The serial rapist’s severed head rolled like an upended bucket, coming to a rest at Nchulu’s ebony hoof. Reanimated lips floundered and puckered. The demon executioner clomped the appendage over the precipice, into the lava lake. Its condemned soul seeped from ear holes and eye hols, squealing as it merged with the writhing fret on the bubbling surface.
Nchulu growled, casting another domeless corpse into the appendage pit with one hulking hand, cracking his ruby knuckles, resetting the slick guillotine.
The skeletal wraith (either Karakas or Kraykus, he told him at induction, but they’d worked together for two millennia, so it felt too late to ask again), dragged the next wretch from a creaking cage. Its knees buckled from fear. The wraith laboured. Nchulu intercepted, stepping on its groin and tearing legs and arms from sockets, smelling slaughtered indigenous villagers on the spurting fountains of blood.
The hellbound colleagues exchanged a cordial nod. Nchulu wondered if he enjoyed racket sports outside of work.
The executioner slammed the war criminal by the scruff of his neck into the sodden block, thunking the blade down with the rote efficiency of wantaway butcher.
A successive transgressor was already at his elbow. She was tiny and wizened and brittle, the kindly crinkled eyes of Nchulu’s mother, except without the tentacles, or the constant threat of infanticide.
“I’m so sorry you have to do this. It must be a burden,” she twinkled upwards. Nchulu stroked his lantern jaw. He flared his nostrils, exhuming her earthly scent, tasting her flavour of sin. It was giving malice. Greed. Some minor notes of manipulative despotism. Nothing out of the ordinary for those merely destined for eternal enslavement in the sulphur mines.
Nchulu took her nape. It was warm. Unclammy. The wraith that fed him scuttled like a murderous crab, glancing the way of their supervisor’s great bone balcony, its daggered teeth overhanging the fiery damnation.
Stan, on his twisted sinew deckchair, peered his angular beak over a human skin bound De Sade tome. He sighed, leather wings unfurling, leaping and flapping and crunching down between his underlings.
“Is everything okay, Karakus?”
Karakus! Karakus made sense. He looked like a Karakus.
“Nchulu hesssitatesss, sssire.”
“Please. Sire is my father’s name.”
It was true. Satan spawned Stan after a regrettable tryst with a succubus from the sorting pool. Nepotism ran through hell like cancerous cells.
Stan swung his hawkish head to the muscle. “Nchulu, you… have reservations… again? All opinions are valid, and I want you to feel supported, but you do have to trust the process.”
“I hate to be the cause of any friction between you boys,” the brittle voice below them chimed, the elderly lady unleashing a gummy smile. “Silence, worm!” Stan roared. “Nchulu, why don’t you take a wellbeing break?”
Nchulu steamed at the edge of the scalding hot tub, his hulking arms draped in repose across its lips, dispersed water swilling across the locker room tiles.
Karakus scuttled in, his shift over, flinching and wringing his claws together at the sight of the executioner and his idling, hair-trigger bloodlust.
“G-good work today, Nchulu. I hope you underssstand I wasn’t calling your expertissse into quessstion. It was merely a-a-a-a workflow issssue, yesss. Yesss. Those amatuersss in quality assssurance, hmmm? They’ve thrown that anomaly back in the dungeon until they can assssign blame. Assss covering beauracratsss, yesss. Yesss.”
Nchulu scowled until the emaciated toady scraped a retreat. He exploded from the stew, rivulets glistening on his scarlet bulk. He toweled off his leg fur and bolted for the exit, shoulders scraping the wet stone walls of labyrinthine corridors. Past torture racks and crucifixions, down and down. Following his nose, to the dungeons, crammed with cryptic cases and unclassifiables.
He caught her scent. Lavender. Mint imperials. Malice. Greed. Some minor notes of manipulative despotism.
Nchulu peered through the bars. The old lady’s dainty wrists hung from shackles, like a Papa Legba voodoo doll. She had the bulbous features of a Baba Yaga. The dread allure of a Slender Man. The cold, dead stare of a horny Dhampir.
She was different meat. And she was staring.
“Hello, sweetie. You’re the one who saved me.”
Nchulu flattened himself into the shadows.
“Oh my, don’t be shy, now. It isn’t a crime to be curious, after all. Let me see you.”
Nchulu ripped the door from its hinges, crushing the skull of a previous occupant as he galloped forward, snarling in the face of this temptress, his hot breath moving the seductive grey wisps sprouting from her chin.
“There you are,” she creaked. “Just as they made you.”
The demon stomped backwards, his thick chest heaving.
“I can see you’re not a talker, and I like that. I think they called you Tulip. It’s pretty, it’s what I’ll call you. I’m Mary. I’ve been unlucky in love, you see, Tulip. Husband number one was a depressive type anyway; I merely drove him to that bridge. I believe in shared interests, and husband number two shared my grudge against our neighbour——I had no idea he owned a shotgun when I sent him over. Husband number three, well, he was just nuts, and those gangbangers were looking at me funny, and chivalry is noble, where I come from. Yes, I made sure their lives were insured handsomely, but is being frugal so wrong? Is preparedness a sin?”
Nchulu reeled, smoothing his horns, pacing as he chewed at a discarded femur.
“Oh, sweet Tulip. Why don’t you and I get better acquainted, somewhere less final?”
Nchulu ripped Mary’s chains from the ceiling, heaving her onto his bicep.
He bouldered along labyrinthine corridors. Past maimings and castrations. Up and up, and up further still, through open plan offices and executive suites, the great golden elevator to the temporal yawning before them.
Stan swooped and skidded into their path.
“Now, Nchulu. I’m as upset as anyone about these triage mix-ups, but we need to take a beat here and reflect on behaviour, buddy. This is not the culture of hell. We improve together. We collaborate, holistically, and——”
Stan’s beak cracked as Nchulu whipped his head skywards, his liberated spine dripping and dangling.
“Ooo,” Mary cooed from his armpit, the elevator doors sliding closed.
Nchulu shivered on the edge of their double bed, sipping at his mug of molten mercury. The motel room baked in the Florida heat, the air conditioning unit in a thousand smashed pieces. He hugged himself; the winter coats Mary had stitched together straining against his gigantic torso.
She entered from the en-suite, all gummy smiles in her paper-thin nightgown. Once they’d overcome the logistics, she was an extraordinary lover, her temptress credentials wax sealed (and what she did with those candles was a nice touch).
“I thought tomorrow we might find you a focus, my sweet Tulip. You can’t very well stay cooped up in here for another week.” She plonked in Nchulu’s ample lap, nuzzling his pulsing neck. “I thought maybe something in the line of withdrawals?”
Nchulu cast a languid yellow eye sideways.
“Your strengths are being strong, Tulip… persuasively strong. And, I would assume, pretty darn bullet-proof. There’s a bank across the way. It’ll be easy as blueberry pie for you to, say, wait until the guards change at two o’clock, charge in there, murder a few patrons, decapitate a couple o’ tellers, and haul that lil’ ol’ bank manager back to the safe there. See what goodies they got for Mary and Tulip, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.”
Nchulu grunted his understanding, his black heart sinking.
As Mary slept, he slipped into the night, to a straightforwardly dead-end alley. He scratched a pentagram on the side of a dumpster. A fiery schism cracked the ground.
As he leapt into the depths, Nchulu practised his mea culpa.
Maybe they’d transfer him to the Disembowelment Unit. A change is as good as a rest, and he’d always harboured a passion for that.
Ian Johnson is a writer from North East England. His words appear in such publications as Trash Cat Lit, Bull, Underbelly, 3:AM, and Scaffold. He is a Best of the Net nominee. Follow him on X or on Bluesky. His favorite revenge movie is Dead Man’s Shoes.
