William jennings bryan, the deceased American politician; Hortensia, daughter of Roman consul and advocate Quintus Hortensius Hortalus; and Logan the Orator (son of Shikellamy), Native American war leader, took their respective seats, quickly adjusting their table microphones. The view through the Hexiglass (methyl methacrylate) window-walls of the broadcasting booth displayed a panorama of Mourningstar Square below.
An indigo demon dollied his camera to focus on Hortensia, on-scene reporter for the Perdition Broadcasting System; as Logan, to her left, typed madly on his laptop to test his minicam before his Hellcast.
Meanwhile, Bryan tapped his antiquated ribbon microphone and smiled as the feedback whined. He strongly suspected this was going to be a red-letter day for H-ELL, the underdog among greater infernity’s radio stations.
Below the three commentators was a stage with a large black podium holding fifty folding chairs. In front of that podium, poets took their seats.
Hortensia, sitting ramrod straight with all the discipline and arrogant calm one would expect of the Roman upper class, glanced down. Already, tens of thousands of Pandemonium’s residents were flooding into the massive square. The event was scheduled to kick off in five minutes. Large panning klieg lights switched on. Bright yellow beams cut upward through the polluted air. Background noise rose dramatically as one million damned souls poured into the huge city square.
On the far side of this imposing crowd towered Satan’s citadel, his black-marble offices of perdition. The Dark Lord’s balcony looked empty, but flapping scarlet curtains proclaimed his residence. And the evening news confirmed that His Satanic Majesty was in town.
Bryan’s southern voice boomed: “Well, it’s happening, folks. This is Bill Bryan for H-ELL, welcoming you to the ‘Poets Ignoring Sulfuric Suffrage with Eternal Demands’ extravaganza, broadcast as it occurs from Mourningstar Square. We’ll bring you hell’s best poets doing what they’ve been forbidden to do since their damnation, when the Almighty turned his face away from —”
At the sound of that name, a terrific peal of thunder ripped the air overhead, sending vibrations through everyone and everything.
“Uh,” Bryan continued, “the big man upstairs needs to hear the creativity of those he has unfairly banned to this lower realm, and finally, once and for all, heed our appeals. And yes, I think I see a figure taking the podium … right, Hortensia?”
“The unshaven face,” Hortensia said in English, “sloppy clothing reeking of the common citizenry, yes … I believe it is Baudelaire, that brashest of Gauls …”
Charles Baudelaire, continental essayist, art critic, and translator of Poe, elbowed his way through the crowd onstage to lean upon the podium. The bawdy Gallic poet overtly ogled a buxom woman at the front of the crowd, while loudspeakers all around projected his voice with disturbing intimacy:
I, Baudelaire, bring you tidbits from my Défaite Stratégique …
Madame, my dame, your protests lame
I cannot drop my bleeding pen
I will not stop, you will not tame
My flame with female whim or yen…
Not once did Baudelaire’s gaze stray from the face of the buxom woman as he droned on, until his closing stanza:
Be damned Madame, demoiselle devilish
My writing halts, you are at blame
My bed the battlefield you claim,
Your naked smile and ivory breast… vanquish!
Baudelaire’s final flourish brought a rolling wave of cheers and applause from several thousand attendees. He launched himself off the stage directly at the shapely maiden, tackling her, struggling to kiss her red lips.
She clouted Baudelaire atop his skull with her fist and disappeared into the mob.
Baudelaire staggered upright just as the ground beneath him erupted with dozens of thorny stalks on which red roses bloomed, sprouting fangs, and leaped upon the Frenchman. Baudelaire howled in agony as the carnivorous blossoms tore bloody gouges in the French poet’s face, his neck, his hands.
The camera pulled back and refocused on Logan, the Native American orator. “Yes,” Logan said in his sturdy but unemotional voice, while simultaneously typing on his computer, “those are some pretty evil flowers.”
“I can now see a rather dour gentleman stepping forth,” Bryan said.
“Oh, my,” Hortensia sniffed, “I do believe we are in for a macabre lament about tragic romantic loss.”
On the stage below the commentators, a pale man with dark hair waited for the huge audience to calm down.
Once the background roar subsided, Edgar Allen Poe, famed American poet and author of mystery and macabre, began reciting from his Lyralee. When he neared the tragic end, his voice became a ghostly whisper.
