Infernal Parade Read online

  Dietrick looked at them one more time—at their loose, drooling mouths, at their monstrously misshapen bodies—and he shook his head.

  “Cretins, huh?” he said.

  “Human refuse.”

  And yet their eyes, Dietrick thought, their eyes. They were filled with feeling, and with a sad but marvelous intelligence.

  “You know what?” he said to Fetter. “Maybe I should stick around awhile.”

  “What for?”

  “Just to make sure these folks are getting treated kindly.”

  “I don’t like your implication, Dietrick. Take your money and get out of here. Go on!”

  “No”—said the two-headed creature who was closest to the door—“please stay!”

  “Shut up!” Fetter said, and delivered the creature a back-handed blow that threw it across the room. Then he glanced back at the detective. “Are you still here?” he said. “I told you: go! This isn’t your business.”

  “You lied to me,” Dietrick said.

  “What if I did?”

  “They weren’t abducted at all.”

  “Don’t start getting sentimental, Dietrick. You’ve got your money—”

  “I’m not interested in your money.” Dietrick pressed past Fetter and went to where the struck freak now lay, sprawled on the floor. “Here,” he said, offering the creature his hand.

  The thing shook its heads. “You’d best go, mister,” one of them said. The other agreed. “Go quick. The Doctor, he no play fair.”

  “I’m not scared of Fetter,” Dietrick said.

  “You should be, mister,” said the first head. “You’ll get into trouble if you help us.”

  “Go! Please go!”

  As it spoke, its four eyes slid away from Dietrick’s face and focused on something behind him.

  Dietrick turned, instinctively raising his hand in front of his face to ward off a blow from Fetter. But it was not a blow that was coming his way; it was a hypodermic needle. It plunged into the meat of his hand and emerged on the other side, piercing his eye. With the hypodermic pinned to his face, Dietrick fell back against the wall. Fetter was on him in an instant, pressing the hypodermic’s plunger. Its contents surged into Dietrick’s bloodstream.

  “Oh God…” Dietrick said, “…what have you…?”

  He didn’t finish the question. The drug Fetter had put into him had already turned his tongue to lead.

  “I told you to leave,” Fetter said as the detective slid down the wall. “But no. You had to be the hero, didn’t you?” He shook his head. “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid!”

  HOW MANY HOURS went by before the experiment began? Or was it days perhaps? Dietrick no longer knew. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t defend himself, he couldn’t even piss or shit. The doctor had control of him, utterly, utterly, and everything that passed in front of him did so like a kind of dream. No, not a dream. A nightmare…

  Fetter came at him with a hundred hypodermics, and filled his flesh with some transforming fluid. Fetter watched him as his drugs took their terrible effect. Dietrick shrank in his skin, decades of decrepitude claiming his flesh, his bone, his marrow.

  Only when it was all over, and his body had become a contorted broken thing, did Doctor Fetter proffer a mirror, so that Dietrick could see with his one good eye the abomination he had become. He let out a wordless howl that woke others all through the Doctor’s Chamber of Transformation: a ragged chorus of melancholia that went on and on and on till there was no strength left in their twisted forms.

  In the end, mercifully, Fetter lowered his suffering monster into a jar of formaldehyde. It burned as it filled Dietrick’s lungs, but through the pain he heard Fetter boasting, of what glories the future held, of how they were all to be part of some Infernal Parade. Fetter’s insane boasts meant nothing to Dietrick. The last thought that passed through his head as death overcame him was that there had never been anyone in his life, man or woman, who had cared about him enough to send someone looking for him, the way he had been sent, over the years. Undetected, then, he died.

  And in time Doctor Fetter’s Family of Freaks—swelled by one—joined the Infernal Parade.

  IN THE WASTELANDS of Thyle there is a city called Karantica. Once mighty, it is now deserted. Lizards bask on the sun-baked plazas, undisturbed by the tread of human feet. Wild dogs fight and bleed and die in the great houses of that city, where every day was once filled with beauty and music and the high talk of great philosophers.

