Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades

I’ve set numerous novels and short stories in my world of Punktown, a futuristic metropolis that gives Hades a run for its money in the category of Most Nightmarish Places to Live (if one can be said to live in the afterlife). The way I approach nearly all of my Punktown work is that you need not have read any other Punktown story previously in order to enjoy the one currently in front of you. They are individual tales, told by the many voices of that city’s citizens.

So, too, you needn’t have read my novel LETTERS FROM HADES already in order to enjoy the stories you will encounter here in VOICES FROM HADES. Of course, it would enhance the experience. But the stories in this collection all concern other protagonists, each in their own private hell.

LETTERS FROM HADES (Bedlam Press, 2003) follows the adventures of a nameless narrator who awakens from his death-by-suicide to find himself reborn in a Hell overseen by various races of Demons, one of whom he falls in love with, his story told in the form of the journal he keeps. The novelette BEAUTIFUL HELL is a quasi-sequel in that it revolves around a secondary character from LETTERS FROM HADES, and the increasing turmoil in Hades that is seen brewing in the first novel. But again, while they often address the violent changes that are taking place in my world of Hades, the stories collected here stand alone, and constitute all of my Hades stories to date other than the original novel and its follow-up.

Following this wee introduction you will find a bonus introduction. Consider it a DVD extra. It was written for a translation of LETTERS FROM HADES into the Chinese language for Taiwan’s Fantasy Foundation Publications (and thanks again to my Taiwanese agent Grey Tan for making that happen). I thought it might be of interest for English language readers to have an opportunity to see it in print, as well. And mainly, the following introduction expresses a lot about the origins of LETTERS FROM HADES, the thoughts and feelings that inspire me and the approach I take when I write my Hades-based stories. So, I will take you by the hand a few steps further, fellow sojourner—but Virgil must abandon Dante at last. Good luck on the other side.

A Prayer for Lost Souls:

An Introduction to the Taiwanese edition of LETTERS FROM HADES

There are over twenty religions represented in Taiwan. Here, Taoism and Buddhism boast millions of adherents. But the religious freedoms of Taiwan allow for everything from Islam to the Church of Scientology. There is even something called the Lord of the Universe Church. (I was going to devise my own religion by this name, appointing myself Lord of the Universe, but now I can’t since it’s already been used. Oh well.) Protestant Christianity ranks highly with approximately 600,000 worshipers, as does Catholicism with 300,000.

The varied religious institutions of Taiwan have done a lot of good for its people, in promoting cultural and humanitarian attitudes. They have established roughly 80 hospitals and clinics, plus centers for the elderly, the mentally ill, orphans. They have founded schools, colleges, libraries. Religion in Taiwan, as elsewhere in the world, has brought out the very best qualities that human beings have to offer. The love of our families, our neighbors, our ancestors, and humankind in general. The love of the mysterious forces that created us, be those forces sentient or not.

But there is yin to the yang. The light casts deep shadows. Throughout the world, wherever there are people who believe in something, there is going to be the opinion that anyone who doesn’t embrace those same beliefs is wrong. Sinful. Maybe even destined for damnation.

Hell is a worldwide concept, and whether your tainted soul is bound for a Christian or a Buddhist version of the netherworld, neither sounds particularly appealing. Hell can be plenty of fun in entertainment, though, whenever we want to scare people into good behavior (and scare a little money out of their pockets, besides). There is something called the Haw Par Villa in Singapore, where I understand they have a tourist attraction centered on Chinese mythology, in which colorful statues enact the tortures of the Ten Courts of Hell. In the Sixth Court, a person’s soul will be sawed in half for such crimes as squandering food, owning pornographic materials, or "misuse of books." (Let that be a warning to you if you decide to burn my novel in disgust after reading it!) This puts me in mind of a tourist attraction I have twice visited myself, my wife being Vietnamese: Saigon’s surreal Suoi Tien Theme Park. Here, my wife Hong and I experienced another thrill-inducing representation of the underworld, that we entered by passing through an immense dragon head from which reverberated an eerie and—to me—indecipherable voice. Inside, we witnessed a kind of trial by mannequin, with the soon-to-be-damned kneeling before glowering judges. Descending into the ill-lit and spooky bowels of Hades itself, with my beautiful wife clinging to my arm (heh heh), we encountered flourescent skeletons and tombstones, and scene after scene of the damned in their torments. As in a movie like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the cheap production values only made the terrors more effective. A week before coming to Viet Nam I had taken my son to Disney World, and the admittedly wonderful technology behind the Haunted Mansion just doesn’t have the same unnerving effect as seeing these figures in their blood-splashed white pajamas, each one’s face obscured in long black hair like something from a Japanese horror movie, undergoing tortures that were hard for me to make out, inflicted by demons even harder to make out (though I vividly recall one demon dipping a figure in and out of a vat of sizzling fire, and another using a tremendous saw to split a man’s head down the middle).

So, yes, in an amusement park or a movie or a novel, Hell can be quite the engaging place. After all, you’re just passing through like those earlier tourists, Dante and Virgil. My wife and I were out of that mechanized Hades in mere minutes. A movie ends, a book’s cover closes. As they say in the United States, "A nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there." No, Hell is not the kind of place where you’d want to set down roots—for all eternity. Unless, of course, you had no choice. But if you were condemned to Hades…well, I guess you’d want to try to make the best of it, wouldn’t you? You might attempt to carry on a semblance of your former life. Joining a community of other damned people. Making a home for yourself amongst them. Maybe even taking on a job. But would this behavior simply be a programmed instinct to keep plodding along no matter what, like an unthinking animal…or would it be an inspiring example of the indomitable nature of the human spirit?

These are the themes—and the questions raised—in my novel LETTERS FROM HADES.

If there is an afterlife, and some of us will be going to a very bad place—but this very bad place resembles the very bad place we already live in—then we’re going to need that very bad stuff called money. At the time I wrote my novel and devised the idea of the damned laboring to earn money in Hades, I didn’t know that in a number of Asian countries, symbolic currency called "votive money," "ghost money," or frequently "Hell money" is burned so that the souls of the dead might have use of it in the world beyond. This practice has gone on to include the creation and burning of paper cars, houses, bodyguards, golf clubs, Viagra (I guess one of the tortures inflicted in Hell is impotence), and condoms (maybe so the spirits don’t impregnate each other, or catch a disease from the paper prostitutes one can purchase and burn). This to me is a curious juxtaposition of ancient tradition and modern concerns, of spirituality and materialism, and it illustrates that not only does the strong belief in an afterlife persist, but that—rather than it being a landscape that would appear totally alien to us as mortals—in Hell we might "live" much as we do here on Earth. Going about our daily routines, until such time as a soul might be able to move on and be reincarnated. At least in Eastern thought there is the possibility of an eventual escape from Hell. The Christian notion does not allow for this.

In Taiwan there is a ceremony called Ullambana, a word derived from Sanskrit. Ullambana originates in the Buddhist story of a man named Mulien, who journeys into Hades to find his mother (as the Greek hero Orpheus descended into the underworld to seek his wife Eurydice), and attempts to ease her anguish by giving her food. Thwarted in his efforts, however, he has to call upon a group of monks to help him pray on the fifteenth day of the seventh Lunar month, thus beginning the tradition that carries on to this day. It is a ceremony observed throughout Asia, known by different names, such as Obon by the Japanese. The Vietnamese call the festival Tet Trung Nguyen, or "Wandering Souls Day." Prayers are said for the inhabitants of Hell, who on that one day venture forth into the world of the living. I’m reminded of the United States’ own "All Hallows’ Eve," or Halloween, where children dressed as goblins beg for candy door-to-door. Halloween has its origins in the religion of the ancient Celtic people, who on the day called Samhain would leave offerings of food for the dead, when they came forth amongst the living. Similarly, on Tet Trung Nguyen, food is laid out for these wandering souls, and Hell money burned for their benefit.

I like this attitude of benevolence. (In Christian thought, there are no tears shed for those banished to Hell.) On my last trip to Viet Nam, one of my brothers-in-law lent my wife and me some video disks to watch. Well, some of these were Japanese pornography, so I guess we’re headed for the Sixth Court of Hell, but the others were about Buddhism, and one disk concerned the prayers said for the souls suffering in Hades. The movie showed horrible enactments of demons torturing the damned, plus gory real life scenes of cows having their throats cut and terrified pigs thrashing in their own blood. But again, I liked the idea of these prayers being said for the souls of the damned. It shows a sense of mercy. Of human compassion.

Much evil has been done in the name of religion. Hatred, murder, crusades and inquisitions. But in the USA, we say, "Guns don’t kill people; people kill people." The same can be said of religion. Religion is a fire in one’s hands that can be used to illuminate, or destroy. You’ll meet no God or Satan in LETTERS FROM HADES. Just people. People are scary enough.

Two people inspired LETTERS FROM HADES; one in a bad way, one in a good way. At a printing company I used to work for there was a young employee who had become a Born Again Christian. Around his work station he posted Biblical quotes that he had enlarged on the photocopier, these quotes essentially meant to threaten damnation for any of his co-workers who did not subscribe to his own beliefs. I found this display arrogant and offensive. Would he truly like to see us all burn and bleed every minute for all of eternity, simply because we didn’t feel precisely the same way he felt? This callous boy inspired me to write a short story called COFFEE BREAK. In COFFEE BREAK, for one hour every year the damned are allowed a brief respite, a break, during which they can visit any number of restaurants and cafes and ice cream parlors scattered throughout Hell, before resuming their torments. It’s sort of like Tet Trung Nguyen, when the dead can return to walk the Earth for that single night.

Years later, publisher David G. Barnett of Necro Publications invited me to write a novel for him, and suggested I return to the world of COFFEE BREAK and expand upon it. I accepted this invitation eagerly. While the netherworld of LETTERS FROM HADES turned out differently from the way I portrayed it in COFFEE BREAK, the short story definitely afforded me the initial sketch for my larger painting.

In LETTERS FROM HADES, I’m not issuing a warning to the living about the dangers of being damned in the afterlife. I’m actually reflecting on the world we are alive in now, filled with religious intolerance and human hatred.

In one sense, you will not need to fear for the protagonist of LETTERS FROM HADES too much. He is already dead, after all, so he cannot be killed. But what you will need to be concerned about is whether he can maintain his sanity, and his dignity. Can his afterlife in Hell even become a second chance for him to find the personal fulfillment he lacked when he was physically alive?

I’ve written a loose sequel to LETTERS FROM HADES called BEAUTIFUL HELL, which explores another region of Hades where the demons are Asian in appearance, have the names of Japanese devils and wield samurai swords. Hell has many nations but no borders; we all dwell beneath its imprisoning sky. We can all relate to the same fears of pain and despair, and the same hopes for courage and perseverance. My aim in presenting this novel is that it will speak to you no matter how different from mine your language, your culture, your religious inclinations may be. Besides the widespread notion of a Hades, there is a larger theme contained within LETTERS FROM HADES; something even more universal, something that connects every human being—devout or faithless—through the whole world and the whole of time.

The eternal struggle of the human spirit.

The Abandoned

Maria had been told she was lucky to have acquired work in the city of Tartarus, so soon upon her arrival in the netherworld.

It wasn’t much comfort. She could only take the word of her co-workers—her fellow slaves, more precisely—that to be employed here brought a measure of protection from the Demons in place of the punishments inflicted on those beyond the city’s borders. It was as reassuring as being told that she should be thankful for having one leg chainsawed off instead of two.

Seeing the Demon city of Tartarus for the first time had been the third greatest shock of her afterlife. The first shock had been that there was an afterlife (she had been one of the only Mexicans she’d ever known not to be devoutly religious) and the second greatest shock had been that the afterlife adjudged for her was as a citizen of Hell.

Mexico City was dwarfed by Tartarus, though to Maria’s mind the population of her own former city might have been greater. Perhaps that was only an illusion because of the vast scale of this place, which rendered all (mock) life microscopic, and because of its absence of streets, of commerce. Its very expanse and scope made it seem empty, its fullness made it desolate, and most strangely, its hideousness made it terribly beautiful.

Every structure was a skyscraper, many of them vanishing into the almost solid layer of slowly churning clouds that forever obscured the sky. These skyscrapers were not so much ranked beside each other as merged with each other, so that often the only way one might tell them apart (if indeed they were in any sense apart) was to notice how the color of one was shaded slightly darker or lighter than another, or how a building composed of nothing but uncountable, tiny opaque windows faded into a building that appeared to be entirely constructed (within as well as without?) out of gigantic auto parts blended with a madman’s plumbing system combined with computer circuit boards…some of this machinery glossy smooth, other sections corroded rust red. Though a building might be a ghostly pale hue and another so dark it seemed one existed in day while the other loomed at midnight, there was a bleak sepia tone over the whole of the city that made it weirdly homogenous. Her own former city had been notorious for its smog, but sectors of this city seemed to loom out of a more subtle mist that blurred its edges, while other areas stood out with a sharpness of line and detail that stabbed the eye. White, luminous fog wound like a living entity between the fissures and irregular gaps in the mountains of concrete and metal, and steam plumed out of apertures, some of these like grates or exhaust ports while others were more like organic orifices. Because worked into the weave of Tartarus was an unmistakable organic element, as if the city wasn’t actually built from concrete and metal, plastic and stone, but had been grown like one titanic living body. There was thick tubing that looked both flexible but vitreous and that snaked down the faces of buildings, that ran in and out of their very bodies, like arteries. There were huge, glassy bulbs or boils or tumors of some kind which were filled with that glowing mist or else with seething black masses like gigantic worms in rows of immense egg sacs. There were portions of the city that looked formed out of translucent bone, out of some calcified matter like a coral reef, out of tons of oxidized fossil. Buildings that seemed made of polished insect chitin, structures that were not linear and hard-edged but fluid and asymmetrical and a chaos of shape and design. All of these things in unlikely conjunction were Taratarus, unified by its leeched brown color however it might shade, compressed so tightly together it was like one colossal building alone, unified by its strange silence despite the ringing and hammering heard here and there as its mechanical flanks pumped and pistoned, unified by its atmosphere of hopelessness and loneliness…like an abandoned city haunted only by ghosts. Of which Maria was one.

««—»»

Maria had been raped again. It was bad enough when a Demon raped her, but much worse when one of her co-workers did. She expected better from them, since they shared her plight. She supposed these men needed to vent their terrible, frustrated rage. Or else they simply felt that this world was a place where evil was expected, being the very substance of the walls, their masters, of their own mock flesh. Still, they expressed their humiliation by humiliating her. Spent their bottled anger by filling her up with it instead.

A Demon had come along the narrow corridor in which they lay, and had kicked the man hard in the ass. The man had scampered to his feet, his slick cock bobbing ridiculously, and scampered off down the passageway to wherever his work station was. The Demon had then strolled on, not bothering to help Maria up from the floor. As she rearranged her wrenched and ripped clothing, she watched the Demon recede. He hadn’t been concerned for her, but only for the work that waited to be done.

The first man who had raped her, on her second day in Tartarus, she had afterwards struck across the back of the head with a huge two-handed wrench swung from over her shoulder. He had dropped to her feet with blood already pouring heavily out of his nose and ears. An hour later, the damage almost entirely regenerated, the rapist had sought her out with a lead pipe in his hand for his own club…but a Demon had pushed him away and told him to leave her alone. "Thanks," Maria had told the creature.

"Go back to work," it had rasped at her. And several days later, she thought it was this very same Demon who raped her against the wall of a hiss-filled boiler room…though it was hard to tell some of them apart, especially the ones like this who were less human in form.

Brushing off her bottom with both hands, Maria resumed her interrupted journey to her current work station for the beginning of her shift. She picked up her pace, afraid of being late, and thus punished. She had been allowed a period of sleep so as to recuperate from yesterday’s seemingly endless shift, and the workers were even given food to eat. These sham bodies they possessed did not really require sleep or sustenance, just as it wasn’t true blood that ran in their veins or live sperm that spurted from rapists’ pricks. (And nerves did not really scream at the touch of a torturer’s brand or blade, however it might seem they did.)

The bodies of the Damned thought they were still alive, and so they had the urges and instincts of the living.

««—»»

Tartarus was one of those far-spaced cities of Hell in which its Demonic population was not only trained for their duties…but made.

This was Maria’s line of work. She was, for all intents and purposes, a manufacturer of the very creatures that had rustled her up for this employment.

Shifts were long. One often burned or froze their hands, depending on what sort of Demon—or what stage of that Demon’s progression—they were working on. Toward the end of today’s shift, a gust of hot steam had scalded Maria’s left hand…but already, on her way to this floor’s showers, the pain and angry redness were fading.

Whenever she was badly burned, by steam or splashed corrosive chemical or by bumping into a red-hot metal surface, Maria was reminded of her father. His right arm had been terribly scarred as a toddler, when he had tipped a pot full of boiling water off the stove top. He had told Maria that his mother was passed out on the sofa at the time. He had told Maria that his mother was a worthless bitch and whore, and a neglectful mother who ultimately left her husband for a man who was younger but just as drunken as herself.

Maria’s own mother had met her father while she was living for a time in San Antonio. He was white, she a Mexican. When she was eight years old, after an escalating series of terrifying fights, her father left her mother. She had never seen him again, and her mother had moved them back to Mexico to be with family.

Maria had thought that her father loved her; that he would never leave her as his mother had ended up leaving him. Now, she couldn’t even remember his face clearly. But she remembered the scars on his arm. They had never faded away, like the burn on her own hand today.

Maria nodded in mute greeting to the three men who stood watch outside the women’s shower area. The Demons had not assigned them to this duty; they had volunteered, to protect the women from other men who might enter the showers to attack them. On the rare occasion, though, a Demon or even a pack might enter into the showers, and for them the men lowered their eyes and stepped aside.

Maria stripped and angled her wide pretty face toward the pelting hot streams, turned slowly around, her long hair plastering to her back. Opening her eyes, stepping back a little, she gazed upwards as she exposed her underarms to the irregular streams that fell from the machinery high overhead, the fallen water then trickling into a grated floor rough against her bare feet. This large chamber was not intended for this use, but the Demons shrugged it off, didn’t bother stopping them. High above, cloudy cocoons in row after row were suspended pendulously like a crop nearly ripe for harvesting. The raining water rinsed these subtly pulsating sacs. Here and there, Maria could see a more pronounced bulge where a limb or wing pressed at the membrane that sheathed its owner.

A reverberating thud made her step entirely out of the torrents for a moment or two to listen. An explosion, perhaps. Another boiler blown? It wasn’t too uncommon. A dangerous mistake on the part of a worker (though even if shredded to chum, he would reconstitute) or simply an overtaxed machine. No further detonations followed, and Maria ducked back into the downpour.

After bathing herself, she dipped her shed uniform into a mechanical recess in one wall that had collected a puddle of this falling hot water, so as to clean it as best she could—then she changed into her fresh uniform and headed out of the shower chamber, her hair still dripping wet. At the entrance, one of the guards (his name was Russ, he’d recently told her) smiled at her again and shifted in his hands the heavy mallet he carried as a weapon. "So Maria, how are ya?"

"I’m fine," she told him, smiling a little. She couldn’t believe people could still ask such inane questions. Empty civility. Like robot servants after a nuclear war, making tea for mummies long dead in their armchairs. Russ was that robot and that mummy at the same time. She dropped her eyes and hurried past him without trying to look obvious about it. "You?" she called back over her shoulder obligatorily. She saw he was watching her go.

"Okay. Goin’ to the mess hall?"

"Yup."

"Maybe I’ll see you there in a few."

"Sure."

He was cute enough, she supposed. White. A redhead. And she could not conceive of falling in love with any man here in Hades. As numb as she was, as hollowed out inside, as automaton-like in her work and her daily routines, she was not some robot with a bolted-on grin. Her programming had been shorted out. Civility had been an illusion all along.

Affection was a sham better left to the living.

When Maria turned a corner of the cramped hallway, the rainfall hiss of the showers still in her ears, she looked up to see a Demon plant itself in front of her.

"What is your sin?" it snarled, and backhanded her across the jaw.

The Demons didn’t apparently use names to distinguish one infernal race from another, but for their own convenience (since they had to manufacture them), the workers had given them designations, and this species was called a Caliban. It was like a cross between a sumo wrestler and an insect, bulgingly soft in some places and armored in others, the same sepia brown as the exteriors and interiors of Tartarus, except that its eyes glowed a bright white and its primary forearms shaded to almost black at the ends of their scorpion-like pincers. It was one of these appendages that had just sent Maria to the floor.

"What is your sin?" it demanded again, taking another threatening step toward her so that she smelled the choking incense scent burned into its dimpled flesh and glossy chitin. She might have made this creature herself for all she knew.

Her mouth lubricated with blood, which drooled out over the middle of her bisected lower lip, Maria managed to get out, "I have forsaken the Father."

It was true, wasn’t it?

On the night of the great and final fight, that frightening last battle like some apocalyptic war, after her father had left, Maria had found a crucifix on the floor. She recognized it as her father’s, and realized her mother must have wrenched it off his chest in their shoving and slapping. Without her mother seeing, she swept it up in her fist. And buried it under her pillow that night. But the next day, the first day of her father no longer being in her life, Maria had taken the chain and little cross out into their backyard and buried it there, partly out of angry rejection, partly out of despair.

Was it that some neighbor child or even adult had seen her dig the hole, and had dug up the silver crucifix? Or was it that her vision had been so blurred with tears at the time? Whatever the case, when Maria went to exhume the crucifix out of guilt and longing a week later, it wasn’t in the spot she had thought it would be. She tried another spot, and there she came upon a bundle in a green plastic trash bag. Now she remembered what she had buried in this vaguely familiar spot; their cat, which had been hit by a car a year ago. Disinterring this poor corpse was too great a punctuation mark to her pain. She reburied the cat, and didn’t try to find her father’s necklace again.

She had left it buried. And with it, her faith in family, in solace, maybe even in love. She had continued to attend church with her devout mother. But she had narrowed her eyes in contempt at the larger version of that symbol hanging above the altar. The man with his hands pinned where they could do no one any good.

The Caliban seemed satisfied with her answer. It shambled on down the hallway, and Maria pulled herself to her feet, blood still running off her lip. She had refused to cry, however. She prided herself on holding her tears even when she had no control over the flow of her blood. But the wound would heal, so that more wounds could take its place. Hadn’t it been the same, pretty much, when she had still been alive, before she was raped and murdered?

Maria continued on her way. But not to the mess hall. She felt vaguely apologetic as far as Russ was concerned, but she had lost her appetite.

««—»»

When she reached the enormous chamber in which she had been assigned a place to sleep, Maria realized that the explosion she’d heard earlier had occurred in here.

This chamber was circular and disturbingly organic, its ceiling lost in gloom but apparently taking the form of a dome. Honeycombed into the curved walls were row upon row of elliptical openings like slots in a mausoleum waiting to be filled. Formerly, this had been a tank in which were nurtured a species of Demons since discontinued. They had been one of the more human-like breeds, and perhaps it was because of their human traits that a number of them had rebelled in the infernal city of Oblivion. Most of these Demons had been killed by now, but there were still those that had escaped the purging.

Her own little cocoon space was in the third tier, and she kept a few belongings inside, which no one had ever deemed worthy of stealing. There, she would rest between shifts, curled like a fetus, reborn—or aborted—every day in an endless cycle.

But today there had been some unknown mishap, and from the room’s obscure heights, torrents of a thick, orange-colored gelatinous fluid were raining down to plop and puddle. Fortunately, the floor was subtly concave and the ooze was draining slowly toward a grille in its center. The foul-smelling matter put Maria very much in mind of the gruel they were fed in the mess hall—the only sustenance they were given—though that substance had a chemical-sharp citrus smell and taste, like slurping orange-scented dish detergent.

The irregular deluge went largely ignored by a few weary laborers who had also skipped mess hall and preceded her into the chamber, and who now climbed toward their cramped sarcophagi. Maria stared up into the leaking darkness only a few moments herself before navigating between aggregations of the viscous slime toward her section of the wall. Having arrived at it, she hoisted up one leg to begin the ascent to her own depression.

She hesitated, however, as her eyes were attracted to where some of the rotten-smelling matter had flowed down the wall and accumulated in a particularly large, glistening heap. She saw that there were several bones protruding from it; some ribs, and the bat-like struts of a wing. Not the bones of a human; humans reconstituted, their bodies were notional, they could not be killed. Demons, however: they could die. But there was more than the bones. One spot in the mound was subtly but definitely pulsing. Also, Maria could just discern a muted gurgling sound with an unsettling, familiar quality.

Holding her breath against the reek, she crouched by the edge of the pile, and from it drew a loose leg bone. She then used this to probe the slime in the area where it was undulating. There was resistance as she prodded a mass buried within it. And then, a tiny arm thrust up through the jelly, its stubby fingers wriggling.

Maria used the bone to paddle away as much of the slime as she could around the arm. Then, leaning forward carefully, she reached out and took hold of it. It was slippery, and cold, and she was repulsed by the fingers that squirmed against her wrist, but she pulled…and in standing, she extracted a body drooling streamers of muck. She held the thing out at arm’s length to examine it. Pudgy legs pedaled the air sluggishly, eyes squinted open in its sliding mask of ooze, and its wings moved as if to fan the goo from them. Free of the half-congealed amniotic fluid in which it had once been nurtured, the Demon gurgled more freely, but not loudly enough for anyone else to have noticed as yet.

Though Maria had never seen a mature version, she realized what this creature was. One of those discontinued Demons that had been nurtured in this chamber before it had been emptied and converted into barracks. It was a miracle—or, more accurately, an oversight—that it had survived this long. Overlooked in the cleansing that had eliminated all its siblings. Now, accidentally but belatedly miscarried.

Maria was afraid to bring the infant Demon close to her, but was even more afraid of being seen holding it. She glanced behind her furtively, but determined that her back had as yet shielded her find from anyone who might have looked in her direction. She then did the first thing that came impulsively to mind. Rather than drop the immature creature back into its afterbirth, rather than fetch an adult Demon to tend to this matter, she again hoisted up a leg to begin climbing to her tiny nook. In so doing, she was forced to fold the creature close to her chest.

She was afraid that at any moment, the larval Demon would snap its jaws onto her throat. But instead, it merely mewled faintly, and instinctively clung to her so as not to fall.

