THE HAUNTED KINGDOM 3 by CHARLES E.J. MOULTON (ereader that reads to you .txt) 📕

him and he had to shake several of them off just to be able to walk. But there were always more. He kicked one of them in the face, who started to bleed.
He, a longhaired gentleman of maybe 40 with distinguished features, screamed:
”You dumb soul, you broke my nose.” He looked at him and held up his own nose. “You will have to get me a new one, you will.”
Alex kept on walking, all the time petrified that he would lose contact with himself and why he was here. Why was he here? Family. Get his family. Was Adnicul behind him? Had Adnicul lost his way? Of course he had not. He knew this place. He simply could not hear him because of the noise of all these people screaming in the mud.
He saw the tunnel straight ahead and aimed for it.
It was simply a black hole in the horizon that seemed to suck up everything around.
That was it, wasn’t it?
”Come and join us, it’s fun down here, it is!”
“Become one of the mud club, har-har!”
No, don’t look back.
Was he there?
Just a few feet now.
Then, two minutes prior to his head bursting all of the souls simply disappeared and the acute clamour from before was exchanged by an incredible silence.
Alex looked behind him and saw nothing, only mud and no screaming faces, not even Adnicul.
Before he could converse Adnicul’s name he was sucked backward into the black hole, only this time he was sliding through space, sucked by something that wanted him to move faster and faster down this mysterious shaft. All he could see was lights flashing past his vision and he kept wondering if he had lost his friend back in the valley or if he should go back or …
The tunnel spun and curved and escalated and dropped and curved again.
Then, all at once, he was in familiar territory, he thought, in the path of red brown clay.
“Adnicul?”
No answer, maybe he had been swallowed after all.
“I’m here, Alex.”
Alexander turned around and saw his friend’s familiar face smiling.
“I was always here, friend!” Adnicul pointed at the sword Alex was carrying at his back. “You will need that here.”
Alex did what he was told and realized that they were aiming for a staircase a bit of a way off.
This was no pit, no valley.
“After the doomed are registered and made to wait, they are made to work. After their endless pain in the field of lost souls they come here, to level five. What you see here is pure chaos and the only way to get by here is walk past the chaos. There is a path that leads around it, is unfortunately not as safe as the other paths, but the path is so full of parasites that you will have cut off a few arms and legs to get by. You will see what I mean.”
“Arms and legs?”
”These souls, when they are eaten and killed or whipped, will never actually die or loose a leg. They can die a million times here. It is absolute carnal debauchery because they don’t need to eat or sleep or multiply or anything. This is the beginning of Lucifer’s army. They will do anything for him because once they get here they are taught to spit and suffer and that has made them increadably angry at anything.”
Alexander had nothing to say. He just heard the noise now. It was unbearably loud like a mob going completely crazy.
“What about the collectors? I fail to see them.”
”You won’t anymore. After the third level they could not keep anything under charge. It is eat and be eaten here. All of your magic powers that you have gained on your trip here will be necessary. You see, the whole point of these seven levels is to consciously train an army that is so loyal that no one can break it apart.”
”But that is scary.”
“It is all built on destruction. Sooner or later it eats itself. The army that destroys has no future. Here or on earth.”
“Does Lucifer know how this?”
Adnicul took a long look at Alexander. He looked at him as if he had just bitten his leg.
Adnicul shook his head and pointed his finger at him.
“Alex, don’t ever ask that question. You don’t want to tempt him.”
The two men walked to the staircase.
When they arrived at the top of it, what they saw was the biggest arena they had ever seen. There was a blue sky above with clouds of various formations. There was a big rising in the middle with a baldachin. There were several figures there, sitting and enjoying themselves Alex presumed. But they were small as ants, so it was hard to see.
The entire area was probably nine or ten time the equivalent of say the Colloseum in Rome. It was huge and all that Alex could see at the moment was that this entire area around the baldachin was smock full of people. He was too far up at the moment to see what they were doing, but as he was walking down this long staircase, narrow as it was, he began to see what it was.
These were people, all of these crazy antlike things were people. The closer he came, the more he saw that this entire place was full of people who were rolling in food, making love, eating each other.
“We have a problem.”
”What?”
”We need to get to that baldachin over there.”
Alex looked at Adnicul. “What? Excuse me?”
”The person sitting there has the key to the sixth level. You cannot enter the sixth level without a key. Anyone who enters it would be crazy.”
