own exploratory efforts, and other general bureaucratic office clatter. But tonight, his once cozy, plush office, was as deadly silent and empty as a tomb.
His tomb.
Despite the whale oil lamp on his cluttered desk, the deepening gloom around him seemed to press down on him like a solemn blanket, dampening the outside world. The malamute's blue eyes rolled about the musty pages laying silent on his desk, testament to the long years that had worn thin on his old bones. Tonight, the only light of noteworthy importance that shone in this naval mausoleum at Kent was the glimmer of hope in the old seaman's heart.
But it, like the oil lamp on his desk, started to flicker and sputter, its wick low.
The canine closed his weary eyes and inhaled deeply, but instead of sharp, pristine scent of salty sea air, the scent of rotting book spines clogged his once keen nostrils. Where once a refreshing ocean gale ruffled his black and white fur, now only stagnant air settled dust upon him, covered him like everything else in this museum of antiquated relics. The weary seaman's paw dropped to his desk, to fumble around the loose leafs of yellowing parchments for the eccentric paperweight holding them down.
Just one of many noteworthy, exotic trinkets the old seaman had collected on his travels over the northern White Sea, the Dreamweaver cube twinkled in the faded glory of the oil lamp. Once in ownership of Czar Ivan IV Vasilyevich, the curious occult relic was said to be able to bring one's most desired dream to substance. Borough's brittle claws ran over the cube's metallic sides.
Now, his desperate heart yearned only to touch his first mate.
Thirty years ago, in a different time, he had explored the frigid reaches of the White Sea, only to have a freak winter storm separate him from his former first mate, Rogers. While he carried on the expedition without word from the Bona Confidentia or the fate of her captain, he later learned that the bitter Russian chill had taken its toll on his best friend, his most able seahand. When the malamute finally reached the familiar waters of the Thaymes once again, word of his first mate's death crushed him.
For the last thirty, long years, he had regretted not expressing to Rogers his secret desire for him. Apprentice ship hands together, they worked long hours into the fabled sailor's red dawn to make sure their captain and his ship could sail any sea, weather any storm. But each time they slid by each other on the gangwalk, ferrying supply on their strong backs, Borough struggled long and hard to weather the tempest in his young, virile flesh.
For a while, the malamute convinced himself that it was just the curse of the sea, adrift from any safe call of port, away from the soft fat and fur of shore leave whores. A few times, Borough woke up to the pitch and roll of the ship below deck, sleepwalking. He also convinced himself that each time his found himself about to slip in between Rogers' bunk sheet, that it was just his way of making sure his best friend was secure. Although such things did happen between shipmates, the feelings underlying his tormented flesh would brand him if caught.
Such a fool. Caught between the Mistress of the Sea and his First Mate. His only Mate.
But now, as his feeble, calloused paws caressed the Dreamweaver cube, he begged silently for one final chance. One last grasp at personal redemption, to feel that blistering flare of desire boil through his most private flesh once more. To have Rogers caress it, know its aching arousal. As if hearkening to his last dream, the Dreamweaver cube defied logic, space, as its surfaces folded inward, its innards collapsing outward. The spinning bluish black whirlpool of Hell's Charybdis swallowed him in its swirling, infinite vortex.
After the dimensional vertigo, the black and white canid stared in horror at the endless dark sea out past the bow of the ship, a unholy tempest slinging hard, stinging rain into his naked fur. His paws, now young again, groped blindly for the rigging next to him, the canid trying to compensate for the pitch and yaw of the wet deck under his hind paws. Even over the howl of the maelstrom around him, his perked canid ears caught the needful groans and masochistic wails of his crew behind him.
He didn't have to turn around to know what their desperate souls had found solace in.
For a despairing moment, he found the Second Layer to be woefully incomplete, until a pair of large, tiger paws wrapped themselves around his midsection from behind. The malamute's eyes slid shut as the rough ridges of the feline's paws worked their way over his skin just under his belly fur, the slightly extended razor claws grazing the wet flesh. Despite Borough's newfound youthful stamina, his knees buckled under the sensation, but the strong arms of his first mate caught him before he could collapse on the swaying sea soaked deck.
