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Agonistes is the main antagonist of Tortured Souls, a novella written by Clive Barker published in installments attached to the action figures of the various characters that appear in the story. He is a powerful demon created by God, with the power to create monstrous beings called Supplicants, whose body is horribly ravaged by scars, mutilations and deformations of various kinds.
Agonistes is a transformer of human flesh; a creator of monsters. If a Supplicant comes to him with sufficient need, sufficient hunger for change - knowing how painful that will be - he will accommodate them. They become objects of perverse beauty beneath his hand; their bodies remade in fashions that they have no power to dictate. As written, The Book of Genesis is wrong in parts - God did not rest on the seventh day, rather continuing to work to create creatures that did not walk the perfect Garden of Eden, rather ugly demons and destroyers, like that of Agonistes. As a surgeon, he is a monster that appears to those with the most desperate need to be altered, altered into creatures of only death - assassins who feel only pain. In the full story of the Tortured Souls, Agonistes plays a central role in the molding of the next two characters from their original forms into something more. His entire body is clad in leather, and there's dozens of belts, straps and blades hanging from his body. The skull/head of Agonistes is delightfully sick - a piece of messed up muscle tissue with empty eye sockets and a creepy mouth peering out. Below, on his articulated neck di lui, his throat di lui is slit and opened so one can see the bloody insides. Agonistes has dozens of blades all over his body, no doubt to operate on the Supplicant-but his headgear is the most impressive and creepy of them all. He includes a strange round metal piece that wraps around the top of his skull and appears to store an arrangement of scalpels, blades and scissors - behind that two long metal pieces which rise above his head to attach many blades and machinery, including a long blade with a working pneumatic device which stabs into his right eye, and then two stands which hold a removed face, most likely the face of one of the Supplicants being operated on, leading up to two hooks at the top, articulated with further pneumatic devices.
Trivia[]
Given the resemblance of Agonistes and the Supplicants to the Cenobites of the Hellraiser saga, Clive Barker fans are convinced that Tortured Souls could be a sort of prequel-spinoff of the Hellraiser literary canon (formed by the books Hellraiser: A Film by Clive Barker, Scarlet Gospels and Hellraiser: The Toll), due to the difference between the mythology of the literary timeline and that of the cinematic timeline (in the first Leviathan does not exist and Hell is ruled by Satan, and in both the Hellraiser books and Tortured Souls the existence of God is confirmed). If this theory (never confirmed nor denied by Clive Barker) were true, Agonistes could have been the first Cenobite or at least have created The Order Of Gash and this would make him the second overarching antagonist of the Hellraiser literary canon (together with Satan) .