Infernal Solicitations

“An Angel Leading a Soul into Hell” by A Follower of Hieronymus Bosch

Life in the underworld isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Allow me now to share with you this revealing tale of one depressed denizen and his harrowing experiences in the pit of eternal suffering.  Originally written on the 12th May 2016.

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“Infernal Solicitations“

He had always hated Bilefield, what with its stupid citizens and copious amounts of flesh statues on every corner. It made him sick, which was appropriate given that the constant vomiting of bile from its inhabitants was precisely how it came to acquire such a striking name in the first place. Most locals assumed it was the smell from the flesh mines to the east that irked their insides so, though some insisted it was simply the Overlord’s wish. Whatever the case, it was a foul place, one in which the residents perpetually felt like killing each other. More so than they were expected to, at any rate.

Drekavac Merihem was a socially maladjusted Poliknish drinker with buff knees and very handsome exo-spines. He’d lived in Bilefield since his sack burst and he’d crawled out of the birth divots in larva form. His old friends had once seen him as a strong, sometimes squealing, suicidal nutcase, the kind that really goes places around those lawless haunts. Once, he had even revived a dying, paraplegic wasp queen with gout after she’d had a heart attack whilst teaching aquatic yoga to troubled larvae in the hot mucus springs. That’s the sort of demon he had been.

Nowadays however, he was an alcoholic shut-in. His friends were long gone, he’d dumped their ruptured bodies down a shaft at the nearby flesh mine. They nagged way too much anyway. He’d spent his most recent years throwing back the glowing radioactive liquid and spending his last coal coins on deformed prostitutes, the kind that smelled and dressed like unwashed toilet lids.

Drekavac got up off his bed of screaming bones, stretched, chose a set of arms for the day and shuffled over to the pentagram-shaped window overlooking the square. He gazed down with malice at the other spawn, mindlessly going about their day, maiming, devouring and generally causing a scene. “Look at this hole,” he muttered to himself with disdain. “The worst district in all of Dis”. He glared at the soul destroying surroundings. It was lucky he had no soul of his own, the ones he’d collected in jars on the outskirts usually burst within a matter of hours, though they did smell nice for the brief time he had them. The sight of the busting square below made him want to pee. Not out of the appendage he usually urinated out of, no, but rather the curved tumour growing out of his right eye. He only ever peed out of it when he was bitterly angry or depressed.

Thunder rumbled overhead once more. Drekavac wondered if the large, fapping centaur on top of Mount Cyst was abusing himself again. Sure sounded like it.

The demon poured himself a mug of molten iron and added a liberal splashing of Poliknish, favoured tipple of the damned. It sizzled as it tore a hole through his throat and blistered his gullet. Drekavac wheezed and looked back out the window. “What a life”.

Then he saw something in the distance, or rather someone. It sort of looked like a dead whale, one that had already exploded and hadn’t done a very good job of stitching itself back up yet, pieces of gelatinous fat were falling off as it drew nearer. Eventually the figure got so close that its awkward gait was unmistakable. That shambling, stumbling disaster of tissue was the festering figure of Philomena Catastrophe. Philomena was a worthless whore with sagging, pierced knees and an atrocious set of bleached blonde spines held together in a tight bun. She was disgusting, she was diseased, she was renowned in Bilefield for her catastrophic existence of putrefying horror. She also happened to be the deformed prostitute that Drekavac currently owed the most coal to.

The demon gulped back the rest of his drink, tore some skin off the wall and sewed it over the gaping wound in his throat. He was not prepared for a visit from Philomena.

As Drekavac stepped outside and Philomena came scuttling closer, he could see the trademark belligerent glint in her one good eye. It made the left side of his head collapse. “I am here because I want my damn coal!” the broken wreck of femininity bellowed in a fat tone that curled both paving slabs and roofing tiles. With a grunt, she slammed a podgy fist against Drekavac’s spiny chest equal to the force of a shotgun blast. “I frigging hate you, Drekavac Merihem. You gave me bum sex for nine hours last Friday and didn’t pay a damn thing. Cough up the coal or I’ll tear your head off and squirt my rancid teets down your neck!” Most clients would pay a small bag’s worth for an experience like that, but Drekavac wasn’t a normal client. His personal tastes never involved Philomena’s teets, they reminded him far too much of his former career as a nipple remover on the dead hooker barges.

Drekavac looked back, his wall of depression collapsing beneath the wrecking ball of nervousness that Bilefield’s worst prostitute had brought to his door. He started fingering a marginally seductive earwax candle he’d picked up off the table where he kept his keys and hatchets. “Philomena,” he eventually replied, “die in a ditch”.

As the town clock struck thirteen and the roosting bundles of carrion took to the red skies, the two demons looked at each other with upset feelings, like two leaking, little lobsters abusing each other at a very gimpy orgy, one which had thumping organ music playing in the background and two lazy uncles dancing to the beat in crops tops and stilettos.

In the stewing silence that ensued, Drekavac regarded Philomena’s pierced knees and blonde spines for a moment. They sure made him sick. Spurts of vomit erupted from his shoulder pipes and coated them both in steaming foulness. With a snort and a shake of his head, the depressed demon eventually held out a claw in truce. “Let’s not fight,” he whispered about as gently as a hacksaw to the head. “Come into my house and we shall soon sort this mess out”.

“Hmph,” sulked Philomena, passing gas in abundance at the helplessness she felt when trying to argue with him. Despite his attitude and tendency to never pay for their sordid and more-often-than-not crusty escapades time and time again, she had a soft spot for him. She thought it was probably in her post-gastric love box. Once, she’d even tried to cut it out with a rasp, but to no avail. There was just something about Drekavac that made parts of her melt like boiled lard.

“Please?” begged the demon with puppy dog eyes. That is to say, with a puppy dog’s freshly plucked eyes in his clawed hand, something that he very much liked to play with whenever nervous or bored.

Philomena looked ravenous, her bulbous body blushing like a teenage nymph after lifting a stranger’s kilt to discern that which hangs beneath. Try as she might, she couldn’t fight the urge to be with Drekavac one more time. His array of detachable appendages and unique secretions never failed to rock her underworld, and she was an afflicted whore very much in need of a good rocking.

With a menstrual belch that stripped all the pebbledash off Drekavac’s house, Philomena waddled inside for a nice drink of Poliknish and the prospect of yet another unpaid cardiovascular workout. Little did she know that it would be the last anyone would ever see of her. Well, except for the eye fungus that grew at the bottom of the flesh mine, anyway.

The following morning, as the haemorrhaging moon broke the horizon and scared away the feasting nightkin, Drekavac Merihem stood at his window overlooking the square once more. With a mug of molten iron laced with Poliknish in his hand, he counted up the tally in his head and scratched another line into the frame. “I hate this town,” he quietly wheezed as a piece of Philomena’s fat melted away in the steaming mug, like a creamy ice cube.