= TWILIGHT WORLD - Volume 4 Issue 3 (May 18th 1996) =========================


 You  can do anything with this magazine as long as it  remains  intact.  All
stories  in  it  are fiction.  No actual persons are designated  by  name  or
character and similarity is coincidental.
 This  magazine  is  for free - get it as cheaply as  possible.  It  is  also
uncensored - ban any sites/servers/people that hinder freedom of speech.
 Please refer to the end of this file for further information.


= LIST OF CONTENTS ==========================================================


 EDITORIAL
 by Richard Karsmakers

 TRACKS
 by Michaela Croe

 THE SEVEN GATES OF HELL, OR, OBVIOUSLY INFLUENCED BY THE DEVIL TOO
 by Richard Karsmakers


= EDITORIAL =================================================================
 by Richard Karsmakers


 It looks,  unfortunately, very much like this might be the penultimate issue
of "Twilight World".  I stand to lose Internet access in September,  and  for
now  I can't afford a modem and Internet account outside the one  at  Utrecht
University, which was for free. That's problem number one, of course, for the
second problem is a lack of submissions.  I've got one more submission and  a
few stories left from the "Twilight World" mother magazine,  "ST  News",  and
then  there'll simply be no more stuff to fill this magazine with.  I'd  have
thought the supply of ready stories would last longer,  but reader  passivity
is a lot more persistent than I thought.
 If  you  want  to show that you think "Twilight World"  is  a  nice,  fresh,
unpretentious, easy read on the Internet, I'd like you to do me a favour. I'd
like  all you budding writers to pop out of the woodwork and do some  serious
writing.  There's  always space for another good story!  I might  lose  email
access  for  a while until I actually have a job and can afford  to  buy  the
necessary hardware and get a commercial email account.  After that, "Twilight
World" may well continue,  though likely on a less regular  basis,  depending
entirely on the amount of stories available.
 Enough of all these negative vibes.  We've got a real nice story by Michaela
Croe for this issue, originally planned for Volume 4 Issue 2 but postponed on
the  author's request.  You'll also find the most recent story  I've  written
myself,  which  is also,  incidentally,  the last story in  the  long-running
Cronos  Warchild series.  What with eMpTyV having had a  "Warchild  weekend",
that seemed to me reason enough to call it - or, rather, him - a day.

 Please spread the word, and the file, and have fun reading!


 Richard Karsmakers
 (Editor)


= TRACKS ====================================================================
 by Michaela Croe - napalm@labyrinth.net.au


 Joey Graham was seven years old and had always loved trains.  He spent hours
playing  next to the train tracks which ran behind his parents' small  house,
and was always getting into strife for it.  His mother would scream and  yell
at him to get off those damn rails.  Joey hated it when his mother used those
bad words at him.
 He  didn't often step onto the rails themselves,  anyway - he kept  for  the
most part to the gravelly edges of the tracks, where the best stones could be
collected, and he could play 'jungle' in the weeds overhanging the trainline.
Today  was Sunday,  his favourite play day,  and he was busily  playing  army
commander when the whispers came.  Joey stopped,  his right hand clutching  a
stone,  poised  ready  to throw it at the 'enemy' on the other  side  of  the
rails.  He listened,  but heard nothing.  Shrugging,  he threw the stone  and
yelled  heartily,  running  down  a few feet  to  collect  more  projectiles.
Suddenly the noise came again - a low murmur, rising up from the tracks a few
metres further down and overcome with curiosity,  the boy dropped the  stones
and slowly approached the strange sound. The whispers became louder, and Joey
could  just  make  out  the  sound  of  his  own  name.   "Hello?"  he  asked
tentatively,  kneeling  down  to get closer to the sound.  At his  voice  the
whispers  abruptly stopped,  and Joey put his ear to the gravel  between  the
sleepers,  straining to hear, his mind full of images of fairies and gremlins
he'd  heard about at school,  the things his mother told him were  'rubbish'.
The  sounds  of  the  traffic on the nearby  road,  a  dog  barking  and  the
twittering of the birds seemed to fade as Joey concentrated on listening  for
the whispers.  They came again,  low and soothing,  a mixture of children and
adults,  persuasive and friendly,  and he lay down on the tracks,  stretching
out  to  get his ear as close to the ground as he  could.  The  little  boy's
concentration was broken by the sound of his mother's voice,  swearing at him
to get off the tracks this minute,  and get home.  His head jerked up, and he
rubbed  the side of it,  blinking in the light.  The sounds of the birds  and
traffic flooded back, and he wondered why everything was so loud, so bright!
 His  mother called out to him again,  and Joey ran back down to the  broken-
down  fence which separated his backyard and the train  tracks,  and  climbed
over. Janet Martin watched the little boy play on the tracks from her seat on
the  train station.  She smiled at his antics despite the unease she felt  at
the possible danger he was in. She was puzzled by his interest in one spot on
the ground, in between the tracks, where he remained motionless, listening to
the ground,  for several minutes.  The boy's wavy blond hair reminded her  of
her own son.  David had been her only child,  and was ten when he died.  He'd
been playing,  much like this boy had,  on these very same tracks when he was
struck and killed by an express train. The grief proved too much of a strain,
and  Janet's husband Peter left a few months after their son's  death.  Janet
applied for a job at a local brewery,  working night-shift,  leaving late  at
night  and  arriving  home just after  dawn.  It  was  difficult,  physically
demanding work,  and very different to being a house wife, but the busier she
kept  herself the less she thought about David.  Janet didn't think  of  Joey
again that day as she went to the market to pick up the weekly groceries. Her
day was uneventful,  and she returned to the small flat,  ate and retired for
the night.
 David looked up at her and smiled.  Janet could see the gentle blue pools of
his eyes glinting in the bright sunlight as he waved to her.  She screamed at
him to come to her, but no sound escaped her lips. Her son waved back at her,
and pointed to the ground. He shouted something about people under the ground
- and then the train came. It hurtled past in front of her eyes, and suddenly
Janet  could no longer see her son.  The roar of the train was  ear-splitting
and she screamed again,  covering her ears with her hands.  As suddenly as it
arrived,  the train disappeared, taking its terrifying noise with it. Silence
fell across the tracks,  and she moved forward,  afraid to look but unable to
stop herself.  The gravel was stained black with her son's blood,  and a  few
tiny pieces of flesh and fabric were scattered on the ground.  Her eyes fixed
to the earth, Janet followed the tracks and the trail of gore, until she came
across  her  son's tiny arm,  which had been pulled from its  socket  by  the
impact of the train.
 To Janet it seemed that it still held its pose in an obscene wave,  and next
to it was a large pool of blood. As she watched, the pool slowly drained into
the  gravel,  but  didn't seep out into the surrounding  ground,  instead  it
seemed to pour deep into the earth under the train tracks.  Janet turned, and
was about to walk away,  when a whisper from behind caught her attention. She
turned  back  in  time to see a pale hand appear  from  beneath  the  tracks,
pushing  gravel  aside  as it strained upwards.  It took hold  of  her  son's
severed  arm,  and Janet woke in a cold sweat,  shivering  with  fear.  She'd
suffered  from  nightmares for almost a year after  David's  death,  and  had
thought that they'd finally stopped. Seeing the little boy on the tracks that
morning had triggered her grief again,  and she lay for many  hours,  hugging
herself and crying quiet,  painful tears. If only Peter had stayed - at least
they could have dealt with the grief together.  Janet was a strong woman, but
losing  both  a  son and a husband had taken their inevitable  toll  on  her,
physically  and emotionally.  She'd lost a considerable amount of weight  and
her  previously lustrous and thick blond hair now lay limp and straggly  down
her back.
 The next night,  exhausted from lack of sleep,  Janet travelled to work. She
dozed for several minutes,  when she was suddenly jerked awake by a noise. It
had  sounded just like David's voice - but that was ridiculous,  she  scolded
herself.  She  shook her head,  and put it down to an echo of  the  nightmare
she'd  suffered the day before.  The train reached its destination and  Janet
stepped  out into the crowd of other late-night commuters and shift  workers.
She  shuffled up to the bored ticket collector and was about to give him  her
ticket,  when the whispers came again.  Startled,  she whipped round,  to see
only  a sea of puzzled faces waiting for her to pass through  the  turnstile.
Confused and embarrassed,  she turned back to the ticket collector,  gave him
her ticket and rushed off the platform.
 During that night, Janet was haunted again by the whispers and the vision of
her son.  While eating her lunch,  she drifted off into a daydream about him.
David was standing on the railway tracks,  waving to her again.  She screamed
for  him to run to her,  as she had done in the nightmare,  and this time  he
heard her,  and ran to her side just before the train rushed past. She hugged
him tightly, and smiled to herself.
 "Mummy?"
 "Yes, David?" she replied, opening her eyes to find herself once more in the
empty lunchroom.  She stared down at her sandwich,  trembling,  her  appetite
gone. Why was this happening? Her son's voice had sounded so lifelike, and so
close.  Had she fallen asleep?  Distracted and upset,  she went back to work,
but couldn't get the sound of David's voice out of her mind.
 The  whispers  and nightmares became much more frequent over  the  following
week.  Janet  stopped eating almost completely,  and couldn't sleep for  more
than two or three hours each night.  Her nervous and unpredictable  behaviour
began to disturb her workmates, and after several complaints and comments her
foreman  was  forced  to  tell her to take  a  few  days  off.  Janet  didn't
understand what was happening,  and protested,  claiming that a good  night's
sleep would be enough to set her to rights again. She finished the shift, and
visited  her  local  doctor.  He looked at her for a full  minute  after  she
finished  telling him about the hallucinations and nightmares,  and  silently
began to write out a prescription.  The tranquillisers were strong,  and  she
took one as soon as she returned home, and slept for nearly twelve hours.
 The  next  few  days were uneventful,  as Janet pottered  around  the  flat,
catching  up on house work and letter writing.  She went for long  walks  and
spent many hours napping.  On that weekend,  however,  the whispers returned.
She was watching television in the evening when they came,  a constant murmur
under the inane babble of the TV show.  She curled up on the couch, her hands
over her ears,  shaking her head to try to make them go away,  but they crept
inside,  and she began to cry. Eventually they subsided, and she took another
tranquilliser,  but to no avail.  The whispers returned later that night, and
this time she understood snatches of what they were saying.  The voices  were
telling  her to go back to the trainline,  to join her son and Janet  finally
fell asleep, deciding that the next day she would go back to the tracks.
 Sunday was a warm,  sunny day, and Janet enjoyed her walk to the tracks. She
half  expected  to see the child she'd watched the previous  weekend  playing
games beside the rails again,  but the area was deserted.  She stared down at
the  shiny  steel  lines,  and  the cracked  wooden  sleepers  between  them,
remembering the blood and gore from the nightmare to appear before her  eyes.
She checked up and down the line for trains,  and stepped between the  rails.
She thought about her son,  his smiling face and blond hair,  as if trying to
conjure  up  his ghost.  Janet waited for the whispers  to  start,  but  they
didn't.  She waited for almost half an hour,  pacing up and down the  tracks.
Finally she gave up,  and turned to leave when the whispers started up again,
a low murmur rising from beneath the tracks.  Janet turned back,  knelt down,
and put her ear to the ground. She could hear her son calling her, along with
a  mixture  of  other voices,  both adult  and  child,  and  listened  there,
motionless for several minutes.  She was so engrossed in the voices that  she
didn't  hear the express train approaching.  The driver,  unable to  stop  in
time, blew the train's horn several times in a desperate attempt to alert the
form  that  was  hunched  in the middle  of  the  tracks.  Janet  was  killed
instantly, her body shattered by the impact.

                                    *****

 The people under the ground were talking to Joey Graham again.  He loved  to
sit  on the tracks and listen to them chatter while he played in  the  gravel
between  the sleepers.  They told him wonderful things,  and he became  their
friend.  They told him they were lonely, and wanted him to keep visiting them
every  day.  Janet  held David's hand as they whispered up to the  small  boy
sitting on the tracks above their heads.  She was finally with her  boy,  and
with others like herself.  They all lived under the train lines,  and  coaxed
people from the upper world to join them with their whispers.  Suddenly  they
hushed,  as  the  faint tremor of a train's approach reached them  under  the
earth.  They  clutched each other with excitement and  expectation,  as  they
waited for their next friend to join them under the tracks.


