A short horror story inspired by and loosely based on the Hellraiser series by Clive Baker

A possible sequel to Beneath the Skin, by Adiabatik

Her writing, and some of her wonderful paintings inspired the best parts of this story.
For the worst parts I accept full culpability.

It is as though the fiends prevail'd
Against the seraphs they assail'd
And, fix'd on heavenly thrones, should dwell
The freed inheritors of hell...

from The Giaour, Lord Byron.

She awoke in darkness. There was an acrid taste in her mouth and something felt wrong with her body. As her eyes became accustomed to the stygian gloom, she was able to discern four elongated, pale things hanging above her, one of them slowly rotating.
Oh God! She gagged in nauseated horror; as she recognised them as severed human limbs, two slender legs and a thin pair of arms. Each limb had been clumsily skewered onto a sharp meat hook, suspended on a chain that disappeared into the blackness. Several other hooks dangled on other rusting chains, unoccupied - waiting for whatever grisly loads they were intended to bear. The points of the hooks were stained dark with the crusted blood of the things they had formerly born. She could not move, but was rooted to the spot where she lay- was it shock?

* * *
Her name had been Leela O'Riley but her friends had always called her Lee. She had been in her mid-twenties but looked younger. She had been fair skinned, fine boned, lithe limbed and slenderly built. Plenty of people had told her she looked beautiful, or cute, or fit, or a babe, or whatever, but she had never let it go to her head and had not thought herself vain. Off stage she had never been much of one for makeup, and she had usually left her long dark hair to its own unruly devices. She had been a dancer, but she had also been trying to break into the world of stage acting for a while. She had also had a relish for all things mysterious, arcane and outré, and recently she had found the nerve to go in for her first group of tattoos. The strange, profusely body-pierced tattoo artist, Astor, had set her at ease by his manner if not by his appearance. He had shown her four symbols, claiming that they came from a carving associated with the excavation of a burial site in Madagascar, two thousand years older than the pyramids of Egypt. The quartet of curious devices, and even their names, had fascinated Lee, almost holding her spellbound. They had looked right in their preallocated positions on the body- senth and ruar on the chest below the collarbones, kurtan and menon above the pelvis, flanking the navel. Their esoteric meaning, the tattooist had told her, was something to do with the inevitability of existence, destiny, passion and nature... 'because I can't not'.
Each tattoo took up not quite the area of one of her palms. Being situated neatly around the torso they would not be on constant show. This was a plus, for one thing, because they could join the list of things about which Lee's mother need not find out. (She would not have approved and what she was unaware of she could not bend her grown-up daughter's ear about.) Moreover, being hidden, they would not debar Lee from more traditional dancing or acting parts if her stage career progressed. They had seemed perfect. The thought of bearing them secretly had excited Lee, giving her a heady frisson. It had hurt when she was under the needle, true, but ultimately in an almost enjoyable way, giving her palpitations and an endorphin rush. She had appreciated why people like here best friend Anna grew quite addicted to getting tattooed and why some ended up with more ink covering them than natural skin. However, the idea of having any additional tattooing done had not appealed to Lee. It would have seemed somehow to detract from the - what? - purity..? force..? intensity..? the primeval majesty of the symbols. She had come away from King Ink on Aurora Street quite surprised by her audacity, and also buoyant with herself for going through with it, and enduring the pain. She had smiled to herself as if all of her movements contained a secret. She had felt somehow empowered, as if initiated into some exclusive mystery cult. She had not known the real meaning of the four characters, their real power, or where they would lead her.

* * *

What was this awful place? What light there was had a reddish tinge to it, and came through the metal grilled doors of a furnace. The walls enclosing her were of thick, rough, stones, greasy and defiled. Near the furnace she could see a heavy wooden table or worktop. On it were arrayed a range of metal implements including hooks, knives, spikes, claws, saws, cleavers, forks and axe blades. All were joined onto iron sections or sockets, the size and shape of large cups or the hand-guards of fencing swords. The sight of the utensils, like the tools of some barbarous surgeon - or butcher - filled Lee with an even deeper sense of trepidation. Some of the knives and the cleavers did indeed remind her of the butcher's shop her stepfather had kept when she was a child, but that was little comfort to her. From beyond the dark room she could hear abattoir noises. The air around her was heavy with a stale, odious smell, the perfume of death and sickness, excrement and fear. There was a slight roar from the furnace. She also became aware of another presence in the room, something that made a hollow, rasping sound.

Then she saw him, the tall man in the shadows, if one could call this wretched being a man. His upper parts were bare, his lower parts hidden under the folds of a long black kilt. His flesh was deathly pale but it seemed to consist entirely of hideous scar tissue - rough, fissured and distorted, as though he had been caught in a fire or immersed in acid. It stretched in a grotesque way over bone and sinew. His musculature was that of a strong young man, but his air was of ancientness and of anguish. His hairless head was a horror in itself, more so because his mutilated face may once have been handsome. But the ears and nose were missing, she saw, and only sickening holes with shrivelled edges left where they belonged. The eyes - oh God - and mouth appeared to have been stitched shut with straps of thin leather chord, at some time prior to the scarring. Distorted scar tissue had formed around and over some of the stitches, and now the wizened skin of his eyelids and lips was fused as if never to open again. He breathed only through the open wound that had been his nose, and the sound it made was loathsome.
She felt pity for him, but stronger were her feelings of revulsion and fear. She tried to crawl away from him but she could not move, she felt a raw spasm of pain, and only then did she look down at herself. Only then did she find the ability to scream. She was lying naked in the grime, and her arms and legs were gone. They had been severed entirely, the wounds calcified, as though cleaved off in one stroke by a white-hot blade. As if for good measure, the amputation wounds had been sealed with some black substance, hot tar that had cooled and hardened. For however-long she could think nothing coherently. Panic, stupefaction and dismay engulfed her mind.
She began to whimper; 'Oh my God! Oh shit! Oh fucking hell!' Her heart thumped in the tattooed torso, which was virtually all that remained of her (tattooed and torn), but for her ferment-filled head and the sorry stumps of her limbs. Only gradually did she recover enough of her faculties to put together the meaning of the pieces of meat hanging above her, and the metal blades by the furnace. She had been butchered alive. She looked back up at the monstrous figure, who she felt was watching her. She could not work out how he could see her for a while, then she looked properly at his broad torso. It had been branded with four all-too-familiar symbols, but that was far from the most disturbing feature. In the middle of his serrated rib cage, where his nipples should have been, were a ghastly pair of open eyes, red and reptilian, and they stared at her avidly.
She laughed, manically, oddly relieved, for this was impossible, and such monsters could only exist in a bad dream. She figured, and latched onto the hope, that now she had realised that she was asleep and dreaming she must soon wake up. That was just how it worked. She had never had a nightmare this bad, this vivid before, but a nightmare was all this was. 'You're not real!' she muttered. Soon she would come to in her bed, maybe in a sticky sweat, but otherwise full of relief, and complete and safe. Soon... But she did not wake. She did not wake, and she could not go home.

The figure made a low, hissing susseration. He raised a pair of muscular arms. In place of hands there were a murderously sharp looking pair of iron hooks. Old-fashioned and grim, they looked, like something from a pirate film. She recognised the metal attachments, and guessed that this was the being responsible for hacking off her arms and legs, the butcher. He came closer to her.
She shook her throbbing head, panting, gasping for breath. 'You're not real!' she insisted, with panic in her voice. 'You're not real,' she said again; but still he came. 'You're not fucking real!'
He did not speak to her but she heard his mocking voice inside her head, an inhuman hiss. 'Oh yes I am! Oh yes I am, oh yes I am! Welcome home my darling!'
She cried out in fear. 'No!' She managed to roll away from him, automatically pushing back with the stump that was all that remained of her left arm, but in no time he was upon her. The butcher put his arms around her and picked her up, at least facing away from him. Lee cringed; squeezing shut her watering eyes, hoping against hope that she may yet awaken. He crushed her to him like a doll, in his brawny arms, and one of the hooks scratched her side.

* * *

Anna called Lee's place on the phone and there was no reply. There was no answer from her mobile, either, which was odd. She tried again the next evening, after getting back from the office-come-video warehouse where she worked as an independent film distributor. She had had a nagging feeling that something was wrong all day, and had hardly been able to concentrate at her lunch-meeting with a small time film director. Lee had been playing on her mind.
Still there was no answer. She felt a bit concerned but it was not impossible Lee had taken herself off somewhere on the spur of the moment. Later that day Lee's mother, Wendy, phoned Anna (whom Wendy had never much approved of- all those nasty tattoos, what does the silly girl think she looks like?) and asked if Leela was with her. Anna was getting worried. She had just been thinking about phoning Lee's mother to ask the same question. Anna said she would call around Lee's other friends and colleagues to see if they had any idea where she might be. Maybe she was stopping somewhere rehearsing, maybe she had a secret new boyfriend... Wendy wanted to call the police at once, but Anna suggested waiting until she had gone to have a look at Lee's flat first. Maybe it was something simple, maybe she had knocked the phone on the floor and accidentally switched it onto silent ringing- if that was not an oxymoron- or maybe she was poorly and bed-bound.
* * *

The butcher propped Lee's truncated body against the stone wall, which was slimy against her bare back. It crawled with beetles and millipedes, and she felt something fall into, then from her hair, find its many feet and then creep over her shoulder. She tried to remain calm, and to preserve the melancholy sense of composure and resignation with which she had emerged from her fits of panic, denial and despair. She watched the Butcher who had his back to her, and who was changing one of his hooks for another metal implement. He turned to face her, and she saw the flame of a sort of blowtorch. The light reflected in the glossy eyes in his chest. Those ghastly eyes, they were similar to the eyes of the unreal monster that had emerged from the passageway to the netherworld, which had opened in her room. That gateway between realms had opened like an eye as soon as she had put on the necklace, a beautiful gift from the tattooist Astor, which he had insisted she take. There had been the giant, the putrid hulking being with the diabolical mouth and the gross, scorpion-like tail curling back over its enormous bulk. There had been another, too; man-shaped, tattooed with senth, ruar, kurtan and menon. Dimly she recalled it. It had not been the butcher, but it had been the same sort of thing as he was. Its skin had shared the same ghastly hue and texture. These two phantasms had claimed her, and had directed the chains that had dragged her here. The fearful memory of her abduction returned in a vivid flash, as this new monster, the butcher, as she had already christened him in her mind, came closer with the spitting torch.
Lee's eyes widened, filled with tears. 'No', she murmured, pleadingly, but still he came. He drew her to him, snaring her around her graceful neck with a hook - like a shepherd pulling a sheep to him with his crook. Her life flashed before her. The butcher directed the jet of fire at the stump of her right arm. She screeched in pain. Tar and flesh melted. She felt all the pain in the world. It was more than she could ever have endured, but she could not pass out, here. She could not get away and she could not die. She just screamed.
He burned both her upper stumps away, burned the remains of each humerus back to the shoulders. She was powerless, and could only screw shut her eyes and clench her teeth, trying to transcend the searing pain and wish her mind elsewhere. Next came more boiling hot tar, which the butcher applied with a fitting like a trowel. The tar mixed and melded with her molten flesh.
'Why?' she sobbed, over and over, but it was not finished. She opened her eyes and through her tears saw him before her, pointing with his hook to the branded marks on his body, then to identical designs tattooed on her own. Was that his answer, then? He returned to the greasy tabletop, and now attached some claw-like fittings to the stumps of his wrists. With these he brought two great screws with looped ends like oversized eyelets, or meat skewers. He forced one of them through the crust of tar and twisted the long screw by the ring until it pulled its way through her muscle and cartilage and into her shoulder bone. He did the same on the other side.
He picked her up by the waste and lifted her to something like his level. Two spare hooks hung on chains from the ceiling, close by, and these he slid through the ring-screws he had inserted into her ravaged shoulders. She was suspended at what had been her normal height. The pain, with all her weight on the bolts, was immense. She thought she would explode with it. She struggled to breathe.