As Borough looked down past the muscular, stripped arms around his waist supporting him, the sight of his canid shaft jutting thick and hard out of his drenched sheath surprised him. While the needle like rain stung the vulnerable, bare flesh, a blistering hot length pressed itself up against his furry backside, right above his tail. When the tiger's paw ran down to squeeze his throbbing orb, the first mate's vice like grip surpassed mere seduction, and delved deep into a more insipid realm. As the shrieking gale carried off Borough's barks of pain and pleasure on the winds of desire, the trademark flat snout of a feline pressed into his flattened canid ears.
"I see you found the box, Steven. I knew that if it fell into your paws that you would come here to find me." The malamute's eyes sealed tight as the tiger's claws extended into the tender flesh of his knot. His squirms and struggles only brought the hard, barbed length pressing into him from behind downward, the hot, slick feline tip sliding back and forth between his furry cheeks.
"I found the box first, I'll have you know. I found so many delicious secrets within, but without your burning heart next to mine, the blistering pleasures I found were nothing but icy suffering." The adamant grip around his chest tightened, and Borough felt like a rag doll, powerless to prevent Rogers' other paw from raking his chest, a single claw circling the hard nub on his left pectoral. Despite Rogers' more subdued personality, he had always been the stronger of the apprenticed pair.
Borough had no clue his first mate had opened the box first, just as he had no clue that an adopted ancestor of his, Steven Culverton, would repeat this similar twist of fate with Rogers' ancestor, exactly three hundred years later.
All Sons eventually transgress the same Sins of their Fathers.
"The Arkhangelsk winter didn't steal the warmth from my breast, Steven, it was being apart from you for far ... too long ..." Borough muzzle split in a blissful growl of anguish as his first mate's fiery tip speared his clenched pucker, spreading him wide. His tail thumped hard against the hard abs of the seaman riding him, the tiger's barbed cock slipping deeper ... and deeper ... within him. Despite the blurring pain, the captain could not dismiss the underlying rapture he found in his first mate buried deep inside his tight, hot guts. This was just the beginning.
Somewhere between Heaven's broken promises, the captain and his first mate had finally found a rightful place alongside each other.
In Hell.
Florida, 1974
A sudden pocket of turbulence jolted Joshua Merchant from his nightmare, and for a brief, terrifying moment, the eight year old fox didn't know where he was. As the black fox gripped the armrests of his seat and blinked around about the other passengers of the airplane, his blurry, double gaze tried to focus, but failed. He rubbed the bridge of his snout, feeling the mending cartridge from his broken nose, and thought back to only a few hours ago, as the trio of Brazilian armed police had ushered him through the international airport's terminals.
Once the eight year old fox had been escorted to his plane, each of the guards had breathed a secret sigh of relief.
Not quite extradited, not quite sent away, Joshua now looked about the Red Eye flight, the plane fairly empty. He turned to his left to unbuckle himself, and jumped when his snout came within inches of a bloody, canid skeleton in the seat in the seat next to him, which turned and grinned at him with silent malice. Joshua's scarred paws tried to fumble with his lap belt, his cry of fright cut off as he turned the other way into the mad look of a bedraggled, naked coyote, his bloodshot eyes not a few centimeters from the fox's own.
Don't think for one second you've escaped us, you little bender ... the coyote growled, his fetid breath billowing into Joshua's facial fur. The black fox's muzzle scrunched up from the rank, as if the purifying flesh of native little boys and girls had got stuck between his teeth. ... Lord Leviathan has plans for you little one ... oh ... yes ...
The yote's paws snatched out for his flesh and fur, pulling the squeaking vulpine into a deep kiss, his tongue dancing about inside the small canid's muzzle. Joshua's green eyes shot wide, expecting to puke down into the open throat of the trickster. But that was the worst part.
Instead of rancid flesh, the coyote's muzzle tasted of brown sugar and spice, maybe small snips of puppy tails.
Joshua closed his eyes, his instant, prepubescent erection straining the material of his pants. He knew he tasted like that, and for the most terrifying moment of his short life, he knew he would always now hunger for that sweet, spicy Taste of Innocence ...