= THE SEVEN GATES OF HELL, OR, OBVIOUSLY INFLUENCED BY THE DEVIL II =========
 by Richard Karsmakers


                     I - PRELUDE TO MADNESS

 The  date  with  the dentist's assistant had  been  disastrous.  At  various
instances Cronos Warchild, mercenary annex hired gun, had put his foot in his
mouth  and had happily blabbered on about his rather  none-too-glorious  past
and  rather not very illustrious exploits,  lethally boring the poor girl  to
death.  Somehow it had struck him as odd when the girl had found it necessary
to  take her coat with her when basically all she'd said she went to  do  was
powder her nose.
 He never saw her again. Feeling blue, he eventually left the restaurant when
the cleaners had assured him all to be found in the ladies' room was a  piece
of  purple dress caught on an open window,  flapping forlornly in the  chilly
night breeze.
 Warchild  felt  wretched  utterly as he walked home  along  a  small  river.
Willows drooped in it disconsoledly, fog flowing slowly off the pastures onto
the  water.  Autumn's decay made leaves rustle as he moved his  feet  through
them,  not particularly caring where he went. Vegetative death was all around
him,  and at times the sky would clear enough for the pale light of the  moon
to peep through wanly.  Although Cronos would never have admitted it,  he was
feeling thoroughly melancholic.
 It was in such a mood,  feeling really sorry for himself as usual,  that  he
found himself reading the classifieds in a fairly recent newspaper. He didn't
know what he was looking for, nor whether he actually wanted to find anything
at all. Some of the adverts caused him to raise an eyebrow; a few even caused
him to raise both. He thought it was incredible to which lengths people would
go to get what they wanted.  A particular advert,  however, got his immediate
and virtually undivided attention.
 "Bored?" it read,  "Bored,  strong and talented?  Come and help my nephew to
become  a  man and make it in this world that he seems unable to  cope  with.
Martial skills are a prerequisite. Lavish reimbursement to be expected."
 Small glowing stars lit up in Cronos' eyes.  Had someone bothered to take  a
much  closer  look  at the little starlets that  glowed  in  those  virtually
measureless  depths,  he  would have seen that in fact they were  two  almost
infinitely tiny dollar signs.

                                    *****

 The  driveway looked almost like an interstate.  Somewhere near the  horizon
was a huge mansion, looming ponderously, speaking real estate's body language
of  a man radiating vast wealth,  almost right up to and including the  Rolly
Royce key hanger.  A gardener was mowing the lawn with a nail  clipper.  When
Cronos  moved  up the driveway to the house,  the garderer looked  up  as  if
apologising for daring to exist.
 It took quite a while until he finally arrived at the mansion.  Up close  it
looked  much huger than he had anticipated.  The front had a lot of  pillars.
Around  it were sumptuous lawns that,  he now saw,  were kept by a  veritable
army  of gardeners. Someone had a lot of money here,  and he guessed  rightly
that this particular person was not among those wielding the nail clippers.
 He stood before the huge doors,  which hung on huge shiny hinges that looked
like - and most likely *were* - gold. The mercenary annex hired gun could not
help  but hold his breath for a while,  in awe.  Beauty and ugliness  can  be
fascinating,  and  so can hard-core wealth such as was blatantly  on  display
right in front of him.  Above the doors was a huge,  ornately fashioned coat-
of-arms. It consisted of a spear, a ball and a dog, embraced by red branches.
 Cronos  made  to knock on the door when it opened as if on its  own  accord.
Behind it stood,  so Warchild thought, the human equivalent of a penguin. The
man wore tails and a bow tie, and looked as if, freshly pressed and starched,
he'd just been delivered back from the dry cleaner's.
 "Sir?" the butler inquired politely.
 "No," Warchild said,  brushing the man aside,  "Warchild. Cronos Warchild. I
am here to see Anthony Hepplewhite Saintjohn Thurny."
 "*Sir* Anthony..."
 Cronos  made a nondescript sign with his left hand,  leaving behind him  the
butler  and  stepping inside something like a glossy 'Houses  of  the  Rather
Absurdly Rich' magazine,  quite oblivious of the highly polished marble,  the
tasteful arches and the countless displays of exorbitantly expensive antiques
that  would  probably  have made many other individuals cause  to  sweat  and
salivate vehemently and simultaneously.
 He  stepped through a vast hall or two,  followed by an  embarrassed  butler
mumbling  humble  apologies,  before almost walking into a old  man  that  he
rightly reckoned might be the lord of the mansion.
 The  man  had  a large,  drooping nose and eyes that  slanted  down  to  the
outsides.  What little hair he had left was combed back to attempt to cover a
huge bald patch, the long strands held in place by what seemed like litres of
gel  and which were,  in fact,  litres of gel.  More ample supplies of  hair,
however, seemed to sprout forth from the man's nasal cavities.
 Behind the man stood a boy no older than twenty.  There was a certain family
resemblance,  undeniably, although the youth still had more hair on his scalp
and rather less of it protruding from his nose.
 Cronos raised an eyebrow and said, "He is your nephew?"
 Anthony  Hepplewhite Saintjohn Thurny - pardon,  *Lord* Anthony  Hepplewhite
Saintjohn Thurny - nodded.
 "That is the young fellow in question,  Mr. Warchild," he said. "Like I said
over the telephone,  he has some difficulty coping with the world around him.
He needs to become a man, and methinks you seem pretty much up to the job."
 Warchild looked at the boy.  Maybe the rough working material was there, but
he'd first have to do some chiselling to get it exposed.
 "What's your name, son?" Warchild asked.
 "Trom," the boy said, stepping forward. There was a spark of defiance in the
lad's eyes,  Cronos saw. No problem. It might, in fact, make this potentially
boring job a more interesting one. He loved children, and not necessarily for
breakfast, even.
 "Would  you  mind stepping into the library with  me,  Mr.  Warchild?"  Lord
Anthony  Hepplewhite  Saintjohn Thurny beckoned,  walking past  Warchild  and
vanishing  through a pair of huge swinging doors into  semi-darkness.  Cronos
followed,  to find himself entering a huge library with shelves upon  shelves
of books,  the upper tiers accessible only by means of a ladder that stood in
a corner. It looked like it hadn't been moved for quite a while, though.
 "Mr.  Warchild," Lord Anthony said,  his voice down to slightly more than  a
whisper, "I am worried about my nephew."
 "Oh? Why?" Cronos said, "He seems like a strapping young fellow to me."
 "Hmm," Lord Anthony hmm-ed,  "Hmm.  You see, I think something is wrong with
him. You see, we come from a lineage of fine army officers. Trom's father was
actually a general and most of his uncles are colonels at the least. You see,
the  boy shows no desire to fight at all.  He doesn't want to  *command*,  he
does not want to *rule*. He does not want to slay natives or something. He is
not  the kind of boy that our Great Empire became a Great Empire with in  the
first  place.  You see,  on his eighteenth birthday I offered him  a  hundred
naked women. And you know what, Mr. Warchild?"
 "No,"  Cronos  said,  after some genuine thought on  the  matter,  "I  don't
believe  I do." He thought of the dental assistant.  Hell,  even *one*  woman
would be just fine and dandy to him, let alone...
 "You see,  he simply didn't mind them," the man said,  rolling his eyes, "He
never looked at them.  Instead,  he looked *past* them to discover if perhaps
they  were some trick to hide from him some other gift,  a chemistry  set  or
something. I recall he was pretty disappointed. The women, too."
 "So what do you want me to do?" Cronos asked.
 "I want you to expose him to discipline," Lord Anthony said firmly,  looking
around  for a handy table to hit with his fist and failing,  "teach  him  the
ropes, nose on the grindstone kind of thing, train him into the martial arts,
get  him in touch with the real dog-eat-dog world outside  this  estate.  And
maybe, just *maybe*, get him in touch with, er, the fairer sex, too."
 Cronos mulled it over for a while.
 "Why  me?"  Warchild  wondered,  "And don't tell  me  Julie  Andrews  wasn't
available."
 "Funny  you  should  mention  that..."  Lord  Anthony  mused,  trailing  off
somewhere  within  his head and barely remembering to  come  back.  "Er,"  he
recuperated,  "because you have what it takes.  Whatever it is,  my instincts
tell  me  you have it.  Knew it the very instant I heard your  voice  on  the
telephone. And I always trust my instincts."
 Warchild mulled that over for a while, too. "What's the pay?" he inquired.
 "The reimbursement, you mean?"
 "Yeah, whatever."
 "What  about  having a go at a hundred of my aunts and nieces,"  an  inanely
grinning Trom interrupted, who turned out to have entered the library not too
long after they had, "all of them sexually thwarted not too long ago?"
 His uncle gave him a killer look.  "No," Lord Anthony said, smiling with the
soft-hearted air of one who will soon be dealing out a good spanking,  "I had
a  more  conventional reward in mind in the shape of a chest  of  Hepplewhite
Saintjohn Thurny family gold."
 "What  are  we  looking at here?" Cronos  asked,  the  little  dollar-shaped
starlets in his eyes swelling and throbbing.
 "Well,"  Lord  Anthony surmised,  "I think it would be safe to  assume  that
we're looking at perpetual wealth here."
 That sounded good.
 "Deal," Cronos said,  grinning.  The boy looked up at him for no  particular
reason. A bell tolled in the distance, but that was just coincidence.

                                    *****

 The sun had barely dared to show itself above the horizon the next day, when
Cronos  and  Trom were out already on one of the  estate's  sumptuous  lawns,
preparing  for a training session.  Warchild had suspended a straw puppet  by
means  of  a  primitive gallows,  and from somewhere  within  Lord  Anthony's
impressive collection of World War I souvenirs he had retrieved a  bajonetted
rifle.
 "Today you're going to learn all you wanted to know about *gutting*," Cronos
said with some relish, "but were afraid to ask."
 "Yuck," Trom said,  with some feeling,  "sounds disgusting." He prodded  the
straw  puppet tentatively with the rifle.  It seemed heavy in  his  hand.  He
wasn't  sure  he  was going to like this training stuff that  his  uncle  had
somehow thought necessary.  Somehow,  however,  he felt like this might be  a
part of him, or of something that used to be him.
 The  world began to go all floppy and swirly...he wanted to embrace  it,  be
one with it and its past,  *his* past.  He flopped to the ground, limply, and
for a while he dreamt...

 The dog ran towards him,  aiming to make of him a tasteful dinner of  sorts.
He didn't know what to do;  the only thing he could think of was grabbing his
playing  ball and throwing it at the dog with all the force that  was  within
him. It entered the dog between its jaws and came out through its tail. Happy
for having accomplished this feat,  he threw one of his warrior's  fits.  His
hair stood out like nails, and his eyes crossed gruesomely. He then picked up
a stick and threw it away as far as he could, then ran like the wind to catch
it himself.
 The  dog's master - who was now the owner of about 80 pounds of dead meat  -
came outside.  It was Culann,  the smith.  He was angry at the boy for having
killed his dog.
 "I  am sorry,  sir Culann," he said,  "but the dog attacked me and I  didn't
know what else to do.  But if you'll let me, I will be your guard dog until I
have made enough money to buy you a new one."

