I'll face the hellish realms
, Camilla thought,
but I'll still use Nigrovum to keep my physical body from decomposing; I can't bear the thought of my beautiful body getting ugly in that mortuary.
With this other resolution in mind, Camilla removed the psychic barrier that had been keeping the spirits of Agape, Don Josiah, and Candice from entering the room Eros had put her in. The spirits immediately rushed in.
"Good," her father said. "You've finally accepted what you must do. Now, come with us, up and through the roof: it will lead you towards the heavenly realms."
"No," Camilla said. "I want to go down into the hellish realms. I must save my son."
"Camilla, he won't let you," Candice told her. "You know that."
"Come with us, please," Don entreated. "Come upwards with us. Though this afterlife parallels the physical one you left behind, it goes by different laws: not the normal laws of physics, but spiritual laws--surreal, non-rational, dream-like. The relationship between heaven and hell isn't a dichotomy here, as we'd been taught in church: the afterlife is a circular continuum, with the extremes of heaven and hell meeting and dissolving into each other."
"I know," Camilla said. "It's like the ouroboros, the serpent coiled in a circle, biting its tail. Heaven is the snakes's head, and hell is its tail. Extreme ecstasy and extreme agony are intimately close, far from being the opposites we thought they were when we were alive on Earth. That's why I must get to the biting head of heaven through the bitten tail of hell. To be saved, I must be purified of my sin: I must assuage my guilt through suffering the worst."
"Not necessarily," Agape insisted. "This dream-like world of the spirit is rather surreal in how bizarre the experiences get, but it provides gentler ways of purifying you. Come up with us, through the roof of this infernal mansion, and in the sky, beyond the clouds, you'll enter other rooms, places of innocent pleasures, like those you saw in your dream with me, back when you were pregnant with Eros. Together, we'll reach the serpent's heavenly head by going up its body, experiencing gradual but sure spiritual progress."
"No!" Camilla said. "I'll never be freed of my lusts and desires in those boring places. I can be purified only through pain, down in the hellish realms."
"Camilla, come with us," Candice said. "Eros put you in here, in this room, to protect you from the demon rapists down there, so they can't come up and get at you. He's doing important work--saving humanity from the masked men's Green Party."
"Being
gang-raped
?" Camilla retorted. "
I
deserve that kind of punishment, for all the bad I've done in my life; my son doesn't deserve it. He may have tricked me into committing incest with him, and he may have killed himself, but he's still my son, and I won't have him being a Christ-figure for my sins."
"'Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light'," said Don.
"I know my Milton, Don," Said Camilla. "And only down into hell, through the bitten tail and into the mouth of the serpent's head, is the way to the light for me. It was for all of you--you know that. Candice, you were a dope-fiend and a demon in hell before they rescued you. Don, you were a fallen priest, seduced by me and incarcerated for a crime you didn't commit, my crime of accidentally killing my dad. Then an inmate murdered you in your cell. Daddy, you were an alcoholic; you were tricked into having sex with Candice and me before I shot you and you went to heaven. Even Mr. Pierce, our old gym teacher, remember him, Candice? He was a lecher, watching underage girls shower in high school before we had him redeem himself with sexual penance--do you still remember, Candice? Now he's as saintly as all of you, and speaking out against the Green Party, as Ravinder is. Ravinder, too, reached a low point in his life, literally low, fetishing my feet as well as those of prostitutes, and catching gonorrhoea, before coming up to the mind and soul, and revering them, as he does now. I want the same chance for that kind of redemption, a baptism through fire, a purgatory to cleanse me of all my guilt."
"You want the
sex
down there, in the lower realms, that's what you want," Candice said. "We know you still crave sex; you're as addicted to it as ever."
"That's what the masked men want," Don said. "They're tempting you down there, so they can drag you down further, where they'll rape you, on the lower floors."
"They're beginning to sense that Eros is the one converting their lust-energy into love, and psychically changing the world's fear into hope," Agape said. "They want to replace Eros with you, and I won't let my daughter be subjected to that brutality."
"But I've acquired Eros' powers of conversion, Daddy!" Camilla insisted. "He gave them to me in his ejaculations when he was committing incest with me. I can do the converting as the masked men are gang-banging me. I owe it to the world, to atone for all the bad I've done, infecting all my lovers with my lustful Nigrovum and killing so many of them. You take Eros up to the heavenly realms, and I can convert the fear and desire into spiritual energy."
"No, you can't!" Candice said. "You'll be too horny to concentrate on converting it. That's what those bastards want."
"And with you and your addiction to desire, and your fear of pain, instead of going all the way through to the other side of the ouroboros' body, you'll just bounce back and forth in the hellish realms, gang-raped forever, in all probability," Agape said. "As your father, I can't allow you to do that to yourself. Allow yourself to have some peace instead, I beg you. We must take you up and out of hell, and
keep
you out of hell."
"No!" Camilla said, horrified at contemplating how Eros was still being gang-raped, without rest. "I must save my son!"
"There'll be another time for that," Don said. "When Eros finishes his converting of bad energy into good, and the masked men are sufficiently weakened;
then
we can rescue him. Until that time, be patient, Camilla. What you should be doing is Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, giving up your son for a greater good. You must learn the value of sacrifice."
"Yes!" Camilla said. "
Self
-sacrifice!"
She summoned all the power of Nigrovum that she could muster, and broke through the barrier Eros had used to keep her in that room on the fifth floor. She kicked open the door and ran down the stairs to the fourth floor. Agape, Don, and Candice raced after her.
In a large, dark, circular room on the fourth floor, naked Camilla saw an orgy being carried on by many of the spirits of her naked former lovers, the masked men, and some of the women in the mansion on Grouse Mountain. The only thing that made them all look different from when they were alive was that everyone had Camilla's black-haired, black-eyed, pale-skinned 'Goth' look. The fact that they were all ghosts made their new look eerily appropriate. Illuminating the darkness was a dozen tall candlesticks placed equidistantly from each other, spread throughout the room, as they would be in all the other rooms on the other floors.
Mr. Phillips, Camilla's fat old high school music teacher, was lying on his back, with that skinny, petite Latina Dora blowing him. Mr. Knowles, Camilla's armpit fucker back in her first gang-bang, was fucking Dora's pretty little asshole. Sitting on Mr. Phillips's face, and receiving eager licking and sucking on her clit, was Veronica, the busty, curvaceous redhead stripper Camilla went to Thailand with. Veronica was giving Peter, her lover in Thailand, the one she met on the boat, a hand job. Richard, another of theThailand lovers on the boat, was getting a hand job from Dora.
"Come join us," Veronica said in moans. "Let me...lick your pussy, just like...old times.
Oh