* * *

Lee's flat was in a modernist block in East London called Timberline House. The dozen or so flats shared the use of a basement with the washing machines in, but were otherwise self-contained. Anna rang the buzzer and waited. And waited. She rang again. Nothing answered. The door was locked but Anna let herself in with the spare key Lee had given her. 'Lee? Where are you hiding babe?' She called out as she stepped inside. Lee's flat was small but she had made it homely. The smell was faintly of candles and incense burners. There was a psychedelic poster above the mantelpiece in the kitchen/living room, incorporating a blue-skinned Hindu god sat in a fantasy landscape. On another wall were the timeless Chinese verses that Lee had always felt embodied her benign philosophy in life. They were copied out in beautiful calligraphy:
Peace to all beings
May all beings be well and happy and free from fear
Peace to all beings whether near or far
Whether known or unknown
Visible or invisible
Real or imaginary
Born or yet to be born...
Within and beyond the imagination
In the world of ideas
In the world of memories
And in the world of dreams...
Peace in all elements
Of earth, air, fire and water
Fulfilled in space...
Peace in all universes
From the smallest cell in the body
To the greatest galaxies of space
Peace
And light rising
Peace and love and comfort and ease
To all in need
May they be well and happy
And free from fear.

Below the text was a Chinese character, like an oval with a line scored through the centre. Anna thought it was the sign for 'world'.
On the other walls were some off-the-wall paintings, Anna's own work that she had given her friend. The paintings reflecting the girls' shared taste for the weird and wonderful. Lee's presence was everywhere in the flat. There sat her familiar rabbit mug, here some of her magazines and dance videos, and one of her jackets lay flung over the rainbow-coloured couch, a florid relic from her hippie phase. Pinned on a cork board next to the microwave were some of Lee's notes to herself, and some photos, here a picture of Lee's mother and grandparents, there one of Lee herself and Anna. It had been taken about four years ago, when Anna still had her natural blonde hair. Now it was purple; it had been blue, black and pink in the interim. In the photo Anna was wearing a skimpy black bikini, Lee a more modest, one-piece red swimsuit. They were smiling and hugging, in the Greek sunshine, on the 'working' holiday they had spent there.
Anna smiled nostalgically when she saw the picture, remembering those days. While at uni they had been moping about their student loans. Anna had hit on a scheme to solve the debt problem - they should get jobs as strippers. The idea had initially appalled Lee, but Anna, who evidently knew more about it than she had at first let on, had persuaded her to come along with her to try out. Anna had always been something of an exhibitionist. The sleazy man at the Lost Souls Cub in Kings Cross had liked the novelty value of her tattoos and she was certainly enthusiastic in her sexy gyrations. He had also been interested in her shyer companion. Lee, though reticent about removing her clothes for the gratification of leering men, had always been a dazzlingly gifted dancer. The thought of being able to earn good money by doing something at least related to her passion, and being able to bank all her student loan, in a high interest account and keep the profit after paying it all back, had tipped her in favour of it. By assuming a separate persona on the podium, Lee had found that she could do it and pour her soul into it, and lose herself in her movements. The only tricky thing had been preventing her strict Catholic mother from finding out, but she had just about managed that. After some months of it, Anna had come up with the idea of using stripping to fund a summer in the Aegean, working the clubs in the resorts there. On the day before they flew back, however, the incorrigible Anna had blown most of her earnings on two large tattoos- an owl and a serpent, the symbols of Athena. The snake, her largest single tattoo, coiled its way up her left leg, the owl spread its wings over the small of her back.
Thinking of tattoos, Anna remembered that Lee had recently had her first ones done, and she made a mental note to call Dave at King Ink, to see if he had heard from her. There was always the remote possibility.

Anna looked in the bathroom, in case Lee had fainted in there, then in the bedroom, which completed her tour of the apartment. Lee was not there. There was no gaping chasm and no portal to a hellish other dimension, nor any blood. There was a bit of a muddle, the bed was not made, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. A pink haired, plastic troll, Lee's lucky mascot, sat on a chest of drawers. Next to it were Lee's handbag, her keys and her purse. This was worrying. Lee would not have left here without them. Her mobile phone, plugged into its recharger, was also there, stating seven missed calls. Anna picked it up and scrolled through them. There were four from Wendy, two from herself, and one from a number she thought she recognised, but for the moment could not quite place. She phoned it back, wondering who it was, as she waited for the answer.

* * *

'What did I do to deserve... this?' Lee asked weakly. The butcher cocked his dumb head to one side, and inside her mind she heard a rasping voice.
'Why should you not be here?'
'I don't know... I don't know what I did wrong.'
'Maybe you believed the wrong thing, or did not believe in God.'
'I never wished any harm to anyone or anything! I never wished harm to any being in the universe, but to Hell with God if this is God's justice!'
There was something akin to laughter in her ears. 'Even now you are proud, you are defiant! What dignity!' He gave her a sharp shove, and the eyes in his chest watched with apparent glee as she swayed on her chains, back then forward, like a swing. She swung into one of her severed arms, which still hung on its chain before her. The dead fingers brushed her hair, and waved at her as she swung back from it. She closed her eyes; the last thing she saw was the twisting of the butcher's sewn mouth into a grotesque smile.
'Damn you, you bastard,' she uttered under her breath as she rocked, helpless, humiliated. 'Damn you. You monstrous bastard.'

* * *

After a while came the answer 'Hello, King Ink tattoo parlour, Dave speaking.'
'Dave? Oh God. Hi, it's Anna Seymour... how's it going?'
'Hiya Anna, not bad, what can I do you for- found space for another one?'
'Er, not just yet. I'm at my friend, Lee- Leela O'Riley's, you tried to call her.'
'Um... Leela... Oh yeah. I wanted to apologise for not being there for her appointment last week, had to take my old man into hospital, bit of an emergency.'
'Oh dear, hope he's OK.'
'Yeah, he's fine now but the old git got us worried for a moment. Anyway, I was wondering if your mate would like to reschedule.'
'But she had it done- she was seen to by your assistant- what was it, As- Aston or something.'
'What? I haven't had an assistant since Bazzo moved back to Thailand! My staff consist of just me, myself and I! I had to close the shop, you must be mistaken. She must have gone somewhere else, like.'
'No, Lee definitely said she went to King Ink... Oh God, this is really strange, see she's vanished, I can't get hold of her anywhere, and she's not been in contact with her folks. I'm really worried now.'
'Well, I'm sure she's all right. Maybe you should report it though. And come over here and talk to me. Christ, I want to know what's going on- especially if some strange bugger's been interloping here! Shit! Anyway gotta go, got a customer in, a young lady waiting for a navel piercing. Talk to you later alright darling?'
'Sure, Dave, take care.'
'And you, cheers Anna.'
Anna put the phone back where she had found it. She shuddered. Then something caught the light on the carpet next to the dressing table. She stooped down and picked up the silver necklace. She gazed as if spellbound at the four symbols embossed on its square pendant. 'Where are you Lee?' she said, in a hushed voice, to the empty room.

* * *

There was no sleep to be had in Hell, no dreams to find solace in, yet Lee would close her eyes against the darkness and drop her head as if asleep. She would try to shut out the distant screaming, and the pain, imagine that she was unconscious, oblivious. The butcher left her alone at times, usually hanging on the hooks, though sometimes - small mercy - lying on the ground. She shut her eyes, most of all, to avoid seeing the withering flesh of her limbs that still hung from the ceiling. Sometimes she wept, sometimes for hours.
The butcher came and went, sometimes hardly acknowledging her presence. Damnation could not consist entirely of outrageous torture. There were long spells of nothing, of solitary confinement. (Stewing in her own juice, as her grandmother might aptly have put it.) Lee had nothing to do but hang on her chains, trapped with her thoughts. She tried to remember the good times in her life, to find consolation in her memories. She though of Anna, she thought of her a lot. She thought of the fun that they had had at parties and on holidays, and some of the amusing things her friend had come out with, at which they used to laugh. Anna had gained a joint media studies and business degree at University. Subsequently she had made a career in film distribution; mostly working with home-grown horror and low budget inde' films, which might not otherwise have found a niche in the competitive film market. Lee remembered how passionate her friend had been about her work. Once she had brought a video of an art-house film, with the title of Keep it Inside, back to show Lee. Anna had loved the film, but she had not yet managed to find an outlet for it. She had zipped all over the city on her motorbike, showing the tape to people in the business, but for all her enthusiasm it had not got much of a look in. 'I'm not giving up on it, Lee. I'll keep on at them,' she had said. 'I'll just go on and on and on- like the Durex bunny. Duracel bunny, sorry! Shows where my mind is!' Lee had cracked up at the time. It had been the look on her friend's face as much as anything; the saucy little smile on her lips. That memory just popped into Lee's head, now, and made her laugh out loud through the gloom. Anna had a naughty, teasing sense of humour, which showed in the things she used to come out with. 'Lee 'O'Riley, Lee O'Riley, lovely Lee loves it orally!' Lee had gone down to her level, and made up a riposte along the lines of 'come and see sweet Anna Seymour, the girl who's sure to let you see more…' It had earned her a grin and a playful slap.
Lee heaved a sigh, fondly at these memories. Then she felt a sharp, stabbing pain in her heart, as she realised just how acutely she missed her friend.