 "You OK,  son?" Cronos asked,  slapping Trom's face,  "It seems you had some
kind of fit there."
 Trom shook his head, entering reality again.
 "I  have these dream fits occasionally," he said,  rubbing his  eyes,  "it's
almost  as  if  there is someone else living in  me,  waiting  to  escape  or
something."
 Cronos nodded.  He was no psychiatrist, so he reckoned it would be best just
to nod at regular intervals. Always worked. Did this time, too.
 "You OK?" Cronos asked again.
 "Yeah, sure," Trom said, "Give me that rifle again."
 "Wait a minute," Warchild interjected, fumbling in his pocket and retrieving
a red piece of cloth, "I've got to tie a ribbon around your head."
 "Why?" Trom asked.
 To  Cronos Warchild it seemed the most stupid question possible.  It  simply
wasn't done not to tie a ribbon around your head prior to heroic exploits  of
sorts. Preferably a red one.
 "Just because it's supposed to be like that," he said.
 At that very instant,  taking Trom quite by surprise, a cloud of acrid smoke
signalled the entry upon the scene of a demon.  Cronos, by now, had met these
so often that it really didn't startle him at all.
 It  grinned  with  fangs  that had be dontocured  perhaps  once  too  often.
Unceremoniously  it zipped open Warchild's fly,  slid in a warty green  hand,
fumbled for a brief instance or three,  then came out again, having retrieved
a Battery Pack.
 With a sound like a dinosaur's handclap and another cloud of smoke, it - and
the Battery Pack - disappeared.  There was a smell of sulphur,  like  someone
had just lit a match factory.
 Hands hung limply,  like Cronos' flabbergasted lower jaw. The ribbon flopped
to the ground uselessly.
 "What  was that,  master?" Trom had never laid eyes on a demon in  his  life
before and,  by the grimace on his face,  was pretty sure he never wanted  to
again.
 "That, Trom," Warchild said, deep in thought, "was a demon."
 "One of the Dark Lord's minions, you mean?"
 "One of those very ones."
 "What did it...er...*do* with its hand down your trousers?"
 A  recollection of intensely nauseous pain raced through Cronos'  groin  and
belly.
 "I am afraid it,  er, borrowed," he sighing painfully, "my Mega Absorb Groin
Protector's Battery Pack."
 "O," Trom said.
 "And,"  Warchild added in a half-hearted attempt at an ominous  voice,  "the
bad thing is that it didn't ask."
 Cronos  looked  around to see if perhaps the demon was looking at  him  from
behind  a bush or a conveniently placed tree.  There was no sign of any  such
thing,  however.  The  world around him had returned once more to a  kind  of
peaceful tranquility. Still...you never knew where a potential groinal threat
might come from.  Not a female in sight, however. He was quite safe. For now,
anyway. He flinched again as if at a particularly painful recollection.
 "Er...Mr. Warchild?" Trom ventured carefully.
 "Hmm?" hmm-ed Cronos.
 "Those Groins...er...are they dangerous?"

                                    *****

 "Well done, oh Flattus," Satan grinned.
 Flattus moved his feet uncomfortably, causing him to appear very much like a
shy schoolgirl would in front of a school principal wielding a cane.
 "It was nothing,  oh Dark One," he said, absent-mindedly fumbling a piece of
paper in his pocket.
 "You *did* remember to leave the note, didn't you?"
 "The note?"
 He stopped fumbling, abruptly.
 "Er...sure I did, oh Jet-Blackest of Lords."

                                    *****

 There was another cloud,  yellow-green, smelling even more horribly than the
previous  one  had.  It appeared right in front of  Cronos,  who  just  about
panicked and quickly used both his hands to protect his vitals.  He was  once
more reminded of how many pores he had.
 Before him,  as the smoke lifted, appeared once more that vilest of the Dark
Lord's Minions. In its warty green hand it now held a crumpled note, which it
deftly  rolled up and put into Warchild's mouth,  what with it  hanging  open
conveniently anyway.
 Within the few instances that Cronos laid eyes on the demon,  he could  have
sworn  that  it  looked  somehow  different.   Yes,  indeed,  he  could  have
sworn...sworn that it had a black eye.
 With another puff of smoke,  however,  the demon swiftly disappeared back to
whatever dark retreat in the deepest hells it had originated from.
 Trom coughed.
 Having ascertained that the demon had properly vanished, Cronos relinquished
the protective grip on his gonads and took from his mouth the note. It tasted
like  burnt sulphur.  He'd never quite tasted that before but he  was  pretty
sure that, if he'd ever taste it, it would taste like this.
 "Yon  Batterye Pakke hath been Pilfered," Cronos read,  "See thee  in  Helle
(Dont Bee Late)." There were some numbers on it,  too,  that didn't make much
sense at all.
 "Turn it over," Trom said, "there's stuff on the back, too."
 "Conseyled  too Alle,  Reveyled too Nonne,  Lye Helles  Infernalle  Gaytes,"
Cronos  continued after flipping the note,  "Heyr the Deymons Calle from  the
Crymson Waterfalle...Where the Blod Weepes from the Skye."
 Warchild's face spelled thunder and lightning.
 "Does that mean..." Trom said.
 "Yes," Warchild cut the boy off.  "Yes,  Trom.  It looks like your  training
might be a bit more rigorous than expected. We're going to hell."
 "*You*  are  going to hell,  certainly," Trom retorted  quickly,  not  quite
wishing  to get into situations where his life would be flashing before  him,
"there's no reason why *I*..."
 Warchild  showed  Trom the note,  pointing out one more  short  sentence  in
somewhat smaller handwriting, apparently scribbled on it as an afterthought.
 "Bringe the Boye," Trom read. His heart sank, his knees went all jelly.
 "Do you know of a waterfall around here?" Cronos asked,  in thought.  He had
to  shake Trom up a bit;  the boy was feeling too sorry for himself  to  have
heard the question.  Instead,  Trom was whimpering about fire,  dirt,  sweat,
heat, fear and functions of the colon.
 "Come on," Cronos said,  pocketing the note,  "get your act together! Do you
know a waterfall here? On the grounds of the estate perhaps?"
 In  between  the pathetic whimpering,  there came out a  barely  discernible
"yes".
 "Where?" Cronos insisted.
 "To  the south of the mansion," Trom said,  breathing  irregularly,  in  the
forest where my uncle usually does his hunting."
 Cronos  considered it apt to lose no more time.  What with his  Mega  Absorb
Groin Protector being useless now,  he felt much too volatile, too *exposed*,
for his own good.  He felt like he was walking around naked or something.  He
simply  *had*  to  find  the Battery  Pack  again;  the  Protector  had  been
manufactured  on Ambulor Eight and,  similarly,  the Battery Packs were  only
available on that planet and selected of its moons.
 "Come on," Cronos said, resolutely, pulling Trom by the arm in the direction
of Lord Anthony's hunting grounds.

 It wasn't a big forest or anything,  but they were practically falling  over
pheasants  and constantly running into startled deer.  Was Lord  Anthony  the
kind of person to hunt with an M-60 or something?
 "It's in that direction," Trom said, pointing to a particularly dense bit of
forest from behind which the sound of falling water seemed to be  coming.  He
was beginning to get a feel of elation.  Obviously,  contact with nature  did
him good.
 The patch was particularly dense indeed.  Cronos had to try his best to tear
away  branches  and  push  aside  deer that had  gathered  to  see  what  was
happening.  Until,  suddenly,  shoving aside a natural curtain of leaves  and
ivy, they beheld the waterfall.
 It was pretty huge,  crashing down at least 60 feet into a shallow lake with
rocky sides. It indeed seemed to be the fabled Crymson Waterfalle referred to
on the note:  The water was a deep dark red and had a thicker  quality,  like
blood.  Curiously,  all  that watery torrent did not blank out the  sound  of
cries, now distinguishable, that seemed to come from whatever lay beyond it.
 "That  waterfall wasn't red last time *I* looked," Trom  shuddered.  He  was
getting ever more convinced that whatever it was they were getting themselves
into,  it  would be well over their heads.  Needless to say,  he didn't  like
things one bit.
 "Come,"  Cronos  beckoned,  stepping  into  the  shallow  lake  towards  the
waterfall.
 "I  was  afraid  you might say that," Trom  said.  He  stept  in  carefully,
horrified.
 It wasn't water,  no si-ree. It was blood all right. It stuck to their boots
and  soaked  their trousers,  feeling uncomfortably warm as if  from  a  vast
source of the freshly dead.
 "The cries," Warchild said, "you hear them?"
 Trom nodded miserably. He'd been trying to ignore the soppy sounds his boots
made  in the redness,  to block out the wailing cries that were indeed  quite
clearly audible.
 "They come from behind the waterfall," Cronos affirmed,  "'Heyr the  Deymons
Calle from the Crymson Waterfalle'." He seemed alight with zeal. Trom wasn't.
 Cronos  had  always dreamt of this,  standing  knee-high  in  blood,  wading
through  soft entrails,  things like that.  This was almost like  mercenary's
heaven as far as he was concerned.  Had Trom known Warchild's thoughts on the
matter, he would surely have begged to differ.
 Warchild halted in front of the waterfall,  of which the sound was now close
to  deafening but still didn't block out the cries and wails that  came  from
beyond. He looked up at it, felt dwarfed by it. The warmth radiating from the
cateract of warm blood made his skin glow.  Trom,  for his part, found he had
to swallow rather a lot. He was beginning to *smell* it too, now. Horrible.
 Rather  unexpectedly  and  unceremoniously,   Cronos  stepped  through   the
waterfall. Trom panicked. What to do now? Before he could make up his mind to
return  to  the  mansion  and face his uncle - and  another  hundred  of  his
scantily  clad relatives,  if need be - Cronos' hand reached out to him  from
beyond the warmly red curtain and pulled the boy through.
 Trom uttered a terrified cry, which died on his lips when he looked back and
discovered that the waterfall in fact consisted of water  and,  miraculously,
both  the  crazy  summabitch  mercenary annex  hired  gun  and  himself  were
completely  dry.  The demonic sounds that had previously been  impossible  to
ignore had vanished similarly. What the hell was going on here?
 "It  must have been an enchanted waterfall or something," Trom  said,  voice
hushed,  feeling  himself now slowly filling with a sense  of  adventure.  He
breathed  in  deeply,  which was a bad idea.  He gagged as the  centuries  of
collected  debris  and rotting animal remains that had  gathered  behind  the
waterfall made his olfactory acquaintance.
 "Yuck," Trom said, and he meant every word of it.
 Cronos,  apparently insensitive to the noxious fumes,  had in the mean  time
discovered  a  kind  of  cave.  He signalled Trom  to  come  closer  to  help
investigate. They probed the cave walls for signs of a lever or a button, but
failed to find them.
 "We're close," Warchild said,  frustrated,  "we're close.  Damn it,  I  know
we're close!"
 Trom looked around as best he could,  but continued to fail to see  anything
other than rock and yet more rock. And rats, of course, especially rats. Dead
rats. They lay rotting there, god knows for how long they'd been lying there.
He prodded one with his foot and got scared out of his wits when the creature
sprang up and legged it. It disappeared through a fairly small hole.
 "Hey, there's a hole here," Trom pointed.
 Cronos  immediately  investigated  it.  The  rat  had  vanished  completely.
Warchild probed the hole with his hand until he felt something like a button.
He pushed it.

