The thug’s fist slammed into Merigon’s jaw to send a further burst of blood from her mouth. Merigon’s head rushed from the sensations bringing a wash of stars to her auburn eyes, the corners twisting in a wave of pain.
   She wished the thug would stop beating on her, had done several times since the onslaught began, but she knew the hammering would continue in earnest until her broken mouth uttered the words he wanted to hear. She knew the slams to her ribs, legs and back would continue pounding as surely as her own head beat a furious rhythm of pain for as long as she kept silent; or as long as her body held out.
   Some part of her felt sympathy for her attacker; Her assailant was simply following orders put to him by the true threat of the evening, the brains behind the blooded fists: Charlie ‘Teeth’ Malone. Anyone refusing to do as he said was as good as dead, and she didn’t envy her assailant’s choice of career.
   No, Malone was Merigon’s challenge tonight, and he was a test that would end her life if not treated with the utmost caution. Malone was a tricky fish to catch, and if she wasn’t vigilant, it would be herself rather than Malone that would end up ruined this evening.
   But the thug’s fists were literally killing her, and Merigon had to play her final hand immediately or death would surely be dealt.

“Stop…stop…” Merigon coughed through a blooded mouth and chipped molars. “Please, no more fists…” She spat again, this time raising her withered hands in a plea for the beatings to stop. “…I’ll tell you everything you want to know…”

“I said you would, but you chose the hard way,” snarled Malone from behind his desk, a plume of cigar smoke misting the room. “Now, tell me how I open the gates to the Cities of Pleasure…”

Charlie ‘Teeth’ Malone ruled 1920’s Los Angeles’ East Side with a steel boot to the face. This was how he’d earned his legendary nickname: by smashing out his enemy’s - and more often than they dared comment - his associate’s teeth.
   He wasn’t a kind man and had never pretended otherwise having publicly executed anyone foolish enough to cross his path. He never took prisoners in his merciless reign of terror and extortion, and those that stood against him slept carefully in their beds, silently fearful of Malone and his steel boots.
   He’d been a gangster ever since he was able to kick, forever bullying and blackmailing his schoolfellows and crystallising the skills he’d take with him into his adult years as a renowned mob ruler. Even his teachers couldn’t escape his evil mechanisations and had often fallen foul to his blackmailing photographs and poisonous whispers, socially crucifying more than one in their profession, and taking twisted pleasure in the downfall of his peers.
   Malone killed his first man at the age of twelve, staving a chimney sweep’s head in with a coal shovel for spilling soot on his shiny new spats. As the sweep lay dying at his feet, Malone had smiled at the warm and decidedly pleasant feeling burning in his guts; he was at last a man, and was ready to enter the shady underworld he’d admired so often in the newspaper headlines.
   How he wanted to rule like the mobsters he admired; to have everything one’s heart could desire, to have money and riches, to play with the dirtiest molls and sip the finest champagne stolen money could buy.
   Malone was not to wait long for his opportunity.

