Happy Hour in Hell

forty: grey woods

LUCKILY, THE lifter was crowded and the two soldiers were talking to each other. Also luckily, they were just Murderers Sect and not the tougher, smarter Purified, the Mastema police. I sank back against the wall near the door, as much behind them as I could manage, and tried to look like just another infernal commuter on his way home, splattered in the blood and dog-brains of an average working day. Because of all my up-and-down trips to confuse the trail, I’d let Niloch’s hunters get past me, which meant I might run into them anywhere from here on down.

“His lordship is steaming,” said one of the soldiers, a bear-headed fellow with a neck big as my waist and shoulders you could build a house on.

“And he doesn’t look too good, neither,” said his companion with a guttural laugh. He was as big and ugly as his friend, although a little shorter. Both looked as though they could separate my head from my body with just a thumb and forefinger. “Did you see the commissar’s yap? Splinters on top of splinters!”

“If the spy hadn’t ruined my day with all this running about,” said Ugly Number One. “I’d shake his hand. ’Course I’d still rip it off him after that.”

“From the description, sounds like someone else already did,” said Number Two. His laugh was starting to annoy me already, but he was looking around the car now so I slouched back even farther and dropped my eyes. If he saw me, he wasn’t really looking at me, because he then said, “Why are we going down to Beggar’s End?”

“You dumb shit-hole,” said Number One. “Why do you think? The commissar’s putting us and a lot more on every level between Tophet and Lower Lethe. This escaped spy can’t go below the top Punishment Levels, see? He tried it once, and it made him sick. I heard some Mastema muckamuck was in a lifter with him when it happened, that’s how they know. So we start down in the Lethe levels and then we work our way back up, some on the lifters, some on the roads. Commissar’s got boats out on the rivers, too, ’case he tries that way again.”

It was all I could do not to groan. How was I going to get to the Neronian Bridge if Niloch and his thugs were going to be looking for me all over? For that matter, how was I going to get off this rotten damn elevator?

Well, somebody once said fortune favors the brave. I think it was my buddy Sam, shortly before he drank himself to death. (Well, really, he only drank that particular body to death, but that’s another story.) Since I didn’t have a plan, or even any hope to speak of, I figured that I might as well do something, so I quietly slipped Riprash’s huge dagger-sword out of my belt and then, when the lifter lurched to a stop at the next level, I shoved it into Ugly Number One’s side as hard as I could, with all the force of my legs, back, and shoulders. As I think I mentioned, I’m pretty strong as a demon, and I was hoping to shove it all the way through both of them at the same time. As it was, by the time I got it all the way through armor and Number One, I only gouged about a three inch hole in Ugly Number Two, but the collapse of his wounded partner knocked him off-balance, which gave me time to get out one of my guns and shoot him in the head.

The door slid open. The customers inside the lifter stared down at the two dead soldiers with wide eyes. The passengers waiting to get on suddenly noticed them, too. Nobody moved for a couple of seconds except for the quiet rattle of scales shivering together. Not many heroes in Hell, thank the Highest.

“Step out,” I said to the nearest passenger, a woman with no eyes. Just to make sure she understood, I pressed the barrel of my revolver gently against her forehead. She stepped out. The other passengers quickly followed her. I waved my gun at the passengers outside; they got the idea, moving back from the door. When it closed again and the lifter started down once more, I was alone with the two motionless soldiers, each an ugly, lumpy island in a spreading sea of blood.

I knew they weren’t dead in any ordinary sense, although these bodies might never be functional again, but I didn’t want to take the risk that they might regenerate on me, so I stopped the car at a random floor, checked to make certain nobody was waiting to get on, then dragged the two semi-corpses out of the car. It wasn’t easy—it took me the best part of three minutes to wrestle all that weight by myself, and when I got the door closed and the lifter moving down once more, I looked like I’d just taken a blood shower. I probably didn’t smell all that great, either, but I had bigger things to worry about.

You know how when you’re trying to think of something really important, these other, much less important ideas keep jumping into your head like bunnies on crystal meth, boing, boing, boing, anything except what you’re supposed to be thinking about? You don’t? It’s just me, huh?

Maybe it was Eligor’s crab-demon flexing in my skull, or maybe just exhaustion, but as I was doing my best to figure out what I should do next, I kept getting distracted by ideas that really were not very important right at that moment, like if Hell was no more of a physical location than Heaven was, why was it so much more realistic? Why did people bleed? Why did they eat? Why go to all the trouble of making a permanent torture chamber, then giving it its own ecology and unnecessary shit like that? Was that God’s idea or the Devil’s? What agreement did they have, exactly?

Then I’d catch myself and try to start thinking about survival again.

