Hellfighters by Alexander Gordon Smith
“They’re herding us,” said Herc as the first demon lumbered closer, baring its teeth. He was right, the demons pushing them toward the archway to their left.
“Miney, mo it is,” said Charlie. He walked toward the arch, his sneakers scuffing on the uneven floor. Marlow followed. They all did. It wasn’t like they had any say in the matter. More demons were swarming from the archways like rats, fighting among one another. The weird call that seemed to vibrate in the air was the only thing holding them back.
The archway led into a corridor, as cold and damp as a sewer. Luckily it was short, ending with another arch up ahead. Through it seeped more firelight and that same pulse that seemed to resonate in Marlow’s soul. It had to be the Engine up there. Nothing else could make that sound, could it?
“It can’t have brought us back to the Nest,” said Pan. “No way.”
“I hope not,” said Charlie. “If we’re back at the Engine, then Ostheim will be here, too.”
Claire shuddered, backing up against the wall.
“In all my time in the Nest, I never saw a tunnel like this,” said Herc. “Not to mention a shop standing in the middle of the basement. No, this is someplace new.”
Behind them the demons pressed closer, spittle spraying from their open jaws. Meridiana might have had some control over them, but even the best-trained dog in the world cut loose when it smelled a free meal.
“Well,” said Marlow. “One way to find out.”
He stepped through the arch.
MERIDIANA
It was an Engine.
But not one made of springs and cogs; not one made from nuts and bolts and iron and steel; not one made from anything mechanical at all.
It was an Engine made of flesh.
It filled a cavern easily as big as the one beneath the Pigeon’s Nest, looking less like the surface of an ocean and more like a coral reef. Pieces of skin and bone and muscle and hair spawned from every crevice in the rock, covering hundreds of stalagmites and stalactites. They glistened in the guttering torchlight, and Pan saw the pump of blood through veins, the slick throb of exposed organs.
There were faces, too, she saw.
No, not faces. One face, repeated a thousand times. A million maybe.
A woman’s face, old enough for wrinkles but at the same time strangely youthful, like a kid made up to look like an old woman. She had high cheekbones, sharp enough to chisel rock, a thin nose. Her hair hung in lank, white-blond streaks, moist bald patches peeking out between them. Her eyes were white marbles flecked with oxblood twists, and they flicked fast from side to side in their sockets like they were trying to escape. The sound of it, of a million wet eyes sliding back and forth, was like heavy rain.
The same face, everywhere she looked.
And they all twisted around to look right back.
Mammon, they said together. Individually they were whispers, but collectively it was a hurricane roar. Pan slapped her hands to her head before her eardrums burst, waiting for it to fade away. Even then the sound rolled around the cavern, echoing into infinity.
“Meridiana,” she said.
It was, and yet it couldn’t be. Each head was connected to a body that had been unraveled and unspooled. Blood vessels hung in the air like crimson cobwebs, nerves had tunneled into the stone, bones had been fragmented into minuscule parts that clicked and whirred like clockwork. Each of the cadavers was intertwined with those around it so that it was impossible to see where one ended and the next began.
Come to me, said the faces, another shock wave of sound that she could feel against her skin. It stank of death and decay, of things long buried.
The demons had entered the cavern behind them, whining like nervous dogs. They snapped at their heels, driving them on. There was no path here that Pan could see, so she hopscotched from one patch of exposed skin to the next, trying to avoid the tender flesh and nerve clusters and brain in between. The heads all watched her go, pink tongues poking from those bloodless lips, white eyes blinking.
The ground rose ahead, as high as a desert dune. Pan struggled up it, grabbing hold of bone and hair to haul herself toward the top. If the Meridiana Engine minded, it showed no sign of it. It was only when Pan slipped and planted her foot into a pulsing mess of organs that the cavern came to life again, every single head snatching in a pained breath.
“Sorry,” Pan said. The horror was a nest of squirming things inside her, so unreal that all she wanted to do was howl with laughter. She bit back the urge, knowing that if she lost it now then she would never leave this palace of flesh. She would lie here until the Engine grew over her like so much ivy.
Struggling for breath, she crested the dune. The cavern stretched as far as she could see, but directly beneath her was an island in the madness. It held a pool of dark water, and next to it a wooden cabin that belonged inside a fairy tale.
“Oh God,” said Marlow as he hauled himself onto the top of the living dune. “Oh God, this is…” He couldn’t finish, just pumped a shot of his inhaler into his mouth. He was covered in old, sticky blood, scraps of skin. Pan glanced down at herself and saw that she was the same. Strands of yellow hair had wrapped themselves around her fingers and her skin squirmed as she tried to brush them loose on her pants.
The faces around her seemed to find it amusing, a laugh rippling from one end of the cavern to the next. The closest heads had to crane themselves up to look at her and she had the urge to kick one like a ball, see how far it went. Once again that tide of insane panic boiled up inside her. She had to close her eyes and count to five before finding herself again.
Descending the other side of the dune was just as hard, gravity tugging at her, trying to make her miss her step. Halfway down her boot sank into a rib cage, the bones grinding against her like she was a wrench caught inside a motor. When she pulled free she heard the mechanical flesh choke into life again, whirring like gears.