As time went by she also thought, wistfully, of the few boyfriends she had had- she was unlikely to have any more. She remembered Ian Brendon, her first love, from college, with a sigh. The dreamy hippie. He had taken her in his camper to see a midsummer sunset from a forgotten stone circle by the sea in Dorset, and shared some cannabis with her. That night he had taken her virginity in the long grass... Her memories just made her miss people, and that hurt even more.
Lee's devout mother would not have approved of Lee's activities with Ian. There hadn't been much of which she did approve. When she was a teenager, Lee had made her TV debut dancing in fishnets (or fishie-nets, as it had been Lee's wont to called them) on stage on Top of the Pops, alongside the rock band the Stoneage Playthings. It had been a complex routine; one to which she and the other three dancers had devoted hours to in practice. It had passed off perfectly; everyone said how great the girls had been. Wendy had phoned up straight after it went out on air, however, and castigated her daughter for being so raunchy. Nice one, Lee had thought, thanks for the support, now, Ma!
Wendy had sent Lee to quite a strict convent school (hardly surprising, then, that the girl should at some stage have wound up becoming a stripper). Lee appreciated that her mother had scrimped and saved and gone without in order to put her through her education. However, in religious terms, the stern approach of the (mostly Irish) teacher-nuns had worked the opposite to the desired effect.
Lee could only remember one conversation in full from her period at convent school. It had galled her enough to lodge, verbatim, in her mind. She had asked a teacher how they knew God was a man.
'It says so in the Bible. Everyone he appeared so he did so as a man.' The nun had told her.
'But that was in the olden days when they didn't listen to women! I was thinking,
you only get males and females in animals, and birds and fishies,' Young Lee had said (for some reason she had always called fish fishies, and still did sometimes). 'You don't have boy or girl trees or boy or girl flowers, so it's not even all living things that are "he"s or "she"s, why should a God be a he or a she?'
'O'Riley stop being so childish or I'll have you standing outside the mother-superior's office,' came the considered theological response.
Lee had always believed in the basic Christian teachings of forgiveness and tolerance, but there was much besides which had never made sense to her. In other religious instruction classes she had found herself asking things like: how did Adam and Eve get married? From where had Cain and Abel's wives come? Why did God make the Devil, and why didn't he stop him doing bad things? And if God was good and loving how come he destroyed Sodom and Gomorra when there must have been some good people there? And why was he always so nasty to the Egyptians, in the Bible stories, when some of them must also have been good? Why, if it was the Romans who killed Jesus, were her sort of Christians called Roman Catholics? And if Jesus had been God, to whom had he spoken when he preyed?' She had been just a reflective child, with an inquisitive mind. She had not been trying to ridicule or undermine the religion; she had just wanted to know. None of the nuns had provided any sensible answers. Instead they had lost their patience with her, and made her ask God to make her less subversive and more faithful. Why would a God who had allowed her father to die intervene to make a correction in a child's character for the convenience of a bunch of nuns? This was something else Lee had wondered at the time, but by then she had learned to keep such questions to herself. The child had soon come to see their God as an unlovable tyrant. The nuns had never answered her questions to her satisfaction, and all their doctrines and dogma seemed self-contradicting and of little relevance to her life. She wondered, now, if the joy she had felt at getting out of that repressive environment and her abandonment of her Catholic heritage (in favour of new-age spirituality and Eastern mysticism) had some connection to her present plight. After all, one of the holy sisters had expressly told Lee that her father was in Hell, and that she would follow him there if she failed to mend her ways.
Lee missed her mother, however, wished she could see her, talk to her. She regretted that they had never really talked, had never seen things eye-to-eye. She felt sorry for her. Wendy had not had an easy time, and had been unlucky in the men in her life. Her first husband, Lee's father, Patrick O'Riley, though he had always turned out looking smart for Sunday Mass, had been the slave to a secret cocaine addiction. He had committed suicide when his daughter was two, leaving a note that they would all be better off without him. He had left Wendy a legacy of social stigma and heavy debt. It had been hard for her, bringing up the child on her own in the subsequent years, and she had never spoken his name in Lee's presence again. When Lee was five, her mother had remarried, to John McNamara, an outwardly charming and avuncular butcher. Lee had never liked him. Her initial prejudice had been vindicated. Once married he showed his true colours as a volatile alcoholic, alternatingly beating and cheating on his new wife. Lee had hated being under the same roof as him, and had even been relieved to get away to boarding school. Or would have been, except that while away she had worried more-or-less constantly about her mother...
She worried about her mother now. Were her mother and friends fretting about her? She hated the thought of her loved-ones being in distress on her account. Were they looking for her? They would never find her- not here. If only she could get through to them, stop them worrying.
She could not believe that she would see neither her Ma nor Anna ever again. She could not come to terms with this perdition being real and permanent, and not a bad dream she would eventually wake up from. Losing her limbs had always been her worst nightmare, as she had lived for dancing, and relished her independence. It was all over now. She hardly had the energy for anger. She just felt weary and lonely and desolate. And ridiculous. Gloomily she wondered how responsible her own mind could have been for creating this private Hell. Was it a coincidence that her tormentor was a butcher; a crueller version of her stepfather? The man who had only abandoned her mother (to Lee's great relief) a few years ago.
Now, in a moment of weakness and faltering pride, Lee wished she had listened more intently to the nuns. Listened to their moralising, their warnings about Hell. Maybe then she could have avoided it.

* * *

It was in all the local papers. A man had been found dead in mysterious circumstances, a man with a shaven head and drooping moustache, a pierced eyebrow and profusely tattooed arms. He was in his grotty dwelling in bedsit land, above a sex-shop and overlooking a bus depot. The police arrived there quickly, only because the neighbours had complained about the rock music- AC/DC, as it happened, blaring through the wall at full volume. The CD was on repeat so the song started again when it got to the end. The door had been locked and banging on it had produced no effect, so the police had been obliged to force it.
The heavyset man's body had been prostrate on the dingy carpet. His wrists had been cut. The razor lay nearby and the incident looked like a suicide. However, the look on the corpse's face was one frozen in terror. This had been the other customer Astor had seen at King Ink, the only other person who had seen the tattooist, with his eye-watering array of piercings and body-modifications. The only one besides a young woman named Leela O'Riley. She, though, had vanished without trace, and the trail had gone cold.
The police conducted a search of the dead man's flat, and found, aside from the tenant's modest stash of illegal substances and pornographic publications, a tattoo after-care leaflet from King Ink, stapled to a recently issued receipt. Two days later they descended on the studio and grilled the proprietor. Dave felt he was being treat like a sordid criminal, but told them about how it seemed someone had opened his shop without his knowing- some strange bloke named Aston, or something. Fortunately Dave had already reported this strange happening, and fortunately it tallied with the date on the receipt and with the information contained in a missing persons report for Leela O'Riley, filed by her worried friend, one Anna Seymour. As to who or what this Astor-or something- was, however, there was no clue. That trail too had gone ice cold. Two people were known to have interacted with him. One was now dead and the other had disappeared.
* * *

There was little to distinguish between day and night in the abyss of Hell, but one time, while she was hanging alone on the hooks, in the dark, a visitor came. Lee was used to Hell, by then, and showed no great reaction when a young woman appeared, through the heavy door, without her skin. The slick, crimson forms of her naked muscles clung to her white skeleton, and her dark eyes stared unblinking from the flayed, bloody mess of her face. Unable to blink. Naked veins and arteries formed a network of fine tracery over her sickly glistening superficies. Tortuous- torturous. Something was keeping this thing alive, here, stopping it bleeding to death.
'I'm sorry,' the skinless woman said ruefully, holding onto the door with one hand, covering part of her face with the other. Her soft voice and its lilting accent seemed out of place in the madness of this world. 'Shall I leaver you in peace?'
Lee had not been in peace, anyway, only in pieces. 'No, stay, please,' she heard herself say. She was glad of someone or something to talk to besides the butcher.
The skinless woman let go of the door, and came in, hesitantly, remaining in the shadows. 'You must be Ramon's new, er, guest.'
Guest? Lee thought wryly. 'I guess, though if this is his hospitality then it... sucks.'
'Hmmm, and not very talkative, either, is he?' The flayed woman gave a nervous laugh. 'How long have you been here?'
'I don't know, not long. I don't think, but longer than I can stand...can bear. How about you?'
'Oh... The same- not years. My name's Rina, by the way.'
'I'm... Lee.'
'That's cute, a girl with a boy's name.' Another nervous giggle. 'Pleased to meet you.'
'You too. If you want to shake my hand, it's hanging up there!' Lee said, gesturing upwards with her face.
Rina stepped out of the shadows. She reached up and touched the dangling left arm. Her raw fingers left smears of blood where she stroked the waxen skin. 'I used to have skin' she declared, wistfully. 'You have beautiful skin, Lee, may I... have it?'
'What?'
'You don't understand, I can't go on like this - as this thing!' Rina stretched up and unhooked the arm, pulling it down, cradling it, trembling with excitement.
Lee realised that the arm was of no more use to her. 'Help yourself, I'll give you a free hand,' she said, sardonically, bemused. Rina seemed no longer to hear her; she had taken one of the butcher's knives from the table, and was concentrating on peeling the white skin from the arm, more or less in one piece. She pulled it on like a long glove, over her grisly, gristly limb, and flexed her fingers in Lee's fair skin. It did fit like a glove. The skin seemed to take to the raw veins and nerves below, and to be infused with life.
'I used to have olive skin, but I... I like this. Oh, I like this!' Rina said, full of libidinous delight. 'I can feel it!' She tottered over to Lee, and stroked her cheek where she hung. 'I can feel with it!' Rina whispered. 'I'm sorry Lee. In a different time and place we could have been friends... But there is no... such thing as... friendship... here. Oh, I must have your skin!' She raised her still skeletal right hand, which still gripped the razor-edged knife.
Lee gasped. 'Jesus! No, please... get away! Rina, don't... You can't want to... Please!'
The tip of Rina's skinless finger touched Lee's mouth, silencing her, then stroked her quivering lips, smearing blood over them like crimson lipstick, the effect actually being quite glamorous. 'I'm sorry, but I can't go on like this! And it fits me so well! You are just my size! And you don't understand...' She removed her hand and stroked the knife down Lee's back, starting to cut a seam. Lee felt the first warm trickle of blood- her own blood, escaping down her spine. Rina gave the stricken girl a bloody kiss on the cheek. 'I'm sorry,' she whispered.
'Oh, please, no!' Lee twitched on her chains. 'Don't do it, please! Oh God, have mercy!' Help me!' She stared into Rina's bleeding eyes, which may once have been beautiful, compassionate. Now there was only pain and psychosis in their haunted depth. Lee was realising, just when it was too late, how attached she had grown to her covering. She could not cope with the idea of her damnation becoming worse even than this. She could not stand the thought of her face turning into the reflection of this blood and sinew monster, the monster under the skin of every human being. The monster that wanted to steal Lee's face from her.
'I need your flesh, darling,' Rina whispered. 'I need your pretty face! You will make my dreams come true! I will be entire again, but for a little skin around my shoulders!'
'Wait, oh please... tell me... what... happened to your own... skin?' Lee wanted to keep Rina talking until... God, until what? No knight in armour was going to arrive on a white mount and rescue her from this one.
Rina looked down, drawing the knife down the skin of Lee's back, raving half coherently, as she cut. 'They let me see it sometimes- open a window for me... See where it is, in the world, still, in the Gallowry. Like a statue, a waxwork, a piece of art... My skin- my beautiful outer layer- my hair, my eyelashes... it looks like me- how I should look... They took it from me- cast me into Hell... like this...'
'Who?'
Anger now showed in Rina's burning eyes. 'It was the professor... He tricked me!'
'Who is...' Lee gasped in pain.... 'Who is he?'
Rina shook her grotesque head. 'He promised me all the ecstasies of heaven and hell. The farthest reaches of experience! The treasures of darkness! Escape...' She gave another deranged giggle, continuing to cut. '...Escape from the prison of my skin! All I had to do was submit to being branded- submit, submit, submit... I can't get back there, anyway not... like... this. The knife reached the base of Lee's spine. Lee cried in anguish, screwing shut her eyes, perhaps for the last time... 'I may have to send others, choose them,' her tormentor continued to babble, 'become like him, but at least I will be out of here!' Rina shook her head again. 'There's no other escape from...'
A metal hook flew over Rina's shoulder. The spike embedded in her skinless chest. (This was the place where a thin layer of bloody cartilage covered her ribcage above one livid, skinless breast. Nearby the sunken outline of ruar was faintly visible.) A second later, Rina flew back, dropping the knife as she went. The butcher shook her off his hook to the floor, where she landed with a squelching sound, in a puddle of her own blood. He gave a furious hiss, and aimed his other hook in a swing at her head. She brought up her left arm to shield herself. The hook snared in the new skin - Lee's skin - and briskly tore it in one piece from Rina's arm. 'My skin!' Rina squealed, pathetically; but as the butcher raised his other weapon to bring it down on her, she scurried away on her hands and knees, and fled through the door

.