««—»»

Working through her interminable shift, knowing what she had left hidden in her skull socket of a bed chamber, Maria was agitated and distracted and made a number of clumsy mistakes. Her function, of late, was to pour large glass jars full of maggots into molds that crawled past her on a conveyor belt. The squirming, pale brown things were not truly maggots, but close enough for the workers to refer to them as such. A co-worker, Patty, told Maria how this particular process reminded her of a carbonated soda plant she’d worked for in life, where bags of hard plastic pellets were melted down so as to be shaped into the two liter soda bottles they would become. But here, Patty and Maria were molding containers of flesh instead of those of plastic. To be filled with bile, venom and vitriol instead of corn syrup and caramel color.

Patty would hand Maria a bottle of the maggots, which she would tip into one of the molds (today, they were for Baphomets, a towering Demon with a blackened, goat-like head enshrouded in a caul of cool white flame). Maria would pass the empty jug back to Patty, who would set it aside to be washed out and reused later.

At one point Maria fumbled and dropped a bottle, which shattered below the little platform she stood on. Patty jumped back as the pool of writhing, half-alive matter spread at her feet. Fortunately, they were able to sweep it all up and dispose of it before any of the Demon supervisors could see them.

Sometimes, when there were no supervisors in sight, Maria would spit into the open molds as she filled them.

She was relieved when the shift ended at last, but also dreaded returning to her sleep chamber to find her secret discovered…or expired. Before she could check on it, however, she first had a stop to make.

««—»»

Russ the shower guard was entering the mess hall as Maria was just leaving it. He looked like he was coming off his regular duties; his uniform was stiff with caked Demon blood, from recycling old bodies for the recasting of new. When he saw her, he grinned and said, "Hey! There’s the pretty senorita. I missed you yesterday."

Maria could not speak. In her mouth she held some of the orange, gel-like gruel she had been served in a bowl by one of the human mess hall workers. She tried to smile at Russ, rubbing her belly and wagging her head as if to indicate she didn’t feel well. Concern flashed into his face and he stepped aside to let her pass.

"Are you going to be sick?" When she nodded, he asked, "Can I help you?"

She shook her head, patted him on the arm as she moved forward again (hoping he didn’t take the contact as having flirtatious meaning) and left her would-be beau behind.

It was not unrealistic for him to believe she might be ill. In Hell, there were microscopic Demons, or at least infernal creatures, that could infest, infect, cause grief to the Damned. Maria knew this well; from the irregular holes rotted open in the walls on the 53rd floor of this building, she had been able to look outside at a narrow building that reminded her of a spinal column, in which these viruses were manufactured by other workers like herself.

"Hope you feel better!" he called after her.

When Hell freezes over, she thought.

She had walked only a few steps when she heard Russ cry out in alarm and pain. Turning, she saw that a Caliban had loomed up behind him and seized him in its pincers. One of his wrists, pinned, was half severed and jetting blood. Another pincer had ripped his trousers down, while a third was closed around his genitals as if to masturbate or castrate. The weight of the immense body doubled him over and the creature was no doubt entering him.

"What is your sin?" the Demon wheezed.

Russ and Maria held their eye contact. Russ looked more ashamed than in pain. Maria was ashamed, too, that there was nothing she could do for him. She knew the next time they met he would be physically healed, at least…and she knew they would not discuss this.

As she left him behind, she heard the Demon grunt more demandingly, "What is your sin?"

We have forsaken our Father, Maria thought. And He has forsaken His children, the ultimate deadbeat dad.

««—»»

There were more people in the sleep chamber than there had been yesterday, when she had retired without a trip to the mess hall first. Many of the orifices were already occupied, like eggs filled with termites that would hatch tomorrow to take to their labors. She climbed up the rib-like ridges that protruded between two columns of the elliptical hollows, and then ducked into her own in the third tier.

Against the back wall of her sleep space, her spare uniform lay crumpled up. And that crumpled heap was subtly moving, like the heap of gelatin had been yesterday.

Maria pulled aside her clothing to reveal the larval Demon lying on the glassy hard surface beneath it. Its eyes shifted toward her, held her gaze, blinking. Its fingers plucked and kneaded at the air. Her eyes trailed down to its puny genitalia; it was a boy.

She pinched the infant boy’s nostrils shut. The creature’s squirming became more pronounced, and she was afraid he would cry out. So far, he hadn’t cried or made any loud sounds. In fact, even his soft burbling sounds had decreased over the hours of her rest period, which made Maria both relieved and concerned. Was he making less sounds because he was content, or because he was ailing, growing weak?

The thought of clamping her free hand over his mouth came into her mind. The Damned were immortal, so that they might suffer through eternity. The Demons could perish. The Demons were only machines, so to speak. This diabolic cherub was at her mercy. He was one of the many genera of her tormentors. And her torments might be increased in severity if she was found to have been hiding him. He was the enemy…

Last night, she had considered smuggling him out of this room and abandoning him in some little-used corridor, or in the space between two machines, and leaving him to the Fates. But there were no Fates, just Demons, and if they found him they’d kill him to further the factory recall, or genocide, of his species.

So what if they killed him? So what?

But it was because they’d want to kill him that she hadn’t killed him. Though still a Demon, he was now something kindred to her.

Maria pinched his nose, but didn’t cover his mouth. His mouth opened in a disgruntled gasp, and leaning over him, she drooled the orange, citrus-flavored gruel out of her own mouth into his, like a bird feeding her winged but flightless chick.

««—»»

One could still dream in Hades. Sometimes, Maria dreamed of Los Dias de Muertos. Markets filled with flaming marigolds and family crypts in pastel shades. Seeing through the eyes of a plastic ghost or ghoul or devil mask. Rows of sugar skulls with sequin eyes. Sometimes, in her dreams, Maria imagined these skulls were the heads of Demons waiting to be attached to their bodies, and come alive. The bread called pan de muerto. Edible crucifixes, in a kind of communion…

Sometimes, Maria would dream of paging through the blood-soaked tabloid Alarma! and seeing photos of her own raped and murdered corpse there for the entertainment of the masses.

Tonight, she dreamed of sneaking out of her mausoleum nook…of stealing down the curved wall of the sleep chamber…of creeping out into the maze of hallways with a bundle tight against her breasts.

She dreamed of climbing staircase after staircase, or scrambling up ladders, or mounting inclined ramps, until at last she had reached the 53rd floor of the structure she worked and lived her undead life in. The level—perhaps near the top, perhaps only halfway up—where great, irregular holes had rotted open in the resin-like, semi-organic walls. Holes looking out upon the immensity of the Demon city, Tartarus, where winds whistled or wailed between the tightly packed skyscrapers of bone, winds which set her long black hair flapping as she neared the lip of one such opening.

She uncovered the face of the infant in her arms, and he gazed up at her dumbly. Not crying, not cooing. She had no idea what thoughts, if any, breathed in his head. Would his interrupted progress resume? Would he mature to an adult, or remain at this stage forever? Though he would be helpless out in the world of the underworld, she found the latter possibility agreeable. That he should remain an eternal innocent.

Maria unwrapped the creature’s swaddling, and as if he guessed her purpose, his wings began to flex and fan. She held him under his arms, held him up at the level of her face. For a moment, she almost kissed his bare belly, where there was a navel though it had never had an umbilicus fed into it. But she didn’t kiss the white flesh, instead turned the infant in her hands to face the city sprawling beyond. She stepped closer to the rim. She held him higher aloft. Her arms slipped out into the biting wind of the air, beyond the lip of the wound. And then, she let him go.

She was afraid he might plummet, but he did not. Instinctually, his wings began to beat so quickly, like those of an insect or hummingbird, that he was buoyed up, and the currents of air howling through the canyons of skyscrapers did much of the work. Up, he rose, and up. Out over the darkness of unseen depths below. Up and into the mist between two particularly gargantuan edifices…until he was lost from sight. Until he was free.

In a building so close to hers they were practically conjoined, she saw a figure in one of the windows. A witness to her act. But just as the figure turned away, she recognized who it was and became less afraid. She knew that her father would not betray her this time.

««—»»

When she awoke and uncovered the Demon larva beside her, she found he had expired while she was asleep, his lids half closed over his already clouded eyes.

Maria did not stir for a long time. She was almost late to work because of it. But at last, she covered his head again under her spare uniform…and this she carried with her to work as she often did, so that she might wash it in one of the basin-like recesses in the shower chamber when her shift was over.

She waited until there were no patrolling Demon guards or supervisors in view. She waited even until Patty, her co-worker, had briefly left to roll in another cart loaded with bottles of maggots. Then, swiftly, she dragged out her bundle from under the conveyor belt. Unwrapped it…took the immobile, rubbery little body in her hands…and dropped it into the next open mold. Then, she poured the contents of one jug of maggots over that. She watched the mold be borne away along its track.

Today they were making Calibans. Would the human-like Demon live on, in some sense, in the body of a new Demon despite its different form? Or had her act been purely one of defiance? Would the Caliban born from this mold be more human, like those rebellious Demons who were being hunted down and cleansed from existence…or would this new Caliban one day rape his own mother?

When Patty returned with the cart she became concerned for Maria, touched her arm. She told Maria she had never seen her cry before. But Maria laughed a little, and touched her arm in turn, and they resumed their work.

««—»»

It was not Russ’ turn to guard at the entrance to the women’s showers today, but Maria sought him out in the mess hall, and found him, seated herself directly to his left. He turned and looked a little surprised to see her there. Her smile made his rising shame over the other day drop away again.

"Hi," she said to him.

"Hi," he said, sounding a little confused at her open tone. Maria had always been reserved with him, her smiles polite, not showing teeth. Now she smiled more warmly at him.

She stole her hand under the long table they sat at, and rested it upon his own hand.

Russ’ uncertain smile grew, as well. But now it was his turn to avert his eyes shyly. He didn’t withdraw his hand from hers, however; instead, curled his fingers around it.

They ate like that, side by side. Almost like a husband and wife. Almost like parents at their supper table.

Black Wings

The palace was called Urian, though amongst themselves the Demons liked to joke that it was Castle Urine. It was a great square block worked from a single stone, its luridly red-orange surface pocked and pitted as pumice, with no towers, no carven decorations, just far-spaced slits for windows and only a single door. This red cube rested at the heart of a desert of red sand, and on the rare occasion that it rained, the scarlet powder would reveal itself to be dehydrated blood, and would liquefy, become a sludgy mud flat of gore. From the desert sprouted a dense forest of bare, tree-like growths as white as coral. The surfaces of these coral trees were so rough that to rub against them was to draw blood, like the rasping skin of a shark. Their leafless, lifeless arms wove jagged thickets of bone that had never worn flesh.

There was a path through the coral reef, however, that ran to the door of the castle. From one of the narrow windows, the Demon named Xaphan peeked out at the approach of the carriage that was delivering Urian’s latest guests. The carriage itself was a featureless, black iron globe between two huge wheels, pulled by a harnessed team of two dozen naked Damned children, so Xaphan could not as yet spy the guests themselves.

He started as another figure slipped beside him; he had been so intent he hadn’t heard Vjeshitza’s approach. She pressed her face into the crook of his neck, and bit him hard there without breaking his dark skin. While doing so, she held onto his folded wings, which like her own were feathered and black as a crow’s, though the wings did not permit their species of Demon to fly. Xaphan and Vjeshitza both possessed skin of a deep chestnut hue and luster, both of them hairless, even without eyebrows. And both wore no garments. Their only embellishments were black onyx rings pierced through their nipples—and on their upper chests, raised keloids like the healed wounds of a tiger’s slash, four of these tracks above each breast, where they had marked themselves with their retractable talons upon having completed their warrior’s training in the city of Tartarus, where all the Demons in this region of Hell were mass produced before marching to their assigned cities, forts and outposts.

Vjeshitza lifted her face, smiling, and traced her tongue—more tender now—along the rim of Xaphan’s ear. "They’re newly dead," she purred, "and this is their first visit to Hades."

"Their first vacation?" Xaphan snorted. "Are they bored with their celestial pleasures so soon?"

"The man wants to hunt. His wife will be entertained here. Come away now, before you’re seen loitering about. We must all be prepared to serve them."

"I hate when their kind come," he said.

"Shh," hissed Xaphan’s lover, looking over her shoulder in case one of the Baphomets might be near. "You mustn’t appear sullen."

"Should I appear giddy, then? I’m a Demon."

"You should appear dignified, but servile. We must assemble now. They’re almost here." As she withdrew from him, she lightly raked the tips of her mostly-retracted claws across his hard belly, as if to mark him with scars again.

««—»»

The Demon population of Castle Urian gathered in the high-ceilinged entry hall, the ranked warriors with their wings folded, but a few superiors, at attention near the door, with their wings opened in a majestic display. Looming over these Demon officers were the three creatures that presided over Urian, nicknamed Baphomets by the Damned laborers who manufactured them in Tartarus. The Baphomets concealed their pillar-straight forms in black robes, their bodies surmounted with the charred heads of goats, though the white flames that enveloped their skulls radiated cold rather than heat. They never spoke, but the winged Demons could read their meaning in the lapping of their flames.

A heavy, hollow rapping of the outer knocker, and a Demon lunged forward to creak open the black iron door. Into the hall walked a small procession of four white-robed Angels. The Angels were not homunculi like the Demons, but had once been mortal, had died and been resurrected in Heaven. One of them wore a white, starched head covering pointed into a cone, the other three simply with cowls that they slipped off their heads as they entered. Xaphan could see that one of these latter Angels was a woman.

They had met the one with the cone-like headdress before; his name was McDonald, a used car salesman who had died in the 1960s and found employment for himself over the past few decades as a guide leading other Angels on vacation tours through certain areas of Hades. The other three were his current tour group, who one of the Demon officers introduced to the assembly. "These are the brothers Anthony and James Colombo, and James’ wife, Teresa. They will be staying with us for an indeterminate time. During that time, we are all to be at their service."

As one, the assembled Demons gave a deep bow.

The party had strolled further into the hall, slowly, as if to inspect each of the Demons in their rows. They were close enough to Xaphan now that he could hear the Angel named James Colombo snort and comment, "Haven’t they heard of clothes around here? I feel like I walked into National Geographic." Over his shoulder, he said, "Check out their color, Tony. Big surprise, huh?"

Their guide, McDonald, put in, "Well, guys, these aren’t the only sort of Demons. Some look like whites, some like orientals…"

"How politically correct."

"I think they’re beautiful," said Teresa Colombo, who unlike her husband had a British accent, dark and smoky. "In a scary way."

"They’re okay," Anthony opined, flicking the nipple ring of one of the female Demons. Xaphan saw her jaw twitch slightly.

The woman’s husband stopped, turned to her with a cocked eyebrow and said, "You do, huh? Well…they’re not as bad as those things." He gestured openly at one of the towering, immobile Baphomets. Xaphan could tell by the fluctuations in its caul of cold flame that it was displeased by the comment, but he knew it wouldn’t have given voice to its disapproval even if it had had a voice.

"Right," said his wife smartly, spinning to address McDonald, Mick as he insisted on being called. "Mick, can those poor children be unharnessed now from that awful contraption we rode here in, and given some food and water and maybe some rest? I never should have stepped into that thing when I saw what was pulling it."

"Uh, this is Hell, sweetheart," said James. "There’s a good reason for those kids to be here, I’m sure."

"It’s their parents’ fault if they weren’t baptized…"

Uncomfortably, McDonald chuckled and put a hand on her arm. "Don’t worry, Terry—we’ll take care of them. And when you leave, I promise we’ll have a carriage pulled by animals."

"What kind of animals? A team of a hundred kittens with their fur on fire?"

Her brother-in-law laughed. "Whoa, that I’d like to see. Terry, you should be one of the torture designers down here."

The guests were shown off to their opulently-appointed rooms, and the ranks of Demons broke up. Xaphan found Vjeshitza and muttered, "I could devise or administer no greater torture than the smile in an Angel’s voice."

««—»»

While Xaphan and Vjeshitza made love, a sandstorm howled outside. Xaphan hoped the two brothers and Mick were on a hunting excursion at this very moment, and had been caught out in the storm. He pictured them hunkered down in the inadequate shelter of the forest of antler-like bone, covering their faces against the stinging sands of dried blood.

That was the main reason the brothers had come to Hades—to hunt the Damned for sport. Though they had brought their own rifles, custom-made for them in Heaven, Castle Urian opened the doors of its armory to guests, and Xaphan had heard that earlier today the brothers had gone down into the tunnels below the palace to fire crossbows into targets. He didn’t know if the targets were Damned prisoners from the palace’s cells, but he didn’t doubt it. These prisoners were released as hunting stock when the free-ranging Damned outside grew scanty in this area.

They were in Xaphan’s room, which was tiny—but he counted himself as lucky, since Demons in other outposts and cities often had only communal barracks to rest in. A red silken tapestry covered one entire wall, the symbol for Castle Urian embroidered on it in metallic purple thread. The sheets of the small cot-like bed were of the same red material. Xaphan was raised over Vjeshitza on the strong columns of his arms, the muscles and cords in his neck pulled taut, his tight chest looking carved from polished ebony. Her powerful legs wrapped around his lower back, Vjeshitza had one finger hooked through both the rings pierced through his nipples, pulling on them just enough that the pleasure didn’t stray too far into pain. Her feathered wings formed a black pool under her that looked like it might swallow them. His, half open, were a canopy that seemed to be casting that intimate pool of shadow.

"I helped prepare a perfumed bath for the woman today," Vjeshitza cooed, staring into her lover’s eyes, which were both intensely focused but oddly detached, as if he gazed at some small object that was the only detail he could recall from a dream.

"Yes?" he grunted absent-mindedly, rocking her hips with his own, their pelvises locked like the antlers of fighting stags. "I imagine she was imperious. Insulting…"

"No. She was polite. She’s bored, though. She’s only here because of her husband, I’m sure. But I saw her body when she disrobed. She’s a horrible thing. Fat, like a white leech gorged on blood. Like fruit that should have fallen from a branch long ago."

"She wasn’t born a warrior, like us. And how old is she?"

"She was forty-two when she died, I heard. Young…for one of them." Both Xaphan and Vjeshitza were only eleven years old. They had left the city of Tartarus, where they had been made, as adults. Had, in fact, been born as adults.

"She doesn’t strike me as being terrible. For one of her kind," he said.

"Don’t let her mislead you. They can’t be trusted. They are all of one evil heart…such as we Demons can only aspire to." Suddenly she darted her head like a snake and nipped him on the neck. His eyes clicked onto hers at last, and she grinned bright teeth in her lovely dark face. "Look at me." Then, more seriously, her smile becoming more subtle, she whispered, "Look at me…" She smoothed her hands over the black globe of his skull, as if to read the future in its surface.

««—»»

Earlier in the day, Xaphan had passed Mrs. Colombo in a hallway. He had lowered his eyes and nodded his head respectfully, but when he glanced up he saw that she had given him a smile. Changed out of her Angel’s customary garments, she was wearing a black long-sleeved pullover and black slacks with flared legs. Her clothing was very tight, emphasizing her overripe figure.

Xaphan felt that his lover had been uncharitable in calling her fat, a leech. Though her body was more voluptuous, more indulged than those of Urian’s devils—which might be taken as a sign of grossness, decadence—he found her shape an artistic abstraction of the features associated with the feminine: her breasts plump, her hips wide (had she birthed children in life?). Also, whereas he, Vjeshitza, and the others had no hair, Teresa Colombo’s flowed down past her breasts, was thick and parted in the center, as black as his own wings. It waved about her face when she moved, and she was always brushing a curtain of it aside to clear her face (with its dark eyes, heavy brows, strong nose, pink lips pressed into that little smile she gave him). Again, compared to one of his kind, her long, heavy hair might seem a sign of lush overindulgence. But the contrast was eye-catching…just as was the brightness of her skin compared to his own.

Later in that same day, as he was turning into a corridor, he heard her voice behind him (its British accent distinct), and turned to see that she was moving briskly to catch up with him. "Excuse me?" she called, gesturing. She smiled more broadly this time, showing large white teeth. He went to her.

"Madam?"

"Can you help me move something?"

"Of course, madam."

He went to her, and she led him back around the corner, down a hallway and to a door of one of the opulent guests suites. He realized it must be her own.

She opened the door, led him inside, and she closed the door after him.

"The desk under the window," she said, pointing. "Can you move that to the corner, and replace it with that armchair? I like to sit and read, but I prefer natural light."

"Certainly, madam." He did as she had instructed. As he lifted her desk, he noticed there were a few books strewn upon it. They were some of those written by the Damned themselves, and published by them as well in the larger cities like Oblivion. These crude booklets had found their way to Castle Urian in the possession of this and that Angel over the years, and Xaphan himself had read several of them in his idle hours (though Vjeshitza had scolded him for it, and had hissed that she didn’t think it was wise for Demons to allow the Damned to express their thoughts in this way, let alone disseminate them to other Damned). He saw that she had a bookmark in one slim volume titled Letters From Hades, the author calling himself Dan Alighieri.

Seeing his eyes on it, Teresa lifted the book and riffled the pages. "There isn’t much to do here while my husband’s out hunting."

A little while ago, Xaphan had heard distant gunshots. "There is a subterranean garden, and a pool, down in the labyrinths," he offered.

"I’ve been to them. Yes, the pool is nice and hot, and the garden is pretty, if you like mushrooms and moss. A bit dungeon-like down there for my tastes, though." She set down the book and unexpectedly moved closer to him, reached out a finger that almost but not quite touched one of the perfect, unbroken onyx rings that passed through his black nipples. Her almost-touch made him flinch harder than an actual touch would have. "How do they get these things in you? I don’t see a break in them."

"They put them in my species of Demon while we are still forming."

"Huh; I see. How strange. And these?" She indicated the slashed scars on both his breasts. He explained to her that he had inflicted the wounds upon himself, in a ritual marking the end of his training as a demonic warrior.

"Rrr," Teresa said, pretending to slash her own fingernails down the raised scars on his chest. Then she chuckled smokily. "Sorry." He didn’t know whether to smile or to feel mocked, so he remained stoic.

She moved around behind him now, and though they weren’t as sensitive as his skin, he could tell she was fingering the glossy black feathers along the edge of one of his folded wings. "Pretty," she said behind him.

"Thank you, madam," Xaphan muttered.

"Do you really fly?"

"No, madam."

"Hm. They’re rather pointless, then, aren’t they?"

He found their reflection in a mirror over a dressing table. She was obscured behind him in the silvered glass, but he felt her hand alight softly on his lower back. Slide into its hollow. Then around his side, along his hip. Now he could see her white hand on his dark skin in the mirror. He saw it glide over his hard belly, and then lower. Until it cupped his prick and his balls, and held them firmly. Her thumb stroked his demonhood, coaxing blood into its tubes.

"I’m bored," she whispered against one wing, as she slid her cheek back and forth across its silken sleekness.

"Yes, madam," he managed. She was pumping him languorously now. He grew hard quickly. Her hand barely fit around his black-veined dusky shaft. Its glans gleamed like the head of an obsidian scepter.

"My God," she husked, and she ran her tongue along the skin of his hard-muscled shoulder as if to taste its salt. Then she moved around in front of him, and sank to her knees. It made Xaphan uncomfortable that an Angel should kneel in supplication before a Demon. But when she took as much of him into her mouth as she could accommodate, he let out a small groan, and a moment later could not restrain himself from putting both hands to her head.

He had never touched a human woman’s head before, except in the course of tortures he was obligated to perform. Her hair was a mass that shifted under his palms. That tangled between his fingers. His listened to the slick sounds of her mouth as her head worked forward and back. He felt her nails against the balls they cupped. Sharp, but not painful like the teasing claws of Vjeshitza.

Before he could find release inside her human head, Teresa rose before him, her dark eyes shining with something like a madness. "Undress me," she whispered.

And he did. He pulled off the form-fitting black pullover, the tight-fitting slacks, as if unpeeling a fruit. Her breasts hung heavy in her bra, and he held them in his hands, his thumbs spiraling across her nipples until they pressed at the restraining material. Then he lowered one of his hands, slipped it under the elastic waistband of her briefs, and fingered open the moist slit hidden in the coils of her secret hair. He had never touched this hair before, either, Vjeshitza as denuded there as a newborn mortal. A dark musk arose, and liquid sounds like her mouth had made at his cock.

"Fuck me," she murmured against his chest. With her tongue, she flicked the ring through one nipple, and then pulled slightly at the ring with her teeth. Then, again: "Fuck me."

He fumbled at her bra; she helped him. He skinned her panties down her legs. Seeing her entirely nude, he nearly ejaculated into the air itself. That vista of white flesh, its whiteness only heightened by the black growth below her rounded belly, and pouring down across her rounded shoulders. There were no hard ribs, points of hip bones, sharply defined arm muscles. She was like the offer of a soft bed to a monk who had been sleeping on a stone floor.

He took her body up in his arms, carried her to the bed she shared with her husband, and lay her on it. And without hesitation, he was on and in her and already plunging, pumping, making the bed dip like a boat on a storm-tossed sea, and her breasts jounced and she threw back her head and moaned deeply.

His wings opened fully above them like a black canopy.

Distantly, Xaphan heard the crack of a rifle shot echo across the desert flatness. Somewhere, a Damned had probably just died. But he or she would resurrect. Being already dead, a Damned or an Angel could not be killed a second time. In this way, the Demons were more like the mortals had once been than the mortals were themselves. Though their powers of regeneration were great, a Demon could be killed. And so the gunshot made Xaphan tense up a little. What if the husband should return and find them this way? Would he allow his wife this entertainment, see it as nothing more than a dip in the spring-fed pool? No more than his own entertainment hunting the Damned? Or…

But his mind drifted from the gunshot, as Teresa took his head in her hands and pulled it down to her breasts. He lost himself in their white softness, as if they filled all creation…all life and afterlife. Xaphan had never seen the Creator—not even Angels had seen Him—so he could blasphemously imagine that He was a She. An embodiment of fertility, like this woman. He imagined all life pouring forth from the hole he was now stirring (like an alchemist’s pestle in a mortar), and all life feeding at the orbs he himself suckled at avidly.

Yes, she was a goddess…and he worshipped…

««—»»

The bathing pool below Castle Urian, fed by hot springs that made steam curl from its surface, was enclosed by a circular wall carved out of solid rock as red as muscle. Into this curving wall, small curtained nooks had been incised so that visitors could change in and out of their clothes. The pool itself was currently empty—no Demon would dare use it while Angel visitors were staying here—but one of these small changing niches was currently occupied by the Demon Xaphan and Teresa Colombo.

