City Infernal Read online

  Table of Contents

  A RAVE REVIEW FOR CITY INFERNAL!

  Praise

  ALL ABOARD THE TRAIN TO HELL

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  PART ONE - ETHERESS

  Chapter One

  (I)

  Chapter Two

  (I)

  (II)

  (III)

  (IV)

  (V)

  Chapter Three

  (I)

  (II)

  Chapter Four

  (I)

  (II)

  (III)

  (IV)

  Chapter Five

  (I)

  (II)

  (III)

  Chapter Six

  (I)

  (II)

  PART TWO - THE MEPHISTOPOLIS

  Chapter Seven

  (I)

  (II)

  (III)

  Chapter Eight

  (I)

  (II)

  Chapter Nine

  (I)

  (II)

  (III)

  Chapter Ten

  (I)

  (II)

  (III)

  Chapter Eleven

  (I)

  (ll)

  (lll)

  Chapter Twelve

  (I)

  (II)

  (III)

  (IV)

  PART THREE - MACHINATIONS

  Chapter Thirteen

  (I)

  (II)

  (III)

  (IV)

  Chapter Fourteen

  (I)

  (II)

  (III)

  Chapter Fifteen

  (I)

  (II)

  (III)

  (IV)

  Chapter Sixteen

  (I)

  Chapter Seventeen

  (I)

  (II)

  (III)

  (IV)

  (V)

  Epilogue

  A RAVE REVIEW FOR CITY INFERNAL!

  “After fifteen some novels, stories selected for over 13 major anthologies, and both critical and popular success, you might expect Edward Lee to show signs of losing the imaginative edge that eventually dulls every author’s pen. Yet Lee’s latest onslaught, City Infernal, is perhaps his most powerful, possessing the frantic pacing and tension of such earlier work as Ghouls with an additional emotional earnestness too often lacking in contemporary horror ...

  Lee has penned some of the wettest, bravest terror this side of the asylum. In City Infernal, an epic-proportioned urban tragedy of guilt, redemption, and the celestial mechanics of pain, he creates a testimony of human despair and redemption that not only shows the higher effect to which graphic terror can be put, but, in addition, evidence of an ever growing control over craft.... Lee’s depiction of Cassie, an adolescent struggling with problems of identity and responsibility for her sister’s suicide, is no less than remarkable.”

  —William P. Simmons, Hellnotes

  MORE CRITICAL PRAISE FOR EDWARD LEE!

  “Lee is a writer you can bank on for tales so extreme they should come with a warning label.”

  —t. Winter-Damon, co-author of Duet for the Devil

  “Edward Lee is the hardest of the hardcore horror writers.”

  -Cemetery Dance

  “Lee pulls no punches.”

  —Fangoria

  “Edward Lee is the living legend of literary mayhem. Read him if you dare.”

  —Richard Laymon, author of Island and In the Dark

  “Lee is a demented Henry Miller of horror.”

  —Douglas Clegg, author of The Infinite and Naomi

  “Anyone for a sightseeing tour of Hell? Follow Cassie ... and have adventures galore.”

  —Publisher’s Weekly

  ALL ABOARD THE TRAIN TO HELL

  The train itself looked like something from the late 1900s—old wooden passenger cars hauled by a steam locomotive. The engine was backed by a high coal tender; however, the chunks of off-yellow fuel were clearly not coal. A man stood on top, shoveling the chunks into a chute. At first he appeared ordinary, dressed in work overalls and a canvas cap as one might expect. He paused a moment to wipe some sweat off his brow, and that’s when he glanced down at Cassie.

  The man had no lower jaw—as if it had been wrenched out. Just an upper row of teeth over a tongue that hung from the open throat.

  “All aboard!”

  “Let’s try to find a decent cabin,” Xeke said and led them down the aisle. He looked into the first cabin, smirked, and said, “Nope.” In the cabin sat a man whose face was warped with large potato-like tumors. Cassie wasn’t sure, but the tumors seemed to have eyes. Xeke frowned into the next cabin, where an ancient woman sat totally naked, leathery skin hanging in folds. Her nostrils looked burned off.