It’d been one summer’s day several years later when Malone had first stepped into the arena of the professional gangster; and by god he’d been ready.
   He’d been hanging around shady clubs and several illegal gambling dens as he’d done for so long now, when he’d heard the shot.
   A single bullet blasted from a handgun someplace inside the club, but near to his position at the back doors - the girls always came out here to smoke and he enjoyed their company, as much as the tales and slithers of gossip that escaped their drunken lips; knowledge was power, that he’d learned at school, and any piece of information, any slanderous gossip, was always a welcome addition to his growing arsenal against the current mob lords. He’d crush them with their secrets one day, he believed, and had spent many hours compiling facts on each of the current bosses and their goons. Their dealings, their molls, even where they ate and what they drank made the list in the little black book he scribbled in with obsessive determination. No one was safe from his prying, vulture eyes.
   The gunshot echoed about the alley sending the dancing girls running back inside, hands and lips flapping in panic. But as they’d made to enter the doors, a large and sweating man had booted them open, firing wildly into the smoky halls behind him as he turned to flee.
   Malone knew one Mickey Jeannette owned the club, a French man with a penchant for feeding his enemies to large lobsters he kept as crustacean trophies in his office. Some victims, he’d heard whispered by gin-oiled regulars, were still alive when plunged into the tank. He’d liked he idea of that, that they’d suffered immeasurably at the claws of hungry beasts, and vowed to top the sadistic act one fine day.
   The fleeing man, he knew, was firing on Jeannette’s goons and was going to make it out of the alley and into the awaiting car that screeched to a halt outside the alley’s entrance. The would-be assassin would be home free for certain; but Malone had other ideas.
   With practiced ease, Malone’s foot slid out and tripped the escaping assassin, snagging his legs and sending him reeling onto the floor before him, his face smashing into the concrete with damaging force. The assassin went to stand with legs as sure as thin wire but Malone hadn’t finished with him yet.
   Malone knew that if, as was his desire, he were to enter a real gang, to become a gangster of repute and fear, then he’d first have to earn the trust of his ‘rivals’, infiltrate their strongholds and ranks, and overpower the group from within.
   Jeannette was a hard man, and Malone knew that if he could take him out, then his role as gangster-supreme would almost certainly be assured. But ‘softly, softly’, Malone had thought: at least for now he must calm his desire to crush the life from those that stood before his dream. He could wait. He was only sixteen after all.

When the mob had found him punting the assassin to death with his steel toe-capped boots, they’d taken an instant liking to him and had brought the, they believed, charming young fellow inside to present him to the boss; he was sure to want to see the face of the canny lad who’d prevented the gunman from escaping.
   They were correct in their assumption, and Jeannette had welcomed Malone with open arms. Malone had reminded the aging Jeannette of a younger version of himself, and had made him, at first, an errand boy. Malone carried folded strips of paper containing secrets and messages to top gangsters for the following years. Of course, he’d read them all, being careful not to leave any trace of his examination, taking the facts within and writing them down in his black book.
   It was on his twenty-first birthday that Malone hit out with a planned frenzy that rocked the South Side with its biblical ferocity.

Jeannette had been getting heat from a rival gang lord, Gerry Rake, a fine and upstanding gangster who wanted nothing but peace between the gangs. Rake believed that by uniting the bosses and their forces they could accomplish more ambitious acts of crime and avoid detection, using the gangs to spread rumours and lies that would confuse the local police into a state of bewilderment. It was easier and more profitable for all in the long run, he’d assured all those that would listen.
   But Jeannette had refused to join the treaty and Rake, in an unusual fit of rage, had declared war between them.
   Many had fallen in drive-by shootings and raids; hundreds of rounds of ammunition were spent playing the ‘eye for an eye’ hitman pastime. But still Jeannette had failed to kill Rake; still he avoided even the most skilled assassin’s lead.
   ‘Teeth’ had taken advantage of both Jeannette’s rage at Rake and his trust of Malone, and had weaved a deadly trap for them both.
   Jeannette had invited Malone to his favourite restaurant for a birthday dinner. The whole evening had worked fine with Malone ploughing his fellow gang members with as much champagne as they could stomach, even Jeannette had become inebriated and merry, dropping his notorious guard for the slimmest of moments. It was all Malone and his newly acquainted contacts in the Rake family had needed.
   The doors had blown open in a fire of bullets as death blazed down upon goons and gang leaders alike, hundreds of hot bullets biting into smart suits to spill geysers of blood. None had survived the massacre.
   As Malone stood grinning at the defeated and dying Jeannette, he’d smiled and spat at the man before smashing his teeth out with his heel in a powerful kick, taking the French man’s snapped molars as a trophy. It was the start of a collection that bloated quickly over the following years.

Malone was now in a position of some importance, being trusted by Rake to perform his dirty deeds as a hitman. But Malone cared not for this work: it was far too ‘direct’ for his liking. It was now that he decided to move against his only, true, surviving competitor: Rake himself.
   He knew that any plan would have to be carefully orchestrated, knew that failure meant a death as worse as any he’d himself delivered. But Malone was not afraid. He’d made several, powerful, contacts over the years and knew that they were ready for a change from the tired and proper way Rake conducted his affairs. Times were changing and they wanted a fresh face to follow, someone with a taste for graphic results, a man with a glacial heart. They knew Charlie ‘Teeth’ Malone was the right man for the position.

