“ For the grave cannot praise you, death cannot sing your praise; those who go down to the pit cannot hope for your faithfulness.”
The warm winds of Hell comforted him more than they should. The acrid odor of sulfur threatened to overwhelm his senses as he breathed in deeply, savoring the smell. It felt good to be back, even though by rights he knew he should hate this place because of what it represented; human suffering, pain, torture, torment.
Sam couldn’t remember how he got here which in itself was suspicious. He couldn’t just appear here at will — he’d have to carry out preparations and he certainly couldn’t remember doing any of those things. His gut told him that something wasn’t right — and Hikari had always told him to trust his intuition. If you smelled a rat, then it probably was a rat. Satan, The Morning Star — was bound to be involved somehow. Whenever something odd happened, it was usually due to the machinations of his father.
Sam smiled sourly. He’d find out soon enough. Like an overly keen schoolboy, his father was usually all too keen to reveal his hand and show off his cleverness to his son. He remained where he was, perfectly still on the black rock of Hell, ignoring the periodic blasts of fire that spurted from nearby crevices, content to wait.
Some time elapsed. How much, he didn’t know, but enough to make him restless and irritable with enforced inaction. He was about to concede defeat, reluctantly forced to admit that his father might have won the waiting game this time, when he heard it — a high pitched scream that rapidly descended into pitiful sobs. Sam cocked his ear and reached out with his senses, concentrating hard to pinpoint the source. It came again and this time he got a bead on it.
It was a woman’s voice. A woman in dreadful pain. It was a sound that could only be produced by torture. Something about the cry seemed familiar to him at an almost instinctive level, and a part of him knew the sound or at least the person who was making it — almost as if this whole scenario had played out before.
Sam burst into motion, his hands already flexing with the need to grasp his sword hilts. Almost immediately, he found an opening in the bleak landscape and darted inside. He knew that this was suspiciously convenient but he didn’t care. Urgency filled him and he wasn’t sure why, his actions controlled by a primal need to aid or end the suffering of the woman.
He found himself in a cave, almost pitch black save for a few flickering flames embedded within wall sconces. An emaciated figure in tattered rags crouched in the middle of the rocky floor, chained by ankle and wrist. Her head was down, tucked into her legs, and her body shook with sobs, now muffled.
A need for caution and self-preservation competed with a burning desire to rush over to the woman. His compromise slowed his pace so that he only trotted towards her rather than ran. Standing over her, he could see that her back was a mass of bloody wounds. An unpleasant stench of corruption wafted from her body, and Sam’s eyes widened in horror at the live maggots feeding on the living flesh.
He was about to reach down and gently lift the woman up when she raised her head of her own accord.
The upturned face was streaked with lines of blackened tears, the deep slashes on her face leaking a sickly combination of pus and blood. The long dark hair was matted and woven through with dead snakes. Despite all this, and the long, long moments since they had last seen each other, Sam recognized her immediately and he staggered back in shock.
His mother opened her mouth, her eyes beseeching. “Help me, Sam. Free me from this place. Please Sam. Help me!” She would clearly have said more but lost the power of coherent speech as another wave of pain washed over her. She started screaming again…
Suddenly, he was no longer in Hell.
He was sitting cross-legged on black soot, surrounded by blackened stumps of what had once been a pine forest. The view suggested he was high up in the mountains. And then he remembered.
He’d been dreaming, which was becoming more commonplace than he was prepared to admit. He tried not to allow himself to dream anymore. Dreams for him were dangerous and disturbing, giving his father access to his mind. That was the whole point of meditation — to stop himself falling asleep and thereby dream. He wished he could just sleep without the nightmares, but that was impossible without his protective pentacle.
Lately, whenever he let down his guard or was just plain exhausted, the dreams would come. They were — without exception — about only one thing. Or one person. His mother. And they were getting worse.
Doubts filled him. He knew he was being manipulated but that was beside the point. If there was any chance his mother was indeed suffering like his dreams suggested, he would really have to do something about it.
The statuette waited patiently in his backpack. His thoughts never strayed far from it. It was time, he realized. Some instinct told him that the Hellhounds would be birthing soon and with their birth, the means to his mother’s salvation.
In the decades the church had stood there, it had never looked so decrepit and run down. Sam paused just outside the grounds and stared sadly at it for a while, letting the enormity of it fill him. The once white-washed walls were now an ashen grey color. The crosses above the door and the steeple had fallen or been torn from the building to lie scattered and broken amongst the dirty weeds.