  “Oh my God!” Cassie gusted. She was close to hyperventilating. “This place is horrible! ”

  Xeke sat down. “What did you expect? We’re in Hell, not the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

  For Richard Laymon Rest In Peace

  A LEISURE BOOK®

  April 2002

  Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc. 276 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10001

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 2001 by Edward Lee

  Lyrics © 2001 by Ryan Harding Excerpts used here with permission of the author

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  ISBN 1-4285-0166-5

  The name “Leisure Books” and the stylized “L” with design aretrademarks of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Visit us on the web at www.dorchesterpub.com.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Though in debt to many, I would like to particularly thank the following for their help, friendship, and encouragement: Rich Chizmar, Doug Clegg, friggin’ Coop, Don D’Auria, Dallas Mayr, Tim McGinnis, Tom Piccirilli, Matt Schwartz, and Bob Strauss.

  Foremost, I need to thank the late Dick Laymon—simply one of the finest and most generous guys I’ve ever known. I miss you terribly.

  Prologue

  It is an incontestable cycle of human history, 5000 years old:

  Cities rise, then they fall.

  What of this city, though?

  The man walks with difficulty down the street. The street sign reads: ISCARIOT AVENUE.

  He is carrying a severed head on a stick, and the severed head talks. “Can you spare any change?” the head asks passersby. The man himself can’t talk; his body has half gone to rot. One eye is an empty hole; tiny fanged mites rove in his hair. His skin is pustulating from the latest urban infection, and his tongue has long-since been eaten out of his mouth by vermin.

  A well-dressed woman in a smart bonnet taps by on elegant high heels. She’s wearing a fur-lined trench coat of patterned human skin, and diminutive horns sprout from her smooth, angled forehead. The woman is an uptown She-Demon.

  “Can you spare some change, ma’am?” the head asks.

  The man holding the head extends a cadaverous hand, and before the elegant She-Demon walks on, she gives him a shiny twenty-five-cent piece.

  The coin is embossed not with the face of George Washin
gton but the face of serial-killer Richard Speck.

  “Thank you,” the severed head says to the She-Demon as she traipses away.

  They recycle here.

  Hybrid Trolls comprise a municipal reclamation crew, transferring any manner of corpse from the streets into the huge back bins of several steam-powered Meat Trucks. Eventually the trucks will chug past the front gates of the Industrial Zone, emptying their wares into the collection hoppers of a typical city Pulping Station. Blood will be drained for distillation, flesh fileted for sustenance, bones dried and ground for cement. Good value, to say the least.

  Barges manned by Golems float atop the brown, lump-ridden surface of a river called Styx, pumping raw sewage into the city’s domestic water reservoirs. Great furnaces burn raw sulphur for no other purpose than polluting the air, but vents in the furnace silos recycle the intense heat to keep the local prisons roaring hot. The hair of the human dead is used to stuff pillows and mattresses for the demonic elite.

  Even Souls are recycled. When one body suffers suf ficient destruction, the Soul is transferred to a lower species. Endless life in eternal death.

  Most cities run on electricity, but this city runs on horror. Suffering serves as convertible energy; terror is the city’s most valuable natural resource, where it is tapped as fuel. Industrial Alchemists and civic Warlocks use their advanced means of sorcery to harness the synaptic activity that constantly fires between neurons, the greatest production of which comes from pain. In the humming Power Plants, the city’s least useful residents are impounded, hung upside-down against long stone slabs and systematically tortured. The torture never ends—as they never really die. Instead they just hang there, often for centuries, convulsing from ceaseless pain, the energy of which is fed from their exposed brains to the vast power converters.

  A single human Soul can generate enough power to light a city block—forever.

  Decapitation, evisceration, and summary dismemberment are chief among its public-service skills. Its claws swipe with the efficiency of newly honed scythes. Its jaws, rowed with canine-like teeth, can bite through an iron pipe—or a human throat—as though it were a tube of cardboard.

  It is called an Usher, one of several demonic species bred specifically for urban riot control and to counter problems with public disobedience. In a more accurate sense, it is a police officer.

  Here, though, the police do not exist to protect and serve. They exist to maintain terror through unimaginable atrocity. Ushers are frequently dispatched in battalions to indiscriminately maim and/or execute citizens en masse.

  They keep the populace on its toes.

  Sharpened horns curve outward from its anvil-shaped head. It has holes for ears and chisel-slits for eyes, and its skin can be likened to the skin of a slug, darkly spotted, exuding a mucus-like slime.

  It eats voraciously.

  Its blood is black.