He slammed the door behind her, then went back towards Lee, shaking the piece of skin off his hook as he went. She breathed heavily, her naked chest heaving. He circled around her and inspected the slash down her back, which was bleeding quite profusely. He quickly changed one of his hooks for a claw, and dimly she watched him fetch a large needle, threaded through similar leather chord to that which sewed up his eyes and mouth. He passed behind her and she flinched as he started to stitch up the long cut.
When it was over he stood before her, watching her with his chest-eyes, as if waiting for her thanks. He who had dismembered her and left her there in the first place! He, the creature who kept her in this nightmarish condition. She looked away, scowling.
'What do you want?' His telepathic voice was in her head again, like a migraine.
'To wake up in my bed.'
'You are not asleep.'
'Then to go home.'
'You are home.'
'No, I'm in Hell, and I haven't done anything! Nothing evil- and I always...tried, well, to get on with people!'
'That sounds... as you would say... lame.'
'Lame is right.' She said caustically, glaring at him. 'Who made me lame?'
'He pulled a bench up and sat near her. 'You hate me so, don't you?'
'I just want to get out of here. I just want to see my mother, and my friend Anna. I want my limbs back, I... wouldn't mind some clothes.' She looked into his face, then into his unreal eyes. 'Were you ever human? Can't you understand that?'
'I understand all. I am a demon more sinned against than sinning- we all are, my love.'
'Were you a man, once?'
His blind face looked away. He was gazing into the past, perhaps, with his mind's eye. 'I was.'
'Who were you?'
'I was Ramon de Beziers. My life ended in the year of grace 1209. Northern knights came, to kill my people in the name of their church. They cut off my hands, ears, nose... manhood; torturing me to betray my brethren- heretics in the eyes of our enemies. I never spoke, but they found out all they needed to know from another poor wretch. In time my fellows resurged, took back the town, found me. Blaming me for their betrayal, they took their turn to torture me. They closed my eyes and mouth and left me to starve in a dungeon. Before they let me die, they branded me thus...' He indicated the four marks with his claw '...and I knew that they had made a pact with Hell, offering me to it. I tried to burn the marks from my flesh, throwing myself into a brazier, but they had already sealed my fate. They had a relic, a key, and with it opened the gateway between worlds. Here I arrived... but now I have you.'
'Who decided that we must suffer like this?' she asked. He gave no answer. She sighed. 'I mean isn't there some sort of... I don't know, appeals procedure? Isn't there someone to whom we could plead our cases? This is wrong, it's just not fair!'
He did not answer her, but there was a strange look in the ghastly eyes that watched her.
'I'm sorry for all you suffered,' she said, 'but that doesn't justify what you have done- how could you chop me up like this? I can never... do anything... never dance again!'
'I had a bride, when I lived, who loved to dance' his melancholy voice said, in her head. He stood up, suddenly, and touched her cheek with his lower arm, the hook passing harmlessly into her hair. When his flesh came into contact with hers, she felt a jolt, and she found herself on an unpaved street.
It was a warm night, under a splendid evening sky, but there was something base in the air. There were picturesque medieval houses of timber and plaster and stone, with steep gables and, for the most part, thatched roofs. Some of the roofs, though, had already collapsed. Smoke was pouring through windows, while flames were licking around the lintels of doors. A great cathedral stood on a hill above the town, but this building too was aflame. Some horsemen suddenly thundered into the street. They were clad in tarnished chain-mail, with crosses on their tunics and shields and heavy iron helmets hiding their faces. Crusaders. They carried torches, which they threw into the houses. One of them, with a blue tabard bearing the emblem of a gold lion, pulled up on his reins just before Lee's eyes. The big, white horse snorted through its flared nostrils, and she felt the heat of it against her face. The knight looked down, looked at her- through her- from the dark slit in his helmet. He paused there for a moment with his hand on the hilt of his sword. Then he turned his horses head away, kicked its spurs into its flanks with a cry, and galloped away.
Next arrived a great rabble of armed men, on foot, with wild looks in their eyes. A corpulent monk in a white robe led them. He carried a sack of loot on his back. He gestured towards the people who had run out onto the street from the burning buildings. His face was red in the light of the flames.
'Abbott, how are we to know which are heretics and which are good Catholics?' one of the ragged soldiers asked the monk.
'Kill them all, my son, God will know his own!' The monk said in a cold voice. The men obeyed. It was pandemonium, a rampage, a massacre. The men ran at the defenceless townspeople, cornering them at the end of the street. An old woman begged for mercy, but one of the foot-soldiers, laughing like a madman, cut off her head. A little boy cried beside his fallen mother until one of the soldiers ran his spear through the child's head, and raised him up, waving the little body like a flag. Lee wanted to cover her eye, or look away, but she couldn't move. People died by the score, blades hacked through flesh- the intimate murder of the age before gunpowder. A man in a black robe tried to shield a dark-haired damsel from these brutes, but the two lances slid into his back at once. The young woman fell beside him, still alive. It startled Lee to see her face- it was the image of her own, stricken with grief and fear. The men, having grabbed her and dragged her aside, tore away their victim's faded blue dress. They subjected her to what brutalised, ruffian-soldiers, when they are out of control in a captured town, generally do to any pretty women unfortunate enough to fall into their clutches. Afterwards they carried her arms and legs away with them, like trophies, impaled on their bloody spears.
Ramon withdrew his arm and Lee was back in the dark place with him. 'That wasn't Hell, that was Earth,' Ramon's voice said, bitterly, inside her head. 'The place you are so keen to get back to, the species you are so keen to rejoin.'
'The woman..?'
'My wife, Blanche, the man in the black robe was her brother, one of the perfecti preachers whom the Crusaders sought to annihilate. By this time I was already a prisoner. I was not there to protect her from those dogs.'
'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry... but... Ramon - I'm not your wife! I still don't see why you had to...'
'I know you are not my wife. She is long gone. You are an ornament, just an ornament! But there is nothing - open your eyes - there is nothing beautiful here except you!' The butcher pointed to the marking on his torso once again. 'And I chose nothing. I have simply followed the rules.'
'Rules? What rules, I don't....'
'I shall show you, it is time.' She watched him fetch a sort of leather satchel, into which he stuffed some of the metal tools from the table, before looping the strap over his shoulder. He pulled a great, dusty black cloak about him, with a hood which he raised over his head, before coming back towards Lee. Then he took her between his arms by her waste, and lifted her from the hooks. Carrying her trunk under his arm like, well, a trunk, he strode towards the door. She realised that she had never yet been beyond this room.

* * *
Anna had tried every avenue she could think of to try to discover what had happened to Lee, with little to show for it. No-one from Lee's past that she knew of had heard from her. Appeals for information on the media by Anna, and by Lee's family, had turned up nothing, nor had the police's offer of a reward for information. Anna had even posted Lee's picture around London, and stuck notes, one on her flat's door and others in places Lee might go, in London and in Cyberspace, telling Lee to get in touch. It was all to no avail.
'I don't get it, I just don't' Anna told her boyfriend Rick, curled up one evening in his strong arms in her living room. Rick was tall and darkly good-looking, he had a goatee and longer hair than his girlfriend. He looked like he should be in a rock band, and indeed he was, thought his group had yet to hit the big-time. He played lead guitar. Anna ran her fingers, absently, over the intricate Celtic knot-work tattooed on his sturdy bicep. 'I just don't know where she can be.'
. 'It's so weird,' he said, 'how that other bod- the bloke who got inked on the same day as her, ended up, like, dead in his flat.'
'Lee's not dead!' Anna said, waspishly. She sighed, softening her tone, composing herself. 'I don't know where she is, but I feel she's somewhere. She and I've got a connection, know what I mean?'
'Sure, babe,' Rick said, but he didn't really. He fingered the necklace that hung against her chest. 'This is cool, where did it come from?'
'I found it in Lee's bedroom when I went to look for her. Sort of connects me to her more, I guess.'
'You shouldn't dwell on it all the time, you know.'
'I can't help it.'
Rick wanted to take Anna's mind off it. She had made herself ill worrying, and had not seemed herself. 'So, anyway, you wanna go out or something tonight?' He asked. 'Or shall we stay here and...' he slid a hand down her top, his fingers finding her right nipple and toying with the ring that pierced it, '...you know...'
She drew away from him. 'I can't. Sorry.' She shook her head. It went to show how Lee's disappearance had effected her, for usually it wouldn't have taken much more than that to get Anna in the mood. 'I couldn't think of anything else, I'm still so worried about poor Lee,' she explained, ruefully. 'You'd better go, sweetie. I'm sorry, I'm not very good company, and I want to have another trawl on the internet- you never know, it might lead me somewhere.'
Rick didn't make a fuss as she showed him out. 'If you need me, angel, if you need anything... You know.'
'Yeah, thanks, I know.' She saw him off with a hug and a last kiss. 'Sorry to be like this... bye Rick.'