Careful, came that thunderous whisper again. We work hard, we do not want to break.
She took her time, hearing Marlow, Charlie, Herc, and Claire all curse as they followed her down into the valley. The closer she got, the more she saw. The shack wasn’t made of wood at all. It had walls of bone and a roof of skin stretched taut. The pool, too, wasn’t made of water but of blood. A wide stone bay surrounded the liquid, with a channel cut into it that was stained rust-red. It still looked like something from a fairy tale, but one of the old ones, one of the ones they told to scare kids.
And like so many of those, this story had a witch.
She had the same face as all the others, but her body hadn’t been cut open and laid out for all to see. She stood beside the pool, stooped and shaking, a filthy rag draped over her shoulders. Her skin was pink—bright pink, like she’d spent her life wading inside a vat of grape juice. Her hair, too, was crimson and clotted.
Pan skittered down past the last few cadavers. She didn’t think she’d ever been so relieved to touch solid ground. Marlow thumped into her back, apologizing as he tried to brush the residue of the not-quite-dead from his clothes. Charlie and Herc clattered down after him like train cars, followed by Claire. The old woman was thirty yards away and she paid them no attention. She was moving erratically, sweeping from side to side across the stone, her hands held out. She waltzed—that’s what she was doing, Pan realized, dancing with an invisible partner—up to the edge of the pool and dunked a bare toe in the thick water. A peal of noise shuddered across the cavern as all of the old woman’s heads sighed.
Pan swallowed, her throat like sandpaper.
“Um … Hello?” she said, the quiet words falling at her feet. The woman didn’t hear them. She was holding a knife in her hand, Pan saw, a sliver of silver that flashed as she moved. Meridiana bowed, then glided back across the stone bay.
There was a second woman there, Pan saw, another Meridiana—identical in every way, except this one was naked. Her wrinkled flesh hung around her like loose cloth, her eyes watching her double as she piro
“I fell asleep,” said Marlow. “Right? I dozed off somewhere back there. Because this … this is, like, pure nightmare.”
And if it hadn’t been before, it was now. The dancing Meridiana swept forward like a kingfisher diving for a fish, her blade a silver beak. It sank into the neck of her doppelganger without the slightest sound, a spurt of ruby-colored blood sluicing outward. It gushed down the channel then flowed into the pool, sending out a web of ripples.
We must keep it full. The words came from Meridiana and all her heads.
“Oh God,” said Pan.
Meridiana held her twin until she stopped twitching, then she laid her gently onto the floor. She flicked the knife, running it over her rags and examining the blade.
Those myriad faces inside the Engine all snatched in a breath then spoke together—we lose one, we gain one, we keep it full.
Only when the echo of their voices stopped booming across the cavern did Pan step forward. The word didn’t want to come up her throat, clinging to her insides like a stubborn child. But she coughed it up.
“Meridiana?”
The woman looked over her shoulder, right at her. Every head did the same and she could feel the force of their stares as a physical pressure. Meridiana’s body trembled, but that knife was rock steady, and it looked sharp enough to cut the universe in two. Pan stepped forward, her hands held high.
“We need your help. Mammon needs your help.” She glanced at Marlow and he shrugged, nodding for her to keep going. “He sent us here, he told us—”
Mammon, the million faces said as one. He is lost to us. The traitorous one took him. He took all of them. Just us left, just us, from one, yes?
It didn’t make much sense but Pan nodded, walking steadily across the stone floor of the cavern. Meridiana was fifteen yards away now, close enough for Pan to see that her skin was so thin it was almost translucent. She looked like she could have been a thousand years old.
More laughter, grinding like an earthquake.
Older than that, child. We are older than that. Time forgets us here, a hundred thousand years of hiding and time could not find us.
She ducked down, using the blade to open up the corpse of her double. For a few seconds she tugged and hacked at the body, seeming to lose herself in it. Then she looked up, her rheumy eyes blinking at Pan as though she’d forgotten who she was. She sniffed at the air, and her heads did, too.
We smell him on you, child. Our brother, we smell his blood. Where is he?
“Ostheim killed him,” Marlow blurted out from her side.
The heads opened their mouths and wailed, a wall of sound that crushed Pan, that might have broken her. It was Meridiana, though, who slapped her hands to her ears, almost stabbing herself with the knife.
Do not speak his name. Do not speak any of his names. Not even that one.
The moaning went on and on until Pan thought she could not bear it, that it would end her. Then it ebbed gently into silence. Meridiana worked at the corpse again, drawing out a long, sticky strand of something red.
“What the hell is she doing?” Charlie asked.
We are building, came the reply. We ran from him, all the lifetimes of the world ago. We ran here, and time forgot us. We had no Engine, we had nothing. So we built one of our own. We built one from all of us.
Pan looked at the wall of flesh that grew all around them. How many moving parts here? There had to be billions, fueled by the channels of blood that ran through it. This thing was not made of metal, but there was no denying it was an Engine. Just staring at it she could feel the cry of whoever lay there, behind the countless Meridianas, behind the gears and cogs and still-beating hearts. She could hear that awful cry of the devil.