  Gumdrop is an ordinary mongrel, part human, part demon—the product of infernal prostitution. She lives in one of the immense public housing complexes in the Ghettoblocks. Her features are attractively human but her skin is green-pocked with white bumps. Her breasts are robust and multi-nippled.

  Like mother, like daughter: Gumdrop, too, is a prostitute. Her pimp is an obese Troll named “Fat-Bag.” Fat-Bag keeps her in line through any conceivable act of degradation and physical violence. He also keeps her hopelessly addicted to drugs, and around here, the drug of choice is called Zap, an organic distillate that is injected directly into the pulp of the brain via a long hypodermic needle inserted into a nostril. Fat-Bag keeps the ’ho down hard.

  She is a streetwalker. In hundred-hour shifts, she walks the decrepit avenues of Pogrom Park, soliciting any species of customer. When she’s lucky, a Grand Duke will pick her up. Grand Dukes pay well.

  When she’s not so lucky, Broodren rip her off and gang-rape her.

  It’s all just a day in the life of a prostitute in Hell.

  But today she’s even less lucky. When she awakes, craving drugs, she rises from the stained mattress that serves as her bed and immediately falls to the floor. She screams when she sees what has happened to her. A Polter-Rat scurries away, barely seen. While Gumdrop slept, the creature ate all the flesh off her feet, leaving only bare bones.

  How will she walk the streets now, with no feet?

  Tough luck for Gumdrop.

  Fat-Bag will wear her out with some kink tricks and then sell her body to a Pulping Station.

  The sky churns dark-scarlet. The moon is black. It has been midnight here for millennia, and it always will be. The scape of the city stretches on in a never-ending sprawl. Fires rage, rumbling, beneath the maze of streets. Smoke and steam rise from between endless buildings and skyscrapers.

  Just as endless are the screams, which fly away into the eternal night only to be immediately replaced by more of the same.

  It is an incontestable cycle of human history, 5000 years old:

  Cities rise, then they fall.

  But not this city.

  Not the Mephistopolis.

  PART ONE

  ETHERESS

  Chapter One

  (I)

  She dreamed of utter darkness, of dripping sounds, and screams.

  But first—

  The embrace.

  The strong hands stroking her body through the hot black satin.

  I’m ready, she thought. I’ve never felt like this before....

  Her breasts pressed against his sculpted chest—she could feel his heart beating deeply within, and it seemed to beat for her. Their souls seemed to fuse through each ravenous kiss, and soon she felt tingling all over, flushed with heat and desire. She didn’t flinch when he pushed up her black blouse, popped the black bra, and smoothed his hands over her breasts. The sensation shocked her; she rose up on her tiptoes to kiss him harder—

  Then—

  The lights flicked on.

  The screams exploded.

  The blood splattered in her face.

  And she saw it all again. Over and over. Every night of her life....

  The club’s sign—GOTH HOUSE—giowed eerily in dark-purple neon. It was a familiar sight, a landmark for her eye. The line out front wound halfway up the block—another familiar sight—which proved the establishment’s popularity as the best Goth club in D.C. There were many, of course, and many more had come and gone over the years, along with every incarnation and reincarnation of the movement. Everything else seemed to change, every aspect of the city and even the world.

  But not this.

  Not Goth House.

  For Cassie and so many like her, the club was a sanctuary, a cultural anchor for the strange ship they all elected to sail, not simply the next big thing in the club craze. Cassie thanked God for that. In a pop society that changed in eyeblinks, where every other week brought some new version of Eminem-like hatred excused as the language of a culture or facile teenybopper tramp-glamour divas with shiny pants and blond hair who couldn’t even read music, the symbolics of Goth House never wavered. The dark music and dark styles of passionately dark minds. Here, Bauhaus reigned, as they had for two decades. There were no Dixie Chicks, no Ricky Martin. There were no Spice Girls here.

  It would be an hour’s wait at least, and Cassie Heydon and her sister were three years shy of the posted requirement: YOU MUST BE 21 OR OVER TO ENTER.

  Cassie frowned. It’s not who you know, it’s who you.... The thought needn’t be finished. She knew what her sister was doing; she could see her shadow in the alley kneeling before the fat, slovenly bouncer. Due to this talent, and her willingness to utilize it, Lissa had already gained quite a reputation at school. This just made it worse.

  “I do it all the time,” she’d told Cassie earlier. “It’s kind of fun and, besides, it’s the only way we can get in. You do want to get in, don’t you?”