Anna made herself a cup of tea, and settled down in front of her PC. Leela O'Riley's name turned up nothing useful from the Internet search engines. There was an old web site she had uploaded while at university, part of a module on contemporary dance. Anna discovered that there was another Leela O'Riley in Australia, but she was 41 and a sculptress. There was also a Canadian beautician by that name, and a Californian estate agents run by a man sharing the appellation of Lee O'Riley. Useful. Next Anna had another look through missing persons reports, but found nothing new. She even made herself read through reports of recently discovered, unidentified dead bodies. Thankfully there was no body fitting Lee's description among them.
There were a bewildering number of people called 'Astor' and 'Aston', Anna could not remember which if either was the name Lee had given as her tattooist's. Even in conjunction with the word 'Tattooist', there was nothing to go on. Anna ran her hands through her purple-dyed crop of hair feeling trumped. Her eyes wondered from the screen. She spotted the flier from a local Thai restaurant, and remembered that Lee had sketched out the symbols she had been tattooed with on the reverse. Anna reached for it and turned it over.
She remembered the story Lee had told her about their origin. She called the search engine back up, and entered the words 'four', 'symbols', 'excavation', 'Madagascar' and 'carving'. It was a long shot. It was probable that the guy had made up the story of the symbols origin on the spot, not that it was usual for Lee to be taken in by nonsense.
Anna couldn't find anything about an excavated burial of the age Lee had described, or of any carving displaying the symbols. It was quite interesting to discover that there had been an ancient civilisation on Madagascar, who erected standing stones more like the ancient monoliths of Western Europe than those of Egypt or the Middle East. Anna found pictures and descriptions of ruins of monuments that reminded her of Stonehenge, or Avebury, or the stone rings in the Scottish Islands and the West Country. When Lee had been with Ian, her new-age boyfriend, she had been obsessed with places like that, Anna remembered. One summer solstice they had joined the neo-druids and hippies at Stonehenge, Ian, Lee, Anna and Rick. There had been an amazing festive atmosphere, notwithstanding the clouds that had obscured the sunrise itself. Anna sighed, remembering Lee's dancing, missing her friend as keenly as ever.
Anna quit the pages on ancient Madagascar, which were fascinating, she thought, but aside from the point. She returned to the search engine. 'Tattoo', 'body', 'ancient', 'symbols', 'four'. Anna typed into the box. Here goes nothing.
She came across another site giving an abridged report of an archaeological dig in Denmark. The dig centred on a bog which had once been a ceremonial lake into which Iron Age people made valuable offerings to the otherworld. The excavation had been conducted in 1986, led by a French archaeologist and anthropologist named Dr. Jean De Lusignan. De Lusignan's team had found a number of beautiful gold necklaces, called torques, worked with gorgeous swirling patterns in the Celtic style known as 'La Tene'- a style which had enjoyed a revival in modern times and was still popular in the tattooing world, as Anna reflected. Rick's tattoos, aside from the stylised angel on his back, were mostly abstract geometric patterns, inspired by Celtic art. She liked that; they contrasted with her own, which were mostly naturalistic representations of animals and reptiles. There is an element of snobbery in most sectors of society. Anna normally met someone every time she ventured out who looked down on her because of her tattoos. She, in turn, however, looked down on people who had collected tattoos haphazardly, without putting any thought into it, and without thematic or stylistic consistency. Mix n' matchers, she called them. At one convention she had seen artless tattoos of Spiderman, an AK47 rifle, Jesus Christ, a Celtic knot, a parrot, Danger-Mouse, Chinese writing and a skull and crossed-bones butting up against each other on the same guy's torso! There should have been a law against it! But her mind was wandering. She returned to the archaeological report.
The excavators had also found fine iron swords, ceremonially broken before being offered to the waters. They had found a silver cauldron, too, with intricate and bizarre imagery focusing on the worship of a horned god. Finally, they had found a body. The rich mud of the bog had preserved the skin intact, though it was blackened and shrivelled. Lee waited for the image of the body to download while she read the explanation. The fibrous remains of a rope had also survived, it seemed, running around the dead man's neck. The image downloading showed the top of the head, discoloured by time, the eyes tightly closed, the nose squashed out of shape. A little more appeared, the mouth was open in an eternal, soundless scream. The blackened, shrivelled lips were pulled away from the starkly white teeth. It looked to Anna like something out of a horror film.
The rope bindings had led some of the team to conclude that they had found a victim of human sacrifice, a barbaric practice long attributed to the Celts. There were even the remnants of clothing, Anna read, including a long gown and a pointed cap. During conservation these had been removed, and Dr De Lusignan had discerned the traces of four tattoos on the ancient cadaver's torso. At this point the downloading image found the energy to show a little more, and Anna caught her breath. She stared at the bog-mummy's chest and the two tattoos which had appeared before her eyes, then down at the upper two on the figure Lee had drawn on the back of the Thai restaurant leaflet. They were identical. She waited for the rest of the bog-mummy's image to download, knowing that the lower two would also correspond. She waited, drumming her fingers impatiently. The Devil's tattoo.

* * *
They were outside. The street was long, the rugged houses low and grey, with mossy shingles. Most had only a single storey, and none of them had windows. The sky above was also low and grey. Dark, granite grey. Rain seemed to threaten. The atmosphere was oppressive. Somehow Lee had expected anything but this. She had expected fire and brimstone, like something from a heavy metal album cover or a medieval painting, or at least fiery red clouds. It was a cold day, too. A cold day... she felt it especially on her wounded back and in the places where the nerves in her brain thought her arms and legs should be. The butcher carried her down the path, beyond a thorny hedge, under a dead, grey tree. She saw a red post-box.
He started to walk along the pavement. In the distance Lee thought she heard the crackle of gunfire.
'What's that?' she asked, flinching.
'Gunfire,' his voice replied.

They turned the corner at the end of the road, into another street just like the one they were leaving. There were wooded hills visible above the roofline, the trees all dead and grey, and some of them smoking, as though slowly burning. An old woman shuffled along the pavement on the other side of the street, muttering to herself as she dragged her laden shopping buggy along. One of the plastic wheels bumped over an uneven paving slab, and something black fell from the buggy's main compartment. The woman stopped, grumbled, backtracked and stooped to pick up the dead crow. She stuffed it back in the buggy with the others. Then she carried on her way.

The butcher carried Lee down the road, past a large black dog with scars on its face and a mangy, scabby back. The animal looked up warily from the body of a white dog. It snarled at them with its bloody jaws, protecting its meal. The butcher ignored it, and continued to carry Lee, like a parcel under his arm. His side felt rough against her bare flesh.
Black clouds gathered in the sky above. Then it started to rain. It rained not water, but little black things, that wriggled like maggots. Thousands of them. They landed all around until the whole road moved with them. They cascaded down the roofs of the houses, and clogged up the gutters and drainpipes. They landed on the butcher and on Lee, squirming in her hair. She could only groan with disgust. For once he seemed mindful of her discomfort, and pulled his cloak around her to shield her from the things.
The butcher was soon wading through a living slush, though some of the strange larvae crawled up his legs, sucking on his flesh like leeches. They were more attracted to the softer flesh of the young woman he carried, but he brushed them away from her, carefully, with his free arm, somehow managing not to scratch her with his hook. For the first time she was glad of him, and preyed that he would not drop her. The ground below now lay buried under a thick slick of the black larvae.
Lee heard a woeful moan. She craned her head around to see where it came from. Through the black storm, she saw Rina, the skinless wretch, on all fours on top of a burned-out car. She howled, and thrashed at the black things with her bloody fingers, trying to keep them away from herself. There were crimson hand-prints all over the door handles of the car- obviously Rina had failed to get inside it, and had climbed on top to escape the mass of the things on the road. They were obviously attracted by her blood, and kept worming up the side of the car towards her. Lee felt sorry for Rina's plight, despite what the maddened creature had tried to do to her. Soon, though, Rina's torment abated, as the black things slowed in their movements. As Lee watched they seemed to solidify. Their segmented bodies hardened into shells, and they grew in mass. They retained their black colour, but gradually took on the shape, size and texture of walnuts. The butcher was now wading through and stumbling over these things, as though through loose pebbles. They crunched and rattled together as he progressed. He was hurrying, now. He rushed down the path of a nearby building of some size, pulling the door open with his hook, and slamming it behind him. A bell jingled overhead.
A human figure, with sandy coloured skin appeared. It had brown hair in some kind of dreadlocks, and wore a blue woollen jumper. It had no mouth, and its sexless lower parts were naked. It's toes were twice the length they should have been, and came to pointed ends. This thing stared fiercely at them with keen brown eyes. Lee was astonished, meanwhile, to see that she was in some sort of clothes store. There was a large window with what appeared to be mannequins in. The butcher set her down on the stumps of her legs by the window. There was a dull pain from where her weight pressed down on the tarred wounds. Her situation was as ridiculous as it was frightful. Without her legs, she was only the height of as small child. She looked up to see what the butcher was doing, but he had turned away, and appeared to be inspecting the shelves of clothing.
She was aware that the butcher and blue jumper were probably communicating telepathically, but if they were she could not hear what they were saying. She wondered if she could move, and found that by shifting her weight carefully, she was able to waddle on the remains of her legs, which had been cut off some way above the knees. It was a painful process. It caused particular agony to put any weight on the broken bone that protruded through the tar on the right stump. She managed to turn around, though, so she could see what was happening beyond the window. Rina was still in sight, squatting on her car roof. By now the shell-like cocoons, which had swelled in size, had started to vibrate, crack and split, and almost at once there arose a humming noise, which Lee could hear through the window. The air outside started to fill with winged insects, with black bodies and long, dangling legs like those of mosquitoes, though longer than human fingers. They swarmed in the air, some of them smacking into the glass. In the distance she heard the dog howling. Meanwhile the freakish insects fell on Rina. Rina screamed, out there, as their wings beat against her, and as their mouths latched onto her skinless body.
'It can't be real,' Lee murmured. 'Oh God, this place can't be real! I can't cope with all this!' Se felt herself picked up by a pair of hands, hands being a pleasant novelty, at least, in these parts. The androgynous, mouthless thing in the blue jumper laid her on her back, supervised by the Butcher, and pulled something dry and tight around her body. She looked down at herself, and saw red. Her heart beat for a moment in confusion, but then she realised that she had been dressed in a red leotard, much like the one she used to rehearse her dance routines in- when she had been complete, and able to dance. It also reminded her of the one-piece red swimsuit she had worn a few years ago, while on her holiday in the Greek Islands with Anna. Oh dear Anna... Lee felt a sudden ache of longing in her heart for her friend. Blue Jumper pulled the straps up over the metal eyelets in Lee's upper body. The butcher had left her with scarcely sufficient shoulders to support them. The straps half covered the two tattoos on her chest. (These esoteric symbols were somehow, she knew, the cause of her being here. What had ever possessed her to get them done?). Lee heard herself give a small and not entirely sane-sounding laugh. It was nice to be covered up again, but she wasn't sure she felt up to dancing- or swimming. They had dressed her in this thing to mock her.

* * *

Anna was intrigued to confirm that the four symbols were not just something made up by the mystery tattooist. They had always seemed too - potent - for that, and she had understood how they had captivated Lee. The site had little more to tell her about the symbols, though. Apparently none of the archaeologists had known their meaning at the time. They appeared to be glyphs of some sort, Dr De Lusignan was quoted as saying, perhaps indicating a foreign origin for the bog mummy, for the Celtic tribes were thought not to have developed a written language. He had declared his ambition to one day be able to decipher them.
Anna seemed to be at another dead end. She thought for a while. She typed 'De Lusignan' into the search engine. A lot of stuff came up about the crusades. It seemed that the De Lusignan family had been kings of Jerusalem and Cyprus in the Middle Ages. This was turning into an informative history lesson, but not getting her any closer to Lee. Finally Anna came upon a staff list for the Parisian University. She found Jean De Lusignan, now Professor De Lusignan, no less. It was all in French. Anna's French was not good and she had to keep flicking to a dictionary site (ah, the wonders of modern technology). She was able to translate that De Lusignan had served on the excavation in Denmark, and had subsequently studied sites in Southern France, Mexico, the Holy Land, Arabia, India, Egypt- where he had discovered an ancient nobleman's tomb, Libya and Madagascar. He had become an expert linguist and a specialist in early languages, especially ancient Semitic scripts. Quite a career. She wondered if she could contact this impressive man. He was obviously a leading boffin in his field, and if nothing else he would probably be able to help her with the meaning of the symbols. It was a shot in the dark, but she had an odd feeling in her bones that told her she was onto something. Anna made a scan of Lee's drawing, and attached it to an e-mail, which she sent to the professor's e-mail address at the Parisian University. She was not confident he would reply though, so scrolled back to the University's front-page, looking for their telephone number. She decided to call in the morning and see if the good professor would be prepared to talk to her.
* * *