I miss her more
In my cold, empty arms
Oh, my love, Lyralee sleeps in the sea cocooned in all her charms
Oh, my dear Lyralee, you now wait for me dressed in your blessed charms.
The last line was read with such anguish, and clearly aimed at the skies above, that tens of thousands of those present gasped out moans of lament in sympathy.
“Still pining for his long dead cousin-spouse?” Logan asked Bryan, who replied with a nonchalant shrug.
Instantly, a loud clang issued from overhead, and before Poe had time to twitch, a large-bladed pendulum, seemingly extending from mid-air, swung down and roughly cut off the poet’s right ear in a nasty splash of blood. Just as quickly the large apparatus swung upward and disappeared into whatever dimensional tear in space and time had been created and destroyed overhead. The blow knocked Poe to his knees, but he managed to hold back a scream by biting fiercely on his tongue. He slowly stood up and staggered back to his chair near the back of the raised stage.
“Who is next?” Bryan asked.
“I think it is the turn,” Hortensia stated, “of the new-world man of lower-cased literature.”
This elicited chuckles from Logan and Bryan as e. e. cummings, renowned poet, painter and essayist, quickly strode to the front of the stage and began reciting from Those Jersey Girls Know What They Want.
those jersey girls know what they want;
they cherish honest, rugged guys;
they stomp on pricks who call them cunts
and bite the tongues off shits who lie…
By the time cummings neared his finale, the audience was his:
they seek out every bar and haunt;
they drink whatever gets them pissed.
those jersey girls know what they want;
they conquer worlds with every kiss.
“Brilliant!” Hortensia said. “That crude ruffian has surely cut to the combative soul of my sister species.”
“Brilliant, my ass,” Bryan sputtered. “The bastard is plagiarizing his own work.”
“Wait,” Bryan said, “something is forming over cummings’ head. Why, yes, it is a miniature storm cloud appearing and, I believe, yes … I think tiny raindrops are falling … directly upon cummings, the former army ambulance driver. And look, streaks of blood are forming across the poet’s face and hands.”
“The raindrops are piercing his skin,” Hortensia added. “And I suppose one must give him credit for keeping to his seat amidst such indignity.”
Hundreds of feet above the squabbling reporters’ heads, His Satanic Majesty stood upon his balcony, listening to the live radio broadcast. Behind him, in shadow, many shapes rustled.
“Samael,” Satan said, “I must show those Above that I am just as unforgiving as they.”
“There is some shuffling,” Bryan’s voice came from Satan’s radio, “on the stage. I wonder … wait a minute: There seems to be some turmoil occurring on the square’s far side.”
Satan and his cadre of Fallen Angels suddenly turned into winged demons: “Take wing. Tell our legions to attack. Now.”
“Something is approaching,” Logan said, squinting with eagle eyes.
Leaping from his balcony and climbing into the air, Satan’s majestic troop quickly focused a quarter of a mile down Aka Manah Boulevard, one of four main streets that intersected and met at Mourningstar Square.
Rushing forward at a double-march came the twenty-thousand man forces of the AVH (Hungary’s Security Police) and at their forefront was Matyas Rakosi, former Hungarian dictator and Soviet puppet. They were armed with sub-machine guns and carried plastic riot shields and wore Lost Angeles Motorcycle Police helmets with dark visors pulled down. All were dressed in dark green uniforms bloused over black combat boots. They would be upon the crowd in minutes. Rakosi stood up on the passenger side of his Jeep and held a megaphone aloft.
Up high, unnoticed, Satan overflew the square. It would take a short measure of time for his legions to arrive. For the nonce, he would enjoy the view.
“Now, my brothers,” Rakosi screamed, “kill the fascist poets. Let us start cutting them down like slices of salami ….”
Just as his lead Jeep was about to plow forward into the packed square, a spray of bullets tore through his torso and his driver exploded in a splash of blood. The Keep curved left and flipped, smashing into the side of a large building.
Instantly, hundreds of khaki clad women leaned out of windows on the lower floors of many of the apartment buildings flanking either side of Aka Manah Boulevard, and flooded the murderous marchers with bullets and Molotov cocktails.
“A true massacre,” Bryan spit into his microphone, “Those that have chosen to interrupt this great occasion are being slaughtered in the hundreds. But who is attacking them?”
