Page 2 of Hell and Its Pleasures

He repeated that line and shook my own head for me. I went limp with the touch, whorish for anybody, and vaguely remembered to close my eyes as if in thoughtful prayer lest they roll back into my skull.

I was let go, and I drooped forward. I splayed my hands on the warm grass and tried to feel below, for the depths of a plane I had never seen but had been conditioned to believe in. Of course, it wasn’t heaven I prayed to. I prayed to it. To Asmodeus. I tried to feel him waiting for me in Hell.

Prince, why have you left me here? Give me the strength to crawl to you. I will drag my body through Hell for you to touch me again.

Bishop Fazio’s wheezing rattle of a voice cut over the prayer. I flinched at the sound and rocked back onto my haunches, standing with a crack and a groan and all my wasted time flaying the fleshof my heart.

The bishop looked between us. “Tell it to me, as you remember it. The both of you.”

I looked over to Oliviero, frightened. Howdidthe young man remember things? Had weeks softened the image of the demon, and me before it? Or had he ruminated on it, prayed on it, cultivated a truth more damning even than my reality?

He saw me looking and flushed. “Please,” he said. “It is your story to tell. I merely. . . found you at the right time.”

“God found me at the right time,” I said quickly, and the bishop let out a thoughtful humming noise. His arms moved as no doubt behind his back he continued fondling that rosary.

I did not say aloud what I was really thinking: of the new religion I had given myself to. I tried to inhabit the fearful, religious part of myself, trying to understand what that version of Alessandro would say. I summoned both false outrage and false fear.

Shaking my head with falsified revulsion, I muttered, “It looked. . .like a distended, larger human, though it had horns, a tail, and claws. Its skin was reddish. And its eyes,”—I saw them in my mind’s eye, the way it looked at me, and I felt fire burning in my groin—“Uh, it, uh. . .It seemed confined to the circle. When Oliviero so bravely disturbed it. . .”

“It was my duty,” Oliviero whispered, and he made the sign of the cross with a furtive prayer accompanying the flight of his fingers.

I glanced up at Bishop Fazio, whose gaze hadn’t moved from me.

“The circle,” the bishop wheezed. When our eyes met, he recoiled ever so slightly and turned his eyes back to the horizon; back to God’s holy light. “How do you suppose it got there?”

This felt like a question for me. Oliviero stilled by my side as if he had never considered that before now. I felt thedistance between us grow, and spiritually I was stranded on my own isle, moored and alone. My fingernails dug into the soft flesh of my palm, and I focused on the bite of them against my skin. Pain had an anchoring force to it. I let it pull me into its harbour, breathing through the sting.

“My holy bishop,” I said. I cast a look back at Oliviero, whose head had fallen deeper in his prayer, and I said, “I would like to speak with you alone.”

Why I did this, I couldn’t tell you. I had opened my mouth to say one thing—a bland lie about finding the circle like that, about wandering in during the dead of night by chance—and said instead something that frightened me.

The bishop turned around bodily now. His eyes drifted over me, over Oliviero, and then to the child servant, who had been so unmoving since delivering my holy brother that I’d forgotten he was there.

“Child.” Bishop Fazio summoned the boy forward with one hand. “Have young Oliviero show you the abbey’s chapel. Both of you shall pray for God to have mercy on all of us sinners.”

The boy and Oliviero dipped their heads and bodies lower and turned so hastily I thought them to be fleeing. What had I done? My stomach twisted—foolish as I was, I hadn’t thought I would be my own demise.

A lie, Alessandro. You were willing for all your brethren to hear you scream that night the demon took you. You knew this was coming. You knew you would be caught, and you still wanted it.

“Speak, Don.”

Unease shuddered out with my exhale. I shuffled forward and placed my hands over the sandstone wall so I might extract the warmth from the stone, and not because I wanted to hold on to something with dear life.

I took a few moments and the bishop let me. I closed myeyes and breathed deep, and in some mockery of every time I had prayed for God’s intervention in the years before now, my desperation was answered. From the soles of my feet, heat seeped up into my body. I could feel every inch of my flesh come alive, every vein popping with the warmth, and when it reached my head, I shuddered. I heard no voice, and saw no sign, but I felt it—I felt Asmodeus. I felt a calling, a claim on my soul and my body, and the urge to get onto my knees to dig my own grave, my own path to Hell, became almost unbearable.

I imagined burrowing into the earth. I imagined dirt in my lungs turning muddy with the wetness of my frantic breaths. I imagined entombing myself in my urge to reach Hell. If I could only get lower. If I could only?—

“Don Alessandro?”

I jerked back to this moment and shook my head. The motion did little to clear my body of the sensation. My cock twitched, a bodily reaction to a presence only I could feel. I pressed myself closer to the wall and I leaned into both the stone and the surety I had of some greater force on my side.

“I. . .am worried about the circle,” I told him. Rather, I opened my mouth, and let something speak through me. It was. . .not possession. It couldn’t be, by the church’s definition, and as much as I might have wished it, Asmodeus had well and truly been sent back to its domain. This was?—

Inspiration.

“What worries me greatly, Bishop, is the knowledge that something of that design could not appear miraculously. God would not allow it.”

The bishop sighed but did not interject. I continued, “The abbey must have been infiltrated. Someone must have. . .”

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