The Nebuchadnezzar magazine

E.K. Anderson

Genre: Fantasy/ Horror

TRIGGER MAN

I don’t know what came over me that night. 

All I remember was a great tiredness upon returning home — a weariness so profound, that I felt a throbbing in my bones. A withering. And my gut was on fire. My head, a tempest. 

Working as I did, I hadn’t slept in over two days. The oil refinery had lost a man to the rig, and was in need of another to fill his place. 

The week prior, I’d accepted the job and wage earnestly. Though enamored with the prospect of greater pay, I couldn’t shake the eerie miasma of misfortune. 

Under what circumstance had my predecessor been lost? Through accident, I supposed — knowing the rigs in Fargo were dangerous, and liable to fail. 

I never asked my superior the particulars of the circumstance and instead stifled my thoughts on my drive back home to Minot. 

I was excited because the day was March 1st —my wife’s birthday and I’d arranged to have a portrait of the two of us framed at the local convenience store. 

I drove up through our patch of pine, until I could see the porch light through the leaves. It flickered like a candle in our sullen wilderness. 

That home with such light. Such warmth.

I imagined my wife, her naked porcelain body lying in the fouton of our living room. I imagined then, as one would a reverie, a Goddess of which was deemed — that by which an individualist or a sculpture would deem an aphrodite.

I climbed the stairs of our cabin with the intent of seeing my wife. It was her birthday.

And it was in that fire of my rage that I pulled the trigger.

Red splattered on the upholstery. Brains too. Blood splattered upon the furnace, as an errant sacrifice.

The bodies I thought to burn, but I thought better of it. For now, the fresh air was a sanctuary.

The remedial smell of iron in the air was as ozone, fresh and watery.

 I could taste it in the back of my throat. 

I ran from our cabin deep in the woods. The circumstance from which I had abandoned was still fresh in my mind, the dullness in my bones increasing, a sinking of the heart, a faint charge of the mind.

My wife’s lover. His brazen form in the candlelight. Making a mockery of me, and the sanctity of marriage itself. A conniving fox to be trapped soon.

I ran until dawn, when the whipperwills first called and in my destitution I’d thought I’d heard my wife calling — I thought I’d seen her form nestled in the forestry and ferns – an Aphrodite beset with the wounds of Chiron, her lover.

I ran until I could not run any longer until I reached a pasture and a mill house. 

I trudged on over to the water, and saw at last my reflection. 

I saw red, only red caked upon my face. 

And then I fell. And fell down the ravine.

I tumbled for a time in the patch of black, down the abysmal plane which felt like a corridor.

I fell into Tartarus.

Tartarus, as few know it is a place after Golgotha, before the Ossuaries, and the Mad–where the mirthless reside. It is the final place before the Torment.
In the fourteenth Quadrant of the Prison Tartarus, lies a certain demon known as Abaddon. The half-demon, is known by many names, Delfonte, and Azgur meaning the First Pagan, and The Traitorous One. Few know him by the name of his birth–that is eons before when he trod the Good Earth as a man. He speaks that name to himself in ceaseless undertone, and he  has not yet forgotten it.
“Judas, Judas,” he says. His lips have bled; his throat is arid as the driest desert, but still he recites his name lest the Madness set in. He has seen it afflict his contemporaries for lesser crimes. It must be recited, that he might not forget it for eternity.
His wings have been torn asunder–the membranous plumage plucked one by one–as torture. The bones in them are broken. They have healed over many times, but once the flesh begins to regenerate and the scabs form he is subject to the same bereavement, a practice from which the Chinese call Lingchi–or death by a thousand cuts.

Every hour the Enslaver comes. He is followed by his henchman, a disfigured ghoul–a common sight here. The ghoul carries a freshly sharpened obsidian blade. After the fletching, his scabs form and were it not for his regenerative powers he’d have let the Madness set in at the shock of his maiming. Then a necklace is brought to him and cast about his neck, it is laced with silver talents. Thirty pieces to be exact.
The effect is devilishly comedic to the Jailer ghoul who brings it, for there is no monetary exchange in Tartarus  except for that of souls. Also to the demon, this is a reminder of his Greatest Error, the treason of a Great Man.
The necklace has become a burden, and like a dilapidated fool he bears it. Despite the shearing force upon his neck, and the crippling it gives him Judas does not move. Like the burden of his guilt, it remains.

As if the torment is not enough he whips himself with his own tail, between the intervals of cutting. The tail is a recent growth, an appropriation of the most recent attempt at Separation. Yet, his skin has not yet turned red.