* * * * *
... Joshua's eyes shot open, and he tore up in his seat, struggling with his lap belt. A few other passengers looked over to him, concerned for the young vulpine and his sudden start from his nightmare. Deeper apathy soon overtook their mild concern however, and they went back to their novellas without saying so much as a single word. The sable vulpine leaned back into his chair and sighed just as the 'Fasten Seatbelt' sign lit up.
As the plane tilted downward on its final approach, Joshua looked out at the dark, wild expanse of the Everglades out the window closest to him. As the plane ushered the tormented fox closer to his uncle's welcoming arms, he wondered if he had finally left behind all the horror and killing behind in Brazil.
Haunting visions of Armel, his father, Phillipe's bother, and Father Anthony wavered before his unblinking vision ..
* * * * *
As the wail of police sirens overcame folded Joshua's ears in the dark alleyway eight months later, the dank urban drizzle masked his small tears. The shaking, hastily dressed vulpine cowered next to a few discarded cardboard boxes, clutching his book bag containing a small lock box of nasty, innocent little secrets.
The killing had not stopped, and the pact he had made only a short while ago with the thing inside him only guaranteed that the unending terror would continue.
Joshua hugged his knees and book bag, rocking back and forth, his horn rimmed glasses fogging up in the chill air from his hot, misting tears. He couldn't let this continue. The sobbing, remorseful fox thought about Adrien, and his uncle, Gabriel. How much longer till they too, wound up missing or skinned alive? With a shaking paw, Joshua reached for a shard of broken glass on the asphalt, and brought it to his other wrist.
It had to End. Here. Now.
"What are you doing?" Another child's voice asked. The startled vulpine dropped the shard and looked up to the eight year old white wolf standing next to him, and Joshua realized that he hadn't heard the other canid's approach over the wail of the siren's only a block away. He got up and wiped the grime from behind his glasses, and just looked at the wolf in deep shadow wearing a light jacket and blue jeans. While the light windbreaker hid his already broadening shoulders, the undone zipper could not hide the hint of developing abdominals, nor did his jeans hide his lean thighs and hind legs.
The hind legs of a future high school running back.
"What are you doing," the white wolf repeated, shuffling a bit nervously back and forth, "and what is going on around here?" Joshua suddenly felt a bit awkward himself, and stepped backwards. Despite the white wolf's initial hesitation, he stepped forward, out of shadow, and Joshua suddenly saw his beautiful cobalt blue eyes.
The same eyes of the naked wolf in Laura's little lock box.
A sudden surge of adrenaline shot through Joshua's blood, his once dead, hollow heart thundering to capricious life in his slim chest. Before he could constrain his emotions, his sudden need, a tendril of shadow formed out of the darkness behind the wolf, and snaked its way around the cuff of his ankle. Despite the black fox's stoic exterior, inside, a fierce battle of wills broke out between his dark desire and the inhabiting Cenobite, Xolotl.
_Don't touch him.
Why? We both know, feel, your need.
I said don't touch him you sick fuck. Everything you touch withers and dies.
The first time you touch him, his soul then belongs to me._
Joshua gathered up what little reservoir of will remained inside of him, and shoved this skeletal daemon down far, down deep, in the dark recesses of himself, where it couldn't harm his white wolf. Before being suppressed for a decade, Xolotl's eerie, deadpan thoughts broke through one final time.
Your efforts are futile. You cannot resist the urges of your fleeting flesh forever. Our pact is eternal.
Go suck shit through a straw ...
With that, Joshua snarled inwardly, and almost fell over as he spent his last ounce of will sealing the cenobite off from the desires of his tactile, young body. As the tendril of shadow dissipated, the white wolf rushed forward after seeing the black fox waver, but a sudden, weak growl made him stop short.
"Shes ... dead ..." Joshua panted, leaning up against a grime spattered dumpster. When the white wolf's large ears flattened, the fox elaborated with labored breaths. "That's who you came to see wasn't? She's dead now, there's nothing up there to go back to ..." The lupine gave a short whine, then a mixture of regret and relief washed over his young, handsome muzzle.
