only real demon this place has ever known or ever will, and that pleased
him.
Months ago he stopped thinking of himself by his Christian name. He
adopted the name of a fiend that he had read about in a book on
Satanism.
Vassago. One of the three most powerful demon princes of Hell, who
answered only to His Satanic Majesty. Vassago. He liked the sound of
it.
When he said it aloud, the name rolled from his tongue so easily that it
seemed as if he’d never answered to anything else.
“Vassago.”
In the heavy subterranean silence, it echoed back to him from the
concrete rocks: “Vassago.”
7
“Eighty degrees.”
“It should be happening,” Ken said.
Surveying the monitors, Kari said, “Flat lines, just flat lines.”
Her long, swan-like neck was slender that Jonas could see her pulse
pounding rapidly in her carotid artery.
He looked down at the dead man’s neck. No pulse there.
“Seventy-five minutes,” Gina announced.
“If he comes around, it’s officially a record now,” Ken said. “We’ll be
obligated to celebrate, get drunk, puke on our shoes, and make fools of
ourselves.”
“Eightyne degrees.”
Jonas was so frustrated that he could not speak for fear of uttering an
obscenity or a low, savage snarl of anger. They had made all the right
moves, but they were losing. He hated losing. He hated Death. He
hated the limitations of modern medicine, all circumscriptions of human
knowledge, and his own inadequacies.
“Eighty-two degrees.”
Suddenly the dead man gasped.
Jonas twitched and looked at the monitors.
The EKG showed spastic movement in the patient’s heart-“here we go,”
Kari said.
8
The robotic figures of the damned, more than a hundred in Hell’s heyday,
were gone with eleven of the twelve demons; gone, as well, were the
wails of agony and the lamentations that had been broadcast through
their speaker-grille mouths. The desolate chamber, however, was not
without lost souls. But now it housed something more appropriate than
robots, more like the real thing: Vassago’s collection.
At the center of the room, Satan waited in all his majesty, fierce and
colossal. A circular pit in the floor, sixteen to eighteen feet in
diameter, housed a massive statue of the Prince of Darkness himself.
He was not shown from the waist down; but from his navel to the tips of
his segmented horns, he measured thirty feet. When the funhouse had
been in operation, the monstrous sculpture waited in a thirty-five-foot
pit, hidden beneath the lake, then periodically surged up out of its
lair, water cascading from it, huge eyes afire, monstrous jaws working,
sharp teeth gnashing, forked tongue flickering, thundering a
warning-“Abandon hope all ye who enter here! “and then laughing
malevolently.
Vassago had ridden the gondolas several times as a boy, when he had been
one of the wholly alive, before he had become a citizen of the
borderland, and in those days he had been spooked by the handcrafted
devil, affected especially by its hideous laugh. If the machinery had
overcome years of corrosion and suddenly brought the cackling monster to
life again, Vassago would not have been impressed, for he was now old
enough and sufficiently experienced to know that Satan was incapable of
laughter.
He halted near the base of the towering Lucifer and studied it with a
mixture of scorn and admiration. It was corny, yes, a funhouse fake
meant to test the bladders of small children and give teenage girls a
reason to squeal and cuddle for protection in the arms of their smirking
boyfriends.
But he had to admit that it was also an inspired creation, because the
designer had not opted for the traditional image of Satan as a
lean-faced, sharp-nosed, thin-lipped Lothario of troubled souls, hair
slicked back from a widow’s peak, goatee sprouting absurdly from a
pointed chin.
Instead, this was a Beast worthy of the title: part reptile, part
insect, part humanoid, repulsive enough to command respect, just
familiar enough to seem real, alien enough to be awesome. Several years
of dust, moisture, and mold had contributed a patina that softened the
garish carnival colors and lent it the authority of one of those
gigantic stone statues of Egyptian gods found in ancient sand-covered