Judas is not as most demons. His flesh is pallid and this is why:
Once subject to the flagging, broiling, and cutting the Soul and the body are wrenched apart. Sometimes this practice is swift for a lucky few ; but in the case of the majority the effect is most unpleasant as the separation of clay from molten iron. Like steel the mind is tempered, and once it has been subjected to this merciless stressor where the soul serves it no purpose, it fragments. The mind, however is kept reverently in tact during this process, so that each sensation of this bleakness is felt to the umpteenth degree.
Such pain one undergoes that the mind is lost. This subsequent process is to be expected: it befalls all of the Condemned. For some, .this lunacy is several centuries, others bear it for endless millennia. This, is what is referred to as the Maddening, and at this opportune time Marduk, being the ruler of this strange sector of Hel may harness one’s mind to his bidding.

Therefore the color red is what the Condemned become, as their mindless fury takes hold of their last inkling of humanity. Berserkers only see red, and so this blood becomes manifest in their flesh.

In a rare case, though, if a person’s Will is strong enough the Maddening does not ensue. This has only happened once, and the Epics say, He was divine.

Guilt, however, is as strong an emotion as Will–and to implore of initial said penance within the throes of this dimension is a rare thing indeed.

It is only because he says his name that the demon Judas retains his sanity. It is only because he remembers his Greatest Failure, with such remorse that he has staved off the Maddening.

The fact that he has his Soul intact makes him unfit for this Quadrant of Tartarus . Despite this solitary malaise, he is free to go if he so desires.  his cell is left open, and the key outside Tartarus has been offered him thrice. But his own mental shackles imprison him, and left at the thresholds of disarray, it is this binding that Marduk uses to subject him.

It was in my cell that I was told his story from some poor soul who’d endured his tenth flogging.

After the Jailor left, I tried to speak to the half-demon. His large body was shrouded in shadow, and the winged members bent at haphazard angles as the structures of a broken parasol.

-You were a man once, I told him.
But to my voice he did not concede.

I know your story. At this his eyes set on me.
I’d noted them, or rather his one colored eye which burned like lake fire. This was an effect of the Maddening as it was taking hold. The other eye, his right, was hazel.

-Everyone knows my story. It has been inscribed for times immemorial said he, and it was under this patronage that I left him.

I am too uncouth for the Courts of Greater Justice, and too preened for Hel. Tell me, slave, what is your purpose in speaking to me? Is it another test to further my torment before the Day?

-No, it is my curiosity at your enslavement. There is no entertainment here as you well know, and the only source of solace is the voice of another man.

He laughed then.

-I am no man, said he only the shadow of one–

-No–I corrected–you still are. A Once-man, but a man at heart nonetheless.

That was when the silence began, for the demon had little if anything to say. I saw the one hazel eye brighten, and the red one dim.

At this moment his hour was up, and the ghoul came with his blade and necklace. He carried a basket, the contents of which stank of a rank odor.
Your supper said the ghoul, with a watery gaffaw.

He cast its contents one by one, a plethora of rotten sardines meant for multitudes at the brute. He kept throwing the fish; the basket having no bottom. I wondered when he’d stop.

At this I noted Judas’ Maddened eye, how it grew brighter, as the heart of a flame. His voice sounded as a tempest.
No judas screamed. And I could not look on any further. I reckoned The cutting lasted well over an hour, and the ghoul had taken certain liberties of his own.

He cried out for several minutes, until his tongue and vocal cords were cut out.

After this, I spoke to him again.

-Have you forgotten your name?

Judas,  yelled I. Judas!

Then I saw his eyes through the shroud of darkness, both gleaming red.

His countenance had changed so that his gleaming flesh had blotched red in places.
His eyes sept blood.

-It is your name! I implored him to say it, a fool’s errand as he was incapable of repeating it.

I knew then, that another attempt at Separation was near, and should the ghoul return the end result would mean his ultimate demise at freedom.

In futility, I asked him then to stretch out his hand of his cell so that he may touch mine. The bars glow red, to discourage the futile notion of escape, I endured it and heard my flesh sizzle. I felt his iron grasp, and the chill of it. With cowardice, he receded at once with a trickle of light in his eyes. I fathom in that swift moment he’d felt my warmth, and something long locked away awoke within him.

That was when I saw him in glory, with wings outstretched. His skin was shining.

“I remember,” he said. “I remember!”

I rested on the floor of my cell. I felt the embers, and the incendiary coals. In the dungeon came the light of the Enslaver.

Judas turned, and his new lighted glory spread the light upon the Enslaver. The Enslaver stumbled, and fell back. 

“For glory!” Said Judas. 

To light shone upon the Enslaver, and his form turned.

And the Enslaver was no more. The key of the Enslaver rested in the ashes, and with a hastened demeanor Judas reached through the bars. 

“Free yourself,” said he.

“But what of you?” I asked. I cared as to his plight.

“Free the others,” Judas said. “I have an appointment with the Courts of Greater Justice.” I saw the spirit disembark from his aged and worn body.

I took the key and unbound myself from my shackles. 

I opened the prison door, and leapt out into the light.

Freedom, I thought. Freedom.

*