Rake’s execution was public and brutal and many men grew ill from the mere sight of what Malone did to him and his ‘family’. The forensic experts, with their plastic evidence bags and magnifying glasses, choked back bile as they photographed the piles of bleeding bodies, all hacked by machetes and riddled with bullets. It was a sight the papers could not print, even the words of their finest journalists failed to capture the utter savagery of Malone’s massacring.
   Many gang bosses’ heads across the world were turned by what had occurred, and at last, Malone sat where he’d always wanted to be: on the throne of a gang lord, a mobster without equal.

The next few years saw Malone race from fresh-faced gang boss to high profile mob lord. Nothing could stand in his way and anything that tried fell onto blooded stumps, teeth caved in and face battered. Malone ruled, and all knew and respected that fact or they died. It was simple: mess with Malone, in any way or form, and you were dead – and toothless, food for the army of large, carnivorous fish Malone fed daily to bursting.

The thrill of his position filled Malone with glee for many years. The killing, the power and the glamour it brought made him think back and laugh at the times and things he’d done as a youth. He’d grown into a bright, feisty man who lorded over all criminal acts this side of Sicily; even the ‘Wops’ couldn’t touch him in the safety of his soundproofed and bullet resistant office. All was well.
   But as the years passed the screams of his opponents rang hollow and joyless to his ears, and Malone longed for something else, something more.
   He was bored and restless with the humdrum activities that he now performed daily, the torture, the extortion, even the look on his savage fish’s faces as they bit into the skin of his opponents didn’t reach him the way they had previously. He wanted more, a lot more, and was prepared to do anything and everything to have it: He wanted to rule it all! Not just the mobs and the criminals he knew feared his kicks as the dead feared judgement, no, he wanted to rule all things: the streets, the clubs, the police and the bars, everything must answer to his will or be wiped from the face of the earth by bullet or boot.
   Malone grew hungry for power and lashed out against foes he was recommended to avoid. Those that urged the negative died suddenly, where they stood, and soon all those with Malone followed his orders without ever a question or utterance to the contrary. Even the mafia silently feared Malone’s psychotic wrath and avoided him as often as was possible.

But it was never enough for Malone; he always wanted more. More money, more power with which to rule, more broads, more drugs, and more…life.
   Yes, thought Malone one cold morning in September, that was what he truly desired above all else: he wanted to outlive everybody he knew. Wanted to walk when they were worm feasts, to dance and sing as they decayed beneath his steel-capped feet.
   Malone wanted, he realised soon, to reign over the whole world, watch it crumble with his plans and topple even the hated FBI and their beloved government. He would outlive them and replace their fetid order with a fresh-faced one, an order that answered solely to him.
   He knew his men thought him mad, heard the things they said about his madness, but he cared not. One day he knew the secrets would be shown to him and all that mankind cherished would be lost to his will.
   But the results he gathered from his raids and assassinations fell woefully short of the mark: it was never sufficient. Never.

Dreams of immortal power plagued his slumber and waking thoughts as a beautiful face haunts a shunned lover’s sanity. He became desperate and began to ask his goons to perform certain, questionable acts that seemed, to them and all that learned of them, to be monstrous…demonic.
   A new wave of horror spread across Los Angeles like a medieval pestilence as Malone’s thugs raided sight after sight in a desperate search for forbidden secrets and tomes of power, anything that may hold some scrap of information to fulfil Malone’s desire.
   Malone stole and murdered many and much and soon his walls were decked with a library of tomes and writings on the bizarre and forbidden. His days and nights had become lost to the dark world of hidden languages and rituals and those that knew him most would say, if they dared, that he’d changed, if it were possible for a man such as he, changed into something worse, a man of dark desires and sickening requests. They feared not only for his mind but also for his soul.
   But after years of searching, the secret that Malone craved still eluded him, if such a secret were there to be discovered in the first place, and Malone’s temper grew fouler than ever.
   Many died. Many more were hideously mutilated in torture rituals that would shame the most brutal inquisitor. But still nothing met Malone’s ears to ease the driving desire behind his cold heart. Nothing that is, until the Dark Woman came to visit him.