                        II - THE SEVEN GATES OF HELL

 Part  of the cave wall,  making the awfulest noise,  opened up to  reveal  a
gathering of approximately a dozen human skeletons clad in armour that ranged
in  age  through a great many centuries.  They stepped closer  to  check  the
skeletons - and the means through which they had died - out.  Without as much
as  a  stony warning groan,  the cave wall closed behind  them  smoothly  and
soundlessly. They heard and saw nothing.
 "I  think  we can at least guess what they died  of,"  Trom  said,  pointing
roughly  in the pitch darkness at the direction where the skeletons  lay.  It
was  amazing  how quickly the air got stale and oppressive when you're  in  a
confined space with about a dozen dead knights.
 "Despair  not," Warchild said,  fumbling in the utter darkness,  "I think  I
found a lever."
 There  was  the rusty sound of a lever being pulled,  followed  by  that  of
several  dozen  razor-sharp  metal things being  rapidly  pulled  from  their
sheaths.  Something sliced through a piece of Trom's clothing,  and he  could
feel  the wind of something very cold and very,  very sharp flying  past  his
ear.
 The  far side of this tomb-like cave now opened up and let a certain  degree
of light stream in.  As it turned out,  several dozen razor-sharp lances  had
appeared from holes in the floor and had connected themselves to the ceiling.
One had nearly impaled Trom,  who began very much to feel uncomfortable  when
that realisation hit him. One of the lances, directly beneath Cronos' genital
area,  seemed as yet hesitant to spring forth; probably a rusty mechanism. It
groaned softly,  ticking,  as if waiting for an inopportune moment to finally
let go.
 "I think we should leave this place," Trom said, worming himself through the
lances  to the far side where Cronos was sweating like a pig at the  prospect
of  that one lance colliding with his Mega Absorb Groin Protector  without  a
Battery Pack inserted.
 Trom reached Cronos and pulled at the man. The mercenary annex hired gun was
frozen to the spot,  however, totally paralysed with fear (though, of course,
he would never have admitted that).
 "CRONOS!!" yelled Trom,  tearing the potentially gonad-less mercenary  annex
hired gun from his stupor of fear, "JUMP!!"
 Before anyone could have asked how high, Cronos took an almost instinctively
giant leap and brought himself and his glockenspiel in safety.  Breathlessly,
he  looked at the one lance that was still stuck in the floor,  battling  its
mechanism  with silent determination.  It stayed put.  Cronos let out a  deep
sigh.
 "Look there," Trom said,  pointing, "would that be the First of the Gates of
Hell?"
 Cronos  looked in the direction where Trom pointed and saw what didn't  much
look  like a gate at all,  really,  let alone one of the  proverbially  famed
Seven Gates. It was, in fact, more like a porch.
 They opened it and walked through.
 "That wasn't half as bad as I thought," Cronos said,  "It's probably not the
First of the Gates at all."
 Trom,  wiping some perspiration off his brow,  was about to tell Warchild to
knock wood when a man with quite a long beard and a staff of lapis lazuli  in
his hand appeared as if materialising from the very darkness around them.
 "It is I,  Nanna, guardian of the First of the Seven Gates of Hell," the man
intoned,  in  a manner of voice that made them realise that,  no  matter  how
countlessly  often he had repeated these exact words,  they were not to  take
whatever he said lightly.
 "I  possess  the secret of the tides of blood," the bearded  man  continued,
completely  ignoring the sound of the last of the lances boring  itself  into
the  ceiling behind them,  which startled hell out of Cronos,  "my colour  is
Silver and I am also known to mortals as Sin. What is my number?"
 The man looked as if he would take offense at them not knowing whatever  his
number might be.  Trom had the impression that the man would not simply  slap
them on the cheek and tell them to head back home,  no,  this was  definitely
the  kind  of man to use that lapis lazuli staff of his and hit them  on  the
head with it until they would voluntarily take the shortcut, one-way route to
hell.  Although  the  man as a whole looked friendly enough - like  a  leaner
version  of Santa Claus with different clothing - his eyes looked  the  exact
opposite. They were "don't fuck with me" eyes.
 Cronos  was racking his brain.  There wasn't much to rack,  so he looked  at
Trom hopefully. Trom looked back, exasperatingly.
 "How the hell should *I* know?" he said.
 The bearded man named Nanna - what a silly name for a guardian of the  First
Gate of Hell - was becoming impatient. All adventurers and questers alike had
at  least  had  the courtesy to know his bloody *number* when  they  had  the
audacity to come here.  He was thinking of something particularly cruel to do
to  these poor bastards - it had been quite a while since he'd  been  visited
and  he'd thought long and hard of what to do next time someone came  -  when
the chunky dude suddenly looked up.
 "Wait a sec'," Cronos suddenly said,  as if some subliminal hand had brushed
by him and had awarded him with one of his traditionally rare moments of True
Lucidity.  He  took the demon's note out of his pocket.  There  were  several
numbers on it,  numbers that had initially not made much sense at all but now
suddenly just might.
 Trom  looked at Cronos.  He hoped he may have misjudged the mercenary  annex
hired gun. He wished the hastily scribbled numbers indeed bore some relevance
to  the situation at hand,  for this Nanna character seemed not too  keen  on
letting them guess more than once.
 Warchild scanned the note. There were Seven Gates but only six numbers. He'd
have to take the chance, however. The first number was thirty.
 "Thirty," Cronos said.
 There was a pause,  during which time could have passed and tipped its  hat,
but didn't.
 "Thirty is my number indeed," the guardian named Nanna  enunciated,  nodding
solemnly, "you have spoken rightly."
 "Cool," Trom said,  suddenly again more confident and courageous.  The sense
of adventure came flowing back into his veins.
 "There  is no reason for relief yet,  I can assure you,  young  man,"  Nanna
said, condescending, "for now there is the Test."
 Somehow,  the way in which the guardian made the word "Test" actually  sound
as if it started with a capital made Trom feel queasy.
 "A test?" Cronos asked.
 "Indeed, noble adventurer," the guardian said, somewhat smugly, "a Test." He
clicked his fingers.
 A broad-shouldered Gorilla,  Warchild's even more primitive alter ego so  it
seemed, appeared from behind a bush as if it had been hidden there all along.
It licked its lower lip as if it was craving for a banana,  and in its  hands
it held a knife that looked very sharp indeed.
 The Gorilla grinned. A knife flashed. An upper lip was licked.
 At  around  that instant,  it became no longer  apparent  what  happened.  A
cartoonesque  cloud of sand evolved around the human and the  primate,  grass
flinging off in several directions.  The occasional sounds along the lines of
"BASH", "WHACK" and, indeed, "THUD", were hurled at the guardian and Trom.
 Few moments later the dust settled upon the unconscious form of the Gorilla.
Its  fur was wrinkled,  it had a black eye and its nose seemed broken with  a
tiny stream of blood pouring out of one nostril.
 It was dead, too.
 Cronos brushed off some grass and sand, then snorted derisively. He had just
been  hit  by  a Gorilla and the most acute sense of *deja vu*  he  had  ever
experienced.  He  could have sworn he had been through this  virtually  exact
experience  before.  He suddenly had to think of a white kangaroo  wearing  a
clock, a guy called Cranium and a most nauseatingly terrible smell.
 He shook the memories off and looked at the guardian,  who was impressed. It
was clear that he was the kind of man that would have liked to place bets  on
this sort of thing.  You could see he didn't like the fact that there had not
been another hellish inhabitant to place bets with.
 "The second gate," Nanna said, "is due south. Have a nice day."
 Trom  and Cronos walked off in the direction that the guardian of the  First
Gate  of Hell had pointed out.  It was not until after an hour's  walking  or
thereabouts when they spotted it.

 They stood before the second Gate of Hell.  It looked a lot more like a gate
this time.  It had wrought-iron hinges and looked made of some kind of really
solid wood,  aged by many,  many centuries. In it was a peephole, below which
hung  a  formidable  door knocker in the shape of a goat's  skull  with  some
ancient inscriptions neither of them could ever hope to decipher.
 Cronos lifted the knocker.  It was black, heavy, and really cold. He knocked
the door with it once,  twice,  thrice,  four times.  A twisted sound, almost
embodying  darkness,  reverberated off the door and echoed beyond and  before
them,  forming  the eerie words "In...Madness...You...Dwell" that  seemed  to
echoe for an unnaturally long time in their minds.
 Trom shivered.  This was seriously scary stuff. His nanny had never told him
things  like  this happened in the world outside  the  Hepplewhite  Saintjohn
Thurny estate.
 The door opened slowly,  and out of it stepped a man wearing a long priestly
robe and a crown of thorns.  Although he had no beard, he appeared ancient on
every  account.  He was bent,  had an  unhealthy-looking  complexion,  hollow
cheeks,  and  leaned on a cane that looked as if it was bought as a  souvenir
from the Mull of Kintyre.
 "It is I,  Nebo, guardian of the Second of the Seven Gates of Hell," the man
said,  his voice sounding like a broom going through a porcelain store that a
rabid elephant had just been in.
 "I am the keeper of the knowledge of Science," Nebo continued, "my colour is
Blue and I bear the sign of Mercury. What is my number?"
 Cronos hoped the list of numbers would continue to be correct.  He took  out
the note again,  uncrumpling it.  He knew there were only six numbers on  the
note,  yet seven Hellish Gates.  He fervently hoped the one missing would not
be that of one of the earlier gates.  Not this one,  at any rate. He wondered
who in hell was helping them,  who actually *wanted* him and Trom to  succeed
this quest and enter Hell itself.
 Nebo was a man of infinitely more patience than Nanna,  maybe on account  of
his  name not being half as silly as that of the  previous  guardian.  Still,
Trom  reckoned  Cronos should not wait too long with the  revelation  of  the
number,  because you never knew. It's best to be on the safe side, especially
on your way to Hell.
 "Twelve," Warchild said,  holding his breath until Nebo nodded  slowly,  the
joints of the ancient man's neck creaking sickeningly.
 Trom let go a sigh of relief, but caught himself.
 "Of course," the old man revealed, "there shall have to be a Test."
 Another one of those capitalised words, Trom noticed. Dratted drat.
 Nebo  took from a pocket a stopwatch.  He flicked a switch that had  so  far
been  quite  invisible,  upon  which a couple  of  spotlights  went  on.  The
spotlights shone on an audience stand on which sat about a hundred demons and
other assorted minions of hell. They were all cackling, making ghastly noises
and waving at where they supposed had to be a camera.
 "You  have  one  minute..."  the  guardian  said,  smiling,  "...to  get  10
toothbrushes  from  our  esteemed  audience!" He  pressed  something  on  the
stopwatch. A hand began to rotate.
 Trom  and Cronos both ran up the audience stand.  From somewhere there  came
music,  the kind of music that makes you ever more nervous,  it ever  gaining
more  speed,  ever  becoming infinitely more irritable.  Some of  the  demons
fumbled in their handbags,  looking if they had perhaps brought a  toothbrush
with them.  Miraculously, quite a few of them actually had. Some other demons
found  the tooth brushes and ate them before Trom or Cronos could come  close
enough to attempt to snatch them from their ugly, warted paws.
 "30 seconds..." Nebo said in the tone of one with all the time in the world.
 Trom had found a couple of tooth brushes already.  Some of them were  shaped
like bones, some others like bat's wings.
 "Look,  Trom," Cronos said,  showing a toothbrush, "this has a really clever
eye-of-newt design!"
 Trom signalled him to hurry and not to bullshit.  He saved a toothbrush from
a demon's fangs,  almost losing a finger or two in the process. The music was
becoming louder; the tuba started humphing ever faster.
 "10 seconds..." Nebo said, appearing bored.
 Cronos grabbed a last toothbrush on his way out.  This particular one had  a
pair of artificial fangs hanging onto it. He shook them off. "Sorry ma'm," he
apologised.
 Right  in the nick of time they arrived back at where  Nebo  stood,  waiting
patiently.
 "Zero,"  the guardian said.  "Let's count those toothbrushes."  The  demonic
audience applauded.
 Trom and Cronos handed the assorted oral hygiene devices to Nebo.  They both
wondered why in hell demons needed toothbrushes, but the fact that apparently
they did *had* saved the day.
 Nebo finished counting them.
 "Eleven,"  he said.  "Strictly taken,  that means you've handed me  one  too
many..."
 Trom  and  Cronos  looked at each other.  So this was where  it  would  end.
Well...
 "...but I'm in a good mood today!  Haven't had this much fun since  Aleister
Crowley  came  here,  a century or two ago." The  demonic  audience  clapped,
whistled,  woo-woo-ed,  yelled and generally made a lot of noise,  like  some
sitcom audiences tend to do.
 "So we may pass?" Trom asked, hopefully.
 Nebo nodded, "Sure, son, you and your friend may pass."
 Cronos and Trom both shook his hand gratefully.
 "If  you  walk  south-east for approximately an hour,"  the  guardian  said,
switching off the spotlights,  "you will find the third of the Seven Gates of
Hell. Now go."

