Read Online House Infernal by Edward Lee by Edward Lee - Free Book Online Page A

the Sea
of Cagliostro, but unfortunately she didn't foresee me being dismembered."
    Ruth caught that. "She?"
    The priest ignored the query. "It's not foolproof, not
even with the most powerful Celestial Magic. There are
pockets of Hex-Fluxes all over the Mephistopolis. It's like
an electromagnetic field in the Living World that interferes with radio waves. These Hex-Flexes interfere with
telepathic wavelengths. We have to take what we can get."
    "You still didn't tell me what happened to your arms
and legs!" she yelled.
    "Sorry, I ramble sometimes. I'd been staking out an
area on the mainland for several months-a place called
Pogrom Park, as well as some other places. I was preparing for your arrival. But as my lousy luck would have it, I
walked right into the middle of a Municipal Mutilation
Zone and a Scyther Detachment got me. Remember, here
everything is opposite. In the Living World, they have
street cleaners to clear dirt and garbage from the roads,
right? Well, here they have Mutilation Zones. Government
agencies clean people from the streets. They butcher anything that moves, and it's legal."
    Ruth stared at him.
    "Ordinarily they shovel the corpses and body parts
into wheeled hoppers when the exercise is over, then take
it all to a District Pulping Station, but they made an exception for me."
    "Why?" she asked, wide-eyed and in a very low voice.
    "Because they saw my Roman collar. They knew I was a priest, and seeing that I'm one of the Human Damnedor so they thought-they knew that my Spirit Body
couldn't be killed by mere dismemberment. So they threw
me into the Sea of Cagliostro to further my torments."

    The boat rocked. Ruth looked down in the blood ... and
could swear she saw things swimming in the red murk.
    "It's best not to look, Ruth," Alexander advised.
"There's stuff down there that you don't want to see.
Fifty-foot lampreys, Phleboto-Fish, marine Gigapedes ...
Just ... don't look."
    Ruth shuddered and shot her gaze away.
    "There's what I want you to look at instead." He mistakenly raised his stump as if to point off the port side.
"We're closer now. Put on the Abyss-Eye and look toward
the shore till you see the port."
    Ruth brought the hideous thing to her eye again and
looked.
    She stared in breathless silence as she beheld a strange
cityscape rimming the edge of the sea. Before it, there
were myriad docks full of boats in slips, and larger ships
moored there. In the background, things like condo buildings rose, but they looked ...
    'What is that place?"
    "It's called the Port of the Vulgaressa, the priciest sector
of the Rot-Port District. See all those condos? If you
thought there was a real estate boom in Florida, that's
nothing compared to this place. Rot-Port is the most expensive bloodfront property in all of Hell."
    Ruth zoomed the Eye. The high balconied condos
seemed ... fuzzy in some way. No clean edges or lines
like normal buildings.
    "The place looks really fucked-up," she articulated as best
she could. "Like the whole town is made of something ...
spongy."
    "The town is made of rot, Ruth," the priest clarified.
"That's why they call it Rot-Port. Every primary district
has something unique about it, to distinguish it from
the others. You know. Maryland's the Crab State, New Jersey's the Garden State. Same thing here. Rot-Port's
made of all manner of rot, every square inch of it. Mold,
fungus, putrefaction, slime, muck, etcetera. It's all cultured onto every beam, block, and plank in the District."

    Ruth slowly lowered the visual aid. "I'd rather drown
in this-this ... sea of fuckin' blood than go to that town!"
    Alexander gave a patient nod. "But, see, you can't
drown, Ruth. You can't die. You need to remember everything I tell you. Your soul will continue to live in Hell-it
can never die. And as for your Spirit Body, it can cease to
function but only if it's damaged to the point of total destruction. Then your soul moves on to something