She had bent over a stone bench carved into the wall, her palms spread on it, while Xaphan gripped her waist and took her from behind. When they were finished, she sank down onto her knees, her breasts and elbows resting against this rock ledge—Xaphan sinking with her, still embracing her, gently wilting inside her. On impulse, he pushed aside some of the thick black hair that was stuck to the expanse of her back with sweat, and he kissed her on her damp shoulder.

"Sweet," she whispered, in almost a little laugh, reaching up to cup his cheek for a moment. She lay her head down on one arm and sighed heavily. "Well—that was rather nice, wasn’t it, my Demondingo?"

"Demondingo?"

"It’s a joke. Mandingo? Demondingo? Never mind. Mmm…keep doing that."

Xaphan was running his hand across her back, spreading the spilled ink of her hair, feeling the bony plates of her shoulders like unsprouted wings beneath her taut skin. "I hated you when I first saw you," he muttered, more to himself than to her.

She lifted her cheek off her forearm a little, seeming amused by his confession. "You did? Why?"

"I’m sorry…"

"No, tell me. Why?"

"Because you are valued by the Creator. And we are nothing more to Him than inanimate things. And sometimes, we don’t see the difference between us. We can’t understand what it is He values in you."

"Well, perhaps if you could understand that, then you would be the same as us." After a moment, Teresa twisted around to look up at him, no longer smiling. "Sorry, X. No…I don’t suppose there is much difference, is there? I was going to point out the horrible things your kind do to the Damned. But right now, my hubby is out in the desert hunting some teenage boys that he saw and liked in your bloody kennels down here." She snorted, lowered her head again. "I don’t want to know why they aroused his interest, in particular. Aroused perhaps being the key word."

Still rubbing her skin, as if contemplating it, as if expecting to at last discern something about it that would distinguish its illusory substance from her mortal skin, wherever that lay moldering right now, he asked, "How did you and your husband die?"

"In a plane crash. Private plane. We were going skiing, in Colorado. We met on a skiing trip in Aspen, actually. I’d moved to the States a few years earlier, and…"

"Did you have children?" Xaphan interrupted.

"Two. Ten and seven. They’re still alive." A few empty beats. "I don’t want to talk about them, X."

He changed the subject, his voice retaining the quality of a sleepwalker. "Your flesh is so different from Vjeshitza’s," he murmured.

"Whose?" A look up at him again.

Tensing up a little, Xaphan let his hand go motionless upon her.

"A mate?"

"A lover," he admitted solemnly. "We don’t need to mate."

"But you fuck." A carnal smile. Was there a hint of jealousy in her dark eyes, or was it merely flirtation that pretended jealousy? He hoped she was jealous. It would cause him pain if she wasn’t, he realized.

He was jealous of her husband, he realized…

"Yes," he whispered.

"I’m different from her, am I? I won’t ask who you like to fuck more. It’s apples and oranges, isn’t it? A bright morning sky is lovely. And so is the black night sky with stars."

Xaphan grunted derisively. "Your theologian Swedenborg said, ‘corporeal loves appear gross, dusky, black and misshapen, while those that are heavenly loves appear fresh, bright, fair, and beautiful.’"

"That must bother you, to have troubled to memorize it."

"It bothers me," Xaphan admitted.

She took the hand that didn’t lay upon her skin, brought it to her lips and kissed it. "Don’t worry—you’re a beautiful midnight sky, aren’t you, my love?"

"Don’t say that."

"Say what?"

"Love. I’m not your love. You don’t love me."

"Why are you…" she began to chuckle.

"Don’t mock me!" he hissed.

"I’m not mocking you, X! It’s an expression, isn’t it? I didn’t realize love was such a touchy subject for Demons. I didn’t even know whether you can feel it." A moment. "Well…can you?"

"I’m not sure I understand it," he grumbled evasively.

"Well I guess we’re not so different after all. I don’t understand it either. I mean, I know I loved my mother, and my children…there’s no ambiguity there." She veered the conversation, again, away from the children who had survived her. "I used to have a neighbor, who told me that he and his wife had once taken in a stray cat. They had it for about ten years, I suppose. My neighbor was an older man, very gruff, an old war vet. And he told me his cat was hit by a car in front of their house one day. He said to me, in his very gruff way, ‘I don’t know why we ever got that damn cat.’" Teresa smiled. "That was the greatest avowal of love I’ve ever heard…"

"Terry?" a voice called out, echoing in the circular, domed cavern beyond.

"Shit," Teresa whispered, getting to her feet as Xaphan let go of her. She grabbed up her balled robe from the stone bench, and began slipping into it. In so doing, her elbow struck the deep red velvet of the cubicle’s curtain, causing it to sway.

"Terry?" The voice had turned in their direction. "You there?"

Pushing Xaphan back against the wall with one hand, Teresa parted the curtain with the other and slid out into the humid air of the bathhouse. "I was just going to take a dip, darling," she said. "Want to join me?"

Xaphan peeked out through the slit in the soft curtain. He saw James Colombo’s loathsome face. Could he not smell the sex on his wife’s sweat-moist body? The film of slickness spread across her inner thighs? With his superior sense of smell, Xaphan himself could clearly detect the musk of his own lifeless sperm, nestled inside her in a miniature version of this secret closet he lurked in.

"Mm." Colombo reached his hands around and cupped Teresa’s full bottom, pulling her against him, kissing her on the mouth. Open mouth. Xaphan felt an animal growl rumble in his guts, fought to keep it contained. Breaking free of their embrace, Colombo groaned, "I’m beat…maybe after supper."

"How was your horrible little fox hunt?"

"I got one kid. The other got away. But the one I hit, I got with a clean shot right through the eye." He jutted a finger toward his own eye, and sniggered.

"I suppose I didn’t really want the particulars," Teresa said, turning and walking back toward the row of cubbyholes. But, she was moving toward the one directly to the left of the one Xaphan was hiding in.

"They don’t die, you know!" Colombo reminded her. "They regenerate…"

"Whatever. I’ll join you for dinner. I still want to have my dip."

"You should," Colombo teased, turning away, "you smell sweaty."

"Thanks, James. Ever the romantic."

"Hey, you love me for my honesty," called his diminishing voice.

"Do I?" she called back. "And do you love me for my honesty?"

"That and your tasty ass," his voice echoed.

A moment later, Teresa ducked back into the closet with Xaphan. She curled her fingers into his nipple rings, drew him into her arms. "Mm," she moaned, as her husband had done while embracing her, running her hands around his shoulders and across the sleek feathers of his folded wings. "Thank God he’s gone. I don’t know why I married him, X, I really don’t understand it…"

Xaphan was not moved by her statement, whether it was an honest sentiment or meant only to reassure him. He said nothing, looked over the top of her head at the dark red curtain. Its featureless smoothness soothed him a little, as her skin had done a minute or so earlier. Now that skin, bending with oppressive pleasure against his own, only confused him. What a curse, the skin. There was no escaping it, even in Hell.

««—»»

As had been the case over the past several days, Vjeshitza was one of the Demons who accompanied the visiting Angels on their hunt. Because of this, Xaphan relented when Teresa insisted he take her to his own tiny room, with its red tapestry bearing the symbol for Castle Urian and the matching red sheets on its narrow bed.

Teresa sat astride him, his hands gripping her breasts, claws extended just far enough to indent their soft flesh. Rolling her ample hips in a slow, circular rhythm, Teresa husked, "I think we’re leaving tomorrow." She said it without lead-in, without segue. Its unexpectedness shocked Xaphan, although the information itself should not have shocked him.

"Your husband bores so soon?"

"I suppose so."

"And you?"

"Me? I’m not bored, X. But what am I to do?"

"What are you to do?" Xaphan repeated hotly. He calmed his tone, but stammered with a raw discomfort that made him bitter, "Will you return, then? Or am I never to see you again?"

"Ohh…darling," Teresa purred, cupping the side of his face. "I will come back to see you again, I promise. We’re both immortal, aren’t we? We have all of eternity to see each other again…"

"You’re immortal. I’m not."

"You won’t age. And you won’t die, unless you’re killed. So don’t get killed, all right?" She smiled down at him. "What is it with me? I’ve always been drawn to either bullies or brooders."

She slid off him, left his cock suspended naked and vulnerable in the air. She rolled onto her belly and raised her rump a bit. "Here," she whispered. He got up over her, lay atop her, began to ease into her again. But she took his shaft in hand, and nuzzled its tip a little higher up. "No—here."

Lubricated with her juices and with the inner mucus of this orifice, he pressed gradually inside her. She winced, gripped the sheet in her fists, tensed up hard beneath him. A little alarmed, Xaphan said, "Do you want me to stop?"

"No," she breathed. "All the way."

"It’s hurting you."

"I’m immortal, aren’t I? And since when is a Demon afraid of hurting someone?"

He did as she asked, until he was in her to his hilt and rocking forward and back atop her. Teresa’s eyes were clenched shut and tearing at the corners, but she gasped, "You love me, then, don’t you?"

"Please don’t make me say it."

"Say it. You’re torturing me. Let me torture you."

"Yes," Xaphan said through gritted teeth, increasing his rhythm now with each thrust until he was slapping against her, until the bed rocked and she began to cry out a little with each stab, "I love you…I love you…"

««—»»

There was a commotion in Castle Urian, which Xaphan with his heightened senses detected, raising his head alertly. Teresa only became aware of it when he halted his thrusts, and she rolled over, her hair in her face, as he slipped out of her. "What is it?"

"The hunting party is back early," he hissed. "You’d better get out of the Demon quarters…"

Teresa got up, pulled her robe on. "Bloody hell. James must be more bored than I thought. Or he wants his lunch early, poor dear." On her way to the door, she gave Xaphan a quick kiss on the cheek. "I hope that wasn’t our last time, love," she cooed, but he didn’t think she sounded mournful, wistful. Or would no measure of emotion satisfy him, any longer?

After cracking his door and peeking out, she darted through it, and closed it after her without a look back at him. Xaphan watched the door nonetheless, as if she might reappear.

««—»»

James and Anthony had indeed wanted their lunch early, particularly since James was in a foul mood. He had wounded a teen age boy by blowing off one leg at the knee, and when he got up close to the boy to finish him off (or to play with him, Xaphan thought, hearing the story at the banquet-like dinner table), the boy had thrown a rock at James and hit him over the eye, splitting the skin and drawing blood. There was no longer any evidence of this wound, but James was still livid.

"I want that kid tortured for the rest of eternity, Mick," he snarled to their guide.

"I’ve already had him taken to the tunnels, Jim," the Angel assured him. "They’ll straighten him out for ya."

"Better straighten him out on a rack," Colombo grumbled, picking through a plate of edible mushrooms grown in the subterranean garden. Vjeshitza had just placed it down in front of him. Xaphan saw the Angel look up at her small, hard breasts as she straightened to remove another cart from her wheeled serving wagon.

Xaphan was one of several Demons merely standing in attendance like living statues. He had offered to take the men’s guns to their rooms, since their weapons merely leaned against the wall behind their chairs, but Anthony Colombo had waved the Demon away. "Don’t touch our gear, boy," he warned him absent-mindedly, while looking at freckles of drying blood that he had just noticed on the white sleeve of his robe.

Xaphan watched Vjeshitza place a glass of wine in front of Teresa Colombo, whose hair had been quickly bunched back in a ponytail to hide its disarray. She did not look up at Vjeshitza. Did she suspect that this was her lover’s lover? Or didn’t she even care? She had not made eye contact with Xaphan once.

But now Xaphan returned his attention to Vjeshitza, muscular and brown, candlelight fluttering on her polished skull. She had placed the glass down already, yet still hovered over Teresa’s shoulder, slightly bent, as if expecting another order.

Oh Creator, Xaphan thought, realizing what was happening. When he widened his nostrils, he could smell it over the aromas of the food, too…even from across the long table he could smell it. The musk of sex on the Angel woman.

The Demon sperm, inside her. And with her superior senses, Vjeshitza would even recognize which Demon it had issued from.

From deep inside Vjeshitza’s guts, from some microcosm of Hades within her, arose a growl that erupted as a bellow when it escaped her wide jaws. Even as Xaphan’s wings spread open (uselessly, as if he might fly over the table), Vjeshitza seized hold of Teresa’s ponytail in one fist, jerking her head back. Her other hand rose, and panther-like claws slid out of her fingertips. In a flash, she swept that hand down, and ripped open the front of the human woman’s arced throat. Blood leaped like an freed animal, landing in the wine glass, toppling it, and rocking an empty soup bowl which quickly filled to its brim.

"Mother of God!" James Colombo shouted, bolting upright. Both he and his brother scrambled to grab up their guns.

"No!" Xaphan roared, leaping up onto the table.

Vjeshitza turned her feral eyes on her lover. "Traitor!" she hurled at him.

Then one gun roared like the voice of yet another Demon. Followed by several more deafening shots.

Xaphan alighted beside Vjeshitza and caught her just as she fell. Her eyes were still on his, though in those last seconds he knew she might not even be seeing him. As practiced as the hunters were, all three bullets had hit her in the chest. One of these projectiles had struck her in the nipple, punching it in, a leaving a hole streaming blood like a profusion of poisoned milk. Below her, on the stone floor, Xaphan could see a fragment of the once unbroken onyx ring that had pierced her nipple, like his own.

He lowered her slack body to the floor, then reared and spun around, wings still open wide, talons fully extended. He saw Anthony Colombo’s gun swing in his direction.

One of the goat-headed Baphomets, also in attendance like a statue, drifted forward a foot or two so smoothly that it seemed to float. Apparently having seen this, the guide McDonald raised his arms and shouted, "Whoa, whoa, whoa! Let’s not go crazy here, people, please! Please!"

Anthony lowered his gun warily. His brother James helped support his wife, who despite the fact that the front of her robes were soaked in gore was able to stay on her feet. Because she was an Angel, she could heal faster than one of the Damned that her husband hunted. She was in agony, Xaphan knew, but unlike a Demon, she couldn’t be slain. She had an immortal soul, where the Demons had been fashioned without them, like a tin man without a heart.

"We’re out of here!" James Colombo cried, incensed. "This is outrageous! Fucking outrageous!" And he began half-dragging his wife toward the doorway, with Anthony covering their retreat and McDonald still blubbering for them to calm down.

Another Demon had come forward to rest a staying hand on Xaphan’s shoulder, claws extended to bite into his skin. Xaphan shook him off, and before he knelt down beside his lover’s corpse, he met Teresa’s eyes for a final time as she was swept backwards out of the dining chamber.

Her eyes were wide with pain. But was it merely physical anguish? The Demon had no way of telling if there were loss…regret…guilt…or only severed nerve endings that would soon weave together again, leaving no scars behind.

Though as a Demon, Xaphan was expected to be a master of pain, he realized its nuances were as mysterious to him as the emotion of love.

He took his eyes off the retreating Angel, and crouched down over Vjeshitza, picked up the halved fragment of her onyx ring. Clenched it in his fist until it bit into him. Clenched his eyes shut like fists, and wished he could take her in his arms and spread his wings and fly both of them directly up, up into the very eye of their Creator.

Not so that He might heal her.

So that they might blind Him. If He wasn’t blind, already.

Siren

Just because one had gone to Heaven didn’t guarantee that one could get laid.

Heaven was a far from perfect place, in Stephen Petty’s estimation. His first disappointment had come immediately upon waking up to realize he was dead, and taking in his new body, made from the stuff of his spirit. He was not disappointed that he could touch and be touched, smell, taste, and even feel pain (though his chronic indigestion and frequent back aches were no more). Being so convincingly corporeal, without fear of a second death, was something to be grateful for, relieved about. As he had neared the age of fifty, he had begun to feel the shadow of his mortality—and with good reason, having died of a massive coronary just shy of his half-centennial.

But shouldn’t this new, faux flesh he inhabited, this miraculous golem, be in the form of some celestial Adonis? Instead, he had been reincarnated, so to speak, as himself—and he had always hated his appearance, as much as it seemed women did. In grade school he had been "Tubby," in high school "Moon Face" because of its shape and pocked craters. The most he had been granted, upon being reborn, was to find that his fifty-year-old body had been reinterpreted as his twenty-five-year-old body. He supposed this was because he had been the least unhappy with his appearance at that time of his abbreviated life: his ravaging acne hadn’t petered out until he was in his early twenties, and after thirty the bald spot on the back of his head had spread swiftly. But even at twenty five he had possessed a prodigious gut. Though he doubted his new lungs were actually breathing in the sense that his mortal lungs had, he still wheezed when he exerted himself. His face was still ridden with scars as if it had been nibbled by rats and healed badly.

Despite his appearance, Petty had at last found a wife at the age of twentynine. But Brenda and his seventeen-year-old daughter Christina had both been killed in an automobile accident two years before his own death. Christina decapitated, Brenda’s head flattened and her brains pushed out her mouth. That was what she got for letting their wild, out-of-control daughter behind the wheel. In those last few years of her life, Petty had almost come to hate the defiant, foul-mouthed (and, he suspected, promiscuous) Christina…had only prevented himself from doing so by recalling her as the younger, sweeter child she’d once been. That child had died years before the seventeen-year-old. He had mourned them both, as if they had been two daughters instead of one.

He’d missed Brenda, too, so he had at first been delighted when he and Brenda had encountered each other by chance a short while ago. She had recognized him, though he would never have recognized her in her present form. Brenda now occupied a twelve-year-old version of herself. She explained that she had been happiest at the age of twelve. And he had to admit she was prettier at twelve than she had ever been in the years he’d known her.

But when Petty tried to goad her into sex, she rebuffed him angrily and stomped off, pigtails jiggling haughtily, and he hadn’t seen her since.

So much for Heaven.

««—»»

The boat bounced as it sped across the crimson waves, and Petty clung to the rail tightly, feeling his guts roil. The hood of his white robe had blown off and the monk-like circle of his thinning hair ruffled. He squinted and flinched as droplets of red spray misted across his face. The robe itself was of a shiny, silky material, and fortunately the blood beaded and trickled on it instead of soaking through. As if the boat’s speed wasn’t bad enough, the stinging metallic tang of this ocean of gore was nauseating.

"Do you think we can slow down just a little?" he shouted to the pilot, Captain Eridan, who stood beside him at a control panel raised like a podium, either caked in rust or accumulated blood.

Eridan smiled without taking his eyes off the prow as it ploughed up the waters of the Red Sea ahead of them. "We want to move through this section quickly, sir. The eels are thick through here. A bit further ahead they’ll be less plentiful."

"They can hurt us, too? Not just the Damned?"

"We’ll taste bad to them. That doesn’t mean they won’t try a taste. And you’ll heal faster than the Damned. That doesn’t mean it won’t hurt."

Captain Eridan was not an Angel like Petty. He was a Demon, who had never been a mortal man as Petty had been; the Demons were homunculi, manufactured in factory-cities like Tartarus. They came in many forms, and Eridan’s breed was adapted to dwell in cities like Sheol at the bottom of this scarlet sea. Perhaps out of camouflage, or simply out of the Creator’s sense of aesthetics, these aquatic Demons were fire-engine red and preferred to go nude, showing off their layers of glittering scales and the wing-like fins (or fin-like wings) that flared from their backs when they weren’t folded up like fans. Petty and another tourist from Heaven, vacationing here in Hades like himself, had joked that Eridan looked like the Creature From The Red Lagoon. Eridan had looked over at them when they’d chuckled at his expense, but he was a mere Demon despite his rank, and bound to serve each visiting Angel as if he were the greatest of dignitaries.

Something slapped across Petty’s chest like a whip, rebounded from him and was left in the jet boat’s frothy wake. Almost dislodged from the rail, Petty let out a cry and looked back behind him. He saw something twist and writhe in the air. One of the eels that flew rather than swam, as disoriented as he was after their collision.

"Sorry!" Eridan called out cheerfully, weaving the boat between furrows of the lapping blood. "I’ve been trying to steer us through the thickest clouds of them." He tilted his chin to indicate a swarm of the airborne creatures, off to their left. The animals squirmed like boiling maggots, a living storm cloud above the surface of the waves.

"What attracts them to one spot like that? Fish in the sea?"

"Maybe. Or a Damned, escaping from Sheol, or from one of the Obsidian Islands. If you think they’re thick here, sir, you should see the Valley of Steam. The air is a solid mass with them."

The other Angel tourist aboard the boat, who’d introduced himself to Petty as Mike Rule, was already at the harpoon gun in the boat’s bow, his fists clenched around the metal handles, swiveling it this way and that. It creaked with its patina of rust-or-blood. "I hope it’s a Damned," he said, pressing his eye to a scope. "Could I hit him from here if I saw him? Or would that draw the eels to us?"

"We’re a bit too far to hit someone there, if there is someone," Captain Eridan said. "But don’t worry, sir, you’ll have your chance."

"What if I see one of your kind swimming?" Rule asked, his grin showing under the cup of the scope. "Can I shoot him? Will I get in trouble?"

Petty glanced over at Eridan’s face, the entirely red eyes devoid of pupils, but the Demon remained courteous as he replied, "It is to be discouraged, sir, but of course you can do as you please."

"Thar she blows," Petty said, shielding his eyes with one hand, as he saw a flailing arm rise out of the water and submerge again. In that brief instant, eels had darted at it, and he was certain had torn chunks from it. The frenzied cloud of animals and the Damned man or woman, who could drown but be quickly resurrected to drown again, and again, were left behind them.

"I hope I see my ex-boss out here," said Rule, still swiveling the harpoon gun. "If that bastard didn’t go to Hell there’s no justice in the universe."

««—»»

After a short while, with the shore of obsidian cliffs and glittering volcanic sand lost in the distance, Captain Eridan cut their speed to a comfortable, leisurely pace. From a cooler in the stern, Petty and Rule took bottles of beer. Rule jokingly offered a bottle to one of Eridan’s crew, but the Demon shook its head and lowered its eyes, slapping away on its webbed feet to continue swabbing blood from the deck. "I’m getting hungry, Mike," Petty quipped dryly as he watched the creature. "Got any tartar sauce?"

"Can you imagine going down on one of their ladies?" Rule said. "That would really smell like fish." He looked over his shoulder at their vessel’s composed captain. "But you know what they say, Captain Sinbad…if it smells like fish, that’s my dish. If it smells like cologne, leave it alone!"

On the horizon they spied a much larger craft, a battleship compared to their sleek but weathered yacht. "Hey, is that a torture ship?" Rule asked their pilot.

"An ocean liner for vacationers like yourself, anxious to see the sights beyond the pearly gates." Petty thought he detected a mocking tinge to the cliche "pearly gates." "Drink, dinner, dance, shuffleboard, harpooning the Damned. I’m sure you would enjoy it, gentlemen. Ships like that find harbor south of here, should you be interested in booking passage when you’ve had your fill of my humble boat."

"We’ll have to talk to our tour guide about it when we get back to our lodgings," Petty said. Because he did indeed feel that he’d prefer cruising slowly on a large ship like that, instead of jouncing across the waves on this smaller craft. He had hoped a visit to Hades would shake up his jaded senses, after having found Heaven to be rather dull, rather lonely. But he hadn’t wanted to be physically shaken.

"I like this boat," Rule stated, however. "Much more exciting, huh, Steve?"

"Sure," Petty muttered.

‘It’s good to be alive again!" Rule chirped, raising his bottle to salute the churning Red Sea and the black layer of perpetual clouds that formed the ceiling of Hades.

««—»»

Petty had considered bringing his apsara with him on his vacation to Hell, but had ultimately decided against it. The apsaras were homunculi like the Demons, and made to order for those in Heaven, as servants and lovers. Because Petty had had no luck meeting a female Angel with whom to enjoy the boundless carnal pleasures he would have expected to await him in the afterlife, he had ordered one of these apsaras for himself. In life he had been a mortgage expert, so he had named his living sex doll Fannie Mae as a private joke, though she had the face and body of Demi Moore, as she had looked in her early movies like St. Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night (in which she’d been deliciously nude). He had preferred her then, soft and young and small-breasted, over how she had looked in Striptease, with her phony-looking breast implants and her buffed body and harder face. Petty liked to think that he had a refined sense of taste, an artistic appreciation of the female form in its natural state. Not to mention that he was drawn to very young women. That they would be the last women to be interested in him made him long for them all the more.

He had enjoyed Fannie Mae on a physical level, but her uncomplaining accommodation, her dog-like complacency, and the fact that the homunculus was nearly monosyllabic had made him fairly discontented of late. Whereas Rule had come to Hades to hunt the Damned for sport, Petty had come in the vague hopes that a Damned woman would be a more willing sex partner than a fellow Angel. Or, if not willing, then an unwilling sex partner. He need not be concerned with raping a Damned woman, whereas such a thing with an Angel would be out of the question. He didn’t know if an Angel like himself could be sentenced as a Damned, but he wasn’t willing to risk it.

He had thought he might even persuade a female Demon to take him to her bed, but after seeing the red-scaled beings back at the Demonic seashore fortress where he and Rule had been given lodgings, he had ruled out the possibility.

He had thought this adventure would exhilarate him, like a safari. Instead, he was already finding this remarkable ocean of live red blood cells boring in its redundancy. The thought of immortality began to depress him. To escape it for a brief while, in what was dubbed the little death (or was that what they called orgasm? he couldn’t recall), he decided it was best to retire to the forecastle for a nap, leaving Rule to his hunt. Though the Damned deserved to be here, because in life they had turned their backs on or denied the existence of their Creator (Petty and his wife had been church-going Catholics, Rule a Baptist), Petty wasn’t sure if he could bring himself to take a turn at the harpoon gun, himself.

««—»»

Petty’s heart, or the ectoplasmic replica of his heart, awakened him with a jolt as if defibrillators had been applied to him—again. He had been dreaming of his final living moments. Riding in the ambulance. Hearing its siren. The last sound he’d heard with his mortal ears, that banshee siren. Like a wailing cry of lamentation. It was as if the ambulance had driven him here, to the plane of the afterlife, instead of to the hospital.

He sat up on his cot, and listened to the boat’s puttering. They were moving very slowly. He raised his bulk with a groan of strain, and emerged from the shaded forecastle to see what was going on up front.

"Look at this, Steve!" cried Rule over his shoulder, crouched even more avidly at the harpoon gun. "Not much sport in shooting these three, but it might make good target practice!"