Malone had been busy with three dancing girls from one of the many clubs he now ruled. His sexual desires, like everything he craved, were extreme to say the least.
   Many girls had been carried away from his chambers with a blanket of crimson wrapped tightly about scarred and bruised faces. It was said, in voices as quiet as death, that Malone could never reach climax, never orgasm, without first receiving the most vicious of beatings. Indeed, many of the girls had been specially shipped in from the more ‘exotic’ of the city’s clubs as experts in domination and sadism, but even these had been shipped out again, their bodies wrapped in plastic, gums empty and red.

The knock on the door to Malone’s bedchambers woke him from a dream of smoking women. They had been extinguishing burning cigars on his chest and spitting warm blood onto the blisters they’d created. Long, serpent tongues had flicked from their mouths to lap at the painful wounds, thick strands of phlegm washing them ‘clean’. His erection had startled even he as he’d cursed the intrusion and rose from his bed to curse his caller.

The black woman who stood before him had said nothing as his face had swelled in rage; who was this bitch and what the fuck did she want? How had she gotten past his guards and why did she stare at him so? These questions were never asked, as Malone’s fists had clenched and rose to strike a heavy blow to the woman’s face.
   But she’d spoken then with a calm voice broad with authority and he’d listened, how he’d listened to her, as she uttered words he’d waited a lifetime to hear:

“Charles Samuel Malone, I am here to offer you that which you desire the most: power immortal. Come with me and learn the riddle of the Cities of Pleasure. If your will is sturdy enough…”

He’d taken the woman in then and there, offered her finest wines and food, all of which she’d dismissed with a wave of her ebon hand. Her eyes registered not a flicker of interest in the jewels and offerings of power that Malone presented to her, and never once did she thank him for the covetous words he bathed her in; she was unimpressed with such mundane obsessions.
   When finally Malone stood before her exhausted with ways to woo this stranger’s favour, only then did she speak again.

“You have bored me with your worldly sacrifices, Charles. Is this all you are prepared to offer in return for omnipotent power, lifeless objects and ‘toothless’ positions by your side? Am I to offer the gods of The Forbidden these as your boon?”

Malone was quick to offer… “Anything. Anything I own, everything you desire is yours for the taking. Simply ask and I’ll get it for you. Just give me POWER!”

The Dark woman’s eyes met his and her chest rose in a sigh. “Do you mean that, Charles, Everything and Anything? These are weighty words indeed; they are the essence of magick, the blood to fuel the pulse of true power.”
   Her thin, dark eyes narrowed as she spoke on. “If you are indeed sincere in your offer, then you are ready to cut the pack, to read the cards of fate; to open the weathered veil and walk beyond the real.”
“I swear on my soul that I’m ready!” screamed Malone. “Give me what I want!”
   The Dark Woman smiled a razor’s grin. “Indeed…”

Malone had never seen a deck of cards so strange as those that flew from the dark woman’s hands that night, and he would never see the like again.
   The cards with the shadowy illustration of a box painted on every back, rushed by Malone’s eyes in a blur. The images crossed and merged, the woman’s hands a whirlwind of accuracy as she dealt the cards into a strange, pyramid, formation, the faces of the highest three cards turned down as to conceal their features.
   Thirty cards in all did the woman deal with a mouth as quiet as a mute and eyes fixed solely on her instrument of divination: Charles Malone’s soul. Indeed, Malone felt as if she were probing his very being with her cold and pitiless eyes, eyes that had witnessed, he imagined, as many a horror as his own.
   He was fascinated also by the texture of the skin of her hands as they stroked the cards lovingly onto the tabletop before him. They were leathered and worn like the bark of a tree with hardened wrinkles that visibly cracked as they flexed. They looked fit to splinter before his eyes.
   The deck of thirty now dealt, the dark woman paused, smiled, and laughed in the face of Charles Malone as if he’d told the funniest joke ever heard by human ears.
   Tears began to leak from her eyes and her body arched with the convulsions of hysteria, almost toppling her from the chair and sending her to the floor.

