A New Face in Hell

A Faustian bargain goes inevitably sour

A short piece inspired by

Nico Harlakenden

and her project for STACKTEMBER ‘25, based on the prompt/theme The Bargain.

CW: As per the remit of this project, the piece is frankly VILE and DISGUSTING, so you have been warned…

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Detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights

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My Dear Soul,

So I’ve arrived in this place, and my first impression, scummed from head to foot as I am by a coating of demonic anus-goo, and cleaning the blood-streaked mucus from my eyes and nostrils, is that it could be a lot worse. As Australian rockers AC/DC will truthfully proclaim some five centuries hence, Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be.

Seems that the mechanism for entering this place is to be swallowed whole by Birdlord Caïm – he of the most vile reputation of all the demons in The Lesser Key of Solomon, second only to King Paimon for debauched and unspeakable appetites – and subsequently shat out as a human turd, while at the same time (hellish wrinkle ahoy) one is shitting out live ravens through one’s own anus. A full flock of sharp-beaked torment, taking wing from my sphincter, pecking on my testicles as they struggle to be free.

A fetid journey, chock-full of beaky discomfort – but, again, one might easily imagine worse. At least if one’s imagination is of the infernal cast and given to imagining torments. And there are plenty of folk that way inclined. Some become inquisitors, others prominent politicians, still others writers, while by far the majority of such spiteful souls are simply content to watch from the sidelines and take great gladness in the suffering of Others. These are the ones who are reborn here as imps and demons, simultaneously suffering from aching bleeding hemorrhoids of the soul and poking their fiery sticks into the sores of those lesser than them. Satan is nothing if not an organizer of hierarchies.

So here’s me, John Faust Esq, passing Caïm’s colonic passage, pushing headfirst through his sphincter and into a kind of translucent jellysac of streaky slime. Slipping out like a newborn, basted in arseooze. Finally I’ve arrived. I pick a dingleberry of burning diarrhea, hot and spicy as brimstone, from where it was trapped inside my left nostril. And survey the scene.

Satan is also nothing if not an imaginer of the bizarre, though he has a suspicious constancy about torments to be enacted upon the rectum which gives one pause for thought. Let’s take a quick look around, shall we?

Here’s a cracked egg with a witch inside. She’s speaking of some burning things trapped within her vulva, which she swears are her vile bastard children, conceived of by a goat-frog with a barbed forked schlong, whose very touch was the stinging of poison ivy and nettles.

It came to her one Walpurgisnacht as she was giving head to a horse-spirit (most likely Lord Orobas, the fifty-fifth spirit, like unto a Great and Mighty Prince, though one possessed of a phallus so warty and diseased that no-one of sound mind will approach it). As the abased witch was fellating this demonic rod, speckled with pus and scabs, the Goat-frog creature slipped in behind her and inserted each prong of his own bifurcated member into a separate orifice of hers.

She knows she will never be delivered of these demonic spawn which crowd her womb and her colonic passage, things of no known species or denomination, deformed half-creatures neither properly of hell nor of earth. But she loves them dearly and urges them to wander. Her own name is Abject; her unborn children are named Squaggoth, Lyyssak and Bitxumina.

Now I’m here on the floor of what may be the outer circle of the infernal district, I must admit that it’s not too bad. Anticipation was worse than the fact itself. Still, it’s all still very new. Its novelty balances its dread as delicately as a toad-beast crouched on the crankhandle of a hurdygurdy, which is something I see not twenty paces off.

Eternity stretching on into chasms of unending epochs is time enough for it to become stale, I imagine. Expulsion as a neonatal turd through a demon’s blistered anus will lose its luster of newness after the millionth time or so.

Yet I wonder what it was all really for, this bargain I made. When I had the shade of Helen of Troy in my arms, and found her to be the spitting image of Moll the Alewife, slovenly slattern of the Bellyrip Tavern, was it all really worth the price of my soul? Is that all there is to life?

I look again. Mephistophiles is here, my tempter come to share an everlasting message: ‘Told you so, Faustie-baby. Didn’t listen. Told you so...’

Nonstop. Nonstop he chants it.

‘Peace, varlet!’ I exclaim. Corn, the last refuge of the lost.

‘You’ve had your way, time to be gracious in victory just as I am gracious in defeat,’ say I, John Faust Esq, great mage and necromancer, conjuror of wonders. Proud words indeed for a man who was just ejected from a pustulent demon’s anus.

The moustachioed mini-demon or imp shrinks from my commanding voice for only a moment. Then he remembers where he is, on his own home turf, and he stands up again confidently.

‘Told you so. Didn’t listen. Told you so. Told you so. Didn’t list—’

Nonstop.

This taunting will go on forever. And now I see it – this is hell, nor am I out of it.

And here I find myself, a new face in hell, half-enjoying the miseries of its newness, but expecting it to become merely grim and routine just as everything in my earthly life finally became.

So, dear soul of mine, we are to part you and I. I’ll try to send word of my progress in this terrible place some time within the next millennium or so. Not that you need to care any more, but still...

Farewell immortal soul of mine,

With grateful thanks for your former service in our brief time together,

Your late possessor and colleague,

Doktor Johannes Faust Esq, DD

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===== ( [ A NEW FACE IN HELL / ENDS ] ) =====

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