"Sorry this spot was a bit out of the way, gentlemen," Captain Eridan called above the motor sounds, "but I thought you might find it of interest!"

The boat had found its way among a series of small islands, some no larger than a manhole cover, the largest as big as a parking lot. All were flattish, and Petty had the impression that these were not the peaks of underwater rock, covered in a congealing slime of blood; instead, he grew convinced they were essentially giant blood clots floating atop the calm surface of the sea in this area. These masses were gelatinous, and so dark a red they were nearly black. Toward their centers, the matter went from a glossy pudding to a hard, flaking crust. Immense scabs, Petty realized. And if the normal scent of the Red Sea wasn’t bad enough—that iron reek of blood—these islets gave off a stench like rotting meat.

On the largest of these raft-like blood clots, somehow a windmill had been erected. It was a tall, metal framework with a fairly small blade at its top, which didn’t even stir in this becalmed air. The whole structure was encrusted with layers of dried gore. At the foot of the windmill, three naked figures stood with their hands chained high above their heads. The legs and support struts of the windmill obscured them, but Eridan began to casually coax his boat around the rim of the island so they could get a direct view of the prisoners.

"The wind should be along any moment," he informed them cryptically.

How grateful Petty was, seeing things like this, that he wasn’t one of the Damned. How foolish these poor people had been! He had gone to church like he went to the toilet; in an automatic, unthinking way—all that it had cost him for an afterlife-long membership to the celestial country club. It wasn’t like one had to be a contemplative monk, teach catechism, do volunteer work. Once he and Brenda left that high-ceilinged, gilded room with the solemn lisping voice of their priest lulling them nearly to sleep, Brenda would begin to gossip about this fellow parishioner or that, and glare at them when they cut her off as they all drove out of the parking lot. That didn’t matter. All that mattered was making an appearance, chanting the words the Creator wanted to hear from you, and you were safe. Was that so hard? Look what these creatures had brought upon themselves by being agnostics, atheists…running away from their Father.

They had almost reached the opposite side of the island, and as Eridan had predicted, a breeze had come up, turning sharp very quickly. He seemed to have almost cut his engine entirely, as if he didn’t want to reach the far side until the wind had mounted to its full strength. But Petty still began to make out more of what lay at the foot of the windmill…

A cage of tight wire mesh covered each of the three captives. These cages, in turn, were connected by chains woven through a mechanism of gears and cogs.

And the eels. About a dozen of them wriggled through the air, circling around the cages, sinuously winding their way through the girders of the windmill’s base. Once in a while one of the animals, with its phallic eyeless head and jaws overflowing with fangs, would try to nose its way through the mesh of the cages to get at the succulent meat within, but the openings were too small.

"Would anybody get mad if I shot these Damned right through the cages?" Rule whispered to their guide.

"Please be patient, sir. The wind current is approaching." He pointed a free hand up at the blades of the windmill, which had begun to spin…lazily, then more quickly, until bursts of breeze made the metal pinwheel blur.

They were near enough now that Petty could see the three Damned souls were nude young women. He leaned against the rail, gripping it more firmly.

Suddenly, like a freight train, the wind arrived. Petty was glad he had a firm grip on the rusty rail. His hood blew off. The calm surface of the Red Sea was whipped up into a pink foam, suds of it spattering him and the deck. The intermittent blurring of the windmill blades became steady, until they were invisible. At the base of the machine, there was a screech and grinding, as gears started to turn, greasy chains to move like tendons.

The three cages began to rise, uncovering their delectable contents. The women squirmed, twisted their lithe white bodies, but their wrists were still bound above their heads. A sound rose above the gusting wind, the noises of machinery. They were wailing. Sobbing. It was an unearthly sound, like sirens calling to Ulysses and his men…to drive them mad with lust…to lure them to their death among the rocks.

Then, the eels darted in. One coordinated movement, like a shoal of fish abruptly changing direction. And not only that, but other eels seemed to appear out of nowhere. Out of the sea? Out of hiding places in the windmill’s skeleton? Had they come up from behind the boat in a swarm? Wherever they had materialized from, the dozen had turned to a hundred…and they converged on the three screaming women in a dense flock.

"Like clockwork," Captain Eridan noted proudly, as if the torture device were of his own design.

Rule had stiffened at his gun, was obviously ready to launch a spear into one of the three newly exposed women, but the spectacle of the eels swooping in on them made him lift his head from the scope and mutter, "My God."

"Yes," Eridan said, with a crescent grin.

At last, like the hand of a clock, the boat had come around to the front of the tiny island, and Eridan cut the motor so they could watch the feeding frenzy clearly.

Petty was reminded of paintings of St. Sebastian, his arms lashed above or behind him, his bare chest pierced by arrows. Except that these were females, and the arrows whipped their tails, alive, their heads buried in smooth white flesh. For whatever reason, however, whether by natural inclination or training, the beasts obviously preferred the flesh and muscle of the face. Only a few chewed at the bodies below; the rest had covered the faces of the trio, muffling and choking off their cries.

Rule spun to the side of the boat and vomited violently over the rail. That made Petty smirk a little. So much for the great white hunter.

Blood did not stream down those nude bodies from the savaged faces—the hovering eels drank it up before it could trickle far. Despite the living nightmares completely enveloping their heads—or because of the heightened contrast—their bodies still struck Petty as immensely beautiful. Like the Venus de Milo without her arms, making her torso all the lovelier. Their succulent flesh was like the white stone of that statue, a marred purity. Petty couldn’t blame the eels for their passion; he almost wanted to consume the flesh himself.

He moved to the abandoned harpoon gun to press his eye to the scope, not caring what Eridan or his men or Rule might think of his blatant voyeurism.

Oh yes, that unalloyed beauty, stripped of clothes, of pretense, of society (and soon, of faces, leaving only the graceful figures without the rejecting sneer of lips, the disapproving squint of eyes). Petty was now reminded of the headless, armless, but spread-winged statue called the Nike of Samothrace. When the Romans conquered Greece, they lopped the heads off their statues. But how beautiful Nike remained, her stone gown clinging to her gentle curves, mutilated though she was…

The girl on the left was very thin, her raised arms pulling her small breasts entirely flat, her ribs showing distinctly through her parchment skin. Her ankles were also chained, he now realized, preventing her legs from kicking like those of a hanged man. But she managed to swing entirely around once, giving him a brief look at the sweep of her back, a tattoo of a butterfly in the hollow above her buttocks (one of his very favorite zones of the female form), and her small, cleft bottom. The girl on the right appeared to be the oldest of the three, her breasts heavier, her hips wide (perhaps she’d given birth?), but Petty loved sumptuous flesh. His eyes kneaded it like hands.

Like Goldilocks, however, he found the girl in the middle to be just right. She was, in a word, perfection.

Her back was forced into a tense arch, the buds of her breasts thrust out, their ends dipped in pink candy. Her skin so smooth that his eyes could feel its tautness across her sides, softer across her belly and thighs. Her pubic hair was red. He had always loved redheads, had married one in fact. Her bush was complemented by two more, under her uplifted arms. He knew most American men disliked underarm hair, but he with his refined tastes found it sexy, earthy, mirroring the hair of the crotch, and he wanted to press his nose into each of the three thatches, to draw in her intimate musk. One stray eel nursed at her skin beside the bullet hole of her navel, appearing like a new umbilical cord for her rebirth here in Hades. She was youth, she was a goddess, with her head covered in writhing bodies he thought of her as Medusa on the Half-Shell…so hideous, and so lovely because of it.

The wind started to die down, the windmill blades to become visible again. With a metallic clatter, the cages began to descend, and conditioned to this or trained like dogs, the eels darted away from their three victims before they could become trapped inside the cages, too. Besides, their bellies were full. As the cages lowered, and the eels escaped, Petty could see what was left of the trio’s faces. Bone, a few strands of hair (he could now see the center girl’s remaining short red locks). Without the eels to catch it, drops of blood began to patter and trickle across the bare canvasses of their bodies, which had mercifully slumped unconscious. Was that a faint, gurgling kind of moan coming from one or more of them?

"Now they will regenerate. Heal," explained Captain Eridan. "Until the next time the wind current comes." In an odd and unwelcome gesture of familiarity, he patted Petty on the shoulder. "I thought you might find this worth the extra time."

Petty straightened from the harpoon gun’s scope. He hoped the Demon didn’t notice his erection, tenting the fabric of his Angelic robes.

"Yes…it was…fascinating," he stammered.

"Would you care to have a shot at one of them before the cages are in place, Mr. Rule?" he called. "You’d better hurry…"

Rule only groaned, still hunched over the rail, and waved them away.

Eridan turned again to Petty. "Such sights to see in Hades, eh?" he whispered conspiratorially, as if afraid the Creator might overhear. "You won’t see the likes of this in Heaven."

And with that, he returned to the wheel, gunned the motor, and swung them back in the direction of the black, obsidian shore.

««—»»

In his room at the Demonic fortress, overlooking the churning Red Sea, Petty lay in bed and masturbated, imaging that the red-haired girl was going down on him. The scary thought that the face clamped to his groin might be ravaged down to the bone only excited him further. He imagined his hands pressing her head to him, running across the tight skin of her humped back. With a cry, he ejaculated into the maw of his imagination.

It wasn’t enough. As he lay there wheezing, the great island of his belly rising and falling, he knew it was not enough.

He went out into the fortress and asked for breakfast, sat down to it alone in a large echoing room built from blocks of volcanic glass. He asked one of the servant Demons if Rule was coming down. He was told Mr. Rule had left a short while ago, had asked to be taken south down the coast to where the ocean liners docked to pick up tourist Angels like himself.

Petty was a bit insulted, but relieved, that Rule had not invited him to join him. When the servant poured him his second coffee, he told her to send word to Captain Eridan that he wanted to ride on his boat again today; specifically, he wanted to ride out again to the series of blood clot islands.

««—»»

When they finally arrived, after what Petty judged to be three hours or more, the wind current had already found the islands, the windmill was already spinning, the cages already lifted. The eels already feeding.

"I wish we could have gotten here sooner," Petty groused to Eridan.

"Sir?"

"I wanted to see their faces."

"Oh…I see…I’m sorry, sir. Well, when the wind dies down, we can linger a while. You can nap, sir, or have a few drinks. Their faces will reconstitute. Then I can draw us in closely, sir. We can even land on the island, if you like."

Land there. Disembark. Might he be able to touch some part of the living triptych through the holes in the mesh of their cages? Might he even coax Eridan, who was required to serve him, into opening one of the cages…even setting one of the prisoners free? That prisoner might be very grateful for her release. Grateful enough to serve him, as well…

"Yes," Petty said, trying not to betray to his guide the tremulous energies swimming through his system. "That would be fine…"

Petty fetched a beer, and watched the display again through the scope. (They couldn’t land on the island until the cages had lowered and the bulk of the eels had departed, for fear of being attacked themselves.)

The wind finally roared away across the ocean of red corpuscles. The eels fled, perhaps to feed on other prisoners on other island chains. The cages descended. Now, Eridan drew them in closer as he had promised, though in a way Petty wished he had waited a while—but he supposed a half reformed face would be no less horrible than these denuded skulls. More horrible, maybe. They came close enough that he could hear the wheezing through their gaping nose cavities, the gargling blood in their throats. He saw breasts rising and falling. Drops of blood flecked their chests like rose petals on snow. So lovely.

Two of Eridan’s men hopped off the boat, into knee-deep blood, and attached lines to the legs of the windmill. They drew the boat against the shining lip of the blood clot raft (and jabbed at the few remaining eels with harpoons to keep them at bay). But Petty did not climb ashore just yet. He had another beer. He watched the slow regeneration. He listened as gurgles became moans, evolved into sobs.

When they had lips again, would they curse him for being one of the blessed? An Angel, never tortured, never suffering? Well, what did they know of his suffering? In life, young beauties like these would have scorned him. It had been that way all his life. Was their Promethean torture any worse than that? Did their physical degradation really outweigh his psychological degradation?

It was unfair, was it not, that Petty was so gross and repulsive an Angel, and these Damned so perfect and lovely? Where was the justice in that? Since becoming reborn, Petty had repeatedly questioned the workings of the Creator’s mind. How could it be that in Heaven he had come to feel so numb, a reanimated zombie, and yet here in the netherworld he suddenly felt vital and alive? Was it the contrast of death? Or just the lust of a younger body whose urges he had forgotten over the past few decades?

The short red hair of the center girl was sprouting anew from the scalp it had been torn from. It was like watching the minute hand of a clock, but it was happening. He noted the curly black hair of the lush-figured girl, the straight mousy brown hair of the thin girl, but the center girl had become his crucified Christ, flanked by nameless fellow sufferers, though in this case all three were resurrecting from the dead…

Yes, he wondered if this were such a good idea after all. When they had eyes again, they would hate him as much as the Demons beside him. He couldn’t sneak his fingers through the mesh; they would withdraw from his touch. And even if he were able to persuade Eridan to lift the middle cage, free his little redhead, and even if she did submit to him, she would despise him. Reject him even as she gave in to him.

Maybe it was better to return to Heaven, flawed as it was. To content himself as best he could with the zombie-like Fannie Mae. She accepted him mindlessly. Wasn’t that perfection, if he could get past the fact that she was essentially a robot? He mustn’t be so jaded, so spoiled. Heaven, however imperfect, could do that to you…

Still, he knew he had to see this through. He had waited this long, and he wouldn’t feel closure unless he could see their restored faces closely. But even as he dreaded having their eyes on him, he couldn’t keep from admiring their bodies. Couldn’t keep from subtly pressing his erection against the bow rail. It was a blind eel aching to feed.

He realized Eridan was directly behind his shoulder, and he flinched as the Demon purred, "Do you wish to go onto the island, sir?"

"I can see well enough from here," Petty muttered.

Muscle now layered the bone, threaded together with bright lattices of vein, elastic bands of tendon tethering this section to that. Were those raw globes in their sockets really eyes? Petty’s own eyes watered to gaze upon them.

Soon, the outer rind of flesh started spreading like a fungus, a cancer, to again put a mask to the horrible beauty that lay beneath, just as it hid what lay inside the rest of their glorious bodies. The flesh asserting its mastery, even here in the spiritual world.

The rotting miasma of the island was so overpowering this close that he cupped his hand over nose and mouth. Or was that reek from the faces themselves, rematerializing in a reverse dissection, a rewound flaying?

The red hair of the center girl stopped growing at the edge of her jaw. That must have been its length when she died, and it would not grow beyond that point. Pretty red hair like copper, framing eyes that now showed blue irises, and black pupils, and which bulged and darted in mad agony.

Then the eyes locked on him with such a force that he almost flinched again. They remained fixed on him. The girl’s struggles against the chains binding her wrists and ankles grew more frantic. Her body moved in serpentine jerks, like the eels had when they were worrying free a hunk of flesh. Her sobs rose, rose in a wail, a banshee shriek, a siren…

And there were words coming on that scream; he could sense them struggling to take form as her flesh was doing. He could feel the words riding at the top of her cry, building toward a crescendo…

"Dahhh…" the center girl screamed.

"Oh God," Petty groaned, letting go of the rail as if blown back by the cry and the stare. He thumped backwards against Eridan, who did not budge.

"Daaaahhh!"

Petty had been disappointed in Heaven, but now he knew that Hades was much worse, even for the casual visitor. Because the remade face of the central girl, this Nike of Samothrace with its head restored, was that of Petty’s teenage daughter, Christina.

"Daaaad!" the cry came in full at last, like lava exploding from a volcano.

Petty whirled away and squeezed his eyes shut tightly. He clamped his hands over his ears, like Ulysses’ sailors, blocking their ears with wax to keep out the call of the sirens. But then he opened his eyes and glared up at Eridan, who was watching him with a little smile, as if he possessed some secret, satisfying knowledge.

"You did this on purpose, you bastard!" Petty sobbed. "You knew she was out here!"

"I’m not the Creator," the Demon told him mildly. "Only He weaves, Mr. Petty."

"You let her go! I order you!"

"I can’t, sir. She’s been Damned. She should have followed her wise and pious parents to church. She should have embraced her Father."

"I’m an Angel! I’m an Angel!" Petty blubbered. "You fucks can’t do this to me!"

"This is Hades," Captain Eridan said simply. "Do you wish to leave it?"

"Yes," Petty cried. He fell to his knees, palms still clamped to his ears. "Yes!"

"Daaaad! Help me!" he heard, regardless of his efforts to blot out the sounds.

Thank God that Eridan started up the motor then. The sound of it helped drown out the screams. The lines were cast off, all the crew clambered aboard, and the boat turned its nose away from the island of congealing blood.

"Your daughter is very beautiful, sir," Eridan told him casually, as he piloted them away and the voices dwindled in their wake. He looked down at Petty, still humped forward as if bowing on the deck in supplication. "Very beautiful."

Sweet Oblivion

Most breeds of Demons didn’t require food as sustenance—but the Buddhas, as the Damned workers had dubbed them, were ravenous beings. They had been designed that way, in the factory city of Tartarus where most of the Demons in this region of Hades were mass produced.

The Buddhas were vast, dinosaur-like travesties of humanity, nine feet tall and wider around. Patrick thought that they made sumo wrestlers look as if they might be the Buddhas’ infant offspring. Their flagrantly naked bulks were an awful canary yellow in color. These elephantine entities had heads as small as a mortal baby’s, however, with eyes crushed shut and sulky pouts. Their heads reminded Patrick of human fetuses who are born with acrania—absence of that section of the skull which contains the brain.

To be born without a brain, Patrick mused. Such blissful oblivion. He had never thought he would envy such a tragic fate, until he had awoken from death to find himself sentenced to eternal damnation.

He had been twenty-two when he died. He estimated he would have been forty-four by now. He had stopped berating himself, long ago, for not having been religious in life, not bowing before the Creator. Though he had never met any of his friends or loved ones in the infinity of Hades, he doubted that any of them would pass the Creator’s harsh criteria to make it through the pearly gates, the golden arches, or whatever the gateway to paradise looked like.

Patrick, Eleanor, and Wally worked close together, wading through the knee-deep (occasionally, waist-deep) bog in which they seeded, grew and harvested the food for the Buddhas. Eleanor had been in Hades the longest; she had died in 1870, when she was twenty-eight. She and Patrick had taken Wally under their wings. Although he had been much older than they, physically, when he died—sixty-seven—he had only been in Hades for a single month. He huffed and panted as he slogged through the marshy plants, cutting free the fleshy globes the Buddhas craved with his curved knife and storing them in the waterproofed leather bag he wore slung onto his back. He paused often to wheeze, to hold his chest with one blistered hand, to squint up at the blazing sky—a ceiling of churning lava. The three of them wore straw hats like Vietnamese farmers laboring in a rice paddy, to protect their flesh from being burned by that intense glow. Of course, they were immortal; their skin would have regenerated even if it had been immersed in lava. This was why Patrick often teased Wally when he saw him clutching at his heart.

"You’re not going to die, Wally, don’t worry."

"I should be so lucky," Wally grumbled, wiping his knife’s blade clean of sap against his pants leg. "I should be so lucky to really die."

"Then we wouldn’t have your charming company," Eleanor teased him in her good-natured British accent, flicking some water at his face. "Would we, my love?"

"He’s your love," Wally jerked his knife toward Patrick, "not me."

"You are too young for me, Wally," Eleanor admitted.

All three of them turned their heads abruptly, and fearfully, when they heard the bellowing roar of one of the Buddhas roll across the swampy farmland. All three were relieved to see that one titanic yellow guard was lumbering slowly, terribly in another direction, perhaps to berate some other knot of workers, instead of coming their way. Wally wagged his head. "They invented this fruit just to give us something to do. Something hard and awful to do. And they invented them just to eat the fruit." By "they," he meant the Creator.

Patrick lifted another of the bright red, rubbery globes out of the water and slipped it into his own heavy sack. "Come on, Wally." He shooed a blood-drinking insect (or miniature Demon, depending on how you looked at it) that had jabbed him in the back of the neck…then patted the older man on the shoulder. "It will drive you mad to dwell on the whys and wherefores."

They had sloshed their way to an outcropping of rock like an island jutting out of the flat landscape. They could climb up on it and rest for a few minutes, on its far side where they wouldn’t be spotted, but not for too long or they’d be missed. It would give them a chance to dry off a little in the heat of the molten sky, and to pluck leeches off each other. They’d throw the leeches back into the mire instead of killing them, just in case those creatures could be considered Demons, too.

It was Patrick who climbed onto the outcropping first, gratefully slinging his sack off his shoulder as he did so. It was Patrick, then, who first spotted the cat.

The cat clearly had heard them coming; it was wary but not surprised. It was tensed, ready to hiss, ready to claw, ready to leap away. But leap away where? Into the water? Most cats hated water. How had it ever gotten to this isolated rock in the first place?

"Oh my!" Eleanor exclaimed. "Oh!"

"It’s a cat," Wally observed, dragging his old, dripping bones onto the barren oasis. "An ugly one," he added. "So what?"

The cat had indeed seen better days. It looked like it might have become tangled in a tattered, filthy curtain. Or could that have been a burial shroud? Scraps of it were twined around its limbs and tail, a loop of it even obscuring one eye. And in one battered ear it wore three earrings. It had been someone’s pet, obviously, at one time. Or something more important. But it looked a long way from having been anything to anyone, in its present condition.

"It’s impossible," Patrick said to Wally, as tensed and unmoving as the cat.

"Why?"

Eleanor answered for him. "There are no cats in Hades. No animals can come here."

"What do you mean? These bloodsuckers…and mosquitoes…"

"There are infernal animals. But no animals from the mortal world can come here upon death, Wally. According to the Creator, animals don’t have souls. They don’t go to Heaven or Hell. They simply cease to be."

"Sweet oblivion," Patrick muttered.

"Then this is an infernal animal, then," said Wally. "Like the leeches. Look at it. Looks infernal to me."

The cat hissed at last. Patrick smiled. "It doesn’t like you, whatever it is, Wally."

"There are no cats in Hades," Eleanor insisted. "I’ve been here well over a century. I’ve covered a lot of ground in that time. I’ve never seen a cat, a dog, any earthly beast."

"There." Patrick pointed. "Look."

Behind the cat, and lower on the opposite face of the rock, there was a deep crack or fissure. Its edges looked black, as though charred. Wally climbed over next to Patrick carefully, trying not to startle the cat. Even in the short time he had been in Hades, he knew this rock well enough to recognize that this fissure had not been there previously.

"He came from the crack," Eleanor said. "He had to have. From some other part of Hell, do you think? Maybe animals do go to another realm, after all…"

"I had another thought," said Patrick.

"What’s that?"

Wally said it before Patrick could. "Maybe it came from our world. The mortal world. You know?" He picked his way nearer to the cat, the fissure below it, less concerned about upsetting the animal now. "Maybe if he could find his way here, we could find our way out…"

The cat gave a warning yowl and hissed again, backing off just a little bit, its broken tail giving an angry flick. Seeing this, Patrick caught Wally by the arm to halt him.

"Shh, puss," Eleanor cooed, extending a delicate white hand to the creature. "Shh. Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you."

"It’s probably hungry." From his sack, Patrick withdrew one of the buoy-like, bobbing red orbs they cut free of the stalks in the swampy water. He sliced into it with his tool, which always reminded him of a linoleum knife. A thick, crimson sap began to well out.

"Don’t feed it blood," Eleanor admonished him.

"What else do I have to feed it? Maybe you could nurse him, eh?"

She swatted his arm.

"It’s seen a lot. It’s been to Hell and back," Wally murmured, staring intensely at the animal as it stared back at him. "I’m telling you, it’s come from someplace far away. If it can come here, we can go there."

"Think, Wally," Patrick said, while he proffered the bleeding fruit to the cat. It didn’t come near it. "If where it comes from is better, then why’d it want to come here?"

"Anyway," Eleanor added, "look at the crack. It isn’t wide enough even for me."

"But we could widen it!" Wally blurted, beginning to sound desperate.

In the distance, the terrible foghorn bleat of one of the Buddhas sounded. The noise rumbled across the watery fields like thunder. The three prisoners of Hell exchanged quick glances. Patrick said, "They’ll notice us gone, soon."

"We have to smuggle the cat back to our barracks with us," Eleanor stated. "We can’t leave it here."

"Smuggle it how?"

"In one of our sacks, of course."

"If we get caught with it, now or later…"

"Never mind the cat!" Wally moaned, as if trying to reason with children. "We have to start widening that hole. Every day, a little more. We have to at least explore what’s beyond! Can it be any worse?"

Eleanor turned toward the old man gravely. "There are sections of Hades that make this bog look like a resort beach, Wally. Yes. It can always get worse."

"I don’t care what you say!" he persisted, and began scrambling over the rock again. "I’m going to see what this hole is about…"

"Wally!" Eleanor cried, trying to snatch hold of his tunic. "Don’t scare the cat!"

"To Hell with the cat!"

Patrick thought for sure the cat would start slicing at the old man’s advancing hands, then. Instead, without even another hiss or yowl, the creature—oddly both bedraggled and regal—turned nimbly and scampered down the rock face toward that split in its surface. It darted into the fissure…disappeared inside.

Wally was after it on all fours, as if by imitating it he might gain access, too. His palm slipped on a slick portion of rock and he scraped his elbow badly, but it only slowed him a moment. He reached the crack before his two companions could stop him, and thrust his arm into the crevice.

"Arr!" he cried. He was up to his shoulder in the hole. Patrick saw him lying on his belly, saw the alarm or surprise on his weathered face, and thought: Something has him…

A horrible dinosaur trumpet, not far away enough. Had one of the Buddha overseers heard Wally’s cry…noticed their absence, finally?

"What is it?" Patrick whispered frantically, taking hold of Wally’s shoulders. Eleanor grabbed onto the back of his shirt. They began to haul at him.

"The rock is closing!" Wally groaned.

He was right; they could hear it. The rock seemed to creak, to squeal, at the stresses which reformed it. As their flesh could be regenerated after injury (after all, their bodies were no longer truly flesh), so did the stone begin to reknit itself. The only trouble was, Wally’s arm was still buried in its maw.

"Ohh…oww!" he moaned. His moan rose at the end, in the start of a wail.

Just as the rock jaws were gnashing shut, Patrick and Eleanor managed to pry their friend free. The split in the rock ground shut a moment later, making a sound like the brakes of an out of control eighteen-wheeler screeching. Sparks leapt into the air.