 So, after another hour's walking, they found themselves standing in front of
the third Gate of Hell.  This particular one again didn't at all look like  a
gate.  It looked,  rather,  like the entrance of an Eastern boudoir of sorts,
the  kind made of bead-stringed curtains that really only serve to  keep  out
flies.  It wasn't located in a wall,  at least not one to be seen. Everything
around  it was just darkness,  a darkness so intense you could bump into  it.
>From through the beady curtain came inviting light,  though, soft to the eyes
and enluring.
 Trom held it open to allow Warchild in. "After you," he said, a smirk on his
face.
 "After *you*," Cronos said,  grinning,  simply shoving Trom inside. Trom was
sick to the back teeth of Warchild telling him what to do, but felt powerless
to do anything about it.
 They  found  themselves  enveloped  by the scent of  a  thousand  sticks  of
incense.  There were candles and tea lights everywhere,  casting a  beautiful
glow  over  the  room,  which  was  large  and,  well,  *cosy*.  Pillows  lay
everywhere,  and drapes of priceless damask lay all about the place and  hung
off the ceiling. It seemed like they had entered a place straight out of some
ancient Eastern faerytale.
 Fantasies  about huge amounts of available women,  such as those  invariably
featured in those Eastern faerytales, were put on hold by a huge, heavy-maned
lion  that introduced itself into the room from a shadowy corner.  It  walked
gracefully, a true king among beasts, sniffing the air.
 "Don't  sweat," Trom said,  who was trying to keep his pores  shut  himself,
too, "for it may smell it if you are afraid."
 "That's *dogs*,  silly," a woman's voice came from that same shadowy corner.
Into the light stepped a woman of insurpassable beauty, with long curly black
hair,  a  voice  like an aural sprinkle of silk and a skin tanned  like  some
California  beach  goddess who had insisted upon there not being  any  bikini
lines.
 Trom  thought  he had seen her - or something pretty damn much  like  her  -
before,  though he couldn't for the life of him put a finger on it.  Again he
felt  a really peculiar sense of *deja vu*,  strong  and  omniscient,  taking
control  of  his body as if lead was being poured in his veins  and  directed
from some other plane of reality.
 "Gosh," he said, his voice dreamy and far-off, "that is surely one *hell* of
a babe..."
 With  those  words,  he  embraced the swirlingly twirling  earth  and  threw
another dreaming fit...

 She had black hair.  She wore a vari-coloured cloak with a golden pin in  it
and a hooded tunic with red embroidery. She had shoes with golden fastenings.
Her  face was oval,  narrow below,  broad above.  Her eyebrows were dark  and
black.  Her  beautiful black eyelashes cast a shadow on to the middle of  her
cheeks.  Her lips seemed to be made of partaing. Her teeth were like a shower
of pearls between her lips.  She had three plaits of hair:  Two plaits  wound
around her head, the third hanging down her back, touching her calves behind.
In her hand she carried a weaver's beam of white bronze,  with golden  inlay.
There  were three pupils in each of her eyes.  The maiden was armed  and  her
chariot was drawn by two black horses.

 Trom woke up with Cronos slapping his face again. He realised he had dreamt,
the same dreams he'd had before.  It was almost as if he was remembering bits
of a life that had happened before him. It was all seriously surreal but in a
way like it was part of himself,  unmistakably.  He now noticed the beautiful
lady again, who sat by him to see if he was recovering from his fainting fit.
It  struck  him how much she looked like the girl from which he  had  dreamt,
invariably,  ever  since  he could remember.  When Trom turned  out  to  have
recovered sufficiently to erect himself, she, too, got up and spoke.
 "It  is I,  Inanna,  guardian to the Third of the Seven Gates of Hell,"  the
insurpassably  beautiful woman said,  "I am the Goddess of Passion,  both  of
Love and War",  she continued, "my colour is Purest White and in my armour no
Priest need fear to tread in the Underworld. What is my number?"
 Trom  reckoned this woman had been using plenty Oil of Olaz if she was  aged
anything close to the other guardians they had met so far.  He was  virtually
struck breathless.  Just imagine...a woman with such an amazingly young  body
yet  the  experience  of someone aged by centuries  or  even  millenia...  He
couldn't believe she would do either of them harm, but the thing was that she
*was* one of the guardians of the dread Seven Gates.  He decided he'd  rather
not put it to the test.
 Trom grabbed the crumpled note from Cronos' hands,  and said the next number
in line.
 "Twenty!"
 Inanna's face darkened.  The lion lifted its nose and bared a few fangs that
Trom decided he'd prefer looking at through solid steel bars in a zoo,  if at
all.  He suddenly felt extremely nauseous.  Even Cronos cringed,  though he'd
never have admitted it.
 "Gimme  that note," Inanna said,  walking up to Trom and snatching  it  away
from him. She looked it over.
 "They left out my number," she said,  sounding hurt,  giving the note  back,
"they left out my number.  Twenty is the *next* guardian's number." The  lion
looked  up  at  her,  brushing  against one of her  godly  legs  and  purring
reassuringly. Her hand stroked the beast's mighty manes.
 "Oh,  well,"  she said,  "it can't be helped,  I suppose.  Where would I  be
without you, my dear Kittecat?" The lion purred a bit louder, sounding like a
distant avalanche.
 "I'll cut you some slack," Innana said,  pacing her boudoir, addressing both
intrepid adventurers, but particularly Trom. She came closer to them now, and
Trom noticed that she smelled more heavenly than any of the women he had ever
come into contact with,  most certainly his aunts.  It was a heady  fragrance
that conjured up visions of beds soft,  pastures green, flowers ablooming and
passion immeasurable.  Weirdly,  it also had a faint tinge of weapon oil  and
gunsmoke, which in turn slightly enraptured Cronos.
 "I can't tell you my number," she told them, "but it is..." She mouthed it.
 "Fitting?" Trom said.
 She shook her head.
 "Flitting?" Cronos guessed.
 She shook her head once more.
 "Vivideen?" Cronos conjured.
 Innana gesticulated wildly now,  pressing her index finger against the  side
of her nose, then making rotating gestures with her hand.
 "Er...erm...fifteen!" Trom shouted gleefully.
 "Yes!"  the raven-haired beauty said,  her face lighting up with  joy,  "You
guessed it right, young master!"
 "And  I suppose now," Cronos interposed,  getting kind of irritated  at  the
attention Trom was getting and he wasn't,  "we have to do some sort of  Test,
right?"
 The lady Innana appeared to be in thought about that.
 "Yes," the said, solemnly, "there shall be a Test indeed."
 Trom and Cronos waited for the lady to utter the words, for her to formulate
what further dreadful ordeal would lay immediately ahead of them on their way
to a place where,  frankly,  neither of them would otherwise ever have wanted
to go.
 "I shall require the young master to kiss me," she breathed, rather huskily.
The  lion looked at her accusingly,  "you've gone all soft,  Innana"  readily
readable in its large black eyes.  Innana didn't see it,  though, for all she
had eyes for was Trom,  who couldn't believe his ears and stood rooted to the
spot.
 "Well?" Cronos said,  "Come on, Trom, let's get this over with." How come he
always  got the short end of the stick?  He was beginning to dislike  all  of
this very much.
 After  a few seconds,  during which there was an almost audible  crackle  of
lightning between Trom and the Passion Goddess and a lot of chemistry to  top
if off,  Trom regained the principle of motion.  Feeling on top of the  world
and not minding the lion,  which was growling indignantly,  he strode forward
the few steps that were needed...and kissed her.
 They both turned away and blushed heavily, like they'd just found out they'd
been sucking in the same strand of spaghetti.
 "Come  on,  Trom,"  Cronos said,  not at all pleased and  sounding  it,  "we
haven't got time for all this dilly-dally and stuff. We have four gates ahead
of us, need I remind you?"
 Trom and the lady Innana were torn from their moments of Complete Bliss.
 "He's right,  you know," she said,  "you two *do* have to go." Trom  nodded,
but didn't like the way reality had checked in again.
 "Remember,"  Innana  said just before she released Trom's  hand,  "the  next
guardian's number is twenty...and remember,  too, Trom...remember the warrior
inside you!"
 They  left her boudoir - Trom with a sense of loss - and walked in  whatever
direction seemed most fit. Sometimes you have to consult your brain, but some
other times you have to listen to your heart.  Trom's heart felt there  would
be but one direction to walk into,  so that's what he did.  Cronos  followed,
cursing  and muttering below his breath about the way things had gone so  far
and how he wasn't happy with them at all.

 So,  after another short stroll,  they found themselves facing the fourth of
the Gates of Hell.  This time it looked most impressive once more;  it was  a
huge portcullis that Warchild wouldn't be able to lift nor Trom would be able
to  crawl through.  Far above them,  barely discernible above  the  blackened
portcullis from beyond which no light reached them,  was a plaque that  read,
curiously,  "Zapfest".  Under it, even harder to read, were two initials, "J"
and "M".
 Just  as they were about to give up their search for something to  press  or
pull  in order to get the guardian's attention,  they heard a  faint  humming
sound to their right. They turned.
 Into  view floated a giant throne of gold,  upon which sat a man  wearing  a
crown  of two horns,  holding a sceptre aloft in his right hand and  a  flame
disc in his left. The flame disc sent off rays in every direction.
 "It is I,  Shammash, guardian of the Fourth of the Seven Gates of Hell," the
Lord said, "I am..."
 "And your number is twenty," Trom interrupted,  grinning,  thinking back  of
the  lovely lady Innana,  "Stop beating around the bush and lay the  Test  on
us."
 The  Lord  Shammash,  who  had just been about to impress hell  out  of  the
adventurers  by telling them he was also sometimes referred to as  Uddo,  was
taken unawares by the young man's boldness.  So was Cronos, actually, who had
not expected Trom suddenly to go courageous after a mere kiss from a  Passion
Goddess. Well, he had to agree that she'd been *quite* a babe...
 The  guardian grinned back at Trom - an icy cold grin in which there was  no
pleasure. He liked a challenge. For centuries - What?! Millenia! - people had
been  seeking  him out and only the smartest among them had ever  passed  his
test.  These two didn't look smart enough at all.  The young man was just  an
insolent  youth,  and the squarely built guy looked like he'd  been  standing
last in line where god had been dishing out the brains.
 "Yes, young man," the Lord Shammash spoke, "there is a test. It is a test of
tremendous mental skill."
 "Yeah, come on, come on," Trom said, impatiently.
 "Well," Lord Shammash said, "it is a question. And the question is...name 10
song titles with 'hell' in it, as well as the bands who recorded them."
 There was a moment of profound silence.
 "Hell," Cronos said, "I'm not into music."
 "Neither am I,  particularly," said Trom,  "but a cousin of mine is." He was
thinking hard.
 "*And*..." the Lord Shammash said, "at least four of the bands must have had
Billboard  Hot  100 Top 10 hits,  though not necessarily  with  the  specific
'hell' song!"
 Trom  looked  at the guardian,  wishing the nasty old man  would  vanish  or
something. They would probably be having difficulty enough with this question
without this extra condition.
 "Is that all?" Trom asked, tersely.
 The guardian nodded. He grinned; that last modification usually cooked their
goose.
 "Lemmesee,"  Trom said,  thinking harder than he could ever recall,  in  his
mind leafing through his cousin's album collection.
 "'Alison Hell'," he said, "by Annihilator."
 The guardian nodded.
 "Three  of  the top 10 hit bands are  easy,  too,"  Trom  continued,  "Black
Sabbath's 'Heaven and Hell',  Kiss' 'Hotter than Hell' and Pink Floyd's  'Run
Like Hell', right?"
 The guardian just nodded. Still six to go.
 There  was another silence.  Cronos felt pretty useless.  He  realised  he'd
spent  his  life totally devoid of culture whatsoever.  Maybe that  ought  to
change. He only knew a few songs by the Beatles, really.
 "'My  Hell',"  Trom  said,  a sense of triumph gleaming in his  eyes  as  he
reached half of the test, "by Nokturnel."
 "That's  a pretty obscure one," the Lord Shammash said,  "well  done,  young
man."
 "'Gates to Hell'," Trom added, "by Obituary."
 He's  actually  alphabetically  browsing  through  his  cousin's  metal   CD
collection, the guardian thought. Any minute now he'll arrive at...
 "'Cowboys  from Hell' and 'Holy Hell'," Trom  said,  "by,  er,  Pantera  and
Possessed respectively."
 The guardian nodded. Two to go. And they'd never guess the fourth Top 10 hit
one.  It was too outright devious. He was actually quite proud of it himself.
He couldn't wait to see the look on their faces when he'd have to tell it  to
them.
 "'Hell Awaits'," Trom sighed, "by Slayer".
 "Well done indeed, young man," the guardian grinned, "but now the fourth one
by a band good enough to have had a Top 10 hit."
 "Damn,  triple  damn," Trom grunted.  Here they were,  up pop  trivia  creek
lacking the necessary theoretical background to paddle with.
 Cronos  was reciting Beatles songs that occurred to him,  "Lucy in  the  Sky
With Diamonds,  I Wanna Hold your Hand,  Michelle,  A Hard Day's  Night,  The
Yellow Submarine, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band..."
 Trom looked at Cronos, grinning the grin of the triumphant.
 "What did you say?" he asked Cronos, "Just now?"
 "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," Warchild repeated,  which was quite a  feat
in itself, "I Wanna Hold your Hand, Mi..."
 "MICHELLE!" Trom cried,  "MICHELLE! That has 'hell' in it." He looked around
at the guardian,  who was not having a good time any more. The Lord  Shammash
nodded.  He  felt  he had to lie down for a bit.  He signalled them  to  pass
through his gate. Had he left the gas on at home?