“Can’t you tell from their pink berets?” Hortensia asked. “Why, it’s none other than those radical libbers from New Hell, the Chicks Undermining Nefarious Testosterone’s Savagery.”
The crowds in the square, seeing their potential attackers quickly routed, shouted out a mighty cheer.
“An esteemed gentleman appears to be taking the podium,” Logan spoke solemnly as Robert Frost, the great American poet from Massachusetts, stepped into view.
“I give you … Sun and Rain,” Robert Frost announced, and then began his recitation:
A youth, I pursued two maidens,
Not knowing blessing from burden;
The belle who courted wind and rain
Or she who loved the sunny day?
Frost paused as if to gauge the interest of his audience and then continued on to the very end, without stopping for another breath:
As years have passed I dread the bliss
And constancy of luminance,
Sadly missing the resonance
And shadows of a darksome kiss.
Smiling, Frost stepped back from the podium to take his seat. Applause crested in a mighty roar that brought a smile to his lips. Upon sitting, his face immediately turned red, and it became clear to all that he was choking. A moment later, Frost began vomiting multi-colored maple leaves down upon his knees and feet, heave after heave, in a disgusting display that lasted ten full minutes.
“Oh my,” Bryan reported, groping to fill the ugly pause, “it appears the poet from New England is having trouble digesting his own rhetoric.”
“How droll,” Hortensia replied.
“Enough,” Logan said without emotion, “look who is taking the podium now.”
The crowd cheered, seeing Pablo Neruda, Chilean Poet and Nobel laureate, a long-faced Caucasian man wearing a small brown cap, leaning toward the microphone.
“Although my good friend Robert,” Pablo said with a strong Castilian accent, “has likened free verse to playing tennis without a net …”
Frost, still vomiting autumnal beauty that was quickly piling up on the surrounding platform floor, waved Neruda to continue.
… I shall return his lyrical lob with this backhand ditty. Oh, and please forgive me if any of my many subtleties are lost in translation.
Neruda began reciting Blushing Idyll.
Take my hand, and let us walk through the white arch
Of this efflorescent construction site
Surrounded by the song of loving work
As hummingbirds and honey bees all toil
Under nature’s mute foremen, sunlight and rain…
Neruda’s body shook, as if from some infernal tremor. But he never missed a beat, leading his huge audience through beauty to the end of his poem:
We end this arboresque amble
As I place on your brow
A red magnolia crown;
We close, we kiss, atremble.
“Here, here,” Baudelaire shouted from the rear of the platform-stage, “this man could win any woman’s heart.”
Neruda smiled at the immense wave of cheers and applause, walked away from the main podium, and retook his chair. A moment later he began convulsing and then thick green ink started bleeding profusely from his nose, ears, and eye sockets. In seconds his clothes and skin became drenched and stained in the dreadful excretion.
“The punishments being bestowed by our ruler are certainly of an eclectic nature today,” Hortensia sniffed.
“Let she who is without sin cast the first stone,” Bryan mumbled. “Well, look here: It appears a limey is going to say something.”
“Hybernian, actually,” Logan said, “and one of the more renowned members of the Ghost Club. Quiet now, he is speaking.”
“I have written the following,” said William Butler Yeats, Irish poet and Nobel laureate, “as a humble gift for my good friend Mister Ernest Hemingway, whom I had hoped would be here, but by all indications is sequestered in that strange frozen prison holding all that mighty horde who so recently tried to breach the gates of the higher realm.”
“I think the renowned combustive fisherman has better ways to waste his time,” Poe drawled from several yards behind Yeats, “than in the company of such dark literary angels as grace this obsidian pit.”
Yeats paused for a moment to consider Poe, cradling his head wound. “My good Edgar,” Yeats said, “even your worst insults hold more sincere currency then Baudelaire’s finest fawning.”
“Eh? What?” Poe asked, turning his head with its one still functional ear toward the Irishman.
This brought a burst of laughter from the dozens sitting upon the platform. “I give you … Sanctuary,” Yeats began:
One day soon I will journey, up to Wood River north,
And a cozy camp I’ll make, in a sylvan clearing;
A hearty toast I’ll make, each night to the loamy earth;
And fish alone by a rippling stream…
Something buzzed the air around Keats, but he did not let it interrupt his recitation that continued on, liltingly, to its final stanza:
One day soon I will journey, for my senses are a haunt
I smell aspen and cottonwood flavor the spicy breeze;
As a walking somnambulant upon a soulless jaunt
I savor the distant musk of trees.