"But ... why are you here?" he asked the fox, confused.
"I got lost. I'm not from this part of town," Joshua said, regaining his stamina. He shuffled his book bag to his left shoulder and started to trudge off through the trash littered alleyway, but the white wolf took after him, slowing to walk beside him.
"You ... want someone to walk you home?"
"Sure ..." After that brief exchange, they walked in silence for a long while, the long kilometers passing behind them like ten, endless years.
"My name's Raymond, whats yours?"
"Joshua ..."
Brazil, 1984
A sudden pocket of turbulence jolted Joshua Merchant from his nightmare, and for a brief, terrifying moment, the eighteen year old fox didn't know where he was. His apathetic jade eyes looked about the plane through his shades, the fleeting memory of the first he had met Raymond still lingering in his prickled vulpine flesh.
But he was dead now, along with anyone who had ever got close to him.
Joshua stretched slightly, smoothing out the creases in his black vinyl pants and charcoal pull over. The leather trench coat hung loose on his thin shoulders, the gaunt shoulders of an emaciated fox. The roar of the jet engines drowned out the light hiss of the opened air jets in the seats around him.
Another Decade, another Red Eye.
Some of the passengers still awake didn't seem to notice the bloated and eviscerated corpses sitting slumped backwards in their blood soaked seats next to them, nor care. That was the problem with the living, they never seemed to really see what was around them. The dead, on the other paw, had nothing but time to pass. Joshua turned calmly to his left, fully expecting the gory sight. Xolotl sat beside him, the black, endless orbits of his skull staring forward into the back of the seat in front of him. The Aztecan psychopomp's skeletal grin never faltered, despite wearing nothing but a red and white flowered Hawaiian shirt.
Joshua smirked.
He turned to his right, expecting to see Ueuecoyotl, but instead his sensual gaze wondered over the pale jaguar with a shredded leather trench, much similar in style to his own. Despite the piercings running through his spotted and flayed flesh, the cenobite's stoic look never faltered, the sadistic grid work of pins in his skull glinting in the dim reading lights of the other passengers around them. Once known as Xipe Totec, known to others as Pinhead, the Dark Angel of Suffering turned and looked to Joshua with black, soulless feline eyes.
So brother, have you accepted the inevitable? We have watched you for what must seem to you like an age, like greedy voyeurs, relishing your anguish with gnashed fangs. One final destination, brother, and all will be set right. The jaguar closed his black eyes slightly, a deep purr rumbling from his chest. I have missed you, in this fleeting expanse of time, our mutilations intertwined, pierced flesh grinding against gouged bone.
A trembling, canid paw moved from the armrest to place itself in the feline's. Pinhead's paw's clenched, and his extended claws bit deep into the fox's thin flesh. Hot streaks of crimson poured from the wounds to seal their paws together in desire and Brotherhood. This Order, despite its infighting, was eternal.
The Order of the Gash.
Joshua heard labored pants off across the isle, and turned to watch a blood drenched coyote in a motley of ratty and halfway undone attire stand partway on a seat cushion, his bushy tail swaying with each thrust. Ueuecoyotl grunted hard as he continued to skull fuck some dead, pregnant antelope, his paws gripping her horns for support.
Forgive our Brother. His excessive exuberance often exceeds his meager rationality. It was him you know, who tricked us both into sacrificing the Mexicas, searching for the one who could build more earthly delights, our Lord's puzzle cubes. We found it in you, Philip, maker of children's toys. Your blood still flows through the veins of your ancestors.
The line of Lemarchand listened, his lax expression never changing. Instead, the calculating, chilling voice of the ascetic goat pauper, the demon Orno rang out from the seat behind the black fox, his logic undeniable.
One to build. One to gather. One to solve. But desire to open the Gateway is not enough. There must be an intentional, indisputable yearn for Lord Leviathan to cross over into his Brother Yahweh's realm. What little of the innocent, puzzle solving fox named Joshua Merchant that remained trapped inside his cadaverous husk didn't quite grasp what the ghastly cenobites around him were foretelling.
