Hellbound by A. A. Attanasio

Author:A. A. Attanasio [Attanasio, A. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novela, Fantástico
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 2001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

For her house leads down to death and her path to the spirits of the dead.

—PROVERBS 2:18

Dren fled across the night under the whispering stars. The pure geometry of buildings captured the horizon in a labyrinth, and the city lights were threads in his hands, leading him around corners, down alleys, over courtyards, ever deeper into his own bewilderment.

“S-s-s-t! Traitor! You cannot hide from us-s!”

No? Dren flew through a subway hole, knotting forgetfulness behind him. He was a demon of deception. He would lose Succoth and Nergal in a fog of unforeseen complications. Yet the faster he wove his demonic illusions, the closer his pursuers drew. In Nadja’s warehouse, Succoth had burned away Dren’s hell-shape, making it harder for Dren to obscure himself.

And worse: Nergal had a strong grip on Dren’s shadow, and no matter what obfuscations the Liar cast behind him, the Flayer would not let go.

The A train slashed by, and he dived on board. The wheels screamed, and the lights flimmered and blinked out. Nergal had grabbed the train by its undercarriage and dragged it to a stop between stations. In the dark, most passengers waited patiently. Only those with the sight noticed the green breath of Succoth as he stalked the cars, hunting the fugitive from hell, and they shivered in a chill of defeat—doom sending its black vines along their veins.

Dren shot straight upward, penetrating steel and rock until once again the constellations blinked above him like ciphers and codes. Desperation closed on him, and he rushed blindly into the city, losing himself in his own scattered deceptions. The endless streetlights, each in its web of glare, watched him with eyes of the spider god. And he lost his orientation, dodging wildly, shadows and neon riffing past in a blur.

And when he stopped to shake off his panic, panic jolted him brainless: He had rushed back to the exact crucible of misery out of which he had shot hours earlier—the satanist’s warehouse! The blood circle had washed away. In its place, at its center where Thartoc the Cruel had once squatted black as a meteorite, a corpse lay on a gray plastic tarp.

Dren recognized Billy Max from his time jaunt with Thartoc—though the Liar was not sure how he recognized the big-shouldered youth, because the body had been scalped, the cranium visible like a pink melon, the eyes bloody gouge-holes, the cheeks cut away to reveal the skull grin. Blood shellacked his mutilated nakedness and the bulky chair that had held his agony.

Amy Darien slumped in a recliner, pale, her complexion buried in a pearlescent sheen of shock. The air around her pulsed with color, the paisley of her screams stenciled on the silence. Her glazed eyes saw him, and her cracked and salty lips parted, to curse or warn, the demon could not tell.

“S-s-S-t!”

Dren swung full about, seeking an exit. But every direction was littered with the deceptions he had strewn around him during his initial escape from this monstrous stage. And now there was no escape that was not impeded by his own obscurings.

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