Butcher Bird

Inside the dark, cramped street was a gallery of horrors. Men turned over bonfires on huge metal spits. Women crushed under rolling boulders studded with surgical blades. Children screamed as spiders and oversized ants tore at their young flesh. Terrified people were tormented up and down the length of the street, shrieking and tearing at the arms of passersby as they were chased by snarling animals or angry mobs. Spyder took a breath and reminded himself that none of this was real. It was just the collective memories of bad dreams, the night terrors these poor saps could never forget. It reminded him of paintings by Bruegel and Goya, and, while he tried to work his way around the thought and not let it invade his consciousness, the memories of the paintings made him think of the underworld. If this is what Hell was going to be like, Spyder wasn't sure he could take it. Of course, he was going to be blindfolded so, unlike here, he wouldn't have to actually look at Hell. It was a small comfort, but Spyder was ready for any comfort he could get.

At the far end of the street, Spyder spotted the Black Clerks. At first, he took them to be part of another nightmare and stopped to watch them pulling the guts out of a cop who had been crucified across a writhing pile of drug-starved junkies, their withered limbs (oozing pus and blood from running sores) strained against the barbed wire that held them together. The head Clerk, the one who always held the reptile-skin ledger, looked at Spyder and beckoned him over.

"You are quite a long way from home?" said the Clerk, in his peculiar singsong cadence.

"You see me. I thought you were someone's bad dream."

"We're as real as you?"

"How about him? Is he real, too?" asked Spyder, inclining his head toward the tormented cop.

"He thought he could escape us," said the Clerk. "Sometimes it is not enough to take what is ours from the body, but to insinuate ourselves in the mind and memory. A warning and object lesson for others? This is our burden."

Spyder started to walk away.

"I hope you aren't running away, trying to cheat providence?"

"No way, Jose. I'm true blue," said Spyder.

"You don't wish to stay and watch us work?"

One of the Clerks had placed an elaborate metal brace into the policeman's open mouth and was studiously sawing off his lower jaw.

"Why would I want to see that?"

"Because you're lying. And most people want to know their future."

Spyder backed away and quickly left the street of nightmares.

Thirty-Two

Dominions

Before this world, there were other worlds. Before this universe, there were other universes. Before the gods you know now, there were plenty of other gods.

Gods like to think of themselves as eternal. It's what gets them through the eons, but there are only two true eternals: birth and death. Everything else is junk washed up on the beach. The tide goes out and the pretty pink shells, the gum wrappers and the dead jellyfish are all washed away. Gods and universes come and go this way, too, but a living god knows some tricks. A god can mold energy and matter into anything it wants, or nothing at all. Gods can appear in an instant. Gods can disappear faster than the half-life of Thulium-145.

To save themselves, gods can scheme and they can hide. Some gods learned to hold their breath and float like kelp in the elemental chaos that rules the roost when one universe ends and the next hasn't quite kicked in.

Each of these trickster gods thought she or he alone had outwitted Creation by crouching in shadows of the universal attic. Then a young God called Jehovah took a band of rebel angels and tossed them, like week-old fish, from his kingdom into the dark between the worlds. As the burning angels fell, the old gods laughed and heard each other. For the first in a long time, they knew they weren't alone.

Worlds collapsed as the old gods, called the Dominions, got to know each other and learn one another's favorite games. Galaxies flickered and went out like cheap motel light bulbs. Whole Spheres of existence burned like phosphorous. Though this took a few million years in human terms, it was just something to do over lunch for the Dominions.

But the universe had its own agenda. When the Dominions tried to slip back into our universe from their refuge in chaos, they took a header out of the starry firmament, every bit as violent and humiliating as Lucifer's fall from Heaven. Not coincidentally, the Dominions fell along the same path as the exiled angels, straight into Hell. But unlike Lucifer's hordes, they didn't stop there. The mass of these beings was so great, that they fell through Hell out the other side, into a dead universe, one whose last echo hadn't yet faded away.