 They  wiped sweat off their brows.  They'd pulled it off again;  four  down,
three to go.
 "We sure showed him, didn't we?" Cronos said.
 Trom nodded.  He wondered how long their luck would hold.  So  far,  though,
they seemed to be a pretty good team.
  Feeling quite good and chatting almost merrily despite what they  know  was
still ahead of them, they nearly walked into a chest.
 It was a fairly large chest that, Cronos guessed, might contain a stupendous
treasure.  Trom reckoned it would not,  because it was a luggage  chest,  the
kind that people used to drag aboard ships in the older days.  As a matter of
fact,  he pointed out,  there was even a label attached to it.  "Anything but
Ankh-Morpork," it read.
 They  looked  at it,  not quite daring to open it,  while  it  stood  there,
simply,  not moving, like luggage is supposed to do. Then, quite suddenly and
to  considerably  dropping of jaws,  it acted very much  unlike  luggage.  It
sprouted a couple of dozen chubby legs,  lifted itself up and gently  trudged
off in the distance before either Cronos or Trom knew what was happening.
 They both shook their heads in disbelief. Instead of pondering over it for a
long while,  however,  they quickly realised why they were actually here  and
went about their business again.
 And  so it happened that,  before they knew it,  they encountered what  they
assumed  must be the next guardian,  the guardian of the Fifth of  the  Seven
Gates of Hell. It was a lion - which made Trom once more reminisce fleetingly
of the beauteous lady Innana - a lion with a man's head,  bearing a sword and
a flail.
 "It is I,  mighty Nergal, guardian to the Fifth of the Seven Gates of Hell,"
the wingless gryphon said, interrupted quickly by Cronos.
 "We  haven't  even discovered your gate yet,"  Warchild  said,  "aren't  you
supposed to introduce yourself until after we've found it?"
 Nergal thought about that for a while.
 "Yes,  ho-hum,  yes, indeed," he muttered, embarrassed, retreating somewhat,
"indeed,  dear adventurers,  it seems like that is in fact,  ho-hum, standard
procedure, as it were."
 Cronos  and Trom looked around for the mystic Fifth Gate.  The  problem  was
that it was nowhere to be seen. Around them was just impenetrable darkness.
 "Ho-hum,  dear sirs, if I may be so bold as to venture," mighty Nergal said,
"I  think I've gone for my afternoon stroll and wandered a bit too  far  off,
actually."
 "Are  you  saying," Trom said,  chuckling,  "that you  are  actually,  well,
*lost*?"
 "Ho-hum,  well," the wingless gryphon replied hesitantly,  "I wouldn't quite
put it like that, er, ho-hum, but, not too put too fine a point to it, yes, I
think I am." He shuffled his paws insecurely.
 "Some guardian," Warchild muttered below his breath, derisively.
 "What does the gate look like?" Trom asked.
 "Promise you won't laugh?" Nergal said.
 Both  adventurers nodded in a kind of noncommittal way.  That  sufficed  for
Nergal.
 "Ho-hum,  well," he explained, "it's actually, ho-hum, a hole in the ground.
Quite embarrassing,  really,  but it was all they hadn't yet assigned when  I
applied for the job.  I was too late, you see; got lost somewhere between the
Styx and Hades, upper East Side, ho-hum."
 It  was  really  too pathetic to be laughed at,  so  both  Cronos  and  Trom
refrained from doing so,  or at least tried to.  They looked around  instead,
Trom  biting his tongue with some vigour,  searching for what looked  like  a
hole in the ground.
 "Oh,  ho-hum," Nergal suddenly said,  grinning embarrassedly,  "there it is,
ho-hum,  seems like I never wandered too far off in the first place. Mayhap I
should put a flag on a stick in it next time, ho-hum."
 Standing  next  to his Gate - well,  the hole in the ground at  any  rate  -
Nergal took a deep breath.
 "It is I,  mighty Nergal, guardian of the Fifth of the Seven Gates of Hell,"
Nergal  said to the slightly bemused questers, "I am sometimes thought to  be
the  agent of the,  erm,  Ancient Ones,  ho-hum.  I dwelt in  Puta...er...no,
*Cutha* for a time and my colour is,  ho-hum,  deep purple?  No, ho-hum, Dark
Red, I am pretty certain about that, ho-hum. Er...what was that last question
again?"
 "What's your number?" Trom ventured, sighing.
 "Eight," Nergal said, immediately covering his mouth, "Grmmbll."
 They left the absent-minded guardian, this mighty Nergal, to his musings and
mutterings  - which mainly involved the topic of early retirement,  and  what
the hell that test was supposed to be - and jumped in the hole.

 After  a rather long sliding experience down a rather claustrophobic  length
of almost gut-like tunnel they dropped onto a large mound of sand that looked
like some kind of dune. It cushioned the impact sufficiently, though Trom was
surely glad he had jumped in second;  "Made it beyond the Fifth Gate of  Hell
but then died because a dimwit mercenary flattened him" would not quite  have
made too satisfactory an epitaph to his taste.
 Whereas so far the stretches of wasteland between the Gates of Hell had been
primarily  dark and ravished,  this time they had appeared to arrive in  what
was definitely a desert.  Sand stretched out in all directions,  and the only
thing  other than a black starlit desert night sky and dark grey sand  to  be
seen  around them was the thing from which they had just  fallen.  It  mostly
resembled a black hole sun.
 They  decided they had to rest for the night.  They had no sleeping bags  or
tents,  so the desert sand would have to do.  Even if they had had  something
with which to light a fire,  they wouldn't have done so. You never knew which
creatures might be attracted by the light, creatures which might somehow find
it  comfortable  to roam in the domain between the Fifth and Sixth  Gates  of
Hell.  Now Cronos came to think of it,  he *did* have a hunch,  which was all
the more reason to keep things as dark as possible.
 They slept like logs. Trom woke up, somewhere way past what he reckoned must
have  been midnight,  to the sounds of an insanely witty person shouting  "Oh
Beth! Beth!", but didn't heed it any more than Cronos, who continued to snore
peacefully.

 They  woke up to the sound of steps in the desert sand and the heat  of  the
sun  on  their faces.  There was no telling how long they had  slept  and  it
wasn't important either,  for in a true Mohammed-and-the-Mountain fashion  it
seemed that the Sixth Gate and its guardian had found them during the night.
 "It is I,  Marduk Kurios, guardian of the Sixth of the Seven Gates of Hell",
said  the guardian,  not even waiting until Cronos and Trom had rubbed  their
eyes  clean,  "bestowed on me were Fifty Names and Powers by the  Council  of
Elders,  and I have put the Queen of the Ancient Ones beneath my foot, though
she is not dead yet dreams. My colour is Purple. What is my number?"
 They  both  looked up at the Gate.  It was a  most  formidable  construction
although,  granted,  they had both seen better and less dated ones.  It was a
tremendously  large,  round  stone,  of the kind that were  used  in  ancient
Palestine to close cave graves off with.  It was, basically, a big wheel made
of  rock.  There  was a name tag attached to it,  which read  "University  of
Turin".
 The guardian looked exceedingly grim and moody, as if it hadn't been him who
had awoken the others from their slumbers but vice versa. He had been waiting
for aeons upon aeons for the occasion to arise,  for no mortals had  actually
ever made it this far. He'd been rolling around this stone through the desert
for  an  endless time.  He had repeated his lines  dutifully  every  morning,
hoping  that some day someone would actually arrive to have them recited  to.
He had had millenia to think of a really nasty Test,  too, and now there were
not  *one*  but *two* mortals to toy with!  He'd be a having a  field  day...
Well, OK...a desert day, for the pedants among you.
 But for now they would first have to know his number.  There were preciously
few who knew it:  Satan,  of course,  who knew all those things,  and the Mad
Arab,  of course.  But the Mad Arab lived no more on earth, and last thing he
heard the Arab's writings had been lost forever.  Granted,  he hadn't been in
touch with reality a lot of late,  so as far as he knew the whole world might
be  in the know with regard to his number.  However,  if they didn't know  it
he'd  have  a really interesting thing waiting  for  them,  involving  flying
chains and fluked hooks and rather a lot of pain.
 "Ten," Cronos said after consulting the ever more crumpled note,  confirming
Marduk's  worst  suspicions about the world and the time he had not  been  in
touch  with it.  He who put the Dark Queen beneath his foot was  suddenly  no
longer so convinced that the Test he had concocted was all too brilliant  nor
too impossible to solve.
 "You have spoken rightly," Marduk said,  a bit unsure of himself,  beginning
to feel really silly and as dated as his Gate, "and now, as you probably now,
there shall have to be a Test."
 The adventurers nodded. Although they'd been lucky a few times so far, there
was  no  way they would continue to be.  They knew the numbers  for  all  the
Gates'  guardians  now,  but all luck has to end some day.  They both  had  a
distinctly nagging feeling that today, like any other, might be it.
 "My test is particularly difficult," Marduk said smugly, adopting a somewhat
friendlier  tone of voice out of sympathy with these people that,  in  little
more  than a minute,  would be burning forever in the effervescent  fires  of
hell.
 "You see," Marduk continued, "I have been assigned to this post thousands of
years ago.  Hells,  I lost track of the time,  to tell you the truth.  On the
brighter  side  of  things,  that  means I've had all that  time  to  use  my
philosopher's  mind  to  think  of what is  conceivably  the  most  difficult
question ever to be posed in the history of the universe." He could help  but
chortle.
 "Well,  it's  been  nice  so far," Cronos said,  "get on with  it."  He  had
committed suicide once and lived to tell about it.  This could hardly be more
difficult.
 Trom just thought of that passionate flame in his life that he would have to
leave behind,  the Passion Goddess Innana.  In his mind he once more  smelled
her  delicate  perfume  and  beheld  her  beautifully  tanned  skin  and  her
eyes...damn,  he'd never even know what colour her eyes had been. Still, he'd
go  out  like a man.  He'd make her proud of him.  Or proud  of  his  memory,
anyway.
 Marduk was regaining his previously dented confidence when he looked at  the
positively despondent faces of the adventurers before him. For not much of an
apparent  reason,  Trom  had  found it necessary to bare  his  chest,  as  if
expecting a sword to be thrust into it.
 "This is not a test of physical skill," Marduk said, "rather an intellectual
one. The question is..."
 Marduk waited a bit.  Trom hated guardians with a sense of dramatic  impact.
Cronos began to hate guardians in general - barring Innana,  of  course,  who
somehow he found quite impossible to hate.
 "Come on, man," Trom said, "say it!"
 "OK,  at  your behest," Marduk said,  still taking his time,  "here  is  the
question..."
 Trom felt his heart beating in his temples.  Cronos felt every of his  pores
opening and excreting that most natural of scents.
 *"What is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything?"*
 There  was a silence broken only by the sound of molecules adhering  to  the
Brownian motion.  The guardian nor the two questers dared  breathe.  Suspense
was so thick you would have needed a blowtorch to cut it.
 So  heavy  was the weight upon their shoulders that it took  almost  a  full
minute  before Trom's mind in some weird and possibly arcane way  started  to
function again,  connecting a few simple facts.  Cronos had already given  up
and  was  wondering if perhaps there was a way he could apply  his  carefully
trained pain-blocking skills to somehow live through the eternal fires of his
hellish destiny.  He ought never have allowed that demon to steal anything in
the first place.  Maybe this was fate telling him to retire.  Well, this time
he'd listen to its inaudible voice. But first he had to shut up this rich kid
who was vigorously nudging him in one of his floating ribs.
 "I  think  I  know it," Trom whispered enthusiastically  below  his  breath,
nudging the mercenary annex hired gun once more.
 "Er?" Cronos said.  He had accepted forthcoming death with such abandon that
his body temperature had already been dropping slowly.
 "I  know  it,  I  know it!  The answer!" Trom insisted.  He  looked  at  the
guardian, who was looking any way but theirs, whistling some Ditty From Hell.
 "Sure?" Cronos asked. Already he felt his body temperature rising again. The
boy  had better know it for sure,  for else all hope would be shattered  once
more.  There are only so many things a man can take,  even when it  concerned
such an indisputably manly man such as himself.
 Trom just nodded.  Cronos couldn't recall ever having seen such a smug  grin
plastered on anyone's face.  Then again,  Cronos in generally didn't remember
much.  Nonetheless,  it  can be said that Trom grinned pret-ty smugly.  As  a
matter of fact,  he was having a pretty hard time to not burst out in  almost
uncontrollable peals of laughter. Biting his tongue did the job, though.
 "Come on then," Cronos said, nudging the boy back in return, "say it."
 "Er,  Mr. Marduk, sir?" Trom ventured, sniggering. He clicked his fingers to
get the required attention.
 The  guardian turned around slowly to look at them,  pity in his  eyes.  The
mortals were going to give it a try.  Well,  you couldn't blame them, really.
Humans  could sometimes indeed be a fairly courageous breed,  you'd  have  to
hand  them that.  They'd give it their best shot - of course they'd not  know
the  right  answer  - and then he would deal with them  swiftly  and  surely.
Painlessly,  even.  No need for useless violence,  no matter how long he  had
waited for this,  no matter how *alone* he had been,  alone and *bitter*,  in
these long, long millenia. Maybe, some day, someone else would come along and
he'd treat them like real shit, the way he had intended to treat these two.
 "You think you know the answer?" Marduk inquired.
 "Yep, Mr. Marduk, sir."
 They couldn't, could they? The boy did seem pretty sure of himself. No, they
couldn't. Marduk was pretty confident of that. Still..
 "Well, boy?" Marduk said.
 "Forty-two,  Mr.  Marduk,  sir," Trom said,  smiling the smile of a  saintly
little angel.
 For a moment,  the guardian felt as if the earth had disappeared from  under
his feet and he was now floating amid a vast wealth of  nothingness,  without
oxygene and doomed to die of suffocation.
 *How  the  hell  had the little brat known that?!*  There  was  a  virtually
limitless range of answers to his question,  varying from "your cousin's left
sock" and "wednesday next" to "a darker shade of dark" and "E minor", but no,
no,  they,  they had to come up with the right answer! He promised himself to
be particularly violent on the next mortals that would - hopefully - come his
way  in what would likely be another four millenia or  so.  Suddenly  feeling
very tired, he leaned on his Gate.
 Cronos was hugging Trom.  Not a very manly man thing to do, he reckoned, but
nobody would ever know about it and Marduk was too busy feeling wretched  and
would,   incidentally,   most   likely  never  meet  anyone   of   Warchild's
acquaintance.
 When  the  general merriment of the two  adventurers  had  ceased,  Warchild
cleared his throat.
 "Say,  Marduk," Cronos said,  "might you be inclined to tell us  whereabouts
the Seventh Gate can be found?"
 "Inclined,  no,"  replied  Marduk,  "Obliged by  honour,  yes."  He  pointed
somewhere behind them. They turned around.
 "If  you look carefully," Marduk said,  still baffled by  the  disappointing
fact  that  these  two mere mortals could so easily  have  solved  that  most
difficult of questions, "you will see the Seventh Gate *there*."
 Trom  and Cronos stared in the distance,  where lay a huge  mountain  shaped
like  a goat's skull with the horns knocked off.  From its top vomited  forth
thick,  black,  bulging,  genuinely evil-looking smoke. It looked like one of
those  "look  what's  happening  to  the  environment"  warning  adverts   by
Greenpeace.
 "Thanks,  Marduk," Cronos said.  Trom and him walked in the direction of the
mountain, in pretty high spirits despite their hellish destination.
 Marduk was not feeling really happy with himself. Now he had to find an even
more  difficult question for whoever would next arrive at the Sixth  Gate  of
Hell.  He hoped he'd be in time,  for,  now he came to think of it,  if lucky
morons  like  these  two could get so far he was pretty  convinced  so  could
almost anyone else.