A strong round of applause followed the poem, so that Yeats was compelled to take a respectful bow before sitting down. Instantly, a small wave of yellow jackets and crickets flowed from a crack in the podium floor beneath him to swarm upon the son of Eire. Yeats gasped in terror and pain from the localized biting and stinging horde and staggered to a far corner of the huge platform, where he crumpled to his hands and knees, whimpering in agony.
“I suppose you could say he found his bee loud glade,” Logan muttered.
Hortensia leaned forward and held her face in her hands.
“Look!” Bryan suddenly shouted into his mic. “Ladies and gentlemen, approaching the square … It looks like … Yes, it is! Military tanks are rolling up toward Jinshui Bridge where it crosses Blood River onto the far side of the square.”
Overhead Satan grins. “Slaughter by the damned of the damned is about to begin.”
Zhu De, former Chinese General under Mao Zedong, poked his head up into the air, atop the lead tank barreling toward Mourningstar Square. Behind him several dozen tanks carried the PLA’s 38th Army. Intermixed with the tanks were APCs that carried paratroopers from the 15th Airborne Corps.
General De raised a hand-mic to his lips: “All forces,” he proclaimed, “hear me! Upon crossing the bridge, execute a full flanking maneuver across the entire perimeter of the square. I want no survivors.”
General De’s tank was almost completely across the bridge when the first explosion occurred.
“Oh, no!” Bryan shouted. “Those Chinese tanks just got a royal welcome, folks. Jinshui Bridge has been completely destroyed by a series of massive detonations. It appears every span of it has collapsed into the river. There must have been two dozen tanks and just as many APCs on it. Whoever mined that bridge must have been up all night planting their explosives. Nearly a third of the windows on that side of the city just shattered.”
“Look,” Hortensia prompted, “on this side of the bridge. It’s a ‘Free Tibet’ flag. And the man holding it …? You don’t think …?”
“Yes,” Logan added, “I recognize his robes. It is Ngawang Lobang Gyatso, the fifth Dalai Lama. Rumor has it that he is only one of several anarchists and rebels who recently snuck into the city.”
“Here now, I do believe it! Someone new is taking the stage,” Hortensia said.
Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet, modernist and neo-romanticist, walked toward the front. He was a clean-cut man in his thirties, with a bow tie and suit.
“Another defiant rant, Dylan?” cummings asked.
Thomas ignored the American, walked past him and took center stage behind the podium. “Hobnobbing Down Blessing Way,” he announced. Clearing his throat, he started in on his recitation.
I am searching for a mountain that is everywhere
thus my life is spent between peaks
from each to each and here to there.
I am trapped into traversing a traipsing, phantom trail
pondering trees, and lakes and snow,
shadow to shadow,
vale to vale…
He went on and on until finally he graced the audience with the final words that were both unheard of and appropriate in hell.
This holy, eternal circle I cannot comprehend,
end to end,
again and again I trip and fail to ascend.
Another wave of applause and cheering erupted from the massive crowd.
“Quite good, ladies and gentlemen,” Bryan said approvingly. “Dylan’s metaphors are very clever indeed.”
“Oh, please,” Logan scoffed, displaying real emotion for the first time since the recitations began. “I saw that Anglophobic prick taking lunch with John Neihardt and Black Elk two days ago in the Pandemonium Hilton’s Algonquin Room. Original? My native-American ass! But enough: I have fully glutted my need for insult.”
Dylan walked back to his chair and sat down when he suddenly took note of the oddest buzzing sounds. In moments a small contingent of tiny Luftwaffe bombers, each no bigger than one’s thumb, started an attack run upon Thomas. The Welsh poet immediately engaged in evasive tactics, dodging back and forth across the large platform-stage bumping into the other poets and shuffling erratically around their chairs, as flea-sized bomblets spilled forth resulting in miniscule explosions on the wood planking and a weird trail of destruction at Dylan’s heels. He frantically tried to stay ahead of his damnation, as occasionally bombs connected with his backside and detonated, tearing holes in his clothes and leaving grape-sized, bloody craters in his flesh. The rest of the poets present did their best to ignore his screams of agony.