I really only had one choice of an escape route. From what the two dead guards had said, Niloch’s soldiers were looking for me everywhere from Abaddon on up because they’d learned from that Mastema mud-man who’d commandeered my lifter how badly I’d reacted to the Punishment Levels my first time, when I’d freaked out so badly he’d tossed me out for the Block and his freaks to chew on. It might even have been Eligor who passed the information along to Commissar Niloch, just to torment me in a new and interesting way before having the intracubus in my skull shut me down. But wondering whether Eligor was playing me for a fool or not was a game with no useful ending. What was more important now, Niloch and his thugs thought they had me figured out, so my only hope was to surprise them. If they knew for a fact I couldn’t survive the Punishment Levels, well, that’s precisely where I had to go—right where they didn’t expect me. And if I survived that return visit, I just had to pray that Eligor really wanted that feather back badly enough not to help the ones chasing me, since for all I knew, the intracubus in my head was keeping him informed of everywhere I went and everything I did.

And a great holiday, I thought, just keeps getting better and better.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t ask the lifter to take me down to Satan’s Parlor or anything, but only a few levels lower than Abaddon. After that I could climb to the level with the Neronian Bridge. After all, I figured, I’d gone a few levels farther below that when I experienced the Punishment Levels before, and I’d survived more or less intact.

What I probably should have thought of, though, was that the last time I had descended to the Punishment Levels and escaped, I didn’t have an intracubus burrowed into my head like a demonic tick. To say I was astonished when I got down to Itching Stump, still several levels above Abaddon, and the inside of my head began to burn, is probably a bit of an exaggeration—I’m a pessimist by nature and, after all, I was already in Hell—but I was definitely astonished by how much it hurt. It got worse every level down. By the time I was getting close to Abaddon itself, a place I’d already survived quite easily, that red-hot robot tarantula was doing Jazzercise in my cerebellum, and I was twitching like a marionette with its strings caught in a power mower.

Like I said, I probably should have guessed things might be different this time, but what with everybody trying to hack me to pieces or torture me I’d been a bit distracted. So now I had a new crisis: I couldn’t afford to get out of the lifter yet, because Niloch’s troops were working their way upward from Abaddon. But every second I stayed was making me more and more certain that my head was going to explode in a splatter of flaming nerves and brain goo.

As the levels passed, and my limbs jerked and my nerves sizzled, I kept singing cartoon theme songs over and over in my head just to keep myself from thinking about how much I was hurting, but Spider-Man was already doing me less good than the Flintstones had, and I had a feeling I probably wouldn’t even get to start Yogi Bear. Still, I hung on in desperate agony until the lifter sank past the Abaddon stop, then I gasped out the name of the next level. When the lifter ground to a halt and opened, I stumbled out into the deserted little station at Grey Woods and then out into the city beyond the station. Except there was no city.

At that exact moment I was having trouble focusing, what with something inside my head chewing on my neural fibers, but I realized a little later that I was in one of the places I’d actually read about, not in any Camp Zion briefing, but in the words of Dante himself. (We read The Inferno for extra credit, even though it’s mostly made-up. Surprisingly, old Dante got quite a few things right, including the idea of Hell’s vertical arrangement.) If you’ve read him too, you might remember “The Wood of Thorns,” or, more directly, the Forest of Suicides. That’s where I was now. The lifter building here was like a remote stop far out on a suburban train line, one of those little places where you think there couldn’t possibly be enough passengers to warrant a station.

Not only was the station empty, outside the station was a sort of platform, which was really just the edge of the building, and then . . . nothing. Not literal nothing—although this being Hell, that would have been possible too, I guess—but nothing resembling infernal civilization. The woods stretched as far as I could see and were as gray as reported, a heavy, dripping forest of oak and alder and other ancient European trees tinseled with thick moss. In the spots where you could see ground through the mist, it was covered with grass of such a dark green that it appeared nearly black.

The good part was that I was only one level below Abaddon now. The bad part: I was only one level below Abaddon, and that’s where the commissar, his hounds, and his troops would be looking for me, and if they were thorough, they might come looking for me here as well. Then I’d be in Niloch’s nasty, rattling hands.

No, I realized, if I was captured, Eligor’s crab-grenade was going to go off in the middle of my thinkers, and then my next conscious thought would be, Oh, shit, I’m in the Infernal Transfer Lounge for Souls and everyone’s staring at me. After that, the real pain would begin. Eligor had held back from my utter destruction because he wanted something from me, but the big bosses of Hell wouldn’t be so kind. The whole operation here was expressly set up for just the kind of things they’d be doing to me, and they’d do them forever.

So I did the only thing I could do at that point. I pulled up my big boy pants and headed out into the Forest of Suicides.

