Surface Detail

“I don’t believe you,” she said. Her voice sounded strange to her, without teeth. Her tongue had been bitten and although not causing her any pain it was swollen, and that was making her voice different too. She didn’t know if she had bitten her own tongue or if one of the demons in the mill had.

The senior demon shrugged. “Suit yourself.” It turned away.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“What?” It turned back to look at her again.

“I’m sorry I don’t believe you.” She shook her head slowly. “But I don’t. Can’t. Sorry.”

The demon looked at her for a moment. “They really have chewed you up bad, haven’t they?”

She didn’t say anything for a while. The demon continued to look at her. “Who are you?” she asked eventually.

“I’m called Klomestrum,” it told her. It nodded at the demon flying the beetle. “Ruriel.”

The other demon waved one forelimb but did not look round.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Place we can all get the fuck out of here. Another portal.”

“A portal to where?”

“The Real. You know; the place where there isn’t all this pain and suffering and torture and shit?”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“And where will we be then? Where in this ‘Real’?”

“Does it really matter? Not here, that’s the point.”

The two demons glanced at each other and laughed.

“Yes,” she insisted, “but where?”

“Wait and see. We’re not there yet. Best not to give anything away, eh?”

She blinked at him.

He sighed. “Look, if I tell you where we’re going to come out and they’ve somehow managed to listen in on this then they might be able to stop us, see?”

The first demon half-turned his head to her. “Where did you think you were going back to just there, back at the mill?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “Another part of here,” she said. “There is no ‘Real’. It’s just a myth to make things seem even worse here.”

“You really think that?” the demon said, looking aghast at her.

“It’s all that makes sense,” she said. “It’s all there is. This is all there is. How could there be a Real where people would allow something so terrible as this to exist? This place must be all that there is. What people call the Real is a myth, an unreachable heaven only there to make existence all the worse by comparison.”

“There could still be a Real,” the demon protested, “but one where the people-”

“Leave it,” the other demon said.

Somehow, without her noticing it happening, the demon piloting the giant beetle had turned into one of the smaller demons, a dark little squirmy thing with a long glistening body. It looked like something that had just been born, or excreted.

“Fuck,” the other demon said. It had turned into something much smaller too; a sort of featherless bird with pale, raw, tattered skin and a beak whose top part had been broken half off. “You really think your friend just went to another part of Hell?”

“Where else is there to go?” she asked.

“Fuck,” the demon said again. It seemed to stiffen. So did the other demon.

“Oh, fuck, we’re not even getting to-”

There was no transition. One instant she was numb and without pain in the pod inside the giant flying beetle, the next she was pinned, flayed, in agony, her flesh opened out and spread out all around her, on a slope in front of some sort of ultimate Demon. She was shrieking.

“Shush,” something said, and the force of it tumbled across her like a gigantic wave, pressing her into the noisome earth beneath her where things crawled and squirmed and invaded her flesh. Now she could not scream. Her throat had been sealed, her mouth had been sewn shut. She breathed through a ragged hole in what was left of her neck, chest muscles working to expand and compress her lungs but leaving her unable to make any sound. She writhed, moved side to side, tried to jerk herself loose from whatever held her. The motions produced only more pain but she persisted.

A noise like a sigh rolled across her, scarcely less batteringly heavy than the sound of “Shush” a moment earlier.

The pain ebbed, retreated, left her quivering. It did not go away entirely but it left her room to think, to feel other things besides the agony.

She could see properly now. The pain before had been so bad she had not been able to understand what she was looking at.

Before her, across a dark valley full of smoke and half-hidden red and orange flames, on a dully glowing throne the size of a great building, sat a demon at least a hundred metres tall.

The demon had four limbs but looked alien, bipedal; its upper limbs were arms rather than legs. Its skin was made from living pelts and hides and flesh, its body from an obscene amalgam of sweating metal, stretched gristle, pitted ceramic gears, reconstituted, pulverised bone and inflamed, smouldering sinew, tattered flesh and leaking, boiling blood. The vast throne glowed dully because it was red hot, producing a greasy slow upwelling of smoke from the fleshes and pelts that cloaked the demon, filling the air with a continual sizzling, spitting noise.