But he soon would. His other paw clutched his book bag containing the eldritch puzzle cube known as the Lament Configuration, and Laura's little secret lock box ...
* * * * *
Phillipe opened his eyes to the prison for his mind. Like most prisons, the white walls surrounding his constrained world were grimy, despite their flaking, dingy coat of old, lead based paint. The ocelot's dull feline eyes never seemed to roam far along the wall anymore. In the long years following his breakdown, he had watched the fresh coat wither and peal, chipping and falling off to the white tiled floor in inescapable entropy.
Order fell from Grace, and now Chaos reigned once more.
Still, the complacent doctors of the underfunded Rio de Janeiro asylum had made some progress with the traumatized feline. Bowel control had been regained, with only the occasional accident. Phillipe could now feed himself, although still had to be reminded to eat. Limited cognitive functionality had been restored, on a rudimentary level. Still they were not miracle workers. The analytical doctors of The Virgin's Vigil left that to the faith of the Catholic church. The new Padre, Rodrigo, was said to have a touch filled with grace.
Especially with young children.
Upon hearing the rusted squeal of the hinges to his room door swing open, the feline uncurled a bit on his bed, stained yellow with long, sweaty nights of blood curdling screams. He rolled over in time to see one of the female doctors, a slim ring tail, and her nurse, a rather short, chiseled looking male chinchilla enter his room. As the feminine ring tail glanced at her watch, then at her clip board, the chinchilla pushed in a cart with ancient medical equipment. It was unusual for the medical staff to make their rounds this late at night.
"How we feeling tonight, Phillipe? Did you manage to eat anything yesterday?" She asked as the ocelot as the nurse pulled him up in his bed to wrap the blood pressure cuff around his arm. Phillipe just stared into the wall behind the two, and after a moment the nurse frowned.
"Dr. Barbosa, the patient's vitals aren't looking that good today ..." Upon hearing the chinchilla's words, the female doctor adjusted her glasses and stepped up to her patient.
"Are you sure?" the ring tail asked, her paw slipping down into the loose band of the feline's hospital shorts, to fondle the slick, barbed pole of the ocelot's near constant erection. Phillipe looked up in time to see the male nurse step in front of the doctor, exposing his own engorged sex towards the feline.
"Still nothing, doctor?" The chinchilla said, chirring, stroking his hardness in front of the unresponsive patient. The ring tail pulled out a scalpel, and with a cheerful grin, drew the sharp implement just underneath the nurse's Adam's apple. A thick line of frothy crimson spilled from the clean gash, quickly dribbling down to lubricate the nurse's paw as he continued to beat himself off with a exhibitionist's smile. Phillipe's eyes grew wide, his heart knocking against his ribs in terror.
"There we go!" the doctor chimed in gleefully, her nurse nodding in agreement, the swell of blood increasing with each rock of his head. "That was the reaction we were looking for ..." The ocelot squeezed his eyes shut, telling them silently to go away.
When he opened his eyes, the phantasms had indeed disappeared back into the ether.
He titled his head to the open door, which was normally locked. The cautious ocelot looked about, before getting off his bed with shaky, rarely used legs, before venturing outside his room for the first time in years. He poked his head out into the hallway for a brief moment, seeing another patient staring intently into the corner down at one end, before shuffling down the other way.
The feline stopped as a wail reached his ears, the yawl of an naked, terrified female opossum racing around the corner. Phillipe just stood there and watched as the streaker shot past him, her breasts flopping around as she disappeared down the way he had just come. He had expected demonic tormentors and nurses armed with heavy doses of sedatives to race after her. He didn't expect to see her personal demons, but he at least expected to see the nurses.
The spotted feline continued walking down bleak hallway after bleak hallway, quickly becoming disoriented and lost. He passed by a open cell, and inside he watched a naked cougar and a wolf assfucking on a mildew and dried cum encrusted mattress. He paused for a moment to watch the two males, enthralled by the sight of the top feline's thick meat disappear in and out of the canid's gaping tail hole in steady rhythm. As the lupine's furry nuts swayed with each rock of their sweating, grunting forms, Phillipe watched the the wolf put a razor blade to his swollen knot, thick drops of blood falling from the sliced, weeping flesh.