“What!” wailed Malone at the top of his voice, his eyes raging red, “What do you see woman? Tell me!!”
   Malone was on her in a thought and raising his hand to slam her face, as the half-opened door to his chamber burst in as his largest goon entered, his hands filled with weapons, concerned for his lord’s well being.
   “Boss…?” asked the goon; “You ok, boss?” he growled.
   But Malone could not hear him, or if he did, he did not care to answer, so loud was the rage beating in his ears.
   “Tell me you fucking bitch! You’ll tell me or I’ll cut you like I’ve never cut anyone before! Fucking tell me!!”

The thud of Malone’s steel-boots against her ribs was deadened by the laughter she felt ripping through her, such was her hysteria, and so fierce were her laughs. Even when Malone ordered his goon to continue the beating until ‘she coughs up either a lung or a secret’, did the Dark Woman, Merigon, continue to weep with amusement.
   For hidden in the order of the cards before her Merigon saw the terrible fate that awaited this man. And she knew she must be ready.
   But first Malone’s thug would dish out his beatings with willing, anvil, fists.

Merigon’s hands were raised in a sign of appeasement and submission. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know…”
   “I said you would, but you chose the hard way,” snarled Malone from behind his desk, a plume of cigar smoke misting the room, “Now, tell me how I open the gates to the Cities of Pleasure…”
   “The final three cards, the top of the pyramid; turn them, from left to right.” “But,” she added through blood and bruises, “unless you want to share your experience with him,” she gestured to the thug with bloodstained hands, “I suggest you have him leave.”
“And you, do you share in my power?” asked Malone. He was standing now, leaning over the table and eyeing the deck, staring transfixed at the backs of the three unturned cards as if watching for a sign of what they held.
   “No.” replied the Dark Woman, still crouched on the floor, “I play my part and you play yours. The powers will not affect me.” “Only you…”
   “Good,” Malone whispered to the air about him, and gestured for the goon to leave, “Then let’s get this done. There’s people I want to kill.”
   “Then…” The dark woman pointed to the three remaining cards before him and Malone knew what he must do, what his destiny had driven him to do, and he turned the first of the last cards.
   The card flipped onto the table to reveal a faded and worn image, roughened from the passing of many years but the distinctiveness was visible still: a sightless man with a well of dried blood reddening each empty socket, his body stabbed by countless spikes.
   “The Blinded Man,” said the Dark Woman knowingly. “Those that would cut the world in three for a taste of forbidden power, those that continue upon the dark path despite all warnings and counsel to the contrary; He that does and is damned”.
   Merigon had spoken without looking at Malone, as her face was to the floor and a finger was busy wiping blood from her lips.
   She’d been beaten before, countless thousands of times had her body worn the scars of her trade - all of them a trophy to her role. Today’s were no different; the scars and blood her assailant had drawn from her were weaving magick and unlocking the doors to the forbidden.
   Malone turned the next card, impatient to be done with this ritual and claim his power.
   His fat fingers slammed its face to the room.
   “The Wounded Witch,” said Merigon as she half rose from the floor with eyes closed from snapped ribs. “She opens the gates to the Cities of Pleasure and brings forth the desires of the insane, of those that seek dark requests through pain,” She stood fully, her vertebrae popping into place awkwardly, “through suffering, through the tears of others.”
   Merigon moved to the table in a single slide of her body and met Malone’s eyes with her own.
   “The final card, Malone. Turn it.” “See what you have dealt up as your destiny.”
   Malone was, he hated to admit, nervous now. Feelings he’d not felt since…he could not recall, but he knew them from his torture of others to be ‘fear’.
   His guts lurched and his tongue flicked out to wet dried lips. He felt his heart beating strong with adrenaline as he reached out and took the final card, turning it slowly before dropping it to the table.

The image was simple, almost unimpressive, and if it were not for the intensity behind Merigon’s gaze then he would surely have thought the image mundane: A thin, double-ended triangle emblazoned with similar designs to those that covered the rear of the tarot deck, hung in a sea of darkness, bolts of black electrical power crashing from it’s face.

