We reached the rock and pushed into a crevice, me, Brigitte, and two of the cops, the only two that remained. We backed way in and were in a shadow. There was a thundering tromp tromp tromp as the demons made their way to us. Through a small slice of horrid light from outside, I could see a giant foot as they stood there. Then the edge of a pitchfork came in, probing around. Then nothing, for a while, but I could still see the foot. Then, the slice of light was blotted out and one giant finger came in. I gasped and Brigitte made a strangled sound as the finger poked around, the claw on the end of it like the three-headed demon’s slicing claw. It waved around but couldn’t poke right in there enough. We pushed back more, a mass of four people crunching into one, and waited there.
I hoped against hope that I would just wake up, and when I thought of that, I grabbed Brigitte’s hand again; we needed to be touching, I figured, when I woke up in order for her to go with me and I was not going to leave her here.
For the next what-seemed-like an hour or more, maybe hours, periodically we’d hear scraping and crashing and the pitchfork or a hand would poke in and try to get us. We could also dimly hear the boiling and screaming from the cauldron of souls. My only hope was that I would wake up back in that park in
But I didn’t wake up and then it got worse because there suddenly started being a grinding scraping sound and the rock shuddered. Then the rock moved, behind us, twisting a little, and some dust came down.
“They’re moving the rock,” said one of the cops.
“Lifting it, probably,” said the other.
Brigitte grabbed onto my shoulder and I wrapped my arms around her.
The rock continued to shudder and groan and move and dust fell and then little chunks fell and then more chunks and we heard cracking and tearing and then suddenly the entire mountain just rose up over us and we looked up to see the three demons standing there, holding the cone of rock about fifty feet above our heads. The three-headed one let out a triple roar and they threw the rock off to the side; when it landed it shook the whole of the ground and we all took off running for the nearest rock which was about 200 yards away, on the other side of the two parts of cop and two parts of Samson which the demons had left sitting there while they’d been trying to get us. We ran past them and Samson’s arm waved weakly; he was saying something but I couldn’t hear what.
The demons made pretty short work of us, though. They simply reached down and scooped us up; me and Brigitte were still holding hands and so one of the demons got us in one hand. We were lucky; it was a demon with relatively smooth hands and he simply smushed us into them and we clung to each other as he lifted us up. One of the cops got grabbed by the thorn-hand and the other cop got sliced in two by three-head.
I couldn’t take it anymore and I simply screamed as loud as I could. I kept my arms wrapped around Brigitte and she kept her arms wrapped around me.
“I’m sorry I’m so sorry I’m sorry” I kept saying. We were being carried to the cauldron and Brigitte leaned her mouth against my ear and said:
“I forgive you, Rachel! I love you!”
“I love you, too!” I said. We were both crying. The demon held us so tightly I could almost not get the air to say the words. Tears rolled down my face and we just hugged each other.
The demon lifted up his hand over the cauldron. We were in his hand, crunched together, and staring down into that boiling swirling lake of souls, spinning around and around and screaming in torment for all eternity, when I remembered Naked Girl.
“Hang on, Brigitte,” I yelled.
She clung to me and I figured that was good enough. I wrapped my arms not around her now but around one of the demon’s fingers. Brigitte shifted so she was a little to the side and I grabbed on with all my life and all my strength as the demon opened his hand to send us tumbling into the cauldron.
I didn’t know what would happen if I fell into the cauldron and then woke up, but I didn’t want to find out what that cauldron felt like and I didn’t think I could hang onto Brigitte in there. Plus, her whole body was here, so wouldn’t it be worse for her? Plus she had the baby… the baby, my baby?... and I couldn’t let that happen. So I hung onto the hand and the demon turned his hand over and we stayed there, hanging onto his finger, over the boiling water. Souls’ screams drifted up to us and I heard the demon mutter/roar something in his backward Hell talk and he shook his hand up and down once, twice, three times. But I hung on and Brigitte hung on and we stayed there.
The demon brought up his pitchfork in his other hand, poking at us. He poked it into my side once, trying to scrape us off his hand, then pulled it away, then brought it back and as he did, I let go with one arm and wrapped my arms around the fork part of it. Brigitte didn’t say anything; she just hung on and we slid down to the base of the pitchfork’s tines, which was smaller than the demon’s finger and which I could get a better grip around. It was easy – all we had to do was avoid the really sharp triangle at the end.
The demon pulled that up and looked at it, holding us right near his face. His sulfur-stink-hot-fire breath wafted over us and I tried not to breath. It felt like my face would melt. Then he shook the fork back and forth and said something again in his backward talk, and then he reversed the pitchfork and held it up, over the cauldron. That’s when I realized my mistake – he could simply poke us into the cauldron and we’d have to let go, or probably would let go when we were immersed in boiling Hell water.
So I let go as he waved it back. He stuck it into the cauldron almost immediately as we let go and I yelled and we fell, dropping down and down and down about 70 feet before we were caught… by the demon’s hand again. Immediately, I scrambled and grabbed onto his thumb.
The demon began lifting us up and held us in front of his head again, staring at us – me clinging to his thumb and Brigitte clinging to me.
“Oh, man, I hope I wake up soon,” I said, and the demon opened his mouth wide and leaned his head back. He brought the hand up to his mouth… was he simply going to eat us? That wasn’t fair! That wasn’t what they did. They were supposed to keep trying to put us in the soup.
He leaned back his head and opened his mouth wide and brought his hand to it. We were about ten feet away from his mouth, with me still clinging to his thumb, when we began falling again.
The hand had fallen off his wrist and was tumbling to the ground. I held onto the thumb as we flipped through the air over and over, and the hand landed on the ground underneath us, with us on top (luckily, or it would have crushed us, I suppose) and we scrambled off and looked up to see what had happened.
There was a beautiful naked lady on a winged horse with a sword swirling around the demon. She darted in and out and in and out and stabbed at the demon, howling at it and the horse whinnying, as the demon swung its pitchfork around and tried to bat at her. She darted in and out and poked at its head, too small to do much damage to the demon but also too quick for it to get easily. She got a score on its eye and the demon howled. She swung around the back of his head and slashed her sword at its neck, and the demon put its remaining hand to the wound there, which sprayed glowing-green-blood, a giant waterfall of it that began spattering around us. We backed away from the demon and the cauldron, still watching the fight as the Valkyrie….
Ivanka! It was her!
… continued to fly around and harass the demon. The other two demons, three head and horn-hand came around, too, and began waving their arms around her and trying to pitchfork-stab her, but they were slow, too, and she was fast.
There were giant puddles of green blood everywhere now, glowing and stinking and looking acidic, and we backed and backed away, until we were standing near half of Samson.
“Help me,” his head said to me.
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