"That's right," the cougar yowled, thick dribbles of spittle flying onto the back of the wolf's furry ear, "puppies cant get fucked by kitties! Cut that nasty knot off pussy bitch!"
Phillipe didn't know if what he was watching was real or in his head. He moved on.
The disoriented feline stumbled about the cretan maze of hallways like a blind rat. He passed visions too horrible to be real, and horrible things too real to be visions. He stopped to chat with Armel's head, which had appeared on the cranky of some pipe jutting out from the wall. The black fox's head growled at him, the ragged stump of his neck leaving a small trail of blood oozing down the conduit.
What's wrong you little Pédale, lost? Why don't you go back to your room? Or do you like hiding away in closets and storage rooms, sucking off the thick pricks of brothers and sons? Not on my watch, soldier! Phillipe stood there for several long minutes, his lips unmoving, before he turned around and walked away. The conversation had turned dull anyway.
The screams in the ocelots head seem to take on a sudden vibrancy, and he followed the sheiks of terror to some type of front desk, now abandoned. Some of the other patients had wandered here, their lifeless bodies strewn about, still clutching paw fulls of tranquilizer pills they had raided from the emergency stash behind the nurse's station. There was a sudden sheik, and the security door to the rest of the asylum dented inward, the barred glass shattering.
The doors began to bleed from the rents in the dented metal.
The ocelot titled his head curiously at the strange sight. With a terrific screech of rent metal, the doors buckled inward, before flying down the hallway towards him. The short fur of Phillipe's spotted coat rippled as the mass of twisted steel passed within centimeters of him, before smashing through the concrete wall behind him with an ear deafening crash. For the first time in ten years, the fresh, humid Brazilian night air met his flat nostrils. Up until he looked out through the gaping hole in the wall behind him, the ocelot had never know he was up on the seventh floor of the building, reserved only for the criminally insane.
The feline turned his unfazed gaze back down the hallway, past the broken hinges, to the bits and pieces of hospital security personnel strewn about. One of the larger chunks moved, a part of a torso with one arm remaining crawled desperately away from the source of the hell spawn chaos, the rat leaving a greasy trail of guts behind him. As the black hind foot of a fox stepped past his head, the flesh began to melt off the vermin's skull.
Phillipe's slitted eyes grew wide as he watched the sable vulpine in vinyl and leather stride towards him, small tendrils of shadow wavering behind him. Despite the mad, endless years, and the supernatural, almost limitless dark power he seemed to now posses, the feline could never forget the face of his best childhood friend.
And my how Joshua had grown.
But instead of his usual vibrant green eyes, his eyes had become like pitch, matching his aphotic fur. The ocelot began to blubber, his ultimate nightmare springing to life before his very eyes. And his nose, now thick with snot, told him Joshua was indeed coming toward him, coming to finish what the ocelot had started. The possessed vulpine stopped just short of the weeping feline, and regarded his long, lost soul mate.
Do you remember our games, Phillipe? Our little secret game in my father's storage closet? Joshua's black muzzle lips never moved, yet Phillipe heard his voice as though his thoughts had been planted inside his empty head. There were other things hidden in the room too. Things my father, Armel, didn't want us to play with.
The thin fox pulled out a puzzle box from his underneath his trench, the same box the feline had seen Joshua clutch right before he watched Armel get ripped apart right before his very eyes.
Come with me, Phillipe. I have learned new games. Games that will make you shudder, gasp in insufferable delight. The fox extended his other paw to his soul mate, the bones inside tight against the withering flesh and fur.
Time ... to Play ...
Phillipe mewled, screamed, the visions of the mad coyote still burning in his mind. Of what Joshua was going to do with him, to him, once he returned. Ueuecoyotl had shown him a great many, terrible things. Things that were worse than death. Without hesitation, the feline flung himself out the gaping hole in the wall behind him, seeking refuge, freedom. For a moment the feline spread his arms, thinking that we would grow the wings of an Angel, and fly away.
If God loved him, he wouldn't let him suffer any more.