Wally cradled a badly bleeding arm, a lot of its skin torn from it like the leaves husked from a cob of corn. The bone showed in one place through the stripped meat. He was sobbing, and Eleanor pulled him against her, wrapped her arms around his chest, rocked him.

"Well, old man," Patrick panted, "now you really have a pain you can complain about."

"Patrick!" Eleanor chided him.

"It could be worse." Patrick patted the man’s bare foot, still bloodlessly white and wrinkly from hours submerged in slimy water. "You could have lost your whole arm. It’s happened to me. It isn’t fun. Regrowing it is worse."

"You scared my pussy away, Wally," Eleanor scolded, but she kept rocking the sobbing man.

"Wally would scare anyone’s pussy away," Patrick said, peeking up over the top of the rock. "I thought they’d heard us. But they haven’t noticed, thank Heavens."

"Bugger the Heavens," Eleanor said.

"So, Wally," Patrick went on. "Did you feel anything on the other side?"

Whimpering now, as his damaged nerve endings began the process of repairing themselves, Wally opened his mauled hand—which had been clenched into a fist until this moment. In it, he clutched only a strip of the dirt-caked gauze or linen which the cat had been tangled up in.

"The little thing just took a wrong turn," Patrick said. "I hope he finds the right way, now."

"I hope he sends us help," Eleanor joked.

Patrick licked at the blood sluicing from the fruit he had offered to the cat. Why not drink blood? They were the undead, weren’t they? "Maybe he was a soul, after all. Maybe he was a reincarnated person."

"Shh," Eleanor mocked. "Don’t talk blasphemy. There is no reincarnation, remember?"

They helped Wally sit up. Recently, he had finally relented and begun drinking the juice of the blood fruit, and allowed Patrick to feed him some now. Already, his own blood was flowing less copiously.

While Wally sat on the rock to recover some more, the other two slipped back into the water to continue harvesting fruit. They passed him orbs to tuck into his own bag, as well. One of the patrolling behemoths noticed them at last, but it must have seen that the old man was injured, merely resting until he could regenerate, and it didn’t come after them. Patrick and Eleanor made a good show of it, working double fast. Patrick purposely bumped his hip against hers at one point. She gave him a flirty smile in return.

Wally looked at the place where the crack had been. Just a jagged black line there, a scar like fossilized lightning, nothing more. He reached out his healing hand and laid it flat against the stone.

"Take care, kitty," he said quietly, as if afraid to let his new friends hear the softness in his tone.

"So where do you think my puss has gone off to, my love?" Eleanor asked Patrick as they worked.

"With any luck," he told her, "sweet oblivion."

The Secret Gallery

"After her death Dante realized she was more alive than ever."

— Dante Alighieri, on his love Beatrice

The Demons did this from time to time.

For a good number of terrestrial years—but who could tell, when there was no true day or night by which to measure?—a print shop might be tolerated, and the bookstores that stocked its humble chapbooks and broadsheets. Restaurants that made the best of indigenous vegetation, infernal animal forms, were abundant and varied in larger Damned settlements like the sprawling cities of Oblivion and Carceri. Clothing stores that offered attire more diverse and cheery than the black uniforms they all started out with. And then, without any extra provocation, without any forewarning, the Demons would come. They would strip a shop of its wares, expel the staff or perhaps round them up for transportation to a torture factory, and burn or demolish the very building itself. There were all sizes of Damned settlements, from tiny villages to great metropolises. Sometimes the Demons would raze the whole settlement to the ground. Not often would the large cities be destroyed, because they often housed a Demonic population as well, but it had happened.

There needed to be no explanation for these raids that took place so suddenly, when these establishments had been in operation for so long. It was to be expected. They looked the other way for quite a while, let you get comfortable, let you forget just a little bit where you were. And then, one day (if such it could be called), they came to take it away to remind you where you were. Letting you have it for a while and taking it away was more cruel than not letting you have it at all, wasn’t it?

The Demons that had surged into Wanda’s gallery were reptilian, like bipedal lizards. Like what dinosaurs might have evolved into had they not gone extinct (and if evolution had existed), or what the Creator might have envisioned for Demons in the early days of the Earth, before He had made His plan more ambitious and designed human beings. Wanda knew it was more likely, though, that their animal-like nature had to do with the recent rebellion throughout Hades of several of the most human-like races of Demons. It had been decreed that those traitorous races would be annihilated, however long the process took, and less human—hopefully, less willful—breeds of Demon mass produced to replace them. These new kinds of Demons were often sent forth with the genocide of their brothers as their mission, but today their assignment was more modest. The demolition of Wanda’s gallery.

It was only moments after she heard the commotion up front, the crashing and the cries of Rita at the counter, that Wanda saw the first of the Demons. It burst into the gallery, tearing down the black door curtain as it came and wearing it on its spiny shoulders like a cape, all naked muscle sheathed in glossy red scales, jaws brimming with teeth, eyes dead black, its head festooned with a fringed yellow crest like a tropical bird. Striking as it was, Wanda had seen more creative-looking devils in artworks like Schongauer’s The Temptation of St. Anthony or Breughel’s Fall of the Rebellious Angels, and so wondered numbly if perhaps the imagination of humans was more extensive than the imagination of the Creator Himself.

The Demon was more intent on the artwork than her. It barely seemed to notice her as it snatched the first framed painting off the gallery’s brick wall, and tore it into two pieces with a sound (too familiar to Wanda) like flesh ripping. It was a scene, painted from memory, of Maine’s forested and rocky coast near Acadia National Park, by a man named Paul. She was glad Paul was not here to see the destruction of his work. On a more primitive level, Wanda was ashamed that she was relieved it was the painting and not her body that was receiving the Demon’s violence, despite the fact that the torn flesh of the Damned would always regenerate. To be torn again, and again.

Discarding the mauled painting, the Demon raged on, swatting a clay bust of a child off its base to shatter like a skull under a mallet in one of the torture plants. It was a portrait done by a woman of her child, again by memory. She had died in 1959, when her child had been seven-years-old. That boy would be fifty-four now, but was forever a child in his mother’s eyes. When she had accepted the sculpture into her gallery, Wanda had wondered just how accurate the bust could be after all these years. She had admired its detail, authentic-looking right down to the lovingly rendered intricate lines meant to represent its strands of hair, remembered as much by the mother’s fingers as by her brain.

A second Demon charged in, threw Wanda a quick glare that was almost like a physical blow, making her back into another of the brick walls. But the creature moved on to pluck down a framed charcoal drawing: a chiaroscuro still life of wine bottles, a man’s smoking pipe, and a stack of beautifully bound books (not like the crudely produced books available at the shops here in the city). Again, a remembered sort of scene. Like much of the art she’d gathered, maybe a little idealized, maybe a little sentimental, but real. Maybe not real here, but real from a life before this afterlife.

One of the artists had been in the gallery, visiting Wanda to discuss a special showing of her work scheduled for several days from now. The artist, Natalie, made the mistake of moving between her paintings and the first Demon. An impulsive action that she no doubt instantly regretted, as her screams pierced Wanda’s ears and her blood sprayed her canvases. The second Demon rushed forward to seize hold of the woman’s flailing limbs so the first could continue its shredding of the canvas of her flesh. Wanda had to look away, and her horrified numbness cracked just enough to permit tears to trickle free.

Several more Demons entered, storming from room to room. They made no sounds, no animal roars or human speech, except for the clamor of their rampage. A couple of patrons fled past Wanda the other way, one bleeding heavily from a hanging flap of scalp. The unwounded one gave her a frenzied look as if to urge her to flee along with them. She didn’t. She didn’t know why. Still too numb with horror, with fatalism, or was it a kind of loyalty? The captain going down with his ship?

Then, into the little museum strode an entirely different brand of Demon, as if another artist had designed him. An earlier, somewhat more anthropomorphic type (though not perhaps so human-like to be considered a threat under the new mind-set), apparently of considerable age. He was so tall that he had to duck his head through the threshold. A more classical rendering: great curling ram horns, frayed dragon wings folded against his massive back. Gray skin rough and pitted as pumice, eyes like empty holes drilled into that stony flesh, and a mouth even more overflowing with daggers than the jaws of the lizard Demons. But instead of seeking out overlooked pieces of art to rip and stomp, the Demon—likely an officer—turned to blaze his empty eye pits down at Wanda.

"You are to come with me," his booming voice rumbled in her ears, inside her very chest.

A torture factory, she thought. No, no…not one of the torture factories again.

But that wasn’t to be the case. Far from it. As far as one afterlife was from another.

««—»»

Wanda’s first assignment in Heaven had been as one of the workers fashioning an exact replica of Brussel’s central market square, often called "The Grand Place." This magnificent complex was the home of Pastor Ed Calvin of the Eastborough Baptist Church, who had passed into Heaven a year earlier after having long served his Creator by preaching such wisdom as "When Fags Die, God Laughs." Wanda supposed there had to be some kind of limit to what souls coming into Heaven could order for their domicile, but she figured Calvin had been especially rewarded for his decades of filial service. Calvin wanted to entertain his fellow Angels by inviting them to sit in the square and listen to concerts as they were waited on by his staff of Celestial servants.

However awe inspiring her surroundings as she worked on the last of the square’s ornate and opulent houses, Wanda had been glad she’d come late to the project. The sizable crew of Damned carpenters and artisans was working from precise plans, which had been drawn up in part by several of the very same architects who had rebuilt the original buildings in the 17th Century after their destruction by the order of Louis XIV of France. Thus, there was no flexibility in the proceedings, no room for personal artistic choices. It was not what Wanda was accustomed to, or preferred. She was much more gratified by the project she had now been switched to. As gratified as she could be by this labor, at least.

Wanda had only met Calvin personally once, and he had looked her body up and down as if to demonstrate that he wasn’t one of his hated homosexuals. Wanda had grown afraid then, because she knew she was attractive, and she had heard rumors that Calvin and other Angels sometimes took the Damned to bed, and could be as rough with them as the Demons in Hades were. But Calvin’s attention had been diverted elsewhere a moment later, to her relief, and he’d seemed to forget about her after that.

The woman whose home she was currently working on, however, struck Wanda as being much more pleasant, and she even watched her work on occasion. Presently Wanda was sketching in a figure with charcoal, making it life-size, as befitted the mural that would run the length of the entrance hallway on both walls. The woman had pretty much only specified that she wanted the vaulted ceiling to be blue with fluffy clouds and flying birds, and that lovely figures should adorn the walls, as if guests to her home would be entering a Heaven within Heaven. The homes of the Angels demonstrated that Heaven could be shaped to the vision of each blessed soul, but this woman—not being an artist—trusted Wanda’s artistic ability in envisioning her vision for her.

"It’s wonderful," the woman said, as Wanda roughed in one of the figure’s hands, reaching out to touch the hand of a smiling child. "You don’t even need to work from photographs. You have it all up here." She tapped her own temple, as if her brain and all its complex cells resided within her skull, though in reality that brain was beginning to rot in a coffin somewhere in the material world. They were both animated statues, in a way, created in the likeness of their mortal selves—the artwork of the Creator Himself.

"Thanks." Wanda smiled over her shoulder at the woman politely.

The woman, whose name was Suzanne and who had died at the age of fifty-three from cancer, shifted her admiring gaze from sketched figure to figure, in their present state a waltz of transparent ghosts. "Did you go to school for this, Wanda?"

"No, actually. Art was my hobby. I worked in Human Resources for an electronics manufacturer." Now she was part of Hades’ Inhuman Resources, she thought.

"Oh my. Well, I envy you. What I wouldn’t give to be able to paint, or play an instrument, or do something creative." Suzanne sighed wistfully. "Though I suppose I have all eternity to learn something like that, now. Maybe you could teach me, hm?"

Wanda smiled at her again. She knew it was said playfully. Bringing Damned laborers into Heaven to construct and adorn houses for Angels was one thing, but she sincerely doubted that the Damned would ever be employed as art instructors or the like.

Suzanne soon excused herself and drifted further into her house, to see what other progress was being made. A moment later, though, Wanda heard another voice behind her. Its quality might have made her confused as to whether or not it came from a man or woman, had she not already recognized the owner of that voice.

"You should try not to engage the Angels in conversation," it said.

Out of an apprehensive respect, Wanda turned around fully to address the speaker. "I’m sorry, but she initiated the conversation. It would have been rude of me not to respond to her." She had tried not to sound argumentative in her self-defense.

This new person let the matter drop, as it directed its eyes to the mural behind Wanda. "You work quickly. Good. It’s coming along well. When do you think you can begin the actual painting?"

"It will be soon." What could she say—a few days? A week? Again, there were no real days, though the Damned did still use that term, based upon the rest periods that broke up periods of work or, if one were in a torture plant for instance, grueling suffering.

The Celestial stepped closer to the sketched mural, absorbed, as if filling in the brush strokes to come with its gaze. Wanda had learned this sort of Celestial being was dubbed a Seraph. This Seraph, whose name was Zaraiah, was one of the Overseers for the construction of Angels’ dwellings, and thus in charge of this particular project. Until meeting these Overseers in the course of her work in Heaven, the only Celestials Wanda had ever been exposed to were the ones who accompanied Angel tourists into Hades to serve as their bodyguards, such as when those tourists hunted the Damned for sport. That Celestial caste of warriors was also sent into Hades to oppose uprisings of the Damned, and to do battle with factions of rebellious Demons. Therefore, with all the current turmoil in Hades, Wanda had seen quite a few of these beings. But they were mute, even struck her as automatonic. Zaraiah could have been one of them, at least in appearance. The Seraph had white-blond hair, shoulder length, and skin so white it gave off a subtle luminescence. Eyes of such an uncanny glowing blue that when the entity turned its head, brief afterimages of blue light marked the air as when a child twirls a flashlight in the dark. The toga the being wore fell loosely from a frame that was slim but athletic, and which was as androgynous as the face with its fine cheekbones and full, cupid-bow lips. So androgynous that Wanda still didn’t know whether to consider Zaraiah a male or a female. She supposed that, owing to what the creature was and the fact that its kind had existed before men and women had come into being, its sex could not be an issue. Its kind were the direct creations of the Father, not of procreation. The Creator’s perfect art, not human offspring like copies degraded through repetition.

The Celestials she was accustomed to never spoke a word, but she knew them to be just as harsh as the Demons whose function it was to preside over and torment the Damned. So despite the Seraph’s softly modulated voice, like the voice of a feminine man or a masculine woman, she always feared saying something that might be deemed impertinent, and incurring the thing’s righteous wrath.

"When I look at this," Zaraiah said, "and watch you at your craft, I see the hand of the Creator inside you…and I cannot help but wonder how a soul given such a gift could have allowed herself to become Damned."

First of all, Wanda did not like the image of the Creator’s hand inside her, rammed up her ass as if she were His puppet. Second of all, she did not think she had allowed herself to become Damned. The game was unfair; she had not known the rules. Or had she, and just never taken them seriously? She had the letter B branded onto her forehead (the one wounding that never regenerated) to indicate her sin, her great crime: that of being a Blasphemer. She probably would have been condemned to Hades anyway, simply for not having embraced the Father in life, but she knew it was one particular act that had cinched it for her. For an art show meant to protest animal abuse, she had contributed a painting of a lab monkey crucified to a cross, the top of its head opened up and electrodes drilled into its skull like a crown of thorns, a huge syringe hanging out of its side like a spear. That was all it took. Monkey as the Son of the Father? One would have thought she was Darwin, for all the punishment she had been meted out ever since her premature death.

"Well," Wanda replied, "at least I’m doing something constructive with my gift now, right? Making pretty pictures for Angels?"

She had tried to make her sarcasm sound like sincerity, but the Seraph immediately turned its head to stare at her with bland, robot-like disapproval, leaving those blue trails in the air.

"Yes. Now you are doing good. Now that it is too late to save you."

««—»»

"Here, dear, wait," Suzanne had said, scurrying to catch up with Wanda as Zaraiah and his team of silent guards, armed with sheathed swords and cradled submachine guns, escorted the slaves toward the edge of her property. She huffed as she pressed a package into Wanda’s arms. "Some fruit, from the garden," she whispered conspiratorially. "Delicious. Share it with your friends if you want; there’s more where that came from. It grows overnight after you pick it."

"Thanks," Wanda said uncertainly. She glanced nervously toward Zaraiah. Sure enough, the Seraph had noticed, but what could it say? It mustn’t insult one of the Angels by making her withdraw her gift, right? From here, Wanda couldn’t read the being’s expression. Then again, even up close she found that difficult. Ectoplasmic androids, she thought.

The workers climbed into the back of a large carriage of white lacquered wood with gold trim, drawn by a team of white horses. In Hades, on their way back to their barracks for their rest period, they would ride in a black metal carriage pulled by a team of naked Damned wearing yokes fastened to their shoulders with bolts through their flesh.

The two rows of laborers rode in silence as the carriage conveyed them to the portal. When they arrived, the Celestial guards who had accompanied them watched them disembark. Zaraiah was still with them. Wanda felt the Celestial officer’s eyes still following her, but she pretended she didn’t notice. They began to file toward the portal, housed inside a small white structure like a pillbox. Two more Celestials guarded it, and at the approach of the Damned one of the guards turned the wheel of a metal hatch like something from the inside of a submarine. Steam hissed free as the hatch was swung open. Wanda could just make out the white-tiled walls of its interior through the bright white light that filled the little structure.

Right up until it was her turn to approach the threshold of the portal, Wanda expected Zaraiah to step forward and demand that she hand over the package of fruit. But the Seraph did not, though she still felt the weight of its cold blue eyes on her back before the white light burned her soul to ashes that would be reconstituted in Hades, which was her home.

««—»»

"Did the mistress tell you what colors she wanted these figures to be wearing?" Zaraiah asked, watching Wanda as she swabbed in the green lawn of the background in rough up-and-down strokes. She would work on the fine details of grass blades later in the process.

"No; she’s left all that to me. She said she wants it to have a feel like A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, by Georges Seurat. Idyllic like that. But in a romantic style, not pointillism. If any of that makes sense to you."

"I’m afraid my knowledge of earthly art is limited." After a few moments, the Seraph went on, "So do you have all the colors worked out in your head, then?"

"Some of it. I’ll make choices as I go along, to keep things balanced."

Zaraiah paced behind her, as if the Celestial might leave the hallway to monitor the progress of other workers in the building, but came pacing back the other way again. "You follow your instincts."

"Yes. I improvise. And I take advantage of happy accidents. I surprise myself when I push the brush a certain way and it looks just the way a wave of hair should look, or how light should fall on a fold of cloth. The trick is to not overwork it—to know when to leave it, and move on."

Wanda surprised herself that she had become so talkative with the creature, but then its inquisitiveness had prompted her, and she was less in awe of it with it behind her back where she couldn’t see it.

"It’s all very interesting," Zaraiah said.

Something had been on Wanda’s mind for a while, and now with the Celestial engaging her in pleasant conversation she decided to seize the moment. She turned to face it, steeling herself for those beautiful and ghastly blue eyes that never seemed to blink. "In the city of Carceri I had some artist friends who contributed to the gallery I founded. They do beautiful seascapes and landscapes, sculptures and so on. I think the mistress and other Angels would love having their work in their homes. Do you think we could bring some of them into this project, too?"

"That is not for either you or I to decide."

"But could you suggest it to someone? Their talents could be put to good use…for the benefit of the Angels."

"For their benefit? Or for the benefit of your friends? So that they too might walk in Heaven a while? Enjoy the fruits of the blessed?"

The pleasantness was slipping away, though the entity’s expression and tone hadn’t changed that much. Still, Wanda pressed on. "To be honest, it isn’t so much that. It’s that they have skills that are going to waste. Ability that could be appreciated by others."

"As I told you, it is not for me to decide or you to suggest. These matters are determined by others. They have their reasons for who they select."

"Then I guess I’m one of the lucky ones," Wanda said, with barely contained bitterness.

"You are fortunate, yes. To step within the glory of Heaven, even as a slave. And to give pleasure to the Angels is the greatest honor of your eternal existence."

"Will it buy me salvation?"

"You squandered your salvation. It will buy you respite. That will have to be enough."

Suzanne entered the hallway then, and clasped her hands together in front of her with delight. "Oh…oh…it’s more beautiful by the hour, honey." She addressed Zaraiah, beaming. "Isn’t she wonderful?"

The Seraph seemed to falter before getting out, "Her gift from the Creator is to be admired."

"Oh, I’m so jealous of her. Can you imagine being able to do this? And to have a face like this, on top of it all." Suzanne stepped closer and cupped Wanda’s cheek, turning to Zaraiah like a proud parent. "Isn’t she lovely? Some people are just so lucky. I think she’s a dead ringer for the actress Scarlett Johansson."

At least Wanda had died recently enough to share the woman’s frame of reference, so she smiled and said, "Thanks. Me and the Overseer here were just talking about luck."

"I have this habit of trying to compare everybody to a celebrity," Suzanne went on obliviously. "I think I look like Jane Fonda. Not Barbarella Jane Fonda, but maybe younger than she is now. Or am I being too kind to myself?"

"No, no, I can see it," Wanda lied.

"And what do you think about our Zaraiah here? I can almost think of someone but I’m not sure."

Wanda looked at the Seraph. A celebrity to match it? Male or female? Without thinking, she said, "I don’t know…they all pretty much look the same to me."

Zaraiah met her eyes a little too quickly. The creature looked like it might become blatantly angry for the first time. In a tighter than usual voice, it said, "If you’ll excuse me, I will go look in on the other workers now."

Watching the faintly glowing figure leave the hallway like a ghost headed to haunt other regions of its castle, Wanda wondered if she hadn’t so much insulted the Seraph as hurt its feelings.

««—»»

Suzanne had handed her a package of pastries, with a wink. Again, Wanda waited for the Seraph to confiscate it from her. Again, it did not.

But when she stepped through the portal on the other side, things were different. The metal carriage awaited, and the yoked Damned, and several of the towering and ancient gray Demons. The sky of molten lava churned and glowed behind the monsters, silhouetting their great horned heads. The apparent oldest of these Demonic officers had cracks in his pumice-like skin that showed the yellow glow of magma within.

Immediately, this very Demon strode toward Wanda, trailing smoke from his empty eye sockets. Could he smell the pastries where the last time he hadn’t detected the fruit, or had she been betrayed by another Damned seeking the Demon’s favor? Whatever the case, he snatched the package out of her hand, tore it to fragments without even glancing at the scattered contents, and then seized Wanda by the hair at the back of her head. He lifted her off her feet until they were face-to-face. She felt the heat that blazed out of his eye holes in rippling waves.

The Demon thundered, "Enjoying our vacation in Paradise, are we? Maybe you forget the true state of affairs. Maybe you need a little perspective restored…pretty little worm."

Wanda’s sob was cut off by the Demon as he clamped his mouth over her own. And even the gurgle that tried to replace the sob was shoved back down her throat, into her chest, as the Demon regurgitated magma into her mouth. He dropped her to writhe, to smoke, before the horrified eyes of the other slaves. In a matter of what might be called hours she would look like the actress Scarlett Johansson again, but for now Wanda’s lower face had burned away and a hole melted open in her chest, like a painted canvas set on fire.

««—»»

Wanda was fashioning long folds in the robe of one of the mural’s figures, having decided to give this one rose pink attire. She had resisted the impulse to make the robe blood red. Somewhere during this process a happy accident, as she called these things, occurred. Two of the folds, forming crescent loops, looked to her like a pair of skull’s eyes.

She glanced over her shoulder. She heard the pounding of carpentry elsewhere in the house. She thought she heard a harpsichord playing; it couldn’t be Suzanne, who professed to be devoid of any talent, so maybe a Celestial played for her, or else it was a recording. And Zaraiah—the Seraph was not to be seen.

Wanda turned back to this wall of the hallway’s double mural and worked another crescent fold, smaller and lower, between the other two. Finally she added a longer drooping crescent, highlighted on its upper edge and deeply shadowed within, below the other three. A ghostly face, as if it pressed against the fabric from the other side. A dark spirit trying to tear through into the realm of Heaven.

"Do you think you could make one of the figures look like me, hon?" Suzanne asked, suddenly there behind her.

Wanda whirled, suppressing a gasp. She smiled tremulously. "Hi. Um, yeah, sure, we could do that." She looked over both walls of the mural nervously, darting her gaze from one potential figure to another.

"Would you want me to pose for that?"

"It would look more like you if you did, instead of me doing it from memory."

"Well if you don’t mind doing that, then you tell me when you’re ready, okay?"

"Sure. I will."

"Are you hungry now? I can bring you a sandwich. And I have some more of that fruit to send home with you tonight."

Wanda’s smile turned apologetic. "I’m sorry, but they don’t want me to bring home any more gifts. Against the rules, I guess."

"Oh, really? What a shame! I’m sorry to hear that."

"But thanks anyway."

"Well, you can still eat while you’re here in my home—I insist. Let me go round up something for you."

"And the others? I’d feel guilty if…"

"Oh sure, sure dear, I’ll see the others get some lunch, too. But you’re my favorite, you know." Suzanne wiggled her fingers, and floated off into her house in the direction of the kitchen, more likely to oversee the making of lunch by her staff of Celestial servants than actually prepare it herself.

Wanda returned her attention to the morose, skull-like face she had half-concealed within the figure’s robe. Subliminal advertising, she thought. She was familiar with that insidious practice and often spotted it at work in magazines. FUCK or SEX spelled out in the reflections of an ice cube in a whiskey ad. Skulls in ice cubes and cigarette smoke. Such grim images might seem opposed to the selling of a product but they still captured the subconscious eye—as did applying these techniques to ads featuring children, for instance, where a little girl might be blowing at a phallic toy saxophone while a little boy aimed the neck of a toy guitar at her from the level of his groin, wrinkles digitally airbrushed into his shorts to make it look like he had an erection in there. Yes, insidious, but it seized people’s attention without their knowing why their eyes had been hooked and reeled in. The technique hijacked the mind, stole inside it, and sold products.

What did Wanda have to sell?

She tried not to hate Suzanne for her grating sweet voice, her beaming eyes like those of a drugged or insane person, her neatly cut club sandwiches and her tinkling harpsichord music. It wasn’t her fault, all this, was it? Wanda felt she shouldn’t begrudge Suzanne’s good fortune. Instead of being petty and envious, she should be happy that this human being, at least, didn’t have to suffer, too. Suzanne was kind. Human. Not one of those Angels who traveled to Hades on tours to rape women and children and hunt the Damned with bows or high-powered rifles. But for Suzanne to say she envied Wanda. To say Wanda was lucky. Oh, she just didn’t know how it was on the other side of the portals. She just didn’t have a clue. If she and others like her really cared, really empathized, wouldn’t they be trying to do more than just hand out the occasional box of cream-filled pastries, like scraps of meat to a dog whose beatings they turned a blind eye to?