The black insects eventually rose into the dark sky, and dispersed into the bleak atmosphere. The Butcher picked Lee up as he had before, and took her back outside. Their empty cocoons had already degraded, and the street was left under a layer of dark dust. There was a wretched, bloody skeleton on top of the car where Rina had been and she was gasping for air feebly, her neck and body torn and eaten away in places by the insects.
'Oh my God, poor Rina! Ramon, can't you help her?' Lee said to the butcher. She heard something akin to a sneer in her mind. 'She won't die. Rare and fortunate is the thing that can die in this place.' Soon they had left the unfortunate Rina far behind them.
They were nearer to the centre of town, Lee didn't even know, she realised, what this place was. 'Where are we, anyway?'
'Perditon' His voice said.
'Perdition?'
'No, Perditon.'
There was a car park in front of them, and he bore her across to a great metal monstrosity of a truck. He ripped one of the doors open and hoisted her into the passenger seat. He then stooped below the steering wheel, and hot-wired it with his claw and his hook. The juddering juggernaut lurched forward. Hook handed, the butcher's driving skills left something to be desired.
There was no other traffic, and only a few shadowy figures moving about the streets. 'Like the end of the world' Lee murmured, looking out the window. Soon they left the town. Presently, she saw a cart on the other side of the road, coming their way. As they came closer, she saw that it was drawn by skinless and deformed human slaves, the feet of whom left a trail of bloody prints. The cart carried armed men, the skin of whom seemed to have been sewn from scraps, like a monstrous parody of a patchwork quilt, over their formidable muscles. Their eyes were as reptilian as those in the butcher's chest. Their long, razor teeth, however, were like those of a piranha fish. Severed heads and disembodied hearts were strung on a gory chord that trailed behind the cart. Lee noticed it in the rear-view mirror, after they passed, and felt her empty stomach heave. 'Jesus.'
They passed thorny hedgerows and barren grey fields that seemed shrouded in a layer of ash. Something had killed all the trees, and someone had used their naked lower branches as a gibbet. Lee stared at the hanged figures, which were swaying on ropes. Some of them were headless, hanging by their feet, the golden wings of their backs falling open behind them. Others had thick brown ropes around their necks. Lee stared at one in particular. Its white face slumped forward, wisps of black hair tossing around it in the breeze. Its naked body was smeared with blood from where its heart had been torn out. Its pale gold wings were pierced through with ghastly metal hooks, attached by chains to large rocks that held them down.
'Angels, dead angels,' Lee said, with an equal amount of wonder and despair audible in her voice. 'What's going on, what happened to them?'
'What do you think?' Came the butcher's voice.
'Demons- cruel demons like you are the only things that could kill angels. But I don't understand this. God, can't you explain this madness for me? Where is God in all this?'
'Look again,' the butcher's voice said. She did so. The body of one of the hanging angels twitched. It could no-longer function, but it was not dead.
'Oh Jesus! What in the Hell is going on here?'
'Isn't it obvious to you that God is dead? Can't you feel it in your soul? Can't you taste it in the air? You are home, Lee, but it has gone to the dogs!'
'It's not true!'
'Yes, God is dead- or at least may as well be. Nothing can really die here. God is locked in a struggle with what you would think of as the Devil- light and darkness in mortal combat, in the deadly embrace of eternal foes. They have fought since time as you understand it began, but the Devil is the younger of the two, and God is struggling to hold the Satanic adversary at bay. Darkness has gained the upper hand. The demons are encroaching into this place that used to be Heaven. They have all but made it their own.'
'This can't be real.'
'Maybe this is all there ever was, Lee. Maybe the life you thought you knew was the illusion.'
Lee looked at him. His sightless face, under the hood, was turned to her as if he were a normal man in conversation with her. The eyes in his chest, though, looked forward at the road. She wondered if he were lying, or talking allegorically. Part of her thought that this might not be a spiritual Hell, for everything seemed too solid and material. Everything from the meat hooks to the post-box, everything from the stitches in his cadaverous face to the leotard they had put her in. She was certainly somewhere physical. She wondered whether it could be an alternative dimension, another planet, or even a nightmarish future. If it was then the symbols on her torso were not an ancient script but the writing of dark days still to come.
A terrible plague afflicted this destroyed world. She imagined that something had happened to humanity. Somehow they could not die anymore. Perhaps they had thought they were pretty clever when they had done whatever they had done, and rid the world of death. Surrendered their ability to die. If that were so then she could not guess how or why they opened doors to the past- all periods in the past, and pulled unsuspecting victims like the people she and Rina and Ramon and all the ones who she had glimpsed in her first vision had been. Then she remembered the answer given to her by the two monsters that had crossed into her world to claim her for this place. They wanted to extend their power into her place, the exalted elules, as they had called her world. Astor had been part of that design.
Throughout time the dark forces had posted their collaborators, the men and women who had put the marks on those condemned to be brought here. The people who opened the gate- when the time was right- with, she supposed, 'keys' like the silver necklace Astor had forced her to accept, and the enigmatic 'relic' which Ramon had alluded to, in the possession of the leaders of his sect. (She had received the vision back at home, in her room, planted into her head by the dead-fleshed man-thing that had accompanied the grotesque behemoth with the scorpion-tail. The vision had shown her a caveman, first, being pinned to a rock as a shaman with a sharpened staff scratched into his torso the same symbols as she and her deathlike visitor bore. She had seen glimpses of the same fundamental horror repeated through the aeons. The vision showed her men and women, young and old - in the ancient world, and in medieval dungeons- being branded and scored with these same devices, usually against their will. More recent subjects, though had been people more like herself. They had been willing though unsuspecting participants. They had including a good-looking young man, slender and dark haired, in a tattoo parlour somewhere, flinching under the needle that marked his body as hers had been marked.)
Why did this world of darkness send its agents- apparently human agents, like the double-crossing tattooist Astor, and the mysterious 'professor' that Rina had referred to, and abduct people from their time and space and bring them to this realm of horrors? And how? What was the real meaning of the symbols- the marks on the flesh of the 'chosen' and on Astor's necklace? How did they open the door? How did they act as a beacon attracting the harvester demons of this place? Lee thought these questions would drive her mad.

* * *

Anna slept fitfully. Before breakfast, she telephoned Lee's apartment, just in case. There was still no reply. She poured out some cornflakes that she didn't really want, picked at them half-heartedly, and then pushed them aside. She went back to the phone, and made an international call to the Parisian University. She tried to get across that she wanted to get in touch with Professor De Lusignan. She fingered Lee's silver and enamel necklace, nervously, as she waited for them to get back to her.
It transpired that the Professor was not in France. Given the far-flung exotic places she had read that the man had been to, Anna wouldn't have been surprised to find that he was on the other side of the world. It was a relief, therefore, to learn that he was actually on her doorstep, on an extended visit to London. The university could not find his contact number, but they were able to furnish her with an address. 1545 Sabbon Road, Islington. Islington? Anna raised her eyebrows, surprised that the Professor would choose an area like that. She had not been aware that Islington was a centre of scholarship. Still, she jotted it down on the same scrap of paper Lee had drawn her tattoo designs on. She spared no time, afterwards, dressing quickly in a black halter-top and jeans, throwing on her leather jacket and shoving the old take-away flier into its pocket. She grabbed her motorbike helmet and headed straight out of the door.
* * *

Ramon steered the truck onto a decayed motorway, and swerved around the gaping cracks and the jagged torn-up sections of asphalt. He drove for some hours. Lee grew drowsy, and closed her eyes, leaning against the door, trying and pretending to slumber. She felt tired to the core of her soul, but sleep was another of the things that had ceased to exist in this place. Darkness was descending as a valley opened out before them, filled with the ruins of a city. In the centre rose the towers of what looked like a Cathedral. It seemed the least ruinous of the city's buildings. The butcher drove into town, crossing the crumbling bridge over a wide grey river. The Cathedral tower, and the ruined towers of several other churches, rose up above the dead trees on the opposite bank. There was a parking lot next to a burnt-out pub, the Bull and Baby, as the sign stated. The tarmac of the car park was strewn with rubbish, gutted cars and busses and broken things, but the butcher found enough space for the truck. The place seemed to back up Lee's perception that she might not after-all be in Hell, as such, but in a post-apocalyptic future or a parallel dimension. This must surely have been a pleasant enough provincial city at one point. There would have been green leaves on these now dead trees and graceful white swans gliding on that now deadly water. There would have been bars and cafes, a market, antiques shops, art galleries and night-clubs, maybe a red-brick university and a students quarter. Lee looked back at the ruined pub. Its lower storey was boarded up. A poster had been pasted over the graffiti covered boards, and she could just make out the main text, in elaborate, theatrical lettering:

THE CARNIVAL OF SOULS
(All the fun of despair)
IN TOWN FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY

The butcher jumped out of the truck and came around to lift Lee from her seat. He carried her along until he saw an abandoned shopping trolley. Then he put her in that, and pushed her into town. In the civic square, below he ruined guildhall, they found the carnival, in full swing. There were flashing light on the fairground rides and trailers, and colourful flags and bunting on the striped tents.

A circus juggler jumped out at Lee, tossing four fiery batons above his head into the dusky sky, and catching them in his sharp teeth. His face was a skull. Lee recoiled away from him. The butcher pushed him aside with his claw. Lee looked about, fearfully, and thought she saw dancing figures, a carnival of lost souls, dwarfs, freaks - she was a freak herself now, of course. The limbless wonder. Figures danced around her. The revenants and harridans whirled, turning painted faces towards her and beckoning with their fingers. They cackled gleefully in her ears, and she could not shut them out. Hundreds of the souls whirled around her, she wondered who they had been when they were alive. Amid the pandemonium and the living shadows, she glimpsed a pale young girl, on the threshold of pubescence, the threshold of life. She was dressed in a white gown, as if for her Confirmation ceremony. She was slim and fine boned. She looked like a miniature bride, an angel. Her hair was lustrous, long and dark, her eyes were large and solemn. She gazed straight at Lee. 'Don't forget me, Lee!' the child said, her sweet, soft voice barely audible through the hubbub.

It somehow hurt to look at her. Glancing away, Lee saw the canvas flaps of one tent, striped blue and yellow, pulled open by two spindly black hands. The hands came from the tent itself. Beyond the flaps was nothing but an enormous, gaping mouth, the long pointed teeth resembling the stalagmites and stalactites of a cave, and horrible darkness stretched beyond them. An enormous pointed tongue like a crimson slug extended from the mouth, it passed over the jaws leaving an oozy coating of saliva to drip from the blade-like fangs. Laughter seemed to come from the butcher. He picked Lee out of her trolley, and took her in his arms, swirling through the ghostly crowds in a parody of a waltz, which she would not have been able to keep up in, even if she had still possessed her legs. Lee tried to keep her eyes on the pale young girl, and saw her being dragged away through the throng. She lost sight of her as the butcher whirled, his black cloak flowing out behind him. The visions of festive horror swirled around, behind the terrible head of the butcher that bent close to her own. Lee changed her mind again, this was surely Hell. The child she had seen was no longer anywhere in sight. As the butcher span around again, Lee looked past him, and past the others, to the blue and yellow striped tent. The flaps had closed up once more, over their abominable secret.

They whirled though the fun-land crowds until they came out on the other side of the square, onto what had once been a grassy area under trees. The ground had subsided under an old war memorial, with a bronze angel crowning a bronze soldier in laurel, which now listed to one side. Gravestones also poked up at various angles through the thorny scrub that had taken over the plot of land, and beyond it climbed the facade of the cathedral. The butcher snapped out of his dance, and bore Lee over to the great doorway.

There were two pillars, supporting a Romanesque arch, with a deep recess between them with the door in. In the way slumped a cadaver, a very pitiable looking devil. It had the same gristled flesh as the butcher, but it was small, emaciated and emasculated. The arms were little more than bones. It too had been deprived of ears and nose, but the mouth hung open, as if in an eternal groan. On its shrivelled torso were carved the four symbols which Lee had learned to despise.
'The rules,' said the butcher's voice, 'are found within this temple.'
The dead body opened its eyes at that, and looked up at him and the limbless young woman in his arms. Again telepathic messages not for Lee's hearing seemed to be exchanged, and soon the corpse opened the door, admitting them into the building.