Joshua howled in tormented rage, denial as his only love flung himself off the building rather than spend an eternity with him. The baying, mad fox mad tears fell thick, his lungs almost bursting with limitless anguish, before he turned and started to bash his head into the concrete wall next to him. The steady thuds turned into a sickening squish as a dark smear appeared on the wall, growing larger each time the fox's head slammed into it ...
Over. And over. And over again ...
* * * * *
The fox once known as Joshua stood on the ledge of the asylum's roof, his bloody, leather trench coat flapping in the warm breeze of early dawn. Behind him, the strengthening gale snatched pictures from Laura's lock box, now wide open, and flung them on an uncaring wind. The suffering of the children contained within flew away, their naked, exploited flesh and faces tumbling about the darkening sky. As he looked down to the parking lot, with its jumble of police cars and their flashing lights, he glowered down to the bloody, broken form of Phillipe laying in the shallow pit of cracked asphalt.
A few tears gathered on his broken snout, the fractured bones of his muzzle and face turning his entire visage into a tragic facet of cubism. No longer simply Joshua Merchant, no longer the Aztecan God of Death, Xolotl, the Cenobite Picasso looked down to the Lament Configuration thrumming between his scarred paws. As the fiery rays of a new born sun began to break over the far, dark eastern horizon, the Cenobite Pinhead rumbled impassively behind his dour brother.
Your friend chose to take his own life rather than be with you. It must break your black heart, doesn't it? To know you can never be with him again ...
Unperturbed, the fox's deadly claws ran over the puzzle cube, rearranged it, in a untried solution. The box twisted in his grasp, locking in its first configuration.
"Police! Open up!" someone shouted from behind the roof access door, and a flurry of blows dented the flimsy metal inward. Above the roof, a dark vortex of storm clouds gathered, hints and quick flashes of lightning breaking between the abysmal, dark billows of fury. The soft, deep rumble above mimicked the jaguars leering, deep voice, egging on the only one who could unleash Lord Leviathan's fury upon this unprepared realm.
His soul belongs in Hell now, beyond even your dark gasp. Does it taunt you? Does it bite at your very existence?
Picasso growled low and wretched the cube into its second configuration, pulses of black electricity coursing through his scarred paws once again, the callused flesh sizzling. Somewhere, in the Heart of Hell, a gargantuan, simmering, segmented diamond stirred from its ageless slumber, the many beams of blueish black light spinning to face the Gate, which now started to swing open.
Do you realize now what you are? You are they Key. You and your linage have been sent from Hell to open the Gate ...
The small bit of Joshua that remained didn't care about anything the phantasmal jaguar said. He didn't care anything in this carnal world, now empty of his even his last desire. The only thing he cared about was Phillipe, who know yowled and bucked in Hell without him. A final kick sent the dented door flying open, and a troupe of Brazilian police swarmed the roof, armed with shotguns and rifles.
"FREEZE!"
Joshua cared nothing for the swarm of ants behind him, nor their pathetic weapons. All he cared about was seeing his only love once more, and being together with him, forever. If he could not go to his soul mate in Hell, then he would bring his soul mate to him.
Joshua would bring Hell to Earth.
The black fox looked up into the swirling vortex above, the faces of suffering children swirling in the air about him. As his crafty, yearning, and scarred paws snapped the chiming, chirping Lament Configuration into its final solution, the police brought their weapons up, their paw tips pulling back on the triggers.
There was a Sound of Thunder.
_Our Father,
Who Aren't in Heaven
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy Kingdom Come
Thy Will be Done
As on Earth
As it is
In ..._
~ FIN ~
It has been said that parting is all we know of Heaven and all we need of Hell. Now, as take my leave, I find the sorrow only marginally sweet. I would like to extent my eternal gratitude for all that have given me assistance or feedback in this novella, and they are, but not limited to:
Lykos Bane, Gazban, Hawk, Glycol, AlopexAlex, Val Bloodfox, Nyn, Bysmark, Hollund, and MattCat.
Dedicated to LupineStar. Next time, don't bring a weapon. It only breeds more desire ...