Wanda switched brushes. She focused her attention on the background, which she had thought was finished on this wall. She squeezed several shades of green and pink onto her smeary palette, eyeing a large rose bush that she had placed in one corner.

Camouflaged within the leaves, the flowers, she began to work the visage of the Demon who had lifted her so close to his face moments before his kiss and the molten lava he vomited down her throat. She rendered his face like that of a pagan "green man" design made of foliage, leaves for flesh, his eyes and jagged piranha mouth formed of dark shadows. No nose, as was the case, and a suggestion of his curling ram horns trailing off into the roses’ twisted vines.

As she painted in deft quick strokes, not quick because she was being furtive but quick because she felt true inspiration, Wanda thought of two things. One was a line from Frida Kahlo, one of her very favorite artists: "I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality."

This is my reality, Suzanne.

The other thought, as she glanced up at the hallway’s arched ceiling, which she hadn’t got to yet, was how easy it would be to hide things within the billowing white substance of clouds.

««—»»

Wanda was on a stepladder, her forearm speckled with blue and white pigment as she pushed around the wet paint of a cloud with churning strokes, when Suzanne entered from outside with two friends in order to show off the work in progress. Suzanne introduced Wanda by name but the women only grunted, barely acknowledging her. After surveying the more completed of the two walls, one of the friends said dubiously, "Mm, it’s nice. I don’t know." Her gaze darted from figure to figure, from rose bush to flower bed. She was frowning vaguely.

"Hm," said the other woman, more vaguely. Without looking down at this woman, Wanda wondered if she might have spotted the word HATE in the long hair of one figure and the word PAIN in the blossomed branches of a cherry tree. She hoped she hadn’t made them too obvious.

"Well, she isn’t finished yet," said Suzanne, "but it’s going to be marvelous, don’t you think? In life Wanda worked for an electronics company, but now she’s followed her true calling, haven’t you, dear? You see—it’s never too late to realize your dreams."

"My dreams," Wanda whispered to herself. "More like I’ve realized my nightmares." She thought again of the Kahlo quote.

Suzanne had ushered her friends into her home for tea, leaving Wanda smiling thinly as she continued with the challenge of hiding the fanged jaws of a lizard Demon in the ethereal softness of cloud vapor.

The work shift had nearly come to its end. When she came down from the ladder, Zaraiah drifted into the hallway, rich with its scents of paint and thinner (as reproduced by the spiritual matter of which the afterlife was composed). The being’s eyes went straight to the mural in appraisal. "You go back and work again on faces and flowers and such that I thought you’d completed already."

"As the whole thing takes form, I change my mind about things."

"That, there, is our mistress Suzanne."

"Yes. She asked me to put her in the picture herself." Wanda and Zaraiah both took in the portrait. "Art’s always been thought of as a kind of immortality, for both the subject and the painter. Leaving our mark on the world."

"Now you know there is a greater immortality, and that the marks you make are made on the soul."

Wanda felt emboldened by their familiarity, as such, to say, "What I’ve found is that immortality sucks. But at least I don’t have to grow old, huh? It’s ironic that I’ll always be this age, young, and Suzanne is the Angel but she has to be older than me for eternity. At least I never have to worry about these things sagging." She cupped her own generous breasts through the fabric of her top. Zaraiah quickly averted its eyes. She found this amusing. Was the Seraph so modest? Or was it something more interesting than that? For the first time, Wanda wondered if it wasn’t just her artwork that the Celestial being admired.

"When this piece is done, there will be another project lined up for you," Zaraiah said, staring at the painting again, this time in what Wanda felt was a conscious effort to avoid looking at her.

"And another after that? I mean, will this go on indefinitely?"

"No, it will not. It would not be allowed. You are more comfortable than most of the Damned; much more privileged, in being permitted into Heaven even in this way. You know from experience that comfort for the Damned cannot be tolerated for long. It is against the purpose of Hades, isn’t it?"

"So my commission will end soon."

"We don’t know when it will end. But there are other artists who will be used instead. It is beyond my control, so do not ask me to extend your commission."

"I wasn’t going to." Wanda watched the creature’s profile, too perfect in line and form like that of a Greek statue; too idealized to be real. Then she saw the thing’s eerie blue eyes narrow. The brow became intense, perplexed. An arm rose to point.

"It looks like there is a face, there, reflected in the edge of the pool."

"A face?" Wanda turned to regard her own work. "Where?"

Zaraiah stepped close to the wall. "Here. It looks like a dark face is reflected in the water. A screaming face." Like someone drowning in the pool, unable to pull herself out as the robed figures cavorted, too oblivious to reach in for the drowning figure’s hand.

Wanda’s heart was thudding. "I don’t see it."

Zaraiah cocked its head sideways, then looked back over its shoulder at the artist. "This seems an intentional effect, to me."

"I think it’s just your own interpretation. Like people seeing figures in the constellations."

Zaraiah straightened, and the Seraph’s gaze was stern. "Do not do mischief here. You have been entrusted with a special task. You are not to conduct any pranks or irreverence."

"I understand that! I appreciate this opportunity I’ve been given, Overseer."

Zaraiah scrutinized both walls of the mural, then the arched ceiling of blue sky, with a new look of analysis on its face. Again, the pointing arm. "That isn’t a face in the clouds? A weeping child’s face?"

Wanda tilted back her head. "Please, Overseer…looking for dogs and sheep and things in the clouds is a game children play."

"It had better not be a game you are playing, my child," it said to her. "If the mistress complains to me about anything she sees within your work, you will be punished for it."

"Believe me, I respect Suzanne, Overseer. And I respect you, too."

Zaraiah met her eyes grimly. "Do you?"

"Yes. Yes, I do."

The Seraph broke their gaze first, then strode out of the hallway, throwing one disturbed look back at her. Wanda was good at psychology, from her days working with unhappy employees in the course of her former Human Resources job. But she wasn’t sure she understood Zaraiah’s look at all. It left her feeling uncomfortable, and doubting the wisdom of her actions. The Celestials could tear the Damned to bloody shreds with the best of the Demons.

She was surprised that the Seraph, clearly suspecting her secreted images, hadn’t demanded that she do away with them. Was it going to turn a blind eye to her defiance, or would the order to destroy the subliminal images be forthcoming later? For a wild moment or two she considered going in and obliterating them on her own, but she decided against it. So what if the Celestials punished her, tortured her? Demon or Celestial, it was all the same. Either way, it was her eternal fate to endure.

««—»»

Just prior to the next work period, she was torn by a Demon into bloody shreds.

As the gray Demon with the glowing cracks in its hide twisted her arm to rip away the last rubbery strings that connected it to its socket, in her agony and panic Wanda wondered if this violence were in fact a response to her subversive acts, a punishment ordered by Zaraiah. But as she lay trembling hard and in shock, watching her vivid blood flow down the slope of rock beneath her, she thought that if Zaraiah had indeed wanted to punish her, the Seraph wouldn’t have permitted her to remain on the team of artists and laborers shuttled from Hades to Heaven like children between divorced parents. And yet the same Demon who had pulled her out of line and attacked her now picked her up and flung her into the black metal carriage like a doll, to be transported with the others to the portal. He kicked away her dismembered limb, leaving it to rot, knowing that a new one would emerge from her shoulder in a matter of hours. Pain-wracked hours.

They arrived at the nearest of the portals between afterlifes, and two of the other slaves helped support Wanda so she could walk. They were still supporting her when they emerged from the brightly glowing interior of the pillbox-like structure on Heaven’s side. Her uniform was black but shiny with her blood, which still oozed from her shoulder though the wound had mostly closed already. Wanda lifted her head, her face a mask of glittering red spatter. She saw that Zaraiah was staring at her.

"What happened?" the Seraph asked.

When Wanda couldn’t form words, one of the Damned who held her up spoke for her. "Our Demon Overseer did this to her."

"Why? Why her?"

"He didn’t say." The slave shrugged timidly. "They don’t need a reason. Today it’s her, tomorrow it’s me. They do this to us. It’s Hades, Overseer."

The Seraph tore its eyes from Wanda, leaving transient brush strokes of blue in the air. "Do not let the mistress see her this way. Once we reach the estate, she will remain inside the carriage until she is healed. Make her comfortable. I will go speak to the Demon Overseer now." Zaraiah started moving toward the closed, submarine-style hatch.

"Why?" Wanda croaked.

Zaraiah stopped at the sound, faced her. "Why what?"

"Why…speak to him?" she managed.

"This can’t be permitted. You are needed to do work here, not waste time regenerating lost limbs. And we cannot have the Angels unsettled by such a sight."

But Wanda had never seen the creature’s face set with such cold rage, the blue eyes dazzling like alien stars. The anger it had shown her when it realized the bitterness disguised within her painting was nothing compared to this.

"Thank you," she said.

Her words seemed to embarrass the entity, as when she had cupped her breasts, because just as then it turned away sharply and continued on to the metal hatch—to pass willingly from the beautiful dream of its home to the nightmare reality of her own.

««—»»

The work periods were long enough that even though it still seemed to take a good number of hours before Wanda’s arm had regrown, she still had time to enter the sprawling mansion at last and resume work on her mural. Her hair and face had been washed, and her blood-soaked black clothing substituted. She wore a lavender robe that fell sensuously along the curves of her young body.

"The mistress saw your condition," Zaraiah realized, when the Overseer appeared at the hallway’s inner threshold and spotted her at work.

"I’m sorry." Wanda looked nervous to be discovered this way, and her face was still white and weary from her ordeal. "The others cleaned me up a little before I came in, but she could still tell I’d been hurt. She made me take a bath and change my clothes. She’s a very nice lady."

"Mm," the Celestial grunted.

Wanda made an apologetic wincing expression. "She’s pretty upset. She said she was going to speak to you about it when she got back from visiting her friend’s house."

"I will assure her that the matter has been seen to. The Demon who injured you has been retired from service for interfering in this important project."

"Retired?"

"Yes." Zaraiah looked away from her as if to signal an end to the subject, but Wanda wondered if the Seraph had retired the towering Demon officer with its own delicately powerful hands. Still watching the creature, she saw its eyes alight where she knew they would. How could her critic and admirer help but notice the addition right away?

"I hope you aren’t offended," she said. "I changed that person to look like you. Do you think it does? Look like you?"

"Yes," Zaraiah said distantly, staring at the figure she had transmuted during the past two hours from a young woman in yellow to the androgynous Seraph in white, its perfect profile gazing off toward the horizon. "It does."

"Now you’re immortalized, too. Not in the Creator’s way, but in my own little way."

"Hm. Thank you." Not taking its eyes off its own portrait, after several long moments the Seraph went on, "I’m sorry to tell you that it’s been determined this is to be your last assignment, after all."

"I see." Wanda nodded. She didn’t doubt that this decision had been advised by Zaraiah, despite its having said that it had no input in these matters. "I understand," she told it. She was used to being fatalistic. The bad news was not unexpected.

But what she did find unexpected was, as the Seraph turned away to ostensibly go check on the headway of the other Damned laborers, Wanda caught a glistening hint of wetness in its enigmatic Celestial eyes.

The Burning House

1: The Angel

After Michael stepped through the doorway of blinding light, he found himself in a room lined in white ceramic tiles, floor and ceiling included. The room’s only feature was a riveted metal hatch with a wheel-like valve in its center, and he saw this immediately turn with a squeal. A blast of steam entered the small white chamber…followed by the first Demon Michael had met since his death, several months earlier.

"Greetings, sir," the thing said, unfolding to its full height. At eight feet tall, it had had to stoop to fit its body through the hatchway. "I am Iblis Al-Qadim—governor of this sector of Hades."

Michael almost said, automatically, "Nice to meet you" or "thanks for having me," so stunned into a sleepwalker’s state was he by the thing’s appearance. He had taken an involuntary step backwards as it had joined him in this, one of apparently countless entry points into the netherworld.

Iblis Al-Qadim’s heavy black robes did not fully hide the fact that his body was an unpleasant cross between human skeleton and insect exoskeleton. His face was more human, but a human long dead, his skin a mere black parchment clinging to jutting bone, twin stars gleaming in the deep wells of his skull sockets. Even his teeth were black, in a lipless and humorless grin. He wore a black metal miter, making him all the more towering, intricate patterns of holes in this officious headpiece showing the green flames that blazed from the top of his skull…where it had apparently been sawed open to emit them.

He carried a staff of iron with a strange swirling design at its head, either a sign of office or a weapon’s blade, or both. His shoulders were bulked with a framework under the robes to make his width more commanding, as if taking a cue from football players (maybe if the ball were a human head), and on one of these shoulders perched and squirmed what Michael at first took to be some kind of familiar. It was a black octopus, its head so bloated with, perhaps, the gases it breathed that the stretched skin was almost translucent. It had small, bat-like wings growing out of the sides of its head, above its golden eyes with their horizontal pupils.

Despite that rasping whisper of a voice coming from the scarecrow-like giant’s jaws, Michael had the strange intuition that—rather than being a mere familiar—it was the octopus that was in charge, and the looming skeleton creature merely its vehicle and mouthpiece. Were they both, then, Iblis Al-Qadim?

Seeing that Michael was still dazed, at a loss, the official went on, "Was it not your wife’s intention to join you, sir?"

Michael recovered enough of his voice to stammer, "Yes…well…not today. We decided it was best, after all, if I came here first by myself to assess the situation, so I could go back and…prepare her for it."

"I see. Very good, sir." The thing tipped its head slightly and pointed a finger twice as long as one of Michael’s at the belt gathering his white, angelic robes. A holster was clipped onto this belt, and from the holster protruded the grip of a handgun. "Did you intend to do some hunting, as well, during your stay?"

"Hunting?" Michael looked down at his gun himself, and then became horrified when he grasped the entity’s meaning. Horrified, and outraged. But even though he was an immortal Angel—and this creature, however seemingly important, a lowly Demon who could be killed because he had no immortal soul—Michael was too intimidated to raise his voice to the being. He kept his tone stern but even. "My son is one of the Damned now, is he not? So I should hardly think I’d want to hunt any of the Damned for sport."

"I see, sir. Many do, of course."

"I’m aware of that. And those Angels should be here in place of many of the Damned. But my Father works in ways even more mysterious than I suspected when I was alive."

The Demon paused with apparent discomfort. "That isn’t for me to say, sir."

"The gun is for my protection," Michael explained tersely.

"We will see that no Damned assault you during your stay. And of course, you are not capable of being killed, or injured for very long, so…"

"I’m well aware of that."

"Of course you are, sir. In any case…allow me to take you to your quarters, now. We have insured your comfort, for the duration of your stay."

"Thank you, but I’d really rather get to where my son is, as quickly as I can."

"Yes, as I understand, sir…but you see, first we must ascertain his whereabouts, and we will assist you in every way we can, in that endeavor."

"His whereabouts?" Now Michael felt too great a heat rising in him to be cowed by the cadaverous titan. "What do you mean? Do you mean to tell me that you don’t know where my son is?"

"We know the general vicinity, sir…we feel confident he is still in this territory that I govern, and that is why you were directed to this portal. But we have not yet been able to narrow down his exact location."

"I don’t believe this!" Michael snapped. "This is unacceptable! My son is suffering here, do you understand? He’s in Hell and he could be tied to a stake in the middle of a bonfire right this moment!"

"You see, sir, there is a breakdown in our former lines of communication. Gaps, and irregularities. Our methods of intelligence gathering, and monitoring of the Damned, have become eroded. I’m sure you have been informed of the conflict we are facing here—the rebellion of certain breeds of the more human-like Demons. These species are to be phased out, but they are resisting violently. There is an atmosphere of chaos, I am sorry to report, that has…"

"Look," the Angel snarled, retaking that step he had lost when the monster had entered the portal chamber with him, "I want my son located immediately, do you understand? I don’t care if it takes every Demon in your jurisdiction…I want him found! I want my boy brought to me!"

"We will do that, sir. But you understand, of course…even when we find him, you may not bring him out of Hades with you. You cannot take him to Heaven. He will still be one of the Damned."

"I am only too aware of that, believe me. I am only too fucking aware that my son is damned for all eternity because he didn’t have a little holy water dribbled on his head by some fucking child-molesting priest…doomed the same as murderers and rapists because a few words weren’t said to placate the Creator that I’d put my trust in for my entire fucking life!"

"It is a pity," the Demon stated in its emotionless, sepulchral hiss. "But as a religious man, sir—if I may presume to ask you this question—why did you not have your child baptized, since you and your wife obviously were yourselves?"

"My wife is my second wife; my son’s stepmother. She was a Catholic in life, as I was. But my first wife—my son’s mother—was always an atheist. She was very adamant about my son not becoming baptized or even attending church until he was old enough to make that decision for himself, as an adult."

"And you gave in to her desires."

"I gave in. Yes, I gave in." Michael was still seething. His voice trembled with his stoppered fury.

"It must have been a great source of enmity between your wife and yourself—you being devout, and she denying the Creator."

"That’s why she’s my ex-wife…isn’t it?"

"And she is still in the world of the living?"

"She’s alive, yes. She’s there, still breathing…still not believing. Maybe even disbelieving more than ever, in her grief. But she’ll learn one day, won’t she? Learn how wrong she was. When she joins her son in Hades. And then she can apologize to him. She’d fucking damn well better apologize to him!"

"Come, sir," Iblis Al-Qadim said, sweeping his arm, in a tone that almost sounded sympathetic. "Let me take you to your quarters. And I assure you—the search is already underway."

"Why did I listen to her? Why was I so weak?" the Angel lamented.

"Sir?" The Demon had his hand on the metal door’s wheel.

Michael grunted, and in starting forward met the eyes of the mollusk-thing poised like a parrot on one of the Demon’s shoulders. An uncanny intelligence glowed in them. He remembered what Iblis Al-Qadim had said—the human-like Demons being gradually phased out, because of the revolts incited by several demonic races. Was he looking at Iblis Al-Qadim’s replacement-in-training?

He saw that one of its glistening tentacles had reached out and curled with insidious slowness around the handle of that great iron staff.

2: The Damned

Before they became lovers, both of them had lain with Demons.

In one region of Hades, Roger had been captured in his wanderings by a group of Apsaras, as their breed had been named by the Damned (since the Demons themselves tended not to give appellations to their many races). The blue-skinned Apsaras were beautiful and terrifying, with voluptuous perfumed bodies and long black hair that swam in the air above their heads endlessly as if they were drowned women under the sea, their dark eyes blazing and tusk-like fangs curving up from their lips. During his confinement, which may have lasted a year or more (how could he judge?), the Apsaras would seize him and arouse him against his will…rape him. Somewhere in the course of this—like a female mantis consuming the head of her mate as he copulates with her—the Demon would rip his throat open with her fangs, or dismount him as he climaxed and tear off his manhood with her powerful hands (it seemed to be a sport, with the Apsaras, to pluck the organ just as it squirted), or bite off his member as she fellated him, or slash his scrotum open with her long nails to eat the savory oysters of his testes. But there were male Demons in this territory as well, incubi known as the Asuras, and they had performed their own brand of sex acts on him, or forced him to perform acts upon them, followed by the usual mutilations. These torments became almost mundane (if no less excruciating) with time, and of course he always fully recovered later on, regenerating whole once more so that he could be rent afresh the next time around.

Davina, on the other hand, had served as one of the living spawning machines in the city of Tartarus, where many species of Demon were manufactured, so to speak, by Damned laborers. Usually the processes employed were more mechanical in nature; Demons were baked from various ingredients like cakes or injection-molded like plastic, grown in dark cellars like mushrooms or developed in bubbling solution like fetal clones—but certain types of these homunculi, these infernal golems, gestated inside human hosts. The sort of Demon that had been grown inside Davina’s body were dubbed Kilcrops—ghastly cadaverous things, always laughing, that never seemed to mature beyond adolescence. She had been captured by a roving Demon squad, taken to Tartarus and put to this use. On a regular basis, she had been raped by the incubus breed called the Asuras. She had lost count of the pregnancies (maybe two hundred?), each lasting what she thought of as thirty days. There was no actual day or night, but the Damned counted days in terms of work periods. Then again, the work periods were so very long.

The farm girls, as they thought of themselves, were treated fairly well, aside from the rapes that planted the devil seed, but even those were intended more as business than punishment. Not that it made much of a difference to Davina. To her knowledge, no laborer had ever escaped a city so full of Demons as Tartarus, but after a while the farm girls and other workers were released and replaced with new souls. Her understanding of this was: rather than being a mercy, or a thanks for their service, it was to insure that they did not get too comfortable in Hades. Again, even a torture could seem commonplace and predictable with repetition. A man, say, locked in a hanging cage and pecked at by an infernal breed of crow would be liberated after a time (maybe a week, a month, a decade by human measurement), so as to wander free for a while and encounter fresh manifestations of anguish.

««—»»

Hades was full of settlements, either constructed and populated entirely by the Damned, or else by the Damned and the Demons in combination. There was everything from thatch-roofed hamlets to metropolises of soaring high-rises, these skyscrapers either familiar or uncanny in their varied outlines. Many times the look of the town or city had to do with the period of human history its Damned citizens came from, though mostly these characteristics became blurred and blended with the coming of new generations.

Certain colonies of Hades alternated between freezing cold and scorching hot, as if each day contained the seasons of a year. Some were built in the shadow of glaciers, where it was eternally frigid, sleet ever stinging the skin, the rooms of the buildings heated with whatever meager measures the Damned themselves could devise.

Other cities were ever burning. Maybe not with blistering, charring earthly fire—how then could the citizenry move about freely, so as to roam to the next place of suffering?—but with a lesser blue flame that nonetheless consumed a city like Apollyon entirely, the flames lapping high into the air so that every street, every room was filled with this hot blue light, so that it filled your mouth when you spoke or slept. It needed no fuel, it never ran out, it was silent and did not crackle. After a while, you could almost forget the pain it caused in every nerve of your body. Almost.

Roger and Davina had drifted to the city of Apollyon at about the same time; it was where they met. He had been an atheist in life, a British soldier killed by a German machine gun in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, when he was twenty-eight years old. In September of 1993, at the age of twenty-three, Davina had been killed along with eleven-thousand other Indian people in an earthquake. She assumed all eleven-thousand victims, being Hindus rather than devout Christians, must be here in Hades with her. He assumed a fair number of the million-plus casualties of the Somme offensive were here for one reason or another, as well. But Hades was infinite. Hades had room enough for all.

The first time Roger and Davina had made love, the sea of flame they were submerged in caused so much pain to their uncovered bodies that it left little room for pleasure. But they stared at each other’s faces as he lay atop her. And they smiled.

Later, they had met the boy. Mark had died only recently, and Apollyon was the first city he’d encountered. He told them he had burned to death at the age of eight, and it was his opinion that he was in Hades not only because he wasn’t baptized, but because he had caused the fire that had killed him…and his parents.

Roger and Davina had pitied the child. They had taken him in as a kind of son, and it was this act as much as their love that made them kind of a husband and wife. Kind of a family.

««—»»

At least paper did not burn in the blue flame, and the Demons of Apollyon apparently did not deem it worth their time to otherwise destroy the books that Roger and his fellow workers produced, nor the presses they printed them on. Roger was adept with machines, and had helped improve these presses and the binding equipment—all designed and built by the Damned over many years—since settling in Apollyon. Currently, he was inking up one of the presses to resume work on a slim volume called Beautiful Hell, a memoir written by a Damned author who had stumbled upon this city and left the manuscript in their care until he should return.

"Mark," he called, looking up but not seeing his boy. "Bring me a fresh can of black, will you?"

A clatter, a clunk (please don’t have spilled another can of ink! thought Roger), and the child appeared from another room, bearing a metal can, looking eager to be of help. His adoptive father even paid him several coins of the netherworld’s currency, every "week," for the scraps of work he performed about the shop.

Roger noticed a smear of red on the boy’s beaming face, and grew concerned, straightened up. "Did you cut yourself?"

Setting the can down, Mark touched his cheek, examined his stained fingertips. He laughed. "No, Rog…it’s red ink. I was putting some cans away!"

His own hands slicked with black pigment, fashioned from native minerals and flora, Roger reached out and dabbed some ink on the boy’s other cheek. "There. You can at least be stained in the same color as me."

"Hey!" The boy flashed out his own hand, and ran his reddened fingertips down Roger’s forearm, leaving smudges. "Now you’re stained the same as me!"

"Watch it, watch it," Roger said, drawing back in a futile attempt to avoid the swipe. In doing so, he felt an unpleasant grinding sensation in his chest, as he did from time to time depending on the nature of his movements. He often felt it while making love with Davina, and she swore she could feel the outline of the shape tucked against his ribs, though he himself could not.

"Why did you ever do that?" she would scold him in her musical accent, her heavy black brows lowered.

"You can cut it out of me if you want," he would tease.

It was not only groups, large and small, of Demons that had begun to revolt and skirmish with the Celestial infantry sent to squash them, and with their own brother races of Demons as well. No, even groups of the Damned had taken up weapons against their Demon and Celestial oppressors alike, lashing out through guerilla warfare, terrorist acts, even full-scale battle on occasion. There had even been cases where Demons and Damned had fought together in uneasy alliance. It was a turbulent time for the eternal afterlife.

Several "months" ago, a major clash had spilled over into Apollyon. The wounded remnants of a Damned rebel outfit had taken shelter in the city, pursued by a type of Demon Roger had not as yet encountered despite his many years here; a race of bipedal tick-like creatures with pale greenish chitin. He assumed it was a brand new breed, designed as a replacement for one of the humanoid species, deemed less trustworthy now. The Damned fighters had had a few guns among them. Roger figured they had stolen these weapons from some Angels who were in Hades as tourists, or to hunt the Damned for sport, or to help out in the fight against the Damned for the sheer joy of battle (being Angels, they could quickly reconstitute after even the most grievous wounds).