“You know,” Hortensia said, “I really don’t think he’ll be able to outpace those little planes much longer.”
“Certainly not on those Grade III legs of his,” Bryan drawled.
Without notice, Sylvia Plath, American poet, novelist, and short-story writer took to the stage. She was an attractive raven-haired woman, dressed in a sensible mid-twentieth century dress. Her demeanor was calm and fatalistic.
“Ladies and gentlemen! Prepare to have your souls frozen by Sylvia Plath’s excellent recitation of her famous Dust Bowl,” Bryan said.
Without preamble, Plath launched into her oration:
Thus my depression started as a doubt
Blighting the soil of my frail soul
In cracked, parched years when love became drought
Bleaching inexorable toll…
She paused only near the end, to highlight her closing couplet:
I’m an aging garden of melancholy
Ripe with baneberries of mortal folly.
A strong round of applause erupted from the mighty crowd.
Sylvia let the slightest of smiles crease her face. As she stepped away from the podium, a loud scuffling noise filled the air. Immediately, a large, odd-looking gurney broke upward through the floor of the stage and across it, sending poets and their chairs flying, until it rested before Sylvia.
Several restraining straps shot out from this well-padded bed. The straps wrapped around her arms and legs, pulling her aboard and into a fully reclined position. Snakelike electrodes swayed above her, then struck, embedding themselves in both her temples. Electricity flowed, and Sylvia’s body rocked with painful convulsions. The bed slowly slid to rest near the edge of the raised stage. Sylvia’s electroshock treatments continued, nonstop, as those on stage did their best to ignore the sight.
Meanwhile, the broadcast audience and gathered souls looked on, chastened but vicariously enjoying her pain.
“Hmmmm,” Hortensia said, “I do not believe anyone else is approaching the podium. Perhaps the combined chastisements placed on all speakers so far, as well as the two attempted incursions by unfriendly forces, has dampened the spirit of this … protest to the higher powers?”
“Could be for the best,” Bryan said, “I suspect bad weather, as a pall is being cast upon us. Some clouds must be rolling in and —”
“It is not cloud,” Logan said with forced gravity, “it is balloon!”
Bryan, Hortensia, and the demon camera-operator all looked skyward through the clear plastic of the press booth to see a full-sized zeppelin rapidly descending from the clouds a mere half mile away. What appeared through various portholes to be fifty to sixty well-armed Nazi Brownshirts were packed into the cupola-cabin underneath, preparing to unleash some kind of hellish punishment on those below.
“What the hell?” Bryan wondered, his eyes wide.
Standing by the main cupola window on the starboard side of the Zeppelin, Gregor Strasser, Nazi leader and one-time rival of Adolph Hitler, grinned an evil grin down upon Mourningstar Square.
“Now all of you,” Strasser said, “are men and women marked by death.”
The lower perimeter of the main gondola spouted two dozen fully-manned hell-replicas of M61 Vulcan twenty-millimeter cannons. Strasser licked his lips in preparation for giving the order to fire. The airship was only thirty seconds away from its optimal firing position, directly over the center of the square. In moments he would pass over the last block of skyscrapers that bordered the huge crowd.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Logan said.
“I think,” Bryan said, “we’re about to feel the paralyzing influence of imperialism.”
Strasser raised a small hand-mic to his lips, but just as he was about to give the killing order, a scream erupted from the rear of the gondola.
“I die nobly as a free man!” someone shouted.
Strasser turned just in time to see Elazar Ben Yair, Sicarii leader and defender of the Jewish fortress of Masada, long black hair in disarray, wearing a simple brown tunic and sandals, and covered in plastic explosives, press his thumb down on a detonator.
The hydrogen filled airship exploded in a gigantic ball of fire.
“Oh, the humanity,” Bryan gasped.
Flying above the Square in a swarm of his Fallen Angels so thick they made a black sky above the crowd's heads, Satan was amused. He enjoyed the delicious carnage as the damned attacked one another. Instantly he flew low, alongside his six favorite Fallen, for a better view of the airship crashing in flames into Blood River.
“It appears,” Hortensia said, “Hell’s flying bottom feeders smell a smorgasbord.”