The image now meant something more than a simple triangular shape to Malone, he knew what the image represented: a conjunction between his world and the Cities of Pleasure he craved more than life itself, or at least the lives of countless others. This shape before him, detailed on the strange cards woven by the woman, was all he had craved since childhood.
   He’d stolen and studied countless volumes of knowledge, performed a myriad of rites and wrongs but they had all been to no avail, a waste of his time. But now the deck, a simple set of cards, had revealed to him answers to questions he’d longed to know. Now his time had come and he grasped at it with two open arms and embraced his destiny with obsessive passion.

Behind him a corner of the room began to mist and blur into an unnatural darkness as if a mirage in a desert’s heat, and the solidity that the two joining walls represented - the pillars of natural stability - dissolved and danced behind Malone’s back. The wave spread fast, sending the ripples of un-reality crawling across the walls of the office, the black haze that was the gates to the Cities of Pleasure rippling out in waves.
   The walls began to drip with the weight of what they held, the dams of this world finally giving and releasing the tidal that is Hell into the flimsy confides of the room.
   The air about them was static and sharp, every breath that passed through Malone’s lungs causing him to sneer with delight at the pain it caused.
   It was then that Malone’s eyes revealed their true nature to all those present, seen and not seen; he was a monster. A wild man turned and stared at the ever-expanding void before him, causing him to laugh at the darkness twitching between the shadows.
   “Is this what others have feared? The darkness of the other side?” He turned fully and paced towards the centre of the shadow. “Then I embrace it! Give me what I will! Send me to the place where I can find my immortality so that I can return to rule over all things!” “Give it to me!!” he raged.
   “Then take it...!” Merigon screamed. Her fingers rose and pointed to the darkness expanding before them, directing him towards his desires, “Take it and be damned.”
   It took an instant for Malone to reach the darkness, indeed it seemed as if the darkest shadows in the corner reached out to smother him, long ripples of black drowning his form in a river of ink.
   It took another instant for Malone to realise he’d made the biggest mistake of his life, a life that was now born again into a world of torture and pain, a place of desolation and fear. He’d been duped and the penalty was his soul.

“Ah, Malone. How we’ve longed to perform the song of your flesh.”
   A creature stepped forth; an abomination to all things godly. His body was robed in black lengths that glimmered under the sheen of fresh blood, a collection of gleaming torture tools dangled at his waist. When its face finally slipped from the shadows, Malone saw that its head had a hundred nails smashed into the bone. The creature grinned.
   “Time to take your place amongst the choir.”
   The dark edges of the shadow’s ceased their wooing of him to stab and poke into his flesh with sharpened edges and razorblade precision. His arms and legs flailed but they were soon held fast by thicker stands of razor-shadow. Malone’s face felt the cold touch of a thousand edges skip lovingly across its features, to swell and burst like ripe fruit revealing the moist blush within.
   A searing pain now replaced all other sensations Malone could register, his senses blinding him with the song of pain as the sting of a butcher’s hook found the vertebrae of his spine to play upon it; a malevolent musician’s piercing chords strummed forth as the music of the lost.
   It was to be an epic song, the one that escaped Malone’s now torn and slashed mouth, the lips there dangling in folds of ribbon-muscle. But his voice was as yet un-tuned, unaccustomed to the shocking requirements of this, Malone’s personalised Hell, and his screams made the other twisted residents of Hell mock his efforts with distain. Still, their emotionally bleached and warped mind’s reasoned, he had plenty of time to learn their tunes, to sing their songs like the best of guests.
   He was to be here with them forever after all.

From a million, million miles away, protected by the terms that surrounded her own lost soul, Merigon coughed and smiled as her injuries faded and vanished as if they never had been, much like the gangster that had stood before her only seconds ago.
   She dusted her hands and lovingly, for they were part of her immortal soul, tidied away the strange tarot cards and slipped them back into the darkness of her robes.
   She knew their faces would not be hidden for too long. There were always others like Malone, others keen to see what should not be seen, and she smiled again, nodding courteously to the shadows resting silently in the corner of the room.