6. Chapter Six

6

CHAPTER SIX

I n the tenebrous dark of that place, I let myself recover. For minutes, my mind felt apart from my body, still spinning above the vessel of my flesh with pleasure.

When it finally settled back into me, I found it difficult to move. My body ached with overuse, and as I pushed up, hand sliding in the wet mess pooling on the stone, my arm shook with the effort.

Sitting upright only made the exhaustion more obvious. Gravity urged me back down, and I had to fight the desire to sleep. I did not know how long the door would remain open, and so I hastily pushed myself up and began the walk over to it.

My feet, wet with fluids, slapped awkwardly along the stone. Wind blew through the tower, and I shivered in the cold breeze of it, mind still fogged with lush pleasure. In this sense, very few thoughts formed in my head—nothing coherent, nothing that said, ‘Go here' or ‘Do this'. I simply found myself pressing the palms of my hands against the jagged black stone, gliding my skin over the uneven texture beneath. It reminded me of the Cave of the Sibyl in some respect, namely the dank scent, thick with old, undisturbed earth and wet soil. My hands came away slightly damp, too, as something akin to water glistened over the walls.

The passage was barely wide enough for me to walk down front on. I would have to turn to the side and shimmy through it. If it weren't for the light at the end, which glowed a warm and inviting orange, I might have been scared—but I was beyond that feeling surely.

I turned my body and pushed down that toothed corridor. The instant my body was inside, the end I had entered from rumbled closed, and the resounding boom throbbed down my body and through the cramped space. My breathing went erratic instantly—not out of any conscious fear, but like a response from my body, which cowered at the mounting pressure building in my chest and lungs and the ever-present fear that I would somehow be crushed.

Do not be foolish , I thought, but that did nothing to relax me. In times like this, in the past, I would have prayed. My tongue went thick with that knowledge. I had no other way to cope, no practised method, and no knowledge of how to centre myself without the presence of God. And so I fell into old habits, with a new subject to laud.

Asmodeus , I thought. I prayed. I come to you. Protect me.

There was no answer. My heart sank, most likely because the demon had answered before. God never had, of course, but knowing Asmodeus could hear me, could reply, and for whatever reason chose not to—it made my heart hurt.

I kept moving, squeezing down that stone passage. The skin on my stomach and upper back gave way, sliced open by stone shaped at odd angles. I barely registered the pain, but warm blood ran in thin trickles down my body, my spine, my thigh; a terrible lubricant that did little to make the journey any slicker for me. All the while, I was coaxed towards the other end by that inviting warm light.

Come to me .

I heard Asmodeus, then, faintly. Like a cautious whisper carried by the wind, like it didn't quite want to say it, come to me , sounding more like a desire than an order for me to fulfil. I stopped in the cramped tunnel and closed my eyes, inhaling deeply that scent of petrichor and depth.

Soon , I told my prince. I will be there soon . In my mind's eye, I conjured that hierarchy the lesser demons had spoken to me about. I had passed the trials of the President of Hell, and so next was the Knight of this realm. I waited tensely for some kind of approval, some kind of acknowledgement, but nothing came. When I opened my eyes, I had to wonder if I had heard Asmodeus at all or just the whisper of my desperation echoing in my head.

I pressed on. For minutes, I pushed and scraped my naked body through the passage, and finally, when I reached the end and was roughly expelled out the other side, I breathed as deeply as I could and half collapsed onto the ground.

My fingers sank into warm, dry soil. I spent a minute deliberately not looking anywhere but my hands, at the way my fingers pressed and disappeared beneath the particles. The earth smelled fresh and upturned and green the way much of Italy did in the summer. I shivered and gained the strength to look up.

This part of Asmodeus' domain stretched to the horizon, an open plain dotted with dry brush tinged red as if stained by blood. I felt like I might run for hours and never reach the end of the field; in fact, I felt certain that would be what happened. The red sun and that impassable expanse of fields would drive me mad. Almost stubbornly, I stayed rooted to the ground, where my hands and bare feet could sink into the grassless soil, and I could be sure I was touching solid ground. Something about the way the grass swayed made me dizzy like it was an ocean stretching before me, not grass.

Like that, dog-like on all fours, I moved sideways, hoping to get a better lay of the land. When nothing more revealed itself to me, I gingerly stood. I had been hoping for a vantage point, as had existed in Malphas' territory, a ledge where I could see where I was meant to go. Instead, all I had was the strangely red grass and my human fear, an instinct telling me: do not touch.

I think it was out of instinct that I went down onto my knees as if in prayer. It was something I knew how to do and something that inspired in me a kind of certainty, the sense that I was doing something productive. I prayed for direction, a way to fulfil my purpose, which I held proudly in my heart.

Let me go to Asmodeus , my Prince of Lust , I begged, either to Asmodeus itself or some mighty power in Hell, or perhaps I was appealing to my own instincts to comprehend what I was supposed to do next. I needed a Knight of Hell, a rank I knew very little about.

When I opened my eyes, a path of pure black soil had emerged in the sea of grass. Inevitably, I thought of Moses as I stood and stepped into the bare soil, my feet gliding through upturned roots and loose dirt. I was careful not to touch the swaying edges of the grass, for I did not know what would become of me if I did.

My mind's eyes showed me all sorts of things: flesh that bubbled and bled off the bone. Death eternal, reliving the same agonising seconds over and over for however long I kept contact with the grass. A strange overtaking of my body, a force transforming it into a vessel, where the seeds of evil took root in my lungs and, bit by bit, destroyed the markers of my humanity, eating everything familiar away until I was a nameless demon myself.

Whether these thoughts were real or simply my fears, I did not test the theory. I knew already, based on Malphas' assertion that I had eaten from the realm and would be more ‘settled', that maintaining my humanity might have been a battle I could not win. Over time, I guessed, my mortal form would change. How could it not? I had no concept of time here, but undoubtedly, even a second in Hell would alter my body.

The thought unnerved me. I wanted to be as I remembered; I wanted to hold onto the old Alessandro as long as I could. In truth, I wanted to retain the identity I'd had most of my life. To be the priest corrupted by the demon—not a disgraced, ex-communicated layman turned demonic. What did that say about me? Perhaps I romanticised my old station. Or perhaps I wanted God to see me; I wanted to fear God as much as I wanted Him to know I was blaspheming against him.

I did not want to lose the thing that made my actions sacrilegious. I wanted this to be a sin.

I bit down on my tongue to ground my wandering mind. No matter the why—I knew what I had to do. With Asmodeus and all the demons I would have to pleasure to reach my new God spurring me on, I walked that dry path with my traitorous mind evoking Exodus; it echoed in my skull, again and again:

". . .and the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided."

This is how I came to the library.