* * *

The motorbike darted through the snarled-up London traffic, past the commuters, taxi-drivers and delivery men snarling in the gridlock. Soon it was out of the centre, and zipping through a quieter part of the city, an industrial backwater in Islington.
Anna swung herself from the saddle of her black and chrome Mitsubishi Marauder, hung her helmet on the handlebar and looked up at the building. This appeared to be the right place, or at least the address correlated to the one she had been given. The Gallowry headquarters was a fairly new warehouse, with glass-doored offices in front, surrounded by a blue-painted fence. There was a car park before the building, and a yard at the side where two big white transit vans were in the process of being unloaded, behind a stack of forklift crates. Large wooden boxes, the smallest of which were the size of coffins, were being unloaded from the vehicles, and manhandled by a gang of contracted workmen in buff overalls, into the building through the large metal sliding doors of the warehouse proper. Two men seemed to be overseeing the transfer, and she caught a snipped of their conversation.
'...Yes, thanks again, your bodies rather saved our skin, so to speak. It was good of you to supply them at such short notice.'
The speaker was tall, facing away from Anna, dressed in blue trousers and a white jacket.
'No problem, Mister Bauman. I trust your gallery's anniversary exhibition went well?'
'God, I'll say, with a bang! One of the most successful art exhibitions we've ever had at Red Tape. The things you guys do are awesome, disturbing, challenging... the logical next step from the work of people like Mark Quinn and Damian Hurst, and that German anatomist fellow- Von Hagens. Everyone was trying to guess how your artists do it, the pieces look so super-real.'
'That so?'
'One of my colleagues swore it was taxidermy! It's a shame you have to take them back; there were plenty of interested buyers. I'd have thought about buying one myself, she was exquisite, the girl with the olive skin and the dark hair, and the weird design things...'
'Not she, Mister Bauman,' the surly brute he was in conversation with corrected. 'It's an it. I told you, the works are all made of some combination of polymer clay and a latex something or other.' This man was squeezed into in a dark suit, and wore dark sunglasses. He was bull-necked and bald headed, and spoke in a gruff cockney accent. He had the general air of a night-club bouncer about him. He did not seem the sort who would usually start a sentence with 'I trust...' Anna imagined that most of the phrases he was now using he had borrowed from someone else, because some of them came out rather garbled.
Bauman nodded. 'Ah yes, your artist's secret formula. It's hard to keep that in mind, though, when you look at her - sorry it.'
'I shall pass your praise onto the artist, Mister Bauman. Meanwhile, shall we go through and settle up?' The men vanished through a side door.

Anna came to the door of the office, and paused, catching the reflected glint of her necklace, Lee's necklace really, in the glass. For some reason she paused, folding her fingers around the pendant, then pushing it out of sight under her top. She passed into a reception painted in a wan shade of green. There was an empty reception desk in front of her with no-one manning it. A potted plant languished in the corner, seeming about to give up the ghost. A row of lockers filled the other wall. One of them had a beer-mat pinned to it, the design attracting Anna's attentions, a skeleton in a dapper suit, holding a fan of cards to the spectator. Below was the legend Rusted Jack's Goodtime Emporium.
'Oh no, not you,' she said, under her breath, to the familiar skeleton. Rusted Jack's was in Soho. It was one of the clubs where she and Lee used to pole-dance. Her friend Lee had quit the stripping game once and for all two years ago, while she was still young, and had had persuaded Anna to do likewise. It had started to depress them both that the punters had not been there to watch the girls dance, so much as to watch their pudenda. Plus it had been draining work, upsetting and humiliating when they got bad crowds in. Both had by then already made headway into their chosen careers anyway, Anna in film promotion, Lee in contemporary dance, fully clothed. Anna didn't admit to feeling at all ashamed about how she had supplemented her student loan. It was always slightly awkward, however, meeting people who remembered her from that period of her life.
'Who are you?' A dry voice asked. Anna jumped, and nearly jumped again when she saw who was had appeared behind the reception. The man was lanky, of indeterminate age though his long hair was white suggested advancing years. His eyes were watery, and his lank face reminded Anna unnervingly of a goblin.
'Oh sorry, um, my name's Anna Seymour. I'm looking for a Professor Jean De Lusignan. I was told I could find him here, is that right?'
'Is that right?' The gaunt receptionist echoed, derisively, chewing a pink piece of gum in his very white teeth. His eyes narrowed. 'Well he's not here.'
'Oh,' she said, disappointed, and fingered the ring in her lower lip nervously. She noticed him staring at the snake tattooed on her hand. 'Well, is there anyone else, anyone who might know where he is?' She asked.
'Angonamo,' the receptionist said, raising his eyes as though he really had no time for these disturbances. He slithered away, disappearing into corridor behind the reception. Anna felt un-nerved. That was nobody she would have hired as a receptionist. She folded her arms and paced about while she waited.
'Hello darlin'' came the gravely voice of the big man she had heard speaking to Bauman outside. She looked up at him as he stepped close to her.
'Hi, she said, I wonder if you can help me...'
He took off his sunglasses and stared at her. He had drooping, pale blue eyes and no eyebrows. 'Hang on, I know you don't I?' he said. 'I know! You're the bird with the tattoos who strips at Rusted Jacks.'
'Used to be, yeah.' She said.
'What happened to your mate, the dark haired chick?'
'That's really what I'd like to know.' Anna said, in a low voice. She looked up at the man. 'So are you, er, in charge here?'
'I look after the operation, yeah.' He said. 'He thrust out a giant hand. 'Gerald Liver.'
She put her hand in his, though a little worried that he might crush it. 'Anna Seymour.' She flinched slightly as he squeezed her fine fingers and ran a stubby finger of his own over the snake tattoo on her hand. Er, so, um, what exactly are your operations, if you don't mind my asking?' she asked.
Liver gave a grunt, released her hand, and pulled a business card from his pocket. She took it, and read:
Gerald Liver, exhibition manager,
THE GALLOWRY
1547 Sabbon Road, London W1----
A new medium of art in body sculpture
Realistic * Life-size * Beautiful.
Tel. 02071411408.

Anna was intrigued, but little the wiser. However, she put aside any questions she might have had about the Gallowry. 'Interesting. Look, um, I'm looking for a man named De Lusignan, Professor Jean De Lusignan. The way things are going I seem to be barking up the wrong tree, but is it at all possible you know where I can find him?'
'The old bugger's not here at the mo. Hopped it somewhere like the Frog he is! Um, he should be about tomorrow. Why don't you come back then.'
Anna saw that this was the best she was going to get. She forced a smile. 'OK, thanks Mister Liver, I'll, er, do that then.' She suddenly felt very awkward indeed. He was staring at her body, though her clothes, a misty look in his eyes, probably remembering her on the pole at Rusted Jack's, legs at ten past ten. She felt glad to get away from his presence.
* * *

Beyond the Romanesque arch ran a long vaulted passage. It reminded Lee awfully of the passage that had lain beyond the dimensional portal that had opened in her bedroom room, through which the beast and the beast-man had came, and down which the living chains and the cruel hooks had dragged her. She found the mutilated remains of her body trembling in the butcher's arms, and a sickly tightness in her empty stomach, under the lower two of her tattoos. The butcher bore her on, across a cloister and towards the demons' inner sanctum.
They came to a long hall, formerly, it seemed, the nave of the cathedral. There were hundreds of them- skeletal figures, naked, bald headed, razor teethed and talon clawed, but all somehow human, nonetheless.
The butcher passed her to them, and their many sharp-fingered hands received her, and bore her aloft, on her back. They carried her truncated body along and passed her forward, as though she were bodysurfing over a crowd at a rock concert. There were so many of them. The high, Gothic vaults of the cathedral roof passed before her eyes, all in dark stone, far above her. Bat-winged things flapped about up there. A wall had been inserted below one of the arches of the central crossing, with a set of tall bronze doors in it. The demons, for such they seemed to be, hauled these doors open, and swept through them, carrying Lee at their head. The entire space under the central tower had been walled in, the walls tiled with a chequered pattern of red and black squares. Row upon row of the tiles stretching up the full height of the tower- impossibly high it seemed. It was a surreal sight. The tiles swam before Lee's eyes. She seemed to be rising past them. Their upper reaches, she saw were lost high above in the gloom of the hollowed-out belfry. More infernal chains dangled from that darkness, above her head, ending in more infernal hooks.
There were two white, Grecian columns rising from the floor within the tall chamber, some sixty feet in height, and five or six feet apart. The demons clambered over one-another, forming a tower from their bodies against the column to the left of the door, clawed feet pressing on bald scalps, talon-hands grasping at bodies and bony backs. They hauled Lee's pathetic body up the column's length. They left her on the flat top of the column's ornate capital. They then quickly retreated, over themselves, down to the oily floor, then away through the doors, which closed once the last one of them, was through. Leaving her alone.
No, not alone, there was another. It was a moment before she spotted him, for he made no sound. He stood on the stumps of legs, cut off just as hers were, at the top of the other column. He was a young man, good-looking, slender, maybe nineteen or twenty years old- little more than a boy. He looked familiar... Both his arms, too, were missing though he still had his stumps, and there were no metal ring-pins in his shoulders. He wore only a black pair of shorts, apparently of some latex-like material. His flesh was very pale, like Lee's. He was thin in the face, though his torso still had the shape of its strong pectoral and stomach muscles. He bore exactly the same four tattoos as Lee did under her red leotard. He had dark, floppy hair that straggled down to his neck, and a little pointed goatee beard on his well-defined chin. He had large dark eyes that appealed to her, and his expression looked sad, apprehensive and traumatised. She supposed that her own expression must be somewhat similar. Finally, she remembered where she had seen him before. It had been in the vision she had received. She had seen him being given these fatal tattoos. Now here they were together, atop their pillars like a couple of statues or stilites, without a limb between them.
'Hi,' she said, with the best friendly smile she could muster. He glanced at her nervously, morosely, but did not seem able to reply. She saw he was terrified.
'It's all right,' she said. 'I'm Leela O'Riley, but people mostly call me Lee.' She smiled again. 'Don't be afraid, I can't exactly hurt you, can I?'
His cheek twitched, maybe he was trying to smile. 'Sorry,' he said. Then he started to cry.
Lee wanted to soothe him, to reach out, but there was nothing she could do.
'Please don't cry,' she said softly.
He was pretty inconsolable, though. 'Why? Look what they did! Why have they done this to me..?' He sobbed. He looked at her. '...To us?'
'I don't know,' she said, sighing. 'What's your name?'
'My... name?'
'That thing they call you.'
'Oh,' he said, trying to stop crying, trying to smile, but not really succeeding. 'Nick, Nick Grant.'
'Nick, nice to meet you Nick.' Lee said. 'The girls call you Nicky, I'm guessing?'
'Yeah.' He looked back at her, looking slightly more at ease. 'Yeah, they did. Hey, Lee, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm crying like a pussy, I...' He turned his face away, ashamed.'
'Don't worry, I've cried more than enough since I got here!' She told him.
'I guess you will have done, but... Never mind.'
'You're American, right?' She asked, noticing his accent.
'No, I'm from Canada, Winnipeg Canada.' He looked back at her. 'You're English?'
'Yeah, Irish family though.'
'You sure are beautiful, whatever you are,' Nick said, after a pause. 'If you don't mind me saying. You're the first beautiful thing I've seen since I got to this fucking place, despite what they've done to you.'
'Well, thanks!' She said, feeling maladroit. 'For that matter you're the most handsome guy I've met here!'
'Yeah, but I've seen the others! Man!' Nick said.
Lee shook her head. It was a surreal conversation to be having, but there were no guidelines for the proper things to say in these unreal circumstances. 'What is this place, Nick?'
'They told me it was where we have to make, like, a choice, or something... but I'm not sure what it means.'
'A choice?'
'Yeah, but I don't know any more than that.'
The two were silent for a space, Lee felt exhausted, and feared she might sway and topple from the column at any moment. She also felt anxious; hating this waiting for whatever new torment was coming. She glanced at Nick from time to time, but for the most part he just stared forward into his own thoughts and worries. 'Nothing?' She asked at length.
'What..?'
'You know nothing more, other than that we've got to make some sort of choice?'
'Oh,' he said, 'well it has- I mean this is just me guessing, mostly, but I think it has something to do with the meaning of these goddamn marks.' He looked down at his body. Oh Jesus, I was such a fucking idiot to get them done.'
'That's how I feel - I mean so was I.'
'How come you did?'
'Well... it hardly matters now.'
'I'd kind of like to know.' He said. She looked away, but felt his eyes on her.
Lee sighed. 'I wanted to get something done, to be like my friend, but I didn't know what. I made an appointment, hoping I might get some last minute inspiration. The tattooist, God, he looked far out, he had metal horns and had pierecings in every conceivable place, anyway, he showed me a drawing, a silhouette with these symbols on, saying that they were from an ancient site, a carving from a tomb in Madagascar. I really couldn't resist them - somehow, just looking at them... I couldn't not get them...' She looked at him. He nodded, and invited her to continue. She went on to tell him about the necklace, and what had happened when she had put it on a few nights afterwards, once the tattoos were healed. It was, paradoxically, both cathartic and traumatic to talk about the episode. The monsters that had tormented her and visions of her limbs hanging on hooks came back to haunt her. By the end she was fighting back tears. 'With the benefit of hindsight,' she said, bitterly, 'I concede that getting these tattoos was not the most the most sensible thing I ever did.'
'At least you can say you weren't warned. You didn't know,' the boy said.
'You had a warning? I don't understand, how come you got them?'
'You'll think I'm so dumb. '
'I don't think I'm any-one to judge.'
'Well, I'm telling you, I was so dumb. Me and my mate found this strange, like thing on the internet. Someone had posted a page, saying something like "Please under no circumstances get yourself tattooed with these four symbols, or something really, really bad will happen to you. Something you would not believe, they are poison. If you care about your soul, do not do it". Then it had, like, a diagram. They looked to me kind of interesting, and mysterious, and weird. I was always sort of into all that occult stuff, so I thought it was cool. My buddy dared me to get 'em done. It's fucking weird, the temptation of the thing- like to look in the mirror and say "Candyman, Candyman, Candyman". It's the imp of the perverse, baby! Like when you think, Christ, wouldn't it be dreadful if I laughed at this funeral- and then you've just gotta do it, just 'cause of that! Plus my mate said I'd be chicken shit if I didn't.' He paused, looking at her, probably aware that he had started to garble his story a bit. He breathed. 'Actually I'd been planning to get a tattoo done for a while, anyway, but I couldn't think what I wanted. I didn't want just anything, it had to be something full-on, and I guess kind of interesting and mysterious and weird.' He looked away. 'I got here, and- oh shit, look what they did to me!'