 When Trom and Cronos came closer to the mountain shaped like a goat's  skull
with  the  horns  knocked off,  looming ever higher before them  until  at  a
certain moment it almost blocked out all the light from that side, they could
see that before the mountain there was the largest of the Gates they had seen
so and by far.
 So this was it, then, the Seventh Gate. The Mother of all the Gates of Hell,
as it were.  It sure looked it. It was almost an exact replica of those large
"Jurassic Park" gates,  only now even much bigger and a pair of giant  stag's
horns  instead of the "JP" logo.  The actual doors were made from a  material
unlike wood or metal,  or anything else they knew.  When Warchild knocked  on
them once, there arose a curiously resonant "boom" sound that carried far and
lasted uncannily long.  For a moment he cowered,  fearing that he might  have
announced their arrival to every single of hell's cursed inhabitants.
 Not so, apparently, because the only person who eventually reacted was a man
wearing a crown of thorns and a long sword,  clad in a cloak of lion's  skin.
He  seemed to have appeared from *through* the Seventh Gate.  He looked  very
old,  too,  which is what they had expected.  He must have been very patient,
what  with them being the first people ever to  come  here.  Nonetheless,  no
anger or frustration seemed to radiate from him.
 "It  is I,  Ninib called Adar,  guardian of the Final of the Seven Gates  of
Hell,"  he  said,  "I am the one whose essence is found in burnt  embers  and
things of death or antiquity, whose symbol are the horns of a stag. My colour
is black. What is my number?"
 For  the last time,  Cronos took out the note.  It was now crumpled to  such
extent that the numbers were difficult to make out.  Nonetheless, the last in
line was clearly a 4.  Or was it a 9 with the top not properly closed?  Damn.
He'd just have to chance it, trusting his initial instinct.
 "Four," he said.
 "You have spoken rightly,  noble adventurer," Ninib called Adar  proclaimed,
"my number is four, as in the quarters of the earth."
 A  silence ensued in which Cronos and Trom waited for the inevitable  -  the
last and probably truly most difficult of the Tests.  None,  however,  seemed
forthcoming.  The  guard  merely seemed a trifle bemused and  volunteered  no
further remarks.
 "What about the Test?" Trom eventually asked,  hoping for the best. They had
come this far,  so it would be a most extreme bummer if they'd fail this last
one. Close but no cigar and all that stuff. An extreme bummer indeed.
 "Test?" Ninib called Adar asked, frowning.
 "Yes,  sure," Cronos fell in, "all the other guardians had tests. Surely you
have one, too?"
 "Actually," the guardian said, "I don't think any of us are supposed to have
tests." He seemed genuinely disconcerted.
 "They surely had 'em," Warchild said.
 "Be  that as it may," Ninib called Adar said,  "I have none.  I suppose  the
others did it quite of their own accord. I shall have to take this up with my
superiors some day." He sounded ominous.
 "Innana had no test,  though," Trom hastened to add,  at which Ninib  called
Adar's face broke in a smile.
 "I will make sure to pass that information on to my superiors,  young  man,"
the guardian said.
 "When will that meeting with your superiors be, if I may be so curious as to
ask?" Cronos inquired.
 "On  August  28th 1997," the guardian replied,  pressing a button  that  had
hitherto been totally invisible, "the day before Judgement Day."
 The  huge gates swung open soundlessly,  almost sucking them in due  to  the
differences in air pressure on either sides. They now had an unobscured sight
of that ghastly blackest of foul mountains.
 They stepped through.
 "Godspeed," Ninib called Adar said, which was an odd thing indeed to hear so
far down in the bowels of the earth,  so close to hell that it almost  singed
your hair. Before they could reply, though, the doors closed and Ninib called
Adar had disappeared.