”What is there?”
”You worry about this place first, my friend.”
Alex was beginning to worry. It all seemed so thought through, so very much like a scheme.
“Who might that person be?”
”Who do you think would be sitting there and watching the game?”
Alex paused. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Adnicul nodded.
”You mean” Alex laughed “we go to the very person that is the reason for all of this and ask him of permission to recapture what he has taken away?”
Adnicul smiled. “You fail to understand. Lucifer doesn’t think that we will survive. That is why he gives us the key. So that we can die and leave him alone. You see, it isn’t that easy after all to get back your family. You have come half way. Your sister is dead. But now comes the tough part.”
There was a long pause and Adnicul could see the wheels turning in the king’s head. “You’re not turning into a coward, are you? I mean you left the palace to find this place, not me.”
That moment, he was reminded of himself running through Iuventus Sacrum and screaming and made a decision.
“Let’s get on with it.”
”Good boy.”
The further down he came, they more steady the grip around the handle of his sword got. He saw now the carnage that was going on. Millions of bodies on top of each other, writhing and screaming and belching and farting and copulating and excrementing and hitting each other. As far as the eye could see this arena was a place with only two spectators and millions of actors.
Once they started walking over the bodies, barely making it, Alex realized how hard this was. Arms were grabbing him from everywhere. They were throwing limbs at him and sometimes their own excrements. He found himself cutting off a limb or two, stepping on heads and occasionally into a mouth or two. The only thing that seemed vital was to get across to the staircase and up the fifty steps to the baldachin first. He had to walk very fast. If he didn’t walk fast, he would find himself among these people. He had to plan who to step on next or he would end up a victim himself.
People were punching him everywhere they could. There was one man that shouted atrocities at him way after Alex had cut off the arm that dangled by his trousers, refusing to loose grip and apparently very much alive. When he looked across his shoulder briefly, he saw the arm scuttling back to its owner.
They were a third of the way now.
Then suddenly, a wrong step and he fell down on top of a woman with a very large nose. The first thing she did was scream at him.
He tried to get up, but there was no way of getting up.
He tried and the more he tried to reach Adnicul’s hand, the worse his chances seemed to be. He sank down into a sea of bodies and could only see flesh everywhere. A sea of screaming flesh.
“Where am I?”
Someone was beating him on the head with his foot and another was kicking him in the ribs.
He fought to see the light and saw it now.
God, he was sinking.
He could not see anything but bodies.
He gathered all his strength and pushed himself up, body by body, only to find the same woman screaming at him again. He grabbed Adnicul’s arm only to find that Adnicul himself was being dragged backward.
Soon Adnicul was gone and his entire form seemed lost forever among these atrocious people. He cut off a few limbs to find him but to no avail. Standing was impossible, but …
There he was. He grabbed his friend’s arm and pulled him out.
Was this the right one?
Yes, it was Adnicul. He had a severe cut on the head, but it was him.
Faster than before, the two ran like the wind to the staircase and found themselves running up the first ten steps of the white marble staircase only to fall down, panting.
“My maker, that was close!”
”Yes, I am glad we made it!”
Alex saw a small dainty fountain to his immediate left, gracing a statue that seemed to just stand there in the middle of everything with fore warning or fanfare.
”Water? Fresh water?”
Adnicul shook his head. “Don’t drink hell water, boy. It will make you want to stay here. Anything offered here is dangerous. We must keep moving.”
As they walked up the staircase he was reminded of how long he had travelled to get here and how close to the goal he was.
Soon enough, he was up there and before him, on a gilded throne positioned upon red satin, was the prince of flies himself.
No large tra-ra. No big orchestra fanfare, just a smile.
“So glad that you could make it all this way here.”
He was dressed in a white toga and his hairstyle reminded Alex very much of Caligula’s own. Next to Lucifer, there was a woman. She was so dazzlingly attractive that Alex had to pinch himself twice in order not to be rude. Dressed completely in blue with long, curvaceous brown hair down her back, she looked at him with large full eyes and every smile seemed aimed at seduction.
He controlled himself.
“Meet Joan.”
Alex said nothing.
“No, it is not the one of Orleans fame. She couldn’t make it.”
Lucifer bellowed and the woman started to laugh as well, her entire body shaking as she did.
She sounded like donkey.
They calmed down. “You like this place?”
Adnicul spoke. “Give us the key, Lucifer.”
His former master played innocent. “Key? What key?