It would have been an awful, awful place even if it had been right beside some lovely college town, five minutes from great nearby schools and nifty places to walk your dog, but as it was, a real estate agent would have had trouble finding anything cheerful to say. The Grey Woods were halfway to being a swamp, the ground treacherous and squelchy, and the constant mist made it difficult to get any idea of where you were or even where you’d already been. But I knew the way up to the next level would be somewhere on the outskirts, and that fact alone was what gave me any kind of chance of finding my way.

In theory, all I had to do was keep the lifter station behind me, and I’d be heading straight out across the level on a radial track. Problem with that was that once I was a hundred steps from the station, I could no longer look back and see the huge lifter tower through the murk. I’m not joking. The tower was the size of the Empire State Building, a giant cuboid reaching all the way to the roof of this level, and it was already hidden by the dense mist. All I could do was try to maintain my direction by picking an object that I could see, then heading toward it, then picking another target by my best guess at the same direction. Efficient and fun, especially in a drizzling gray nothingness of skeletal trees and deadly quicksand bogs. And it got worse when I began to encounter the suicides.

In The Inferno, written in the days when the Church and other important moral influences still thought suicide was a cheater’s way out, the Wood of Thorns was where all of those folks wound up after death, stuck inside the trunks of trees. “Stuck inside a tree forever,” you say, “hah, that doesn’t sound so bad.” But in the poem, there are all these harpies flying around, things that looked like tubby owls with women’s breasts—which doesn’t sound frightening so much as just plain weird. The harpies would pluck limbs off the trees, which apparently really hurt, and would make the suicide trees weep. All together, a creepy setup. Tip of the hat, Mr. Alighieri. But if you offered every one of the souls in the real version of the Woods their choice, I think they’d have voted unanimously to move to Dante’s version, which would have seemed pretty much a romp in the park compared to what they had.

I didn’t know that yet. I didn’t know that until I stumbled across my first self-murdered soul.

At first I thought he was a large lump of moss dangling from the limb of an ancient, gnarled oak tree, but as I got closer the mist cleared between us, and I could see the whole shape, including the pale feet and hands. Compared to some of the things I’d already seen, that wasn’t much. Then as I got a bit closer I saw that the hanging man was alive and struggling.

I really should have figured it out at that point. I mean, Forest of Suicides, right? If killing yourself was a crime—or had been when these people were judged by Heaven—why would they be allowed just to hang around peacefully in Hell, being dead?

As I slogged through the mire toward it, I could see that the corpse was twitching, even clawing weakly at the noose around its neck. Yes, I know, I said “corpse,” because that was sure what it looked like, with all the signs of post-mortem lividity (see, I’ve watched cop shows, too), eyes sunken, tongue black and protruding. But dead or not, this poor bastard was definitely suffering. I pulled out the big knife Riprash had given me, then scrambled up the spider-legged cluster of roots until I could hack through the rope. The first thing the suicide did when he hit the ground was to grab at the noose and loosen it around his throat.

“You shit!” he gasped, his voice as rough as you’d guess with someone who’d spent a good part of forever hanging by his neck. He was on his hands and knees, craning his head around on his lengthened neck so he could glare at me. “What have you done? Why did you interfere? I don’t even know you!”

Interfere? I took a step back. The odor of rot that rose off him was so strong that even demon-senses couldn’t entirely deal with it.

He struggled to his feet, although he could barely stand, and to my astonishment he began trying to throw his now-shortened rope over the branch so he could hang himself again. I took a breath before stepping closer, then grabbed at him but caught only his decaying clothes, which tore in my hands. His rope had been tied to the tree at one end, and I had halved its length by cutting it. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get enough rope over the branch to hoist himself aloft again. When he turned toward me, I saw to my astonishment that he was weeping, viscous tears like snail’s tracks edging down his bluish cheeks. “How could you!” he half-shrieked, half-wheezed, then clumsily began to swing his fists at me.

I had only a moment to figure out what was going on and to remind myself that my philanthropic efforts never did me much good even outside of Hell, when something dropped out of the fog that surrounded us and attached itself to the struggling corpse like a vampire bat in a Friday night horror movie. The hanged man was screaming in pain as well as weeping now, and although I knew I’d almost certainly regret it, I had to try to help him.

Remember when I mentioned Dante’s harpies, the creatures who policed the suicide woods in his literary version of the Inferno? The real ones were a lot less pleasant than owls with tits. They looked more like gobs of phlegm the size of koala bears, with insect wings and faces that were mostly flat, square teeth. And it wasn’t just one of them dropping down out of the murk, it was quickly becoming a lot of harpies, and they obviously weren’t just there to punish the suicide, because another one of those horrid vampire boogers leaped onto my neck, beating its horrid fly’s wings in excitement as it tried to gnaw a hole in me. By the time I managed to impale it on my blade, three more were crawling over my body, looking for a way to burrow headfirst into my guts, and I could hear the wings of dozens more as they swarmed toward us through the mist. And while all this nightmare bullshit was going on, my enemies were only getting closer.