The landscape was even worse. Sam knew he was in Colorado and had long read about the beautiful landscape. He’d hoped it might have been spared the worst that the Tribulation could offer but he had been disappointed. It had suffered like every other place he had been to. Worse, in some cases.
The mountain range towering behind the church would once have had snow at this time of year. Beneath the snow line, fir, spruce and pine trees used to dominate the slopes, their verdant green competing for attention with the dazzling white of the snow. Now all Sam could see was a universal grey. The skeletal remains of the trees were shrouded with ash. It was a depressing vista.
That was why seeing the church, even in its current miserable state, gave Sam a vague sense of hope. It was his path to Hell and with it, a way to rescue those trapped there. Sam lowered his head, closed his eyes and rubbed both hands through his black hair, dislodging the hood of his sweatshirt. His fingers brushed the horns hidden within the unruly mass, but he no longer flinched. They were a part of him — a part that he resented, but was gradually beginning to accept.
He opened his eyes and stood upright. It was time to focus. He had things to do and couldn’t spare the time to dwell on the past. Focusing on the present, he contemplated the church in front of him.
The church grounds had no outer fence. It was hard to tell through the layer of ash and weeds but it either had never had one, or its remains were now buried beneath this foul coating. Sam didn’t really care about the fence — it was more a matter of where the hallowed ground started. Hallowed ground could and still did burn him like phosphorus. Sam had thought that because he was able to wear his mother’s cross — the one he had once given Aimi — that perhaps his sensitivity to holy objects and ground was a thing of the past. It wasn’t. He’d tested this hypothesis in the months since his battle with the Anti-Christ. Sadly, his reaction to other crosses, bibles, holy water and hallowed ground was as powerful and as painful as ever.
It probably wasn’t going to be an issue in this case, however. He strongly suspected that the church had been desecrated. The fact that the crosses adorning the building appeared to have been torn down was a pretty strong indication. Desecration meant that the grounds couldn’t harm him, though he wasn’t going to take any unnecessary risks. Even though it couldn’t kill him, it hurt like nothing else and it wasn’t something he was in a hurry to feel again.
There was a path, half buried, that circled the church. Sam suspected that this path marked the boundary of the church grounds. He took two steps closer and extended one of his legs over the path, allowing the tip of his hiking boot to touch the ground. Nothing. Experimentally, he touched his whole foot down. Still nothing. Confident now, he jumped over the path. A part of him expected that now he would feel the searing pain — a little joke played by his father — and he gritted his teeth as he landed. He crouched, waiting for it. When the pain didn’t come, he let out a little sigh of relief and straightened.
In front of him, the church doors were still intact. Ignoring the flurry of ash it caused, Sam forced his way up the stairs, pushed aside a broken pew and some unhealthy looking weeds, and cautiously pushed the double doors. They opened grudgingly, emitting a grating sound that set Sam’s teeth on edge. If there were any demons around, he had just alerted them. Still, the small town he was in was deserted, and experience had taught him that no humans usually meant no demons.
He forced the door open fully. Inside, the pews were scattered, twisted and broken. As he suspected from the grounds, the place had been desecrated. Crosses were either hung upside down or missing altogether. Blood was smeared on the walls and the altar looked like it had been used for some form of sacrifice. Standard demon practice.
Sam ignored most of it. He’d seen it before and while disturbing, he’d become quite inured to it. After a quick scan around, it was time to get to work. Clearing an area roughly in the center of the nave, he produced some chalk from a pocket and quickly sketched the outline of a pentagram. Working from the inside, he was conscious of the fact that if this didn’t work, he was potentially trapping himself in. A pentagram wouldn’t, but a pentacle would. All it took was for him to connect the points of the pentagram with a circle.
Before he could complete the circle, he fumbled the chalk and dropped it, watching helplessly as it rolled away out of reach. He didn’t dare stand to retrieve it for fear of disturbing his pentagram. He clucked in irritation, wishing that the chalk would somehow just return to his hand.
Something happened. He saw it out of the corner of his eye. At first he thought he was seeing things and then he realized that yes, the chalk had just moved by itself. Nothing had touched it. There was no wind inside the church to stir it. The chalk had moved of its own accord, exactly at the same time he had wished it was in his hand. He decided to experiment. What did he have to lose? There wasn’t exactly anyone around to laugh at him when he failed.
