The Scarlet Gospels

All is death, woman. All is pain. Love breeds loss. Isolation breeds resentment. No matter which way we turn, we are beaten. Our only true inheritance is death. And our only legacy, dust.

Living in Hell kept him aware of the possibility of Heaven, and he’d never felt more alive.

I think babies cry when they’re born because they’re born with the knowledge of all the terrible shit that’s gonna happen to them. That’s why I never had kids. Every life is a death sentence. We just forget it later in life, like dreams we lose the second we wake up. Whether we worry about it or not, the shit’s still going to fly. The important thing is we’re here. At least for now.

Hell was easy; romance was hard.

I have such sights to show you. Soon, you will have answers to questions you have never even dared to ask.

They knew a lot, the dead. How many times had she said to Harry they were the world’s greatest untapped resource? It was true. All they’d seen, all they’d suffered, all they’d triumphed over—lost to a world in need of wisdom. And why? Because at a certain point in the evolution of the species a profound superstition was sewn into the human heart that the dead were to be considered sources of terror rather than enlightenment.

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. —André Gide, The Counterfeiters

War is but a continuation of diplomacy by alternate means.

I swear, the bigger the bully, the smaller the dick.

They had a leader. Some rebel. Shite! I don’t remember his name. You know me and names. He was a dickhead and everybody says so. And old Bitch Tits kicked him down here. He started some rebellion.” “Lucifer?” “That’s the one. Lucifer. They prayed to Lucifer.

The World-Soul is sick, Harry, crazy-sick. And if we don’t each do our part and try to get to the root of its pain and burn it out, then everything is for nothing.

...tonight they all wished they could cut from their mind's configuration the part that knew—had always known, since infancy—that the great wound of the world was deepening, day on day, and they had no choice but feel the hurt as if it was their own, which of course in part it was.

The way she saw it, she was lucky. She wasn't really blind—she just saw a different world from most other folks, and that put her in a unique position to do some good in the world.

That’s fucked,” he remarked, sounding a damn sight less nonchalant than he felt.

We’re all in it together, Harry. We’re all pieces of the fisherman. I know that sounds like a bullshit answer, but you’ll see, when you start to work with the dead. Everyone’s complicit: the most innocent little kiddies; babies who live a day, an hour—they still have a hand in things, even their own deaths. I know that’s very hard for you to get your head around right now, but take it from someone that’s spent a lot of time with death.

Has anyone here ever heard of the Harrowing?” Dale asked, breaking the silence. No one replied. “It was in the time between Christ’s crucifixion and his Resurrection,” he went on. “The story goes, Christ went down into Hell, walked among the damned, and set many of them free. Then he returned to Earth and broke the bondage of death. It’s supposedly the first and only amnesty Hell has ever known.

He loved getting crucified at the summer and winter solstices,” Norma told Harry. Norma listened while the invisible presence added something to this. “He says you should try it, Harry. A crucifixion and a good blow job. Heaven on Earth.

The presence of phantoms – everywhere – their faces, ripe with need and unspent passion, trailing their hunger like pollen from flowers that were past their hour but refused to wither and disappear.

Are you ready for the apocalypse?

The Monastery of the Cenobitical Order was a large-walled compound built seven hundred thousand years ago on a damned-made hill of stone and cement.

Harry knew very little about architecture but enough to know that Lucifer’s labors here had later inspired a whole architecture of the living world and their own Gothic creations. He’d been inside some of them on his travels around Europe, in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Santa Eulalia in Barcelona, in Bourdeaux Cathedral, and of course in Chartres Cathedral, where he’d once taken sanctuary, having just killed in the blizzard-blinded streets a demon who had been seducing infants to their deaths with corrupt nursery rhymes.

Had Harry been born under a star less kind, he might well have ended up among the city’s nomadic visionaries, his days taken up with begging for enough money to buy some liquid oblivion, his nights spent trying to find a place where he could not hear the adversaries singing as they went about their labors of the dark. They had only ever sung one song within earshot of Harry, and that was “Danny Boy,” that hymn to death and maudlin sentiment that Harry had heard so often that he knew the words by heart.

You’re right, of course. I haven’t come this far to deliver us into oblivion. I have such sights to show you. Soon, you will have answers to questions you have never even dared to ask.

Their ascent was accomplished via a wide spiral staircase that sat within the reflective tube. Each of the metal steps were welded to its core. But even here in this elegant construct, the infernal touch hadn’t been neglected. Each of the steps was set not at ninety degrees to the core, but at ninety-seven, or a hundred, or a hundred and five, each one different from the one before but all sending out the same message: nothing was certain here; nothing was safe. There was no railing to break the slide should someone lose their footing, only step after disquieting step designed to make the ascent as vertiginous as possible.

You won’t simply witness what is going to unfold in Hell from this point outward; you will make a testament of it, wherein my acts and my philosophies will be recounted in full detail. They will be my Gospels, and I will forbid you nothing in their chapters and verses, as long as it is observed truth, however far from my ideal of myself I may fall.

Sure, work could be a pain in the ass, but it was purpose, and what was a life, any life, his life, without purpose?

Brooding only looks good in the movies.