Butcher Bird

FORTY-SIX The Damned and the Gentrified

Spyder slipped on the remains of his jacket and followed the others.

They went along the route indicated on Ashbliss’ map. Every step of the way, they crunched over the bones of other adventurers who had come for the book, but none of them talked about this. Spyder and Lulu led Shrike through tricky fields of loose rock. Looking after each other gave them all something to do, and the contact was reassuring.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” said Shrike. “It wasn’t supposed to go this way. You’re trapped down here, Spyder, and I don’t know how to help you.”

“Then it’s best not to dwell on it,” he said. Shrike reached out for him, but he walked on ahead, describing the scene to her.

“We’re going through a slit canyon. The light is grasshopper green. There are strata of some pale orange and turquoise rock that glows like glass lit from the inside. Along the top of the canyon are the ruins of buildings. They’re pretty crude rock and clay shells. They may be some of the first things the angels built when they landed here. No one’s used them in a long, long time. The canyon walls are covered in sigils, the magical symbol for each angel’s name. I recognize a few. Baal. Pillardoc. Azazel. Salmiel. Beelzebub. Lucifer’s sigil is just ahead. It’s huge. The size of a whole cliffside. That hellhound took a great big whizz to mark his territory.”

When they reached the spot on the map indicating that they should circumvent the Plains of Dis, Shrike stopped. It was on the wind: the faint, but unmistakable rotten egg stench of sulfur. Spyder checked the map and turned them to the southwest, as Ashbliss had advised. “This way,” he said. They turned off the road and headed overland, through thick, thorny bushes, following the demon’s map.

Soon, they came to the Forest of Lies, where things were seldom as they first appeared. Paths turned to dust underfoot. A bare tree sprouted vicious thorns when Lulu leaned on it to remove a stone from her shoe. The sickly, brooding birds that nested in the twisted branches murmured to them trying to break their spirits.

“She cares nothing for you. She wants the book. The power. When she has that, she’ll leave you like all the others.”

“You killed your father. With your treachery and lust, you took the snake into your bed and set him loose in your home.”

“They still suspect you. They will abandon you here and return to the world and laugh about your torment while they fuck.”

The deserted library in the Forest of Lies was an ancient wreck. Its doors and windows were long gone and the pages of its books blew through the woods like the ghosts of dead leaves. Spyder picked up the some of the papers that wrapped around his legs and snagged overhead in the trees. There were love notes, suicide notes, tax returns, forged money, old treaties embossed with government seals, lottery tickets, doctored photos, newspaper articles and religious texts.

They passed from the Forest of Lies into the Valley of Lost Desire. The place was eternally shrouded in a thick fog and lovers wandered through the gray desolation hearing each other’s calls, but never finding one another. Ash from a nearby volcano drifted down into the valley, making the fog worse. It looked as if the volcano had erupted sometime in the recent past. Hard-baked bodies lay strewn across the valley floor, like a museum exhibit about the destruction of Pompeii. It wasn’t until Spyder tripped over one of the heavily ashed corpses and heard a steady scraping from inside that he realized that the crusted forms each contained a trapped soul. Spyder tried cracking open a few, but the rocks he used always shattered without making so much as a crack in the stony prisons.

They passed from the Valley of Lost Desire into an overheated swamp that on the map was marked only as Rage. Faceless souls chased and savagely beat other souls in waist-high bogs of boiling blood. Once each attack had been accomplished and the victim beaten senseless or drowned, the victim and attacker would exchange roles and the whole process would begin again. The souls didn’t seem to notice Spyder and the others as they inched by on a narrow ledge. They were grateful to make it out of Rage without incident.

They passed from Rage into the frozen Plains of Misery. The sullen, suicidal and malicious, who took nothing from existence but pain and who made others’ lives as empty and excruciating as their own, lay half in ice, cursing and trying not to look at each other. As they went, Spyder looked down and saw other souls completely submerged in ice, swallowed up by the diamond-blue glacier that inched back and forth across the scarred open land.

They passed from the frozen Plains of Misery into the overgrown Fields of Greed. Souls dug enormous golden thorn bushes from the rocky soil with their bare, bleeding hands and tried to carry them away, only to have the bushes stolen by other souls, driven mad by avarice.

When they tried to carry too many at once, souls ended up buried beneath piles of golden thorns. Others ripped their ghostly bodies to shreds as they fought frantically for the bushes with other souls. A bleeding woman fell at Lulu’s feet and when she tried to help the wounded soul, the woman tried to bite Lulu. She clutched a small collection of golden thorns to her breasts, cutting herself to the bone. “You keep away,” the woman told Lulu. “These are mine.”

When they were finally through the Fields of Greed, the skyline of an enormous city glistened in the distance. “Pandemonium,” said Spyder who, despite himself, felt a little shuddering thrill inside as he spotted the place. The city possessed a brutal but elegant beauty, as if the Manhattan skyline had been dropped into the city of the biggest oil refinery in the world.

What puzzled Spyder, however, was the city that lay just beyond Pandemonium. Though the other city was farther away, it towered over Hell’s greatest metropolis, dwarfing its tallest towers. The graceful mother-of-pearl domes and minarets of this other city shimmered in the light from an artificial sun that was suspended by some magical force high over the place. In the false but dazzling light, the buildings appeared to be trimmed in gold and silver and inlaid with precious stones. Construction cranes huddled silently at the edges of the bright city.

“That looks brand new,” said Spyder.

“Shit,” said Lulu. “Demon condos. Yuppies’ll even gentrify Hell.”