  What happened to Karantica? What was the calamity that overcame the city? Some horrendous plague, was it? Some civil war, that set great families one against the other, and in the process emptied the city of its inhabitants?

  There are historians who believe both explanations are true, but there is another explanation which is worthy of our attention. It has never been set down until now, existing only in the form of rumors and gossip.

  First, let me explain that Karantica was in the time of its greatness a city ruled over by priests, not potentates. Religion subdued its people, rather than the rule of civil law. The laws of the Gods of Karantica were cruel, no question: the judgments passed down through their intercedents in the priest class were often unspeakably vicious. Blinding and castrations were demanded for very minor offences, and female felons who’d been condemned to death were often taken into the temple on the night before their executions, where—according to the accounts of the celibate priests—the Gods sent monstrous creatures to violate them, and tear at their flesh. Even children were not exempt from the judgments of Karantica’s deities. They were regularly cooked alive in the bellies of iron dragons for inconsequential crimes.

  Not everyone was happy with the cruelty of the Gods. Far from it.

  When one Judge Phio opened his people’s court in the filthy streets of Karantica’s poorest district, the Myassa, he found people more than willing to hear his New Theory of the Law. Justice should not be cruel, he said. A civilized society—and what city in the Underland laid greater claim to being cultured than Karantica?—did not cook the flesh of a living child for the “crime” of stealing a fish from the fountains outside the Great Temple. The law, to be respected, needed to balance forcefulness with compassion. There was a better way to be just, Phio said. A human way.

  The people of Karantica weren’t stupid. They saw the sense in what he said. And word of his uncommon love of common sense quickly spread. Rather than take their disputes to the priests, people instead began to present themselves to Phio for judgment, their numbers swelling so quickly that in a matter of weeks his little court was hopelessly over-booked and he would often work from six in the morning to midnight, dispensing his particular brand of what he called “honest law.”

  His presence did not go unnoticed, of course. The priests had spies everywhere around the city, and word soon reached them of this man and his heretical vision of justice. The priests, led by the most vicious of the great punishers, Thamut-ul-mire, met in secret conclave to determine what should be done to bring this problem to an end. It was only a matter of time, they agreed, before this Judge Phio’s heresies spread, and these courts began to proliferate. The answer’s simple, said some of the older priests: accuse Phio of taking the law of the Gods into mortal hands—which he is undeniably doing—and then having Thamut-ul-mire conceive of some public death for him so lingering and so horrible that nobody will ever try his tricks again.

  “It won’t work,” Thamut-ul-mire said quietly. “We’ll make a martyr of him.”

  “Well, what do you suggest?” one of the Elders asked.

  “That we punish the people for listening to him,” Thamut-ul-mire replied.

  “Punish the people? All the people?”

  “Yes.”

  The Elder laughed. “How do you suggest we do that? “Have half of them flog the other half and then flog the floggers?”

  “No, nothing so crude,” Thamut-ul-mire replied. “Fear is what we’ll use to bring them back to us.”

  “F
ear of the Gods?”

  Thamut-ul-mire shook his head. “Fear of that which is not the Gods,” he replied.

  THREE NIGHTS LATER, just after nightfall, three children, two brothers and their little sister, playing in an orchard close to the edge of the city, were murdered under the pithik trees. Not just murdered but, disassembled and disemboweled, their brains scooped out of the cups of their skulls and eaten, their tender innards unwound and left trailing in the grass. What kind of man would do such a thing? People wanted to know. It was beyond comprehension.

  Two nights later, seven more children were slaughtered. This time all of different families, in the streets of a well-heeled district occupied by merchants and their families. The deaths resembled in every way the deaths of the three children murdered in the orchard. The same brutal unknitting of the bodies, the same removing of the brains and the innards left trailing. This time, however, the miscreant was glimpsed as it shambled away from the scene of its depravities. It was not human; not remotely. A great reptilian beast that had apparently come into the city from the wilderness. It was a creature that the citizens of Karantica knew by name: a Sabbaticus. Word of its presence spread through the city. This was not just any scavenger. This was a beast out of the Testaments of Jidadia, the great religious book which the priests went to when they were seeking guidance as to how a certain miscreant needed to be judged. It fed on the thoughts of children, and on the despair of their parents.

  “This is what you have unleashed,” Thamut-ul-mire shouted from his pulpit the next day. “By following laws other than those brought to you by your priests—the laws of the Gods!—you have invited into our once safe streets this abomination of the Wilderness.”

  The thousand-strong congregation fell to its knees, some of the worshippers uttering cries of “Save us! Save us!” Others simply let out sobs, that echoed around the dome of the Great Temple.

  “I cannot save you against your own sin!” Thamut-ul-mire returned. “Only you can do that!”

  “Tell us how!”

  “There is a certain man in this city who has set his laws above those of the Gods. Perhaps if you turned your backs on him, this creature, this Sabbaticus would leave Karantica alone and return to the Wilderness from whence your corruptions called it!”

  The crowd rose as one, their sobs and their entreaties turning to howls for vengeance. They went through the city gathering weapons along the way, the crowd’s numbers swelling as word of what had transpired at the Temple spread. In his makeshift courthouse in the Myassa, Judge Phio heard the roar of the mob as it approached. His supporters had already brought him warning, of course. He knew what would happen to him when the crowd kicked down the door and dragged him out. If he’d been quick and lucky perhaps he might have escaped, but where would he have gone? Karantica was the city where he’d been born and raised. He loved it with all his heart, and he loved its poor manipulated people. Which was not to say that he was happy to die now. Not with so much work to do. But he was ready to face the consequences of what he’d done.

  Judge Phio’s death was not quick. The people of Karantica were expert from past stonings at the craft of keeping a man from perishing too quickly. For two hours and seven minutes Phio suffered in the sun, his left eye dashed from its socket, all broken, his robes soaked red from neck to hem. The blow-flies and the blood-bees swarmed around him in their many thousands, and settled on his ruined face until he was entirely black with them. At last, he dropped to his knees, and minutes later fell forward. There was a curious silence then, and stillness, until a small boy, no more than five or six, ran forward and gleefully proceeded to stamp on Phio’s head. The rest of the crowd—many of whom were alive today thanks to the compassion of the man they had beneath their feet—escalated the fury of the tarantella.

  When it was done—when the judge had breathed his last, every bone in his body shattered—they were not ashamed that they had killed their savior.

  After all, had he not brought the Sabbaticus out of the Wilderness? He deserved his death.

  The priests’ spies returned to the Great Temple quickly, with news of what had happened. They were paid off, and sent on their way.

  “Good,” said the Elder, “it’s done. We have no more need of subterfuge.”

  “What should we do about the men that killed the children?”

  “Bury them alive, out in the Wilderness,” Thamut-ul-mire said. “I’ll see it done. And I’ll have priests with me to help me do the job. We’ll have no more dealings with paid assassins.”

  It was so agreed. That night the two professionals who had been hired to kill the children—and with the aid of a little theatrics, throw the shadow of the beast on a wall here and there, and leave its tracks in the blood of the dead children—were abducted from their huts down by the river and taken out under cover of darkness into the windy wastes that lay all about Karantica. They were given shovels, and told to dig a single hole, large enough for two corpses. They knew they were digging their own graves, but they were too afraid of how Thamut-ul-mire might affect their lives after death to contradict his instructions. As helpless as the children whose lives they had taken, they did as they were instructed, digging their graves and then jumping down into the hole together. The priests then threw down on top of them the crude machinery of their deceptions: the puppets that had cast the flittering shadows of the Sabbaticus on the wall and the blocks of carved wood they’d used to create a trail in blood.

  Finally, at Thamut-ul-mire’s instruction, his fellow priests proceeded to bury the men. Only then, when the dirt began to patter down on their faces, did the murderers begin to voice their fear, sobbing and begging for mercy. None was forthcoming, of course; and after a time the sheer weight of dirt smothered them, and they were silenced.

  “Let’s return to the Temple,” Thamut-ul-mire said. “This wind makes my teeth ache.”

  He had no sooner finished speaking than the wind gusted particularly hard, and the flames in the priests’ lamps went out, and the moon slipped behind a dust cloud that was looming in the east. In the sudden murk, the priest heard the sound of something moving nearby, and a foul stench stung their nostrils.

  “What is that?” one of them said, his voice betraying a veneer of unease.

  “Some animal heard the screams,” Thamut-ul-mire replied. “Come back to scavenge no doubt.”

  “What animal?” the priest replied.

  “Who cares what animal?” the other said. “Let’s be gone.”

  THE TERRIBLE CYCLE of deaths began that very night. Thirteen children died. Another nineteen died the night after. Thirty-six the night after that. The grotesque sights that subsequent dawns presented left the people of the city in no doubt as to the identity of the murderer. The Sabbaticus wasn’t satisfied with the death of Judge Phio.

  The congregation came beating at the doors of the Great Temple, demanding answers from their priests. Why, if they had punished Phio for his crimes, had the Sabbaticus escalated its war against the innocents of Karantica? It wanted blood on blood on blood on blood.

  Sealed up in the darkness of the Temple, the priests debated how they could possibly answer the question without touching upon the truth of the matter, which to them was all too clear: the wind had carried word of their deceits out into the Wilderness, and the Sabbaticus had come from the wastes to see what crimes were being done in its name, and to prove that it could do worse.

  Why, it could even kill priests.

  That very night, in fact, it came up through the tunnels that ran beneath the Temple and it broke the legendary rules of its nature. It killed grown men, instead of children. And instead of eating their brains it ate that part that made them men.

  When the doors of the Great Temple were finally opened, and the massacre within discovered—eleven hundred and two priests slaughtered—a great exodus from the city began.

  Nobody stayed. Not a single soul.

  What was the use? However beautiful Karantica was—however fin
e its palaces and mansions, however exquisite its plazas and boulevards—it was a cursed city. Neither children nor priests were safe there.

  Better the Wilderness than Karantica, people took to saying. And the saying spread, and was never forgotten, even after the Sabbaticus had left the city and been tamed by Tom Requiem, becoming in time part of the Infernal Parade’s great entertainment.

  BETHANY BLED HAD been washing clothes down at the river when the man on the dappled horse had ridden up to her and told her that she was the most beautiful woman in all of Delphi. She was not used to flattery. The daughter of a charcoal burner, and illegitimate at that, she had never known the company of a man who could weave words so exquisitely as the Duke Delphi. For the next several days he made secret assignations with her, and by the time Sunday came, she was ready to give her heart and soul and body to him. They met under the yews in the churchyard, where the many dead of the village were laid in humble graves.

  “Lie with me here,” he said to her.

  She was astonished at how forward he was, and even more astonished at how easily she fell for his fine words and gentle manners. She lay with him, there in the lush grass beneath the spreading yew trees, and within a matter of minutes he had talked her out of her clothes, and was upon her, having his way.

  There was precious little pleasure in it for her, at least in the doing of the deed. But afterwards, when he parted from her, she thought of him over and over, and imagined his eyes upon her neck and breasts, and heard the promises he had made to her.

  “I will marry you,” he’d said to her as he’d unbuttoned her bodice, “and you’ll be the most beautiful Duchess Delphi that ever lived and you’ll want for nothing.”

  “For nothing.”

  “For nothing.”

  NINETEEN TIMES HE had made love to her, on several occasions in the churchyard, and once in the church itself, there on the hard, cold floor. But she had not cared that the floor was cold, or that he sometimes bruised her in his ardor: his promises made everything right. He loved her, he swore, loved her as no man had ever loved a woman, back to the beginning of the world.