Roger himself had been a witness to one messy clash, in which the last of these particular rebels were overpowered and captured by those immense ticks with their awful, scythe-like praying mantis forelimbs, and other sets of arms ending in hooks, blades and pincers like surgical—or dissecting—instruments. One of the rebels had been dropped to the cobblestoned street, an arm lopped off, and had met Roger’s eyes as he wailed. Roger had wanted to look away in shame for not going to the man’s aid or defense. But the carnage he had experienced on Europe’s battlefields, the horrors that had sent his immortal soul here, had scarred him in a way his mock cells could not repair, however miraculous their mending abilities. Or was it simply that his time in Hades had made him cowed, defeated, a dog with his growl beaten out of him? One might think that having participated in so much violence in life and endured so much violence in the afterlife would make him inured to killing, make it easy for him to resume his life as a soldier…but Roger could not see himself ever taking part in a war again.

Even though he had not gone to the wounded man, however, the gun the fighter had been gripping went spinning out of the hand of his severed arm and ended up not far from Roger’s boot. He was standing outside the print shop, and a co-worker of Roger’s had hissed at him from behind, "Rog! The gun! Get it…"

Mindlessly, Roger had taken a step toward the gun, a little semiautomatic pistol of a type designed after his time on Earth; a .25 caliber, he deduced. The gun was closer than the injured man. He might furtively retrieve the weapon without entering into the battle itself, as he would if he gripped that man’s remaining, outstretched hand.

He didn’t know if it were because he scooped up the little pistol, or because the Demon mistook him as one of the actual insurgents, but as he rose he saw a tick scurrying at him, blood from the Damned sloshing darkly in its swollen abdomen, its arms flailing, and the next thing he knew he was on his back, his chest split wide, blood spraying up from him in a fountain. He had to close his eyes against it. The spray went into his own mouth, as if to keep the fountain recycling.

Bullets from somewhere—another of the rebels—crashed into the Demon, causing both its and its victims’ blood to spatter the cobblestones, and it fell convulsing with a terrible screech. Demons could die, because they had no souls, and this one proceeded to do so.

"Rog!" his co-worker cried. This man and another dragged their friend back onto the sidewalk, then around the corner, out of sight. His co-worker took the gun from Roger’s hand, examined it a moment, looked down at the wound that would have killed a mortal man. "Rog, you need to keep this. We need to hide it." He pointed the little weapon at that terrible pumping gash. "Let me put it in there, Rog. No one will find it, and you can always get it out again if you need it."

"No," the other man said, "it could be found if he’s tortured and cut open some day. They’d put him in a snake pit for a fucking century, for having that…"

"Quiet! Rog…"

Did he nod or gurgle his assent? Maybe he did, in his delirium, or maybe his friend simply interpreted Roger’s agony that way; he couldn’t himself recall, so blanked with pain was he at the time. But the next thing he knew, his co-worker was stuffing that hard lump of metal deep inside him like a crude lover.

The co-worker had vanished from Apollyon a week later. Rumor was that the fighting had stirred him, and he himself had joined the rebel movement. And the gun…the gun still lay inside Roger’s chest, healed without trace of a scar—not even the scars of the German machine gun bullets. Inside him like a black pearl. A hunk of shrapnel. Like a dead, cold organ.

"You okay, Rog?" the boy asked, noticing the wince, seeing the man’s hand involuntarily touch his upper chest. "Did I hurt you?"

"No…I’m fine, fine." Roger smiled at him, but sadly. He hated to hear him fill so quickly with guilt, with self-blame. And he wished Mark wouldn’t call him Rog. Or Davina, Davina. Maybe someday, he hoped, the boy would truly think of them as his parents.

««—»»

Roger and Davina were awakened by the sound of a child’s screams.

There were two bedrooms in the little flat they rented; Mark’s room was the smaller, but that was like saying the other room was the larger of two closets. Both had space enough for the bed they contained, and not much else. There were lanterns and candles for light, but even with them extinguished the air had that constant blue glow. Cold burning fire, filling each room to its ceiling. When Roger and Davina opened their eyelids, it took a blinking moment or two to readjust to the pain against their bare eyeballs. It was Davina who slipped out of bed first, her skin very brown against the white pajamas she had made for herself, and shuffled barefoot from the room. Roger trailed after, not as swiftly. He knew what the screaming was about. It was not the first time.

"What is it, my baby? What’s wrong?" Davina cooed, sitting on the edge of the bed and gathering Mark up into her embrace. He wrung her in his arms, his face pressed into her chest.

"Fire," the boy spluttered through his tears. "The fire…"

"I know, my darling. I know." Davina rocked him. She glanced up at Roger, framed in the room’s threshold.

As concerned as he was for the boy’s anguish, he couldn’t help but smile proudly, affectionately at the sight of him in his lover’s arms. Her thick black hair, curly as Medusa’s, wild around her face. Those huge black eyes, so solemn and concerned. Could there ever have been a more affecting portrait of a Madonna? Still meeting his eyes, she kissed the top of the boy’s head and whispered comfort to him.

"It’s my fault," he wept. "I killed my Mom and Dad…I killed them…"

"No, my dear. No…"

"I did! I did!"

"It was an accident, my love."

"It doesn’t matter…it’s my fault…I killed them! I killed my Mom and Dad!"

At last, Roger came to the bed and sat beside Davina, took one of the boy’s hands and clasped it between both of his. "That’s not why you’re here, Mark."

"I’m bad! I’m bad!"

"No. Look at me. Look at Davina. Are we bad, too, Mark?"

The boy didn’t raise his face from her warm breasts, but his muffled voice said, "No-o…"

"It’s not fair, the things that happen. The fire. Us being here. Not fair, then, is it? But we don’t have to accept it. We may have to live with the pain of things, but we don’t have to accept them. I don’t accept that I belong here. I don’t accept that you belong here. That’s what makes us human—that freedom they can’t beat from us or bleed from us—and I’ve found that being human is more important than being an Angel. Or a…deity." He sighed, still holding the child’s hand. "I must not be making sense to you. But, what I’m saying is, they can punish us from now until the universe burns out, but that doesn’t make us evil. And you, my boy, are a beautiful, beautiful soul who would shame the most powerful, most lordly, meanest and ugliest God that anyone could ever worship."

Davina put a hand to the back of Roger’s head, stroked it, and spread her lips in a smile.

3: The Searchers

Dawn hid her face in her hands, as if they might staunch the flow of her tears…as if, if she refused to look at her surroundings long enough they would be gone when she uncovered her eyes, and she would be in Paradise again instead of this apartment provided for her and her husband, here in Hades.

Their Demon hosts no doubt believed they provided a comfortable and even beautiful environment for their angelic guests. The glistening, metallic scarabs that covered every inch of the walls were a living (in a sense) mosaic, that shifted every so often into an entirely new pattern of color and design. And even though Michael had assured her that last night the beetles had not swarmed off the walls and across him in his bed, she still shuddered at their numbers all around her. It wasn’t these creatures, though, that had brought her to such a state…but having been met by Iblis Al-Qadim and two lesser Demons, upon her arrival into the netherworld. Even though Michael had gone back to Paradise to fetch her personally, had told her what to expect, and held her hand when that metal hatch in the white-tiled wall squealed open, she had still gasped and squeezed her eyes shut at her first sight of the three skeletal devils—the looming governor with flame lapping out of the top of his head, inside the black miter he wore, and his two attendants: comparatively smaller and without headgear, a luminous green smoke wisping out of their open skulls in place of their superior’s emerald fire.

Neither of the lesser Demons had a black cephalopod perched on one shoulder, and the one on the governor’s shoulder seemed to have become more affectionate, or aggressive, in the mere hours since Michael had last seen it. It now had one of its slinking arms coiled tightly around Iblis Al-Qadim’s scrawny neck, like a noose.

But now Michael and Dawn were alone, and her sobs were finally diminishing…though she still refused the ice water he offered her from a pitcher. He didn’t proffer any of the brilliantly red unknown fruit, heaped for them in a silver bowl. Even he thought they looked too much like the small hearts of human children.

"And to think that Mark is in this place, huh?" Michael told her, pacing as she sat on the edge of the bed. "This is how you feel, even though you know you can return to Heaven anytime you want. Imagine being stuck in this place forever. And this," he waved an arm around the room, "this isn’t how the Damned live, down here." He still couldn’t help but think of Hades as being "down," as if beneath the Earth’s rind, though he knew it was more like a parallel dimension.

"Terrible," Dawn sniffled, at last lowering her slick hands from eyes burned red. "Terrible. I don’t think I ever really believed in a Hell," she admitted quietly, as if she herself might be damned by the confession. "Did you?"

"Yes," her husband muttered.

"I’m not even sure…I hate to say it, Mike…but I’m not even sure I really, really believed in a Heaven. I mean, I went to church every Sunday, like I was expected to…the way my parents did. But, I don’t know…I didn’t like to really think about an afterlife, even a Paradise, because…it just didn’t seem possible…"

"You see? This is what I don’t understand. The Father only counts the heads that go through the doors of His churches—He doesn’t look into their hearts. If He did, a lot of the people in Heaven would be here, and innocents like my son would be with us in Paradise. Instead of judging you by your acts, your purity, He’s…petty. He’ll throw you into the pit for buttering the wrong side of the bread."

"Honey," she looked up, "shhh!"

"I don’t care. I don’t care anymore," he grumbled. "I never thought that all Buddhists would go to Hell, even though I was told a million times there was only one way to get to Paradise—through the Son. I never believed every Muslim, every Jew, every atheist would be punished without even a look at their souls! It’s insane…it’s crueler than anything I could have imagined, even from Satan. And now, of course, I understand. There never was a Satan. Just our Dad—the big old Yin/Yang. He’s the real Lucifer. The angel of light, turned ruler of Hell. Angel and demon in one. Our Creator is the Devil."

"Michael," Dawn warned him, glancing with a start at the seething, rustling walls as the insects suddenly scurried over each other to reconfigure their positions. For a moment, she had thought the bugs would pour over her husband and eat him alive for his blasphemies.

"I would hate Him less if there were a Satan to blame for this." He swept his arm around him again. "But Satan is the only Demon that was created by Man. The rest are His."

"Enough, Michael, please."

He whirled to glare at her, his goateed chin thrust forward. "I believed in Him! I worshipped Him! I was devout! And here is my son, only eight years old, in fucking Hell! They’d better find him, these monsters. They better bring me to him soon or they’ll see some real wrath."

"I feel sorry for our parents," Dawn said, letting her head sag. "They don’t know our souls live on. They might think we’re gone forever. My poor Mom and Dad. I’m so glad they’re baptized…churchgoers. My brother, too." She wagged her head. "They must be so heartbroken. Now they have to live the rest of their lives thinking about how young I was when I died. The horrible way that I died. It will haunt them, every Christmas, every time my birthday comes along." She moaned. "Why did he have to fool around with matches…why?"

"You blame him," Michael stated. She lifted her head. His sudden calm tone frightened her more than his furious rants. "You blame him for us being killed."

"Michael, I’m only saying…"

"He’s a child. I played with fire, too, when I was a kid. Burning my toy soldiers, watching their faces melt. Seeing how paper burned, Styrofoam. Who left those matches out, by the way?"

"You always liked the candles I burned. Their smell," Dawn managed weakly, close to tears again. "I thought you liked them…"

"You left the matches out."

"So now it’s my fault? You say I hate Mark for doing this to us, but I don’t! I’ve gone to Paradise; I’m not the unlucky one, he is. But don’t you think that tortures me, too? I loved him! You might not believe that, but I loved him like he was my own son. It isn’t that I blame Mark…the thing is, you blame me! You blame me, for what happened to us. And for him being here."

Michael came over to her, spreading his arms open, looking appropriately angelic in his white robes. With his slicked-back, short dark hair and neat goatee, she thought he resembled a modernized Jesus. He put his arms around her and she began sobbing, again, against his chest.

"I don’t blame you, baby. I don’t." He rubbed her back in circles. "We didn’t make this place, did we? We didn’t make these rules. Look…there’s nothing you can really do here. There’s no sense in your staying. I’ll take you back."

"But I wanted to be with you," Dawn whimpered, clutching him. "And I wanted to see Mark. Really."

"When I find him, I’ll come get you again."

"But how long do you think you’ll be here, honey?"

"As long as it takes."

"Well, if you find him, what then? We can’t take him back with us…"

"I don’t know, what then. All I know is I want to see my boy. I want to be sure he’s not in pain. I can’t bear it, Dawn…I can’t bear the thought of my boy suffering…"

««—»»

The Demon seated importantly behind a desk of black marble resembled Iblis Al-Qadim and his underlings in that he appeared like an unwrapped and reanimated mummy, his jointed body vaguely insectoid, but above his skull-like face his head ballooned into a huge translucent sphere, almost like a boneless fluid-filled sack that Michael was surprised the thing’s neck could support. The governor and this Demon had exchanged a few guttural gurgles in an alien tongue, and now the globe-headed entity turned the fiery pinpricks of his eyes to Michael, staring at him intensely. It’s probing me telepathically, he thought, using me to get Mark’s scent. He could almost feel the Demon’s bony digits unraveling the knotted convolutions of his brain and fingering them like the beads of a rosary.

Seated opposite the creature, Michael fidgeted in his chair, vaguely nervous, as if he were a young man applying for his first job. But it had been a long time since Michael had squirmed before a superior. He had died a career military man, an officer, a decorated veteran of the Gulf War. A man on the ground, not on a plane, not directing rockets through windows as if playing a video game. He had two confirmed kills; two faces he had looked into before he had extinguished the life behind them. And were his victims in Hell with him, even now? He had heard that in Hades, infinite as it was, the Damned were prevented somehow from encountering their relatives or spouses, even their friends from life. Would that mean that when his first wife died, she would not be permitted to join her son? It must mean exactly that. He wished he could warn her, like Marley visiting Scrooge, to change her destiny. Despite how disillusioned he had become with his faith, Michael prayed that his former wife would change her mind about religion and become baptized at last, so that she could move about freely between Heaven and Hell as he did. So she could see her son again…if Mark truly could be located.

The globe-headed Demon broke their gaze, and Michael went a little limp in his chair. Had he merely been tensed, or had the thing’s brain been holding him transfixed? The Demon looked up at Iblis Al-Qadim and gave a gravelly hiss.

"You are in luck, sir," the governor announced. "We have found him. It was helpful that he has not strayed considerably from his original point of entry. He is in a city called Apollyon—not far at all from this palace."

"Take me there," Michael said.

"As you wish, sir."

Michael rose from his seat, and nodded at the telepathic Demon in a kind of gruff thanks. But he could feel no real gratitude. The Demons did not sympathize with his plight, were merely being courteous because he was an Angel. These were the things that inflicted misery upon the Damned…and who could tell what this being’s brothers might be doing to his child even now.

4: The Skull

As Roger and Mark wound their way through the twisty, narrow streets of Apollyon, returning home from the print shop, they passed a pair of emaciated, child-like Kilcrops, but the Demons only giggled at them horribly as they turned the corner. Glancing back at the creatures, Roger couldn’t help but wonder if either or both of them had been grown inside his lover’s body.

"One thing I like about Hell," Mark resumed saying, now that the Demons were out of view, "is there’s no school here."

"Now, now," Roger scolded. "I should school you myself, just for saying that. You’re a smart boy…you shouldn’t be thinking that way."

"But why should I learn things I’ll need when I grow up, if I’m never going to grow up?"

"Maybe that’s another good thing about Hell," he muttered to himself. Never having to become an adult, that most awful of creatures excepting, perhaps, Demons. "It’s always important to learn and learn, as much as you can, and never ever stop learning. And there are cities and towns that have schools, you know—I’ve seen them."

"I’d rather just work with you instead. Because…" he produced a few coins from his pocket "…you don’t get paid for going to school."

"Terrible. Why are you so terrible this evening?"

Mark laughed, but then stopped and said, "Wow…Rog…what is that thing?"

Still smiling, Roger turned his head to look at where the boy was pointing.

A moon appeared to hover above the roofs and chimneys, huge in the bluish sky of flame, but even as Roger watched the great sphere was floating closer, in their direction. The sphere was the color of bone, and skull-like sutures squiggled across its surface, and this was why the Damned had come to call the thing the Skull, though there were no other features. Roger had seen it before. Once, here in Apollyon, and in other colonies of the Damned as well. It migrated, wandered, seemingly at random. He was reminded of the Black Cathedral, on its networks of train tracks, and other such roving structures that one hoped never to see enter one’s town.

"Hurry up, Mark," he said, reaching for the boy’s hand. He quickened his pace.

"What is it, Rog?"

"The Skull…"

"What does it do?"

"It’s a torture factory," he told him.

Roger began to look about him for a shop that might be open, into which they might duck if need be. A stranger might even let them into their house, out of sympathy. Then again, they might not want to get involved, for fear of being gathered up by the crew of the Skull themselves.

"It’s getting close," Mark said, sounding worried.

"I know. Here. Under here." Roger broke into a little run, dragging Mark beneath a crumbling aqueduct. They pressed themselves against the damp bricks, and saw the great orb’s shadow as it slithered across the street, darkening it in a brief eclipse as the Skull passed directly overhead, before it moved on and the street glowed blue again. At no point did they hear any sound from the titanic craft.

"It’s gone," Mark whispered.

"We’ll go tell Davina. We won’t step outside for a few days. These things usually only stay in one place several days at a time."

"Okay," Mark said meekly.

They ventured out again, kept holding hands. As they walked, Roger explained, "They collect people sometimes because they see us making cities, communities, creating jobs for ourselves, families. They let it go on for so long. And then one day, they want to shake you, shake you badly, to remind you where you are. They allow the other because it makes you almost comfortable. You can’t feel discomfort without comfort. You can’t know pain without pleasure. If they skinned us alive day after day, sooner or later your mind would shut off. You would become a robot, adapt to the pain and endure it. But this way…this way is worse, in the end."

"You are like my teacher," Mark teased him, trying to make a joke of it.

"Someone has to be, and keep a rascal like you in check."

Roger had taken them through a few alleys as shortcuts, and the one they currently squeezed through was barely wide enough to admit him, even having turned his body sideways. The slime on its bricks helped lubricate his passage somewhat. Mark, of course, had an easier time. He had slipped into the alley ahead of him.

A chittering sound behind Roger made him glance back nervously. He saw a silhouette flicker briefly past the mouth of the alley, where they had entered. He hadn’t seen the figure clearly, but it hadn’t struck him as human in outline.

He looked forward again, and saw that Mark had reached the end of the alley. "Wait for me," he hissed, his palms slapping across the sludge-coated bricks as he advanced. "Mark!"

The boy cleared the alley and entered a bright street ahead. He turned to look back into the passageway. "Come on," he whispered, extending his hand.

And then, jarringly, as if Mark had dropped through a trapdoor, he was gone. For just the briefest moment Roger thought he saw the boy’s fingers rake across the bricks.

"Mark!" he called more loudly, fighting to shuffle along a little faster. He reached one arm out, clawed at the alley’s entrance, caught its edge and tugged himself clear.

It was a wide street, paved in flagstones, almost a plaza. Sometimes, the Damned even held festivals here, as on the day they judged to be Christmas (though Roger himself would no longer celebrate the birth of the Creator’s son). The Skull hovered there, above the street, one of its unevenly-shaped plates having opened along its sutures and lowered to the flagstones like a hatch or drawbridge. He heard screaming. He saw men and women being dragged up onto the hatch. Into the bone-colored globe.

And he saw Mark. Because he was only a child of eight, it took just one of the greenish tick Demons, scurrying on its hind legs, to restrain him and pull him along. Roger saw ribbons of blood twined around the child’s arms, from where the thing’s sharp pincers bit into him.

"You fucking bastards!" he roared, and began racing after the creature. He saw another one of them close to his right, and at his shout it turned and saw him, too. It whisked forward, chattering, and Roger knew it would catch up to him before he caught up to the one grasping Mark. He spun, ducked under the whooshing sickle of a praying mantis arm, came up and punched the thing in its bony face with its tiny bead-like eyes and blood-slickened mouthparts. He heard its chitin crack, or maybe that was the bones in his own hand, so hard did he strike the thing. It dropped onto its back, and he thought he could hear its feast of gore slosh in its expanded body. But from the ground, the Demon whipped its arms crazily, and Roger found himself dropping, the air going out of him.

Lying on his side, he looked down his body and saw that his right leg had been severed below the knee.

The fallen Demon scrambled to its feet, and used one of these to kick Roger in the arm and face, slashing him deeply across his jaw. It then ran to the aid of one of its fellows, who was having a difficult time hanging onto a large black man.

"Oh no, oh no, oh no," Roger was chanting, as he propped himself into a sitting position.

He saw Mark—almost at the hatch now—looking back at him as he struggled in his captor’s grip. There were many people wailing and sobbing in the courtyard, but Roger knew his boy’s voice. And he heard Mark call out to him, "Daaaaad!"

5: Apollyon

At first, Iblis Al-Qadim had offered Michael a ride from his palace to the city of Apollyon in a black metal carriage pulled by a team of unclad Damned, the connecting chains hooked right into their flesh, but the Angel had taken one look and refused. Now, instead they rode inside a carriage drawn by two shaggy, prehistoric-looking infernal animals of a type he had heard the Damned often killed and consumed for food.

Dotted across the landscape they traveled through, Michael saw another kind of animal, or was it an animal-like species of Demon? They reminded him of the elephants with impossibly long, thin, multi-jointed legs bearing obelisks on their backs in paintings by Salvador Dali, such as The Temptation of Saint Anthony, except that these would be headless elephants, and their backs were covered in squirming white objects like maggots, which Michael knew were naked human beings, apparently spiked directly to the thick hides of the slowly striding creatures. He could hear the wispy, faraway howling of hundreds of lamenting souls. Mostly the terrain here was barren, featureless, but presently the carriage rattled across a stone bridge spanning a wide river of blood. Distantly, one of the stilt-legged monstrosities waded like a stork through the sluggishly flowing gore to reach the opposite bank.

Were there children pinned to the tops of those behemoths, too?

As they rode on, Michael saw the Demon governor turn his head and gaze out his own window for a while. It gave Michael an opportunity to stare at the way the tentacles of the octopus were not only coiling around his neck, but now burrowing beneath his leathery skin. One tentacle had even snaked into a skull socket, putting out its bright little star of an eye. Michael had noted that the green flames erupting from the top of his head had diminished. He had also noticed that the black octopus Demon’s head had ballooned even more, a green glow showing through the stretched membrane. The miniature bat wings sprouting above its eyes fluttered uselessly.

"Not even human," Michael heard Iblis Al-Qadim murmur. "Because I walk upright? Because I have two arms, two legs? Now I am just a human, too?"

"Pardon?" Michael spoke up.

Slowly, the terrible lipless visage cranked his way, the remaining eye seeming to have grown dim in its glow as well. The Demon appeared befuddled for a moment. And then, his voice grew strong and assured again, "Nothing, sir. We are nearly there…"

Apollyon’s jagged outlines reared from the bleak landscape. Michael regarded the way a bluish glow rose from the city into the air—its atmosphere of weak fire.

"Do we know where in that big city my son would be?"

"We will need to ask about, sir."

"Ask? And how long will that take?"

The Demon didn’t answer him. He found this out of character, surprisingly rude, but he didn’t pursue it.

As they approached the fortress-like wall surrounding the city, Michael realized that it was studded with countless human heads, the bodies they were attached to fossilized inside the wall’s concrete. There was scaffolding erected here and there, on which Demon overseers forced Damned laborers to chisel some prisoners free, and seal new prisoners up. Crows perched on a number of squalling heads, plucking at their hair to make their nests. Michael cursed under his breath. He felt strangely ashamed, should any of the heads peer into the carriage and see him there, an Angel resting in its plush interior.

Having passed through the wall’s main gate, the carriage soon came to a stop outside a building with statues of winged baboon-like beasts, in something of an Art Deco style, flanking its riveted iron front doors. They disembarked, Michael and the governor and two of his lesser Demons, and mounted the front steps.

Inside, they were met by a Baphomet, as they were called, another towering breed of high-ranking Demon but with a goat-like head enveloped in a veil of white fire. Iblis Al-Qadim and this thing faced each other, but neither uttered a sound. Michael realized their communication was telepathic, unless they were deciphering meaning in the lapping of their respective flames.

At last, the governor turned to look down at the Angel. "The child is known to be new to this city, and he is known to have been taken in by a printer who lives here."

"A printer?"

"He and others produce reading materials, for the entertainment of their kind. The materials are potentially inflammatory, but they have been tolerated. For the time being."

"Take me to him," Michael said.

««—»»

When Davina saw the imperial form of Iblis Al-Qadim soaring behind the white-robed Angel, she fell back with an audible gasp. They had come for her lover, she was sure of it—to punish him for smashing the face of that tick Demon…

Michael stepped through the threshold, seeing the terror on a face already wet with tears, and held up his open palms. "Wait…hang on…we aren’t here to hurt you."

"What do you want?" she managed.

Michael looked around him. It was a tiny sort of parlor, with an even tinier kitchen separated by a half partition. And in the kitchen, tacked to one wall, he spotted drawings. They made his heart lurch, and he moved past the woman to study them closely. Davina watched him but was too stunned to move, wilting in the shadow of that hideous giant with his long staff of office in one fist and the mollusk fixed vampire-like onto his neck.

"He drew these," Michael said softly, standing in front of the drawings, rendered in rough charcoal. One showed a poorly drawn family, barely stick figures, a man and a woman and a child. But who were the man and woman? "Mark drew these…"

"Mark?" Davina said. "You know Mark?"

Michael faced her. "I’m his father."

Davina said nothing, her wide eyes staring. Then, a man appeared in the doorway behind her. He clung to its frame, sort of hopping on one leg, because the other was a stump. But at the end of the stump was a vestigial foot, where the lost one was regenerating. The deep wound on his jaw had almost sealed up, as well.

Roger took in the Demon official—hunched forward to fit his height inside the little apartment—and the two skeleton things lurking silently behind him, then addressed Michael. "Who did you say you are?" he demanded in a frayed voice, badly attempting forcefulness.

"My name is Michael Palladino. These things have led me here…they say you’ve taken in my son, Mark."

"You," Roger stammered, "you’re…"

"Yes. His father."

Davina grasped Roger’s arm. "He can get him released, Roger. He can get Mark freed."

"Freed from where?" Michael said, stepping out of the kitchen, closer to the man and woman.

"He was taken from us…today. A few hours ago. He’s in the Skull, out there." Roger jerked his head toward the one window in their flat.