“Even the buzzard,” Logan said, “has a right to eat.”
Down atop the main stage, the poets all shifted their feet and looked to each other.
“I think,” Bryan said, “a lack of faith is preventing anyone else from taking the podium.”
“Or common sense. Perhaps we have seen an end to today’s festivities?” Hortensia suggested.
“No. Listen,” Bryan said: “the crowds are chanting something. Yes, they’re chanting the word ‘poet’ over and over again.”
That chant grew in pitch and volume, until the very ground began to shake. The three reporters, up in their swaying plastic box, grabbed the table in front of them to steady themselves.
“I don’t think this is convincing anyone to take the stage,” Bryan said.
“Look,” Logan shouted, “just behind the podium.”
The air behind the podium, unoccupied, began to coalesce into a bright shining globe of light. As the chanting reached a deafening peak the strange patch of efflorescence grew almost blinding.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Hortensia said, “it’s as if a crack in reality is forming in the air just behind the main speaker’s podium. Why and for what reason we do not know.”
“Such sparkling and transcendent light,” Bryan said with awe. “So beautiful. Could it be … a Second Coming?”
Suddenly, a human leg coalesced from the light, quickly followed by another, then a torso, with arms and a head. Walt Whitman, American poet and father of free verse, stood before the podium. He appeared as an elderly man, tall, with white hair and a thick white beard and mustache. He wore the simple clothes of a mid-eighteenth century working man.
Overhead, Satan snorted satisfaction that blew from his nostrils like smoke. He had anticipated what the focused power of a million mortal souls could do. And directed it, to breach barriers of space and time, even the spacetime foam in which this trouble-maker (and thousands of others who sought to storm the gates of heaven) had been recently imprisoned.
“Yes,” Logan said, “it is really him. Ladies and Gentlemen, Walt Whitman has arrived.”
“Is it true,” Bryan asked his colleagues, “what they say about his first appearance in the dark lands?”
“Oh, yes,” Hortensia replied with relish. “And I heard it from an American civil war veteran who died of syphilis on the same day … and witnessed every moment.”
“Really? That Whitman issued forth from the Welcome Woman’s belly?” Bryan disbelieved.
“The grandest of entrances,” Hortensia said, “an agonizing premature birth in the elevator. The witch pumped him out screaming almost as loudly as she did. She had sulfuric acid for amniotic fluid. Half his skin and muscles had been eaten away in utero.”
“Horrific,” Logan said.
“It gets worse,” Hortensia added: “It took that poet a full day to grow to manhood, and WW nursed him the whole time … milking ammonia from her ghastly tit.”
Whitman, his eyes practically glowing with inspiration, stood before the podium and raised his fists in the air. “Poets, Rally My Poets!” he shouted the title of the work he was about to present. The audience roared, and when his voice flowed forth the crowds grew silent as he intoned:
Onward, my sad-faced dreamers,
Follow me in your endless ranks,
Bring forth your angers, brandish your burning tears.
Poets, Rally My Poets…!
The million-soul crowd in Mourningstar Square cheered in reply as each of Whitman’s stanzas concluded. More than any of the previous poets, Whitman’s work lit a fire in its appreciative audience.
Up in the air, Satan clacked his demonic jaws: Time to act; the time for all subtlety was past. Drawing upon his vast powers, the Deceiver mobilized all his legions, every sold soul billeted in Pandemonium. In less than a heartbeat his deadly forces completely surrounded the adamantine buildings circumscribing the giant square. Upon command from the Father of Lies, his battalions of angry dead would reap the whirlwind, stopping and slaughtering this rallying crowd, now teased into a frenzy.
And at that time, Satan thought, this rabble will learn their place.
Below, Walt Whitman continued:
Leave your mountains and join us in the valleys
Remember your peaks, and cousin clouds,
Breathe in the thick air and sip the wines of hilly root.
Poets, Rally My Poets…!
Above Whitman’s head, Bryan warned, “Damned souls, take note: some mighty force can be seen surrounding this gathering. Demonic and armed, they march on us to wreak some terrible vengeance. But I tell you now: we will not waiver here. Whitman’s words inspire us all. None of us here in the press booth want to say much more. Just keep listening, I implore you.”
“Look,” Hortensia marveled, “the masses respond. They do not flee.”
“Tens of thousands have turned to face the attackers,” Logan said. “And we will not give up without a fight. We are one million strong. Our will must prevail.”
A huge cheer erupted from the crowd and Satan’s attention was once again distracted by Whitman’s hypnotic recitation on the stage:
Join us all you young, impetuous lovers
Naked shoulder to shoulder, with hands inviting, held tight
Sing of the honey of first kiss, and hot tryst.
Poets, Rally My Poets…!
Reject the cities, pour out of the brick canyons
Charge from them like rampant rivers
Fear not the freedom of open expanse and nature.
Poets, Rally My Poets…!
Overhead, Satan felt the willpower of those one-million souls, fired and inspired by Whitman’s voice and words. And at that moment he decided to stop his armies marching in to destroy these million souls, wisely knowing that no seemingly superior battle strategy always survives contact with the enemy.
Fools, he thought, war among yourselves. This will show the bleeding-hearts Above just how foul is mankind, now warring against heaven, hell, and one another.
On that ill-considered stage so far below, Whitman’s poem at last was coming to its end. The sound of it filled ears from the deepest Deep to the throne of the Highest, and made Satan glad, for this poem would make eternal the winter of the damned’s discontent.
And Whitman exhorted:
Rally round me in the pungent, continental heart,
Let us raise our willful voices in aching harmonies
Cut loose those sharpened tethers of doubt and conformity.
Poets, Rally My Poets…!
At that, as the crowds in Mourningstar Square erupted in an orgy of cheering, screaming and shouting, the despite in Satan’s heart grew to unimagined potency above their myriad heads.
Whitman raised his arms to silence the multitude. The poet then looked straight up into the sky towards the distant glory of Paradise and raised a gnarly fist.
Emboldened by the passion of a million damned souls, Walt Whitman parted his lips: “Now, God, damn it all to hell,” Whitman shouted at the ruddy vault, “where the fuck is our heavenly redemption, you all-powerful son of a bitch?”
Overhead, the light from distant Paradise winked out.
The second response to Whitman’s rabble-rousing blasphemy came roaring after a pregnant pause. It took a whole two seconds for a massive, deific lightning bolt to surge downward through unimaginable distances, plenty of time for all one million damned souls to recognize it for what it was and, united, gasp in terror; but with no time whatsoever to cower or to run.
Upon striking Whitman, the leading edge of the gargantuan lightning bolt incinerated him in a puff of smoke, leaving nothing behind.
This wrath from Above, however, was hardly spent. Simultaneously, the full force and energy of supernal fury connected with the occupied stage and platform. All exploded into a hail of lethal splinters. All fifty poets upon the podium were immediately pulped to shreds. Next, the spray of platform fragments killed the thousands closest to the stage, while maiming tens of thousands more surrounding them.
Windows in every building across the city of Pandemonium shattered.
The raised press booth was knocked sideways, its tower underneath buckling alarmingly. The booth’s clear walls cracked into strings, like automotive glass. The commentators within were tossed, punctured, and battered.
The lightning’s concussive force flooded across Mourningstar Square, a spherical shock wave knocking over all left standing, downing mortals as it expanded as if they were dominos toppling.
Inside the ruined press booth (now suspended sideways merely ten feet above the ground), Bryan pulled his microphone close. Looking around he spotted the American Indian Logan’s limp body, eyes open wide but lifeless; his neck askew. A few feet away Hortensia lay crushed under the largest television camera; her right foot still twitched spasmodically.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Bryan gasped, coughing up blood, “there you have it: Disaster at Mourningstar Square. Thousands dead, many more wounded in this awful response from the ultimate poetry critic.”
A shudder ran through Bryan, and he raised his lips to his microphone one last time: “Folks, once I believed that the humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. Then I came here to hell, where it seems I’ve been proven wrong. This is William Jennings Bryan, for H-ELL, returning you to your regularly scheduled programming …”
Dead Air.
Satan flew over the field of carnage. Hundreds of thousands of survivors below were turning upon each other, battling one another, each lost in a new madness and overcome by their own rage and despair at this final damning sign of eternal judgment from Above.
Satan laughed as he headed his sky-blackening formation of demons back to his adamantine citadel and Paradise reappeared in the vault above, glowering down with its bloody light.