He closed his eyes and concentrated, reaching out. In his mind’s eye, he could see the chalk. He concentrated harder and began to get a sense of the feel of it — could actually feel it like it was physically in his hand. He willed it to come to him, to move, to return to his hand. Gritting his teeth with the effort, he felt the chalk move in his mind and knew that he was succeeding. A light touch on his fingertips confirmed it. He opened his eyes and looked down. The chalk was where he’d known it would be, right next to his fingers. Sam smiled in satisfaction. That was some party trick. There were certainly benefits to being a half-demon — especially a demon Prince. He’d remember this one. It could come in handy some day.
He took a deep breath and used the chalk to draw a circle around his pentagram, instantly transforming it into a pentacle and imbuing the symbol with the power to block mental and demonic physical attacks. In his case, it also served as his own trap. When he was growing up in Jacob’s Ladder, Sam had often slept safe within the chalky outlines of a pentacle. It had been worth it, to finally sleep without dreams, free of his father’s constant mental bombardment.
Of course, his master, Hikari or Aimi had been around then to free him by simply breaking the outline. But now… well, now there was no one. Potentially, he could break free but it would probably take every ounce of strength he possessed, leaving him weak and vulnerable for days if not weeks. And even then, it wasn’t a given.
“This better work,” he said aloud. He’d prepared and thought it through carefully and was confident that he had a good chance, but of course, he’d never done this before either. It wasn’t something that you could practice. He’d traveled the other way before — from Hell to Earth — albeit with help from Joshua. He’d even traveled to Earth to Hell before but that was through a portal created by the Lemure. He’d never actually done this all by himself before.
”Draw the pentacle, visualize the place and will yourself there,” he muttered.
Sam still had some questions. Were there certain designated emergent points in Hell, much like the churches were on Earth? Could he just visualize any place in Hell and will himself there? In all fairness, during his last visit, Sam hadn’t seen much of Hell, intent as he was on hiding or escaping, so his options were fairly limited. Besides, much of Hell looked alike. How did you tell one part of it from another?
Sam sighed and decided to play it safe. He would visualize, or at least try to visualize, the place where he’d emerged last time. Surely that would work? Surely.
He felt a niggling doubt but decided to ignore it. He had to do it. For his mother’s sake. For Grace. In any case, he was committed now, trapped inside the pentacle. As a last exercise in procrastination, he checked that his backpack was secure, that his Katana was strapped to the outside of it and his Wakizashi was securely tucked into the belt at his waist. They were exactly in the same places they had been fifteen minutes earlier. With a shrug, he sat down, crossed his legs and closed his eyes.
For a few minutes, nothing happened. He found it hard to concentrate, his mind slipping away onto other, more pleasant memories. The pentacle blocked all the psychic energy that the demon-infested Earth was now suffused with. It was a pleasant change from the usual constant mental barrage. He’d missed this feeling. Of course, the remembered feeling gave way to other memories: memories of Aimi; of shared pleasures, of caresses and kisses, of her smile and the way her long hair seemed to dance in the breeze. Grudgingly, he tore his mind away from thoughts that served to torture him. What was the point in remembering something that could never be again? Aimi was in Heaven and always would be. A place where he could never go.
The thought made him angrier than he anticipated, wiping out the happy, mellow memories. Without warning, his mind was channeled to a darker place, a place filled with flames and terror, a place he couldn’t deny felt more like home than any other he had known. Hell.
He locked on to the thought, squeezing his eyes tighter in concentration. Something was happening. A movement, a translocation. All at once, he felt different. Stronger. More powerful. He took a deep breath and hot gaseous sulfur filled his lungs. Smiling tightly he opened his eyes, knowing full well what to expect.
Sure enough, he was once again in Hell. But it wasn’t in a place he recognized. Suddenly concerned, Sam stood quickly. The flames of the pentacle were dying already, its power exhausted. He stepped over the outline without restriction and gazed around him. His mouth dropped in awe.
He was standing atop a rocky finger. Hundreds of feet below him was a sea of raging fire. It surrounded the rocky outcrop he was on completely and went on for as far as the eye could see. Hot winds buffeted him, blowing the hood from his head as if to tell him that the need to conceal his heritage was unnecessary here.
He’d done it — he’d transported himself to Hell — just not to the right part. Something had gone wrong. Instead of arriving in a place he vaguely recognized, he was now trapped and isolated with no way of escape.
What the Hell was he meant to do now?