Michael went to it, pushed aside a scrap of curtain, looked out. He could see an ivory-hued dome, gleaming above the dark buildings surrounding it. "What am I looking at?"

"It’s a torture plant. A mobile one. It flew into town today…and they kidnapped Mark. Took him inside it." Roger glared over at the trio of Demons. "Those fucking monsters."

"Torture plant?" Michael whirled to blaze his eyes at the Demons as well. To Davina, watching him, dark-haired Michael with his goatee and furious face looked as much like a Demon, if not more so. And ironically, her Roger, though damned here, was as blond and blue-eyed as an seraph.

"Yes, sir," Iblis Al-Qadim replied simply.

Michael lunged forward, to snarl, "They have my son in a fucking torture chamber?"

"This is Hades, sir," the thing intoned emotionlessly.

The pistol that Michael ripped out of the holster on his belt was a Beretta, of the type he had carried in the Gulf War. He thrust it forward to point up at the Demon’s face. "You son of a bitch! I want you to get my son out of there, right now, do you understand me?"

The octopus’s arms slithered, shifted, and the beating of the wings increased in tempo, but the host creature did not flinch. His zombie-like voice rattled, "I cannot do that, sir. It is beyond my power."

"What do you mean? You’re a Demon…a governor of Demons! You’ll do it or I’ll blow your fucking skull apart, and I know I can kill you…and you know I can kill you."

"Be that as it may, sir, I cannot arrange it. Hades exists because it is the will of the Creator. It is the will of the Creator that those in Hades should suffer. I was able to take you to the place where he is located, but I may not interfere in this process."

"I’m an Angel, do you hear me? I’m an Angel and you have to do as I say!"

"Even Angels, sir, are bound by the laws of the Creator. The will or desire of all the Angels in Paradise combined could still not sway the Creator from His purposes."

"You mother fucker!" Michael extended the semiautomatic, which visibly shivered in the air, another inch.

"You can kill me, sir, but it will avail you nothing."

"I don’t understand you. You’ve helped me to this point." His eyes switched to meet those of the octopus, appraising him enigmatically.

"We’ll have to wait," Roger croaked, sagging onto a roughly upholstered chair. "These mobile factories…they only stay a few days. Then they release their prisoners and move on."

Michael pivoted slowly, his eyes still feral, lowering his handgun somewhat. "Just wait? Just wait for what? My son to endure who knows what kind of agony? Even one day, one hour inside that thing is too much!"

"Do you think I don’t care?" Roger snapped. "That boy is like a son to me."

"Like a son to you? Well he’s my son, do you understand that? Mine!"

Roger dug his fingers into the armrests of the chair, and tears filmed his eyes. Through gritted teeth he hissed, "You sanctimonious bastard. Look at you…all dressed in white like a saint. You, living in Heaven with your fountains of wine and your golden toilets while we rot and burn down here. Don’t you feel this? The fire you’re breathing?" He waved one hand through the pale bluish tincture of the air. "This is what we inhale, what licks at our skin, every day. Your son…here…while you tan on some beach in Paradise."

"Look—I didn’t send my son to Hell. Do you think I’m happy he’s here? I didn’t abandon him. These aren’t my fucking rules…I don’t even understand them!"

"You can’t take him from us," Roger said, raising his chin defiantly. "You can’t bring him back with you and you know it. So take your pompous anger back to Heaven and leave him here. He’s in good hands."

"Good hands? He’s in a torture chamber!"

"Yes. As your friend there said, this is Hades. Welcome to it. That poor dear boy is suffering. And I’m in as much torture as he is, just knowing it. But in a few days, he’ll be released. He’ll heal. And we’ll take him back here, and care for him as best we can…as we have been doing."

"Fuck that." Michael confronted Iblis Al-Qadim again. "I am not waiting any few days, while my son is torn apart in that thing out there. I want you to do something, you son of a bitch…there has to be something you can do! Put me in there. Put me in his place."

"Impossible. An Angel, tortured? It could never be…"

"I’m being tortured now!"

The giant Demon half turned, seemed to sway. Propping himself with his halberd-like staff, he took on that distracted, unfocused aspect again, that Michael had observed in the carriage. "Things are…very confusing at this time. An Angel…wanting to be tortured. An Angel…who I am ordered to deny. My flame…drawn away from me." The creature staggered before he caught himself again. In a tone that almost sounded hurt, he said, "I am betrayed…"

Michael remembered what he had overheard the Demon mumbling inside the carriage. "Because I walk upright? Because I have two arms, two legs? Now I am just a human, too?" As distantly human in appearance as the governor was, could it truly be that his kind was one of those slated to be eliminated, for being too much like men? Because one particularly human-like Demon race had begun a growing rebellion, a genocide was being waged against other strains the Creator deemed a potential threat. Even this creature’s barely anthropomorphic species, as well? His loyal service, up to now, no longer taken into account? "I am betrayed," he had just said.

He saw Iblis Al-Qadim go more rigid, regain his composure. But Michael was aware now what was happening. That parasite, affixed to him, was wrestling back the control that had momentarily slipped away from it.

When Iblis Al-Qadim turned his imposing frame in Michael’s direction again, it was to see the Berreta rising.

"Wait!" cried Roger, half starting up from his chair in alarm and disbelief, even as the room thundered with the enclosed sound of three gunshots in rapid succession.

The projectiles tore through the bulbous, sack-like head of the mollusk being, green-glowing muck splattering out of it. As it collapsed upon itself like a burst balloon, its wings stopped beating and its tentacles came slithering out of the holes they had burrowed into the host Demon’s neck and head. It oozed down his shoulder, hit the floor with a splat like wet leather. Iblis Al-Qadim stood oddly naked, swayed again. Then, he tottered back, fell against the wall behind him, and slid into a broken pile of insect-like skeletal limbs.

"I am…freed," he rasped.

"Now—free my son," Michael told the Demon.

The crumpled entity gazed up at the Angel with his remaining eye glinting inside that pit of a socket. For several moments, Michael felt hypnotized, as when the globe-headed Demon had rummaged inside his brain. And then, he and the others in the room heard a booming thud from outside, in the city. It rattled the one window in its frame and sent a vibration up their legs through their soles.

"What’s happened?" Davina asked.

"I have…contacted the Skull," Iblis Al-Qadim said. "I have brought it down for you, sir."

Michael swept to the window again, looked out. He could only see a bare crescent, the very top, of the vast bone sphere this time. It had lowered, crashed, all the way to the street.

When he looked back at the Demon, he saw that both eyes were black and empty now, and no more emerald fire flickered inside the miter atop his head.

Michael then faced the two lesser skeleton Demons, lingering by the door to the flat. He was prepared to raise his gun and aim it at them if they surged forward, but they did not move, as if they awaited instructions from a new commander.

"I need more guns," he told them.

6: Tortures

While the two creatures were off on their errand to the Demonic station where Iblis Al-Qadim had consulted with the Baphomet, Michael and Roger wrapped the dead governor’s surprisingly light scarecrow of a corpse—and that of his parasite—in several blankets for the departed underlings to take away with them, later.

They returned promptly. Though Demons generally preferred swords and other such primitive weapons to firearms, they used them occasionally or stocked them for the use of vacationing Angels anxious to do a little hunting of the Damned. Thus, the two Demons came back with their bony arms laden. There was a knapsack heavy with various types of ammunition. Michael had asked for an M16 with a grenade launcher beneath the barrel, but he had to make do without the grenade launcher. Before the silent pair had left, Michael had asked Roger, "What kind of guns are you familiar with, if any?"

"Why?" Davina had spoken up.

"I can go alone," Michael said, his eyes remaining on Roger. "But I thought you might want to come with me."

"You’re an Angel," Davina said. "They can’t do much to you. But Roger is Damned. If they catch him, they could lock him into one horrible torture for centuries."

Ignoring her comment, Roger replied evenly, "I was a soldier…killed in what I’m told you people now call the first World War."

Michael smiled. It was the first time Roger had seen the expression on him. "I was in the Gulf War."

"The what war?"

Michael snorted. "I’ll tell you another time. So…a simpler gun for you, huh? I recommend a shotgun; very good for close combat."

Combat, Roger’s mind echoed, with a quaver.

"Roger, please, please don’t." Davina held onto his arm. "They’ve already taken my child…I can’t lose you, too!"

"He’s my child," Michael spoke up. "Mark is my son—just so you know."

Davina flashed her eyes onto him, blacker than twin gun muzzles. "He’s as much our son as he ever was yours."

"Listen…" Michael began.

"I would prefer a .303 Enfield," Roger broke in. "But a shotgun would do."

Michael again showed Roger that little smile, then turned to instruct the Demons.

And so, it was a 12-gauge pump-action Ithaca that the Angel took from one of the Demons and passed into Roger’s hands. He was seated as he examined it, but his severed leg had already almost fully reconstituted. "I suppose I expected a break-open style shotgun."

Michael reclaimed the weapon, showed him how to work the slide, and fed a series of shells into it before he handed it back. "You just stick close to me. I’m hoping they’ll be too afraid to oppose an Angel. But…they may have the attitude of that octopus thing, and think this isn’t for us to interfere in. And then they may try to stop us."

Roger rose from the chair, and looked past the Angel at Davina. "I can’t bear the thought of it either, my love. Our dear boy inside that thing. In their hands…"

Her lower lip was trembling badly and she turned to face the wall, arms tightly crossed as if to hug and console herself, but said nothing more. And a moment later, she gave a little nod.

"Hey. Can you really do this?" Michael asked.

"Yes," Roger said without hesitation, sounding a bit insulted, but Michael persisted.

"It’s been a long time for you."

Roger held his stare, took in a long breath. "There was a German soldier…maybe ten years younger than I. We found ourselves face-to-face. His Mauser was covered in mud; had jammed. My Lee-Endfield had run empty. But I still had my bayonet, and he did not. As he tried to clear the round, I sort of thrust the rifle at him without aiming. The bayonet went into him directly under his right eye. It forced the eye out, onto his cheek. The blade slid out and he sort of turned away, stunned…and began shrieking. My German isn’t very good, but I know the word ‘Mutter.’ He just staggered off holding his face, crying that word again and again like a child. Which he was, really."

"And what did you do?"

"I walked after him…and I stabbed him in the back. He fell, and I stabbed him again. And the crying stopped."

"Yes," Michael said, nodding. "But—did you kill him then because you hated him, or because you pitied him?"

Roger flicked his eyes away, and to Michael that was enough to answer the question. The story, meant to illustrate his toughness, had betrayed his compassion—simply in the fact that he recalled it so vividly at all. But he muttered, "These things aren’t men. They don’t even have mothers." He thought of the way his Davina had been used. "Not really…"

"Yeah. But they have a Father," Michael said. "And I could care less." He hadn’t taken his eyes off the other man. "So—are you ready to get our boy back?"

The British man met the American’s stare again, startled by his phrasing.

"Let’s go," Roger said.

««—»»

As they started off down the street, Roger and Michael glanced back to see the two skeleton beings carrying out the mummy-wrapped package of their fallen leader, to load upon the animal-drawn metal carriage. Roger felt relief that the things were not remaining with Davina, while Michael felt a funny twinge of regret. Had the Demon helped him out of sympathy, or merely out of spite for his Father? Either way, the Demon had been judged to be too human-like…and in doing so, his Creator had only proved Himself right, by pushing the creature into a human-like act of vengeance.

It wouldn’t have been unusual for an Angel to be seen walking along the streets of a city in Hell carrying an assault rifle in his hands, but to see a Damned man striding beside him (with a faint limp) openly carrying a pump-action shotgun would be quite the shock—had there been anyone on the street to witness it. The citizens were still keeping themselves out of sight, though the Skull’s crew seemed to have taken aboard all the prisoners they intended to. But Roger glimpsed a figure ducking behind the edge of a second floor window, and realized he was at least being peeked at around makeshift window shades, and through cracked doors, by his bewildered neighbors—perhaps alarmed by his actions, perhaps stirred.

"That brand on your forehead," Michael said. "It stands for your sin…"

"Atheist," Roger stated.

"And your wife…uh, girlfriend. H?"

"H is for Hinduism."

"Does Mark have one on his head?"

"Yes. A U—unbaptized."

Michael made a hissing sound. "His mother—my first wife—wouldn’t allow it. I could shoot myself for listening to her. Not that it would kill me, now. It’s my fault…my fault, for giving in."

"As you said, we don’t make the bloody laws. You mustn’t blame her. Or yourself. It isn’t his father’s fault…it’s his Father’s fault." Roger nodded his head upward, as if at something hovering unseen above them. "Anyway…if it’s anyone’s fault that Mark is inside that place now, it’s mine. I didn’t protect him well enough. I shouldn’t have let him go into that alley ahead of me. I should have said we’d stay in the alley for an hour or so, until the Skull’s crew had finished rounding up their prey."

Michael looked over at him as they strode side-by-side. "Now it’s you who’s talking shit…because it seems to me, you and your lady back there have been doing a very good job of looking after him. Thank you."

"Guilt," Roger mused aloud. "Yours. Mine. His. He torments himself, you know, over what happened to you and your second wife. The fire he caused."

"He torments himself," Michael repeated, making a wincing expression. "I’ve got to reassure him. I have to show him that Dawn and I still love him—could never blame him for that." After several more steps he said, "When we first got to Heaven, I guess my wife and I were…humbled. We tried to accept our fates, our Father’s judgment…to trust in the system. We settled in a town called Nepenthe. I chose it because it has features that reminded me of places Mark loved. A park, with trees. A mall. Huh. Heaven’s full of shopping malls. Anyway…it wasn’t any solace. It only made my loss sharper, until I couldn’t take it any longer. How can they call it a Paradise, when I’m grieving every day because my only child is trapped in Hell? How can I call that place my home for eternity, without him?"

They turned a street corner, and found themselves at the end of that long, wide avenue as open as a plaza. At its other end, the huge bone orb rested in a little crater of shattered flagstones. In dropping, it had even caved in the front of a brick building facing onto the plaza. Not only had Iblis Al-Qadim prompted it to land, somehow, but that hinged skull-plate had lowered open, a hatchway. Steam was billowing out from inside. How long before those aboard the craft were able to override the mental command the governor had given, or repair whatever damage he might have caused? Might the craft be borne aloft again at any minute?

Michael tossed Roger a glance again, and the British soldier looked blanched, the shotgun drooping heavily in his hands. But the man’s wounded stride didn’t waver, and Michael felt an odd affection suffuse him. Who was he to question his resolve, or abilities? He had obviously killed more men than himself in battle, in a war more earth-shaking than his own, which Michael was a bit crestfallen to know Roger wasn’t even familiar with. The affection Michael experienced was like that he had felt for other warriors, walking beside him many years ago. Like the affection he might have felt for a brother.

Together, they reached the lip of the hatchway…together, walked up through the steam’s obscuring clouds.

7: Unholy War

Just inside the shell of the Skull, the two humans encountered three Kilcrops bent over a series of valves, one of which was leaking steam around its edges and another dripping a greenish fluid. At the sight of the men with guns, they froze with their hands on the great valves’ wheels. One of them held a large wrench, but didn’t raise it as a weapon. Despite their surprise and paralysis, the naked creatures—bony and sunken-faced as starving children—suppressed cackles and giggled behind their fixed grins.

The men moved past them carefully, and left them behind in the steam. Michael said, "Maybe I should’ve killed them so they wouldn’t raise an alarm. But the gunshots would’ve done the same…"

Their path branched off into different directions immediately. Narrow corridors, some with walls of metal but one with walls apparently carved or grown from the same bone substance as the craft’s exterior. A metal ramp rose toward a higher level over there, but over here was a flight of metal steps, and then they saw a metal spiral staircase in the distance, in the light from a caged gas jet in the wall. Roger was about to ask which way they should choose, when they both heard an echoing, haunting cry. It was a woman screaming, apparently off down that bone corridor. They headed that way.

They moved through a mist not so much of steam, now, as incense. Whereas in the more mechanical sections of the Skull bluish gas jets burned along the walls, in the long bone corridor there were organic-looking sockets or hollows in the wall in which burned candles or the incense they smelled. As they proceeded, they heard more reverberating banshee shrieks, from both men and women. So far, none of the cries sounded like the voices of children.

Toward the end of the bone corridor there were two rounded doorways on either side, facing each other. Michael and Roger exchanged looks, then Michael swung into the threshold on the right while Roger did the same on the left.

Michael saw three white Xs floating in the murk of a smallish room. They were the spread-eagled nude bodies of three women, their wrists and ankles shackled to a trio of metal hoops hanging on chains, the ends of which were lost in the darkness of a surprisingly high shaft. When they saw the Angel, they whimpered and sobbed, no doubt thinking he was here to enjoy their torments along with their Demon captors. Their weeping alerted a grotesque tick-like creature, the likes of which Michael hadn’t seen before, bent over a table spread with gleaming metal instruments that it didn’t even seem to require, since its various pairs of arms looked sufficient for any torture it might devise. The entity whipped around, and just from the way it raised its bladed forearms—and from the way its nearly translucent belly was a bottle filled with blood, and the way the three women dribbled blood from various puncture wounds on their bellies and thighs—Michael decided to pull his trigger, and the M16 was set to fully automatic, and the stream of lead caused hunks of chitin to spring into the air like shattered pottery. He drove the tick against its counter of tools, which spilled over it as it fell dead…blood gushing from the broken bottle.

Understanding now that the Angel was not here to partake of their punishments, the women began babbling at him, pleading to be unshackled. "Just shoot through my wrists and ankles," one women begged, wild-eyed, "I’ll heal…it’s okay…shoot me down, please!"

Her request stunned him, until he was shaken by the sound of a shotgun blast, and he spun toward the doorway. "I’m sorry—forgive me," he mumbled too softly for the women to hear.

In the opposite room, Roger had found an elderly man lashed down onto an iron bedframe. The man’s decapitated head had been placed on a shelf several feet away, but rubber hoses and segmented metal cables had been inserted into the stump of its neck, connecting the head to the trunk. The head’s eyes streamed tears as the old man watched two ticks that had bent over him, one with a tubular proboscis plunged into his thigh and the other snipping off his fingers with one of its pincer limbs.

Despite the horrors he had been witness to—and himself suffered—over the decades, Roger was dazed by what he saw. It was Michael’s gunfire that shook him out of his stupor, and even as the two ticks jerked upright at the sound, Roger fired at the one on the right with his shotgun. The weapon jolted in his arms, but the tick jolted even more—exploded across the wall behind it like a water balloon full of gore. The one on the left flew at him, arms spinning, so fast that he barely had time to swing the gun in its direction. He stabbed the thing with the barrel as if there were a bayonet at its end. The blow was only enough to make the Demon stagger back a little, but it gave Roger time to pull the trigger again, and the point-blank eruption of fire and OO buckshot obliterated the top half of the monster.

Roger whirled with the shotgun leveled as he heard a third presence behind him, but he was able to restrain himself from shooting when he saw that it was Michael. "Come on," Michael, the seemingly older of the two men, directed him, and they stepped back into the corridor and emerged from its end. Roger heard the old man’s severed head calling after him.

The next hallway was wider, running transverse to the one they had just exited, and they entered at its midpoint. From its high ceiling, metal cocoons hung in two rows of a half dozen. They were like iron maidens, and both men wondered if there might even be spikes inside them, or if these were merely holding vessels until their human contents could be properly tortured later on. The cocoons dangled and swayed like a strange crop of fruit, emitting a chorus of sobs and pleas. The two men passed under them, toward another doorway at the right hand end of the hallway.

The left hand end of the hall was nothing but a mass of twisting steam, and the men pivoted around when they heard a clatter of armored feet and the chitter of inhuman voices within its depths. Then, they were bursting out of it: three smaller ticks, not yet gorged and slowed with feasted blood, so swift that even though both men fired upon them simultaneously, the sound of their combined thunder deafening, they only just barely cut the things down before they reached them. The last of the creatures skidded to a stop at Roger’s feet, causing an array of spent 5.56mm and shotgun shells to scatter. Now the air was misted with gun smoke in addition to the steam and incense.

"Who are you?" a voice called from one of the cocoons above. "Are you rebels?"

"We’re looking for a boy!" Roger shouted, not sure which of the containers the man’s voice issued from. "Eight years old…"

"Not that way!" the voice yelled down, meaning the right hand path they had chosen. "The other way—into the steam. There were children in these things just like twenty minutes ago, but the bugs switched our places."

"Why?"

The unseen speaker seemed to hesitate. "It’s their turn."

Michael snatched Roger by the arm. "Thanks!" he called.

"Just kill these fuckers!" the disembodied voice replied.

They plunged into the hot steam, apparently originating from a ruptured pipe above them, and could see nothing for several moments except for three evenly-spaced, orange-glowing smudges along their right side. When Michael got close to them, he discerned three tanks set into the wall, containing a luminous orange fluid in which three human faces—flayed from their skulls—were suspended on wires. Though the staring eyes did not follow him and the slack mouths had no muscles to move them, he knew there was a living consciousness in each of the masks. The bodies they had been sliced from had been incinerated, so when these scraps of flesh were eventually freed they would regenerate into their complete human forms again.

Regarding the faces as they regarded him, Michael was momentarily transfixed with horror, and not for the first time felt a vague kind of shame for being an Angel. But mostly, he was just grateful that he didn’t recognize any of the faces; none was that of a child. Tearing himself away, he left the apparitions behind him.

Roger was the first to emerge from the steam, and as he did so heard a whoosh, a curved sword missing his neck by two inches as it cleaved the air. It was a blue-skinned Apsara, her eyes and tusks gleaming. She reminded him uncomfortably of his Davina: the sensual curves of her nearly naked body, her general facial features, the large eyes and heavy brows and thick black hair, the Demon’s swimming in the air as if each strand had its own independent life. He hesitated for only an instant, but that was too long for Michael, who let loose with his M16. With just a grunt, as if punched in the stomach, the female Demon was slammed backwards into a wall. She left smears of red on it as she sank, her animated hair falling in lifeless curtains to obscure her face.

Michael spotted another Apsara hovering in a doorway, a spear in her fists, but either his gun or the fact that he was an Angel caused her to duck back out of sight before he could swing the rifle her way. Roger approached the open threshold and peeked in, wary of the succubus, but he obviously didn’t see anything encouraging, since he waved for Michael to continue onwards.

The hallway dead-ended in a high curved wall. The two men realized they had reached the opposite side of the Skull, but a spiral staircase with steps that clanged under their boots took them up to a metal catwalk. They crossed this, back into the fog of escaping steam, feeling their way along by holding onto the catwalk’s railing.

Behind them, they heard more feet clanging on the steps of the spiral staircase. These new feet struck the metal with a lighter but sharper sound. In only seconds, there were many of these ringing footfalls…accompanied by the rustling sound of multiple bodies scraping against each other, and a chorus of whispering, chittering voices…

Michael and Roger began to run, guessing what sort of creature was swarming behind them…but as they cleared the churning cloud of steam, they saw more of the tick Demons ahead of them, a small horde, razored arms spread into waiting embraces.

Michael skidded to a halt and spun around, opened fire at their pursuers as the first of them sprang out of the wall of steam. "Get through them!" he roared at Roger. "Clear our way!"

Back-to-back, the two men fired their weapons repeatedly, Roger bucking with the explosions from the shotgun, Michael emptying a magazine of his clattering assault rifle and deftly slapping in another.

Two of the ticks went down under one of Roger’s blasts, the OO buckshot having dispersed into a spray of heavy slugs. Another discharge sent one of the arachnid beings up over the railing, but a barb on its foot caught in the mesh of the handrail and it swung from the catwalk lifelessly, blood raining like candy from a burst pinata. Three last ticks leapt over the bodies of their fallen brothers. Roger fired, hit one of them, and then the other two were only a few feet away. A whipping claw struck the end of his barrel just as Roger jerked the trigger again, causing the shot to go wild. He followed through with the momentum of the Demon’s blow, however, and with all his force swung the wooden stock of the weapon into the thing’s plated little face. The cracking impact sent it reeling, its back striking the handrail.

Roger jumped back as the remaining tick took a swipe at him. He blocked a second blow with his shotgun. But the entity had multiple pairs of arms, and Roger felt one of them get under the shotgun, stab into his body and rip upwards. He grunted, fell onto his back on the hard catwalk surface.

Looking down at himself, he saw blood welling out of him…saw that he had been rent deeply.

He tried to angle the shotgun to point up at the thing, but it kicked the gun and its clawed foot not only sent the weapon out of his hands but nearly severed one of his fingers. It hovered above him, its arms spinning and clacking as if in a mad sign language, wordlessly speaking in tongues. The sight of his pumping gore seemed to tantalize the creature. It sank down over him, appeared to stare into his eyes a moment, and dropped its head as if to fellate him. Roger felt another deep stab, as the tick shot its proboscis into his inner thigh…heard a terrible gurgling sound as his blood was sucked up into the vampire.

Wheezing in pain but steeling himself, Roger slipped his injured hand into his shirt. And deeper than that. It burrowed under the lip of his wound.

Either Roger’s motions or another metallic rattle from the Angel’s M16 broke its lustful spell, but the arachnid jumped to its feet, the bloody proboscis withdrawing. It saw Roger rummaging inside his soaked shirt and descended upon him, lashing out with a mantis arm. Roger rolled to one side and the claw banged against the catwalk. The creature lifted its head and chattered, its mouthparts twitching like bloodied fingers. Roger had rolled onto his back again, and he was tearing something out of his chest. It looked like an organ, red and drooling strings of blood. He had known just where to find it. The hunk of metal had been a nagging weight inside him, an irritation and a burden—a pain now extracted, liberated, and returned to those who had inflicted it upon him.

Screaming in a mix of agony and war cry, Roger tugged back the little .25’s slide, aimed it up at the tick and squeezed off round after round. The semi-automatic’s immersion in his body had not dampened its gunpowder. The bullets were small, but they drove the tick back, shrieking. He emptied the pistol. The very last slug sent his attacker flipping backwards over the railing. He heard it crash far below.

Michael had emptied his fresh magazine and popped in yet another, mostly firing blindly into the steam. But soon, he saw only a heap of demolished bodies at the edge of the mist, one or two badly wounded Demons screeching, the ingested blood of their victims streaming through the holes in the catwalk’s floor.

He turned back toward Roger to see that he had gone down. A last tick was moving in on him, its cracked face oozing its own greenish ichor. He saw that Roger was without the shotgun, gripped only a toy-sized pistol that had apparently