We did not know where to start, but we began with ourselves. Each body is an engine that holds its soul, and does that not make it the most powerful machine in the universe? Seven billion billion billion atoms, sixty elements, organics and inorganics. There is a world inside us, there is the power of the stars inside us. Everything you could ever ask for. We only needed to harvest it.
With a single stroke she cut open the skin of the corpse’s chest, rummaging inside with blood-slicked fingers.
There are one million, eight hundred and seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and nineteen of us here, child. And this is just the beginning. We have lived here for a hundred thousand years, in our pocket of broken time. We will live here for a hundred thousand more.
“No,” said Claire. “It cannot be.”
Pan glanced at her, the girl still clutching her stomach like she’d been stabbed. Then she turned back to Meridiana.
“But how…” Pan said. “How did you know how to do it?”
Because the Engine is inside me, child. My brothers and I—even him—we were born to it. It lived inside our blood. We were its guardians. We kept it safe. Our circle was a thing of beauty, a thing of kindness. We were just children, younger than you. And there is no force more formidable than a child.
“Yeah, there is,” muttered Marlow. “Try a pissed-off spider-snake dude with a comb-over.”
He was one of us, once, one of the Five. But he let the Engine corrupt him. He let it fill him with darkness. He tried to take it, but no one entity could ever possess a thing so powerful as the Engine. We fought him, and time ruptured. The Engine split itself in two in order to protect itself. The same infernal machine, but existing inside two separate times.
“But time can’t do that,” said Marlow. “It’s impossible.”
Impossible to comprehend, perhaps. But not impossible. Impossible is a human word, it means nothing to us, it means nothing to the Engine. Time and space are what we make of them. The universes are ours to mold.
Meridiana grabbed hold of something and wrenched hard, a pistol crack echoing across the water as a rib snapped free.
“Universes?” Pan said. She felt as if she was sinking into a dark lake, like the truth was drowning her.
Did you think there was only one? Meridiana laughed again, all of them laughed. Child, you should know better. The first of us believed we were the only living souls. The first of you believed that their tiny pocket of civilization was all there was. How long ago was it that we were certain this planet was the center of everything, and that the sun and the stars revolved around us? Not long, child, not long. There are many universes, many planes of reality, each identical but each unique, and each connected to its brothers. Where else would the Engine have thought of the idea of splitting itself in two? The universe has duplicated itself many times, again and again, in order that it might repair itself if something should happen.
“Something like what?” said Pan.
Something like him. Every universe has its dark side. Every universe spawns something bad. It is the very nature of existence that sooner or later the rot sets in. The things that should not be. The things that seek to eat worlds, and devour souls. The very worst of them. You will always find them, child.
“I don’t understand,” said Pan, the understatement of the year. “All of it, all of this, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah,” said Herc from behind her.
Pan glanced at him and he, too, might have been the living dead. Beside him stood Charlie, rubbing his eyes as if he’d just woken up; then Claire, the girl wearing a thousand-yard stare that looked as if it would never leave her.
“None of it makes sense,” Herc continued, “and none of it needs to. All we need to know is how we kill him. How do we kill that freaking—”
He cannot be killed, said Meridiana, cutting him off. He is too old, and too powerful. Now he has full control of the Engine—the whole Engine, reunited—and he will use it. The Engine was only ever built for one purpose.
“To open the gates to hell,” said Marlow.
There was a sound like applause as all of the faces shook from side to side.
It is true that the Engine can open a path through the void. It can connect all of
“The very worst of who?” said Pan.
“The devil, right?” Marlow added, taking another shot of his inhaler.
Just another meaningless human word, Meridiana replied. These evils are worse than any name you could conjure for them. They are furies that devour worlds. They are strangers who make a mockery of man’s body and mind. They are gods, old and terrible. The Engine is the door that keeps them quiet, that keeps them still.
“And what happens when he opens it?” Pan asked.
It ends.
Those two words hit her like a double tap to the chest from a .45, the loudest sound in the world.
“But you’re about to tell us how we can stop it,” said Herc. “Because Mammon wouldn’t have sent us here if you didn’t have something.”
We have this, Meridiana said, gesturing with the blade at the landscape of life-turned-machine. In our hundred thousand years alone we built this.
“Wait, how can it have been so long?” said Charlie. “I thought it was only a hundred years?”
We hid from time. We hid, and we built.
Pan remembered the way Truck and Jaime had frozen on the other side of the mirror, as if time had no hold here.
Our Engine is not perfect, we have only just begun. But it works.
“We can use it to make a contract?” said Marlow.
Only some. And it is not stable. I cannot guarantee that your contract will hold up. It can give you powers, though. This Engine is testament to that. We use it to clone ourselves, to keep building.
“Why don’t the demons come for you?” Pan asked. And again, the heads laughed together.
The demons of which you speak, they are human souls twisted beyond recognition. Our father was the architect of this machine, we are its children. Those creatures serve us.