                        III - INTO THE LUNGS OF HELL

 They found themselves now at the beginning of a tunnel that was hewn out  of
rock in a most crude manner.  A flickering orange light could be seen at  the
end  of  it,  and  a variety of sounds emanated from there  -  evil  laughter
accompanying the anguished cries of tortured souls.  Bats flew towards  them,
flitting around their heads and disappearing in the sudden darkness they  had
left behind.  The bats seemed impervious to the force fields of Hell. Some of
them,  Cronos could see in short flashes, had faces like ugly fat babies with
moustaches.
 In  front  of the tunnel entrance was a doormat that had  "Welcome"  on  it.
Welcome to Hell. Yeah, right.
 Cronos almost tiptoed through the tunnel, that was gradually becoming hotter
and lighter.  Trom followed him, which Warchild reckoned was a brave thing to
do.  The sounds became louder, and genuinely sliced through Warchild's bones,
so he guessed it might be even worse for the boy. What in all the Netherhells
were they doing to those from whom wailed those anguished,  long-wound cries?
And which creatures could utter such profoundly evil laughter in the face  of
such agony?
 Cronos  had  an idea of what the answers to those questions  would  be,  but
blocked out their implications.  He found himself shivering despite the  ever
mounting heat.
 Before them,  the tunnel now opened into a wide hall that seemed the setting
of some weird and diabolic rite.  There were hideously ugly creatures jumping
left and right, with their winged counterparts bobbing in the air above them,
spitting and cursing. There was, as it were, not a very friendly atmosphere.
 Amidst these ghastly creatures of hell and flickering flames of glowing fire
there  was  a large black throne that seemed made from bones -  human  bones.
Several blackened skulls gaped at Cronos and Trom lifelessly from the back of
the  throne,  the flames of life quenched from them and replaced by those  of
purgatory.
 Someone  sat  on the throne,  laughing evilly along with  those  around  the
throne.  Whoever it was, he had to be impervious to the flames that seemed to
lick and consume, caressing the throne and everything around it.
 Cronos should have kept his head low,  for a demon spotted him,  immediately
pointing at the mercenary annex hired gun with a warty,  long-nailed claw. It
opened its jaws and let go a drawling sound that almost seemed to *ooze* from
between its fangs.  Cronos was pinpointed by dozens of pairs of red eyes, red
eyes gleaming with unholy joy.  Trom hid quickly behind the mercenary's  huge
square form,  liking all of this even less than he had liked the whole  stuff
of going down to hell through its Seven Gates in the first place (though,  of
course,  he had liked making acquaintance with the spitting image of the girl
of his dreams in the form of the lady Innana of the Third Gate).
 An  intricate  mechanism set to work to turn the Darkest of  Thrones  around
with  agonizing slowness.  The demons hushed up while their  master's  throne
turned to face the damned intruder.
 This  was  it.  He had bested the Seven Gates of  Hell,  had  ridden  Hell's
Stallions  and had had a Disagreement with Death.  Now he would  face  Satan,
Baphomet,  the Fallen Angel, Azagtoth, *the Dark One*. He closed his eyes. He
wasn't  actually afraid as such,  but wasn't feeling too  confidently  secure
either.  The ground throbbed from the inner workings of whatever mechanism it
was that turned the vast, blackened, skeletal throne around.
 When the throbbing stopped, around him was a virtually complete silence. The
tortured souls,  wherever they might be, seemed to have turned mute. The evil
demons seemed no longer to have the urge to utter their cursed laughter,  nor
even a chuckly guffaw.
 There  was only one person - *creature* - who made - *dared make*  -  sound,
and  did - a deep kind of restrained chuckle.  Cronos opened his  eyes;  he'd
have to face this sooner or later anyway.
 His  eyes instantly opened a lot wider,  and his jaw dropped deeper than  it
ever had.  Nobody had ever mentioned to him the fact that Satan might not  be
like the way he is commonly described. Well...she was quite different indeed.
 "You are...er...are...a...a...*woman*?" Warchild stammered.
 He  looked  at  her extremely tight leather outfit with the  sexy  tail  and
perhaps rather too high heels that,  somehow, she must be able to balance on.
How  the hell did people get into those clothes?  It seemed like  a  physical
impossibility  to  him,  especially  because there was not  a  zip  in  sight
anywhere.
 "Now  let's not get all male chauvinist pig on me,  my dearest Cronos,"  she
tut-tutted, wagging a finger, "I am not known to take too kindly to that sort
of thing."
 Within his mind, Cronos suddenly had irrepressable visions of being strapped
to a bed,  this woman towering above him, about to do to him very unspeakable
things indeed. He swallowed. His eyes crossed.
 Satan smiled.  It wasn't her usual grin, no, it was a true smile. One of her
minions,  standing  by her,  couldn't believe its eyes.  It blinked them  and
shook  its  head,  only to discover that the smile was still  there  when  it
looked  again.  Actually,  though you wouldn't normally think these  kind  of
things, Satan was a distinctly attractive...
 Her head abruptly twisted around to face her minion.  *It twisted the  wrong
way around*.  All thoughts vanished from the demon's mind entirely.  It  felt
very   small   indeed,   exceedingly  insignificant   and   altogether   more
uncomfortable than it'd ever felt before in its almost eternal life.
 It expected her to vomit.
 She  continued  turning her head,  completing the 360  degree  turn,  facing
Cronos again.
 "Cronos,  baby," Satan purred,  wagging her tail enluringly, "I shall cut to
the chase.  I need you. I want you. I need a man without a conscience. In the
day-time you can reap souls; tempt people to sell them, promise anything, and
then,  well,  kill them." Her eyes flashed;  she licked her lips almost as if
subconsciously. "And when night falls, well..."
 Warchild thought he was going to faint.  Not a very manly thing to  do,  but
every muscle in his body told him it might be a good idea anyway. Satan ought
not to be looking at him like that,  woman or not.  It made him feel strange,
insecure, *vulnerable*. It also made his scrotum contract.
 He spotted the Battery Pack on one of the arms of Satan's blackened  throne.
Maybe,  just  maybe,  if  he leapt for it he just might be able to  grab  it,
quickly slip it inside where it ought to be, and then beat them all silly. He
had  a vague hunch that there might be one or two flaws in this  theory,  the
most  important  of which was that there were rather a lot of demons  in  the
direct vicinity, including a few between him and the Battery Pack.
 "Your timing is a bit off, er, Mrs Satan," Warchild said.
 "*Do*  call me Lucy,  *please*," Satan said,  then asked,  "Why?  I do  hope
you're not, er, *spoken for*, as it were?"
 "Well," Cronos said,  "not as such,  but, you see, I've got an apprentice to
train."
 He stepped aside and pointed at Trom. Trom wished he didn't, and prepared to
cower to the best of his ability. Not a very heroic thing to do, he reckoned,
but that would just be, as they say, tough titties.
 Satan threw back her head and laughed loudly.  The minion who had previously
observed her smiling now felt reassured again:  It was one of those typically
evil,  echoing bouts of laughter,  the kind that made the inhabitants of hell
cringe,  that  could impale people due to stalactites  spontaneously  tearing
loose from ceilings.
 "The boy?" she said, sneeringly, "The boy will no longer need you."
 Trom  had  not the slightest reason whatsoever to like that tone  of  voice.
Instead of waiting for whatever was going to happen,  he took matters in  his
own hand. Displaying a skill he had not been taught by anyone in his life, he
dashed  for Satan's throne,  agile like water,  cleverly dodging demons  that
slashed at him with daggers,  wanted to impale him on their lances and strove
to  run him through with their swords.  He had love in his heart and  in  his
head,  which  gave him the strength he had never known was  somewhere  within
him.
 He seemed made for this kind of thing. Something in his mind had gone "snap"
and he now finally felt *in touch* with whatever it was that ruled his  dream
fits,  whoever the hero was that sometimes gave him glances of a distant past
but that had so far refused to come out.  Trom barked like a dog, fending off
whatever weapons threatened him with his bare hands. Just to see if he could,
he took from one particularly surprised demon a lance and threw it away  with
all the power that was in him. He then ran, faster than the wind, to catch it
himself.
 "Ha!" he cried, triumphantly, "Ha!"
 "Are you crazy?!" Cronos shouted.
 "Provided I be famous," Trom cried,  pride and deep emotion throbbing in his
voice, "I am content to be only one day on earth!"
 Trom - or whoever he was now - again pursued his way to Satan's throne. More
and more of the Dark One's minions joined in the fray,  and some of them were
getting seriously injured.  Young Trom seemed invincible and,  indeed,  as it
would later go down in the Hellish Annals, he was.
 He reached the throne.  Satan warded the young boy off,  afraid that she had
now  finally met someone who was clever and quick enough to assassinate  her,
like so many creatures of Heaven and Hell had attempted in vain in those many
millenia  that  had gone before.  It was not  her,  however,  that  Trom  was
interested  in.  Instead,  he  snatched Cronos' Mega Absorb  Groin  Protector
Battery  Pack off the arm of Satan's throne where it has been  standing,  and
tossed it to the mercenary annex hired gun.  Warchild quickly slipped it into
the designated cavity.
 Trom's hair looked all funny now,  like nails,  just like in his dream fits.
His eyes crossed and he looked around wildly for more hostility to quench.
 Satan could but sit back and watch.  With a subtle sign of a  professionally
manicured,  red-nailed  hand she told her servants to allow  this  boy,  this
*hero*,  to live.  She had for him a worthy reward in store,  a worthy reward
indeed to praise one of such heroic stature.
 "Be still, young Trom," Satan intoned in as much a voice of authority as she
could muster.  Trom looked around at her,  feeling relaxed but not devoid  of
the tremendous strength that he had discovered within, the well of force that
he had learned to sip from.
 "That's better," Satan now said,  almost purring,  "because I have in  store
for  you  something befitting a hero like you." She  signalled  to  somewhere
behind the throne, from which now stepped Innana, his Passion Goddess and now
former guardian of the Third Gate.
 Trom  felt his heart pounding in his chest,  and now he felt his eyes  cross
and  his stomach knot,  not from one of his warrior's fits but from the  most
sincere feelings of love that any man could ever feel for a woman.  Sometimes
you meet someone that is really meant for you, someone that is *your person*.
Innana was his person, and to Innana he was hers.
 And they called each other by different names henceforth,  *Cu Chulainn* and
*Fedelm*, and they walked off in the wings, started a life of love down there
in the very wombs of Hades. And the last words he uttered before disappearing
with her forever to a distant outpost of the Dark One's domain,  as  recorded
in the Hellish Annals, were, "Leave me in Hell".

 All  the  excitement having abated somewhat,  Satan stepped  down  from  her
throne  and  strutted up to Cronos.  She was wearing a really weird  kind  of
perfume,  he noticed,  something he'd never smelled before.  *Was* it perfume
actually? He now also saw that she was actually rather a tall woman, standing
almost half a foot higher than him.
 She bent over, her infernal breath tickling his ear.
 "Spank me," she whispered under it.
 "What?!"  Warchild said,  incredulously.  Obviously,  the phrase  must  have
meanings he was quite unaware of.
 "You heard me," Satan continued,  taking one of Cronos' hands and laying  it
on the patch of leather that covered one of her buns, "spank me, loverboy!"
 Her  breath  is  his ear,  her raspy voice in his mind,  her  scent  in  his
nostrils  and  one of his hands on what he had to admit  was  a  particularly
gorgeous  and  very  tight pair of buns,  he could only but  succumb  to  her
wishes. Reluctantly, of course.

                                    *****

 Satan  was smoking a low-tar cigarette,  blowing pentagrams to the  ceiling.
Cronos was exhausted. His hands ached and throbbed. And not just his hands.
 "Darling?" Satan purred.
 "Hmmm?"
 "I heard on the grapevine that you're thinking of retiring?"
 Cronos thought about it for a bit.  He'd had a fruitful life.  Had his share
of fun,  his share of violence.  Now it was time to settle down. Lead a quiet
life.  Devote himself to a more peaceful hobby or two. What's more, he'd like
to disappear from public life, as it were.
 "I will," he said, a bit drowsy, "and I think I already have."
 "Hmmmm," Satan crooned, "I like the sound of that."
 "I do, too."
 "Darling?"
 "Hmmm?"
 "Kiss me...*there*."
 Cronos did.
 "Now kiss me...*there*."
 Cronos did.
 "And now I'd like you to kiss me...*there*."
 Cronos did.
 *"Oh, Croney-baby!"*

                          AND THAT IS, AS THEY SAY,
                                  *THE END*
                 OF THE LAST OF THE CRONOS WARCHILD STORIES

 Written  on  February 21st and November 25th-27th 1995,  just for  the  hell
(pun!) of it.  Based on an idea written down May 27th 1991.  Inspiration  was
partly supplied by the legend of Cu Chulain, ancient Irish hero.


= THE NEXT ISSUE ============================================================


 The next issue of "Twilight World",  Volume 4 Issue 4, is to be released mid
July 1996. It will be uploaded to the FTP sites mentioned further down.
 The next issue will feature, probably, the following stories.

 THE ASSASSINS
 by Guilford Barton

 FLYING SHARK
 by Stefan Posthuma

 UIS III (working title)
 by Richard Karsmakers

 GAUNTLET II
 by Richard Karsmakers

 BARBARIAN II
 by Stefan Posthuma

 MULTIFACE (working title)
 by Richard Karsmakers

 And more, most likely.


= SOME GENERAL REMARKS ======================================================


 DESCRIPTION

 "Twilight World" is an on-line magazine aimed at everybody who is interested
in any sort of fiction - although it usually tends to concentrate on fantasy-
and science-fiction, often with the odd bit of humour thrown in.
 Its  main source is an Atari ST/TT/Falcon disk magazine by the name  of  "ST
NEWS" which publishes computer-related articles as well as fiction. "Twilight
World"  mostly consists of fiction featured in "ST NEWS" so far,  with  added
stories submitted by "Twilight World" readers.

 SUBMISSIONS

 If you've written some good fiction and you wouldn't mind it being published
world-wide,  you can mail it to me either electronically or by standard mail.
At all times do I reserve the right not to publish submissions.  Do note that
submissions  on disk will have to use the MS-DOS or Atari  ST/TT/Falcon  disk
format on 3.5" Double-or High-Density floppy disk.  Provided sufficient  IRCs
are  supplied  (see below),  you will get your disk back with  the  issue  of
"Twilight World" on it that features your fiction. Electronic submittees will
get an electronic subscription if so requested.
 At all times, please submit straight ASCII texts without any special control
codes whatsoever, nor right justify or ASCII characters above 128. Please use
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World"  house style).  Also remember the difference between  possessives  and
contractions, only use multiple question marks when absolutely necessary (!!)
and never use other than one (.) or three (...) periods in sequence.

 COPYRIGHT

 Unless  specified along with the individual stories,  all  "Twilight  World"
stories are copyrighted by the individual authors but may be spread wholly or
separately  to  any  place - and indeed into any other  magazine  -  provided
credit is given both to the original author and "Twilight World".

 CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS

 I prefer electronic correspondence,  but regular stuff (such as  postcards!)
can  be sent to my regular address.  If you expect a reply please supply  one
International Reply Coupon (available at your post office), *two* if you live
outside  Europe.   If  you  want  your  disk(s)  (if  any)  returned,  add  2
International  Reply  Coupons  per disk (and one extra if  you  live  outside
Europe).  Correspondence failing these guidelines will be read (and  perused)
but not replied to.
 The address:

 Richard Karsmakers
 P.O. Box 67
 NL-3500 AB Utrecht
 The Netherlands

 Email r.c.karsmakers@stud.let.ruu.nl
 (This should be valid up to the summer of 1996 at least)

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 And the following html page can be referred to, too:

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 The latest three issues can be requested with me personally if you email and
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the best.
 Thanks!

 DISCLAIMER

 All authors are responsible for the views they express. Also, The individual
authors are the ones you should sue in case of copyright infringements!

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over  a thousand readers on five continents.  It publishes fiction  from  all
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 It  is published in both ASCII and PostScript (laser  printer)  formats.  To
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 EOF