'I'm sorry, Nicky.' Lee said.
'So am I, Lee.' He said, one corner of his mouth twisting up into a crooked sort of smile. 'Good to know you ain't alone, though, ay?'
She smiled at him, lulled into a welcome feeling of camaraderie. It was indeed somehow a comfort, in a perverse way, to know hers was a shared suffering, a shared curse. It was like they were family. The cliché was true, she thought, misery loves company.

Then the doors opened and a tall figure in a billowing black robe entered, carrying a long staff in a gloved hand . He was flanked by some of the smaller demons, the ones that had brought her here. There then came a rattling sound, and two chains, forged of grim dark links, with hooks suspended from their nethermost extremities, lowered from the dimness above. They swung at Lee.
'No! Leave her alone!' Nick cried, but the hooks shot home into the ringed eyelets embedded in Lee's shoulder-bones, as if drawn by some magnetic power. She fell forward in the force of their impact, and her body jerked on the chains. 'Leave her alone! Lee!' Nick cried again, but the chains lowered Lee to the ground. She was received by the hands of the waiting demons, which carried her through the doors after the tall one in the robe.

* * *
'Well, what does she damned well want?' The professor demanded.
'Dunno, Prof.,' Liver said, 'You don't reckon she's another friend of Rina's come lookin' for her do you?'
'How would I know? I've never heard of an Anna Seymour. And a stripper, you say, my oh my!' De Lusignan leaned back behind his desk. He was dressed in good quality tweeds. His long, silver-grey hair rippled back from the broad brow of an academic and a patrician. He had a long bony nose and gaunt, sunken cheeks, and an overall air of distinction and hauteur. In his hands he held a little gold box, with ornate engravings on its faces. He fiddled with it idly. 'It was bad enough that infernal journalist coming with all his infernal questions.'
'The tosser made a nice exhibit, though, didn't he? A contrast to the little pretties.'
'Yes, but he shouldn't have, he shouldn't have been among the chosen. I always had my reservations about this whole Gallowry affair, anyway. We should be keeping our people secret, not sending them out to art galleries and inviting the public to gawp at them. We must be insane, every time they leave this place the chances increase of someone recognising one of them.'
'There's no harm making a bit of dough on the side with the leftovers from our holy work.' Liver smirked. 'Besides, as far as the punters are concerned they ain't real, the works are made of some combination of pol...'
'Yes, yes, Liver. Please, spare me!'
There was a knock on the office door. 'Scuse me gents, her with the purple hair's come back.' The receptionist said.
De Lusignan rose. 'Oh well, never keep a lady waiting. Who knows, she may make a suitable addition to our little collection.'

* * *

Lee was blindfolded. What need there was for it she couldn't guess, when she could not move to go anywhere, but hoodwink her they had. She was carried by the hissing hoard for an indeterminate amount of time. Then she was allowed to see again. She found herself in a dark chamber, and it was a while before she could make out anything. The robed figure dropped his hood. His head was bald, white as a corpse, and scored all over with a grid pattern. Each line dug deep into his ashen flesh, and a nail stuck into him at every intersection. His garment, beneath his hooded cloak, was a black robe, similar to a priestly cassock. It was made of some leather-like material, with open sections at his chest discoloured by blood. Three other figures, similarly dressed, appeared behind him from the shadows. The first was a female, bald headed and as pale as the man with the head of nails. There was a bloody orifice in her throat, its labia held open by metal wires. The other two figures were even more sickening to behold. These genderless beings were in no recognisable way human above the neck. One had a head like an oversized maggot. It had a monstrous mouth with sharp teeth that chattered and gnashed continually. It had no eyes, ears or nose whatever. The other thing had eyes, at least, but these were, like the butcher's, sewn shut. An oversized tongue protruded from its mouth.
'Welcome, Lee, my child,' Head-of-nails said. His dark eyes glinted. 'We have been waiting for you for a long time.'
'What are you? What do you want with me?' She lowered her voice, sadly. 'Why can't you just leave me in peace?'
'We are called cenobites. We want to lift you out of the Abyss, daughter.' Head-of-nails said. The others said nothing, though maggot-head continued to gnash his teeth. 'We brought you here to show you how you may achieve elevation from your pathetic state. How you may be free, up to a point. Your flesh will always be ours, because it bears our mark.'
'Are you in charge here?' She asked him, fearfully.
He laughed. 'We are, ah, think of us as the Devil's senior civil servants,' he said, and then he pointed. She followed his finger and saw two freestanding, oblong monoliths. On them was writing. It was in English, though the stones and the inscription looked millennia older than the Anglo-Saxon tongue, or event than the Latin alphabet. The four strange symbols, which were marked onto so many of the inmates of this Hell, also featured at intervals throughout the text. Behind the inscribed stones hung a numberless quantity of chains with hooks on the ends. The floor was foul with blood and scraps of skin and meat. 'The rules, my daughter,' Head-of-nails said. 'Read.'
'I'm not your daughter.' She said, faintly, with the last spark of her defiance.
He laughed, and then turned her face to the stones with his cold, gloved hand. 'Read!'
* * *


They are hollowed out. De Lusignan passed through the warehouse on his way to meet the visitor. The staff had started to unpack some of the crates. The professor paused, seeing the middle-aged man's face through the one of the open boxes, like a body in a coffin. There was a grisly mark around one of the eyes as though something had tried to tear it out. In fact that was where a metal hook had lodged. The man in the crate wore a crumpled suit, though his legs and lower body were still wrapped in packing foam. 'Hello old darling' De Lusignan said, as he passed. Then he saw Rina. He could not help lingering by Rina. She had been half Spanish aristocrat and half English rose. Her face was almost indecently beautiful, the shapes of her closed eyes and her luxuriant black lashes stirred a never-dying feeling of wonder in De Lusignan's heart. The faint breeze from the air conditioning stirred her cascading hair. He reached out to run his hand through it, a shiver going down his spine as he did so. He was still in love with the twenty-one year old belle, who had been his student, protégée and lover. She had loved him too, and had submitted obediently to being branded with the four symbols that now lay concealed under the chains that wrapped around her skin- her beautiful olive skin, securing it to its metal frame. This thing, this relic of her was his, now, unchanging, unageing, serene and beautiful forever. The four symbols were also found on the gold box, now in the professor's pocket, and under the clothes and wrappings of the other bodies in this room. The Gallowry kept their skin, Hell claimed the rest. Some of the bodies displayed lacerations and other wounds. Not Rina's though. Rina had to be forever perfect. She was to be like Sleeping Beauty, or Snow White in her glass coffin. That had been the professor's condition with the beings that had hollowed her out and taken her soul- and her body minus this lovely skin. Her appearance here must be as it had been in life, she must never change, never age, never wilt. He had insisted on that. It was his reward for years of loyal service to the Satanic power. Greedy for this beauty, he reached out and stroked her cheek, the cheek of her embalmed skin. After a moment he reluctantly tore himself away from his most prized exhibit.

'Miss Seymour, I believe!' De Lusignan smiled, turning on the charm as he stepped into the lobby. 'Professor Jean de Lusignan at your service, I understand there was something you wished to talk to me about?'
* * *

Lee focused on the writing on the stones. On the first stone she read the following:

HELL IS EVER HUNGRY; ALL ITS INHABITANTS ARE CONDEMNED TO SUFFER. YET THERE, AS ELSEWHERE A HIERARCHY EXISTS, AND THE DAMNED RISE IN RANK FROM TORTURED TO TORTURERS BY ENLISTING AND BY TAKING NEW SOULS. BECAUSE (the four symbols, senth, ruar, kurtan, menon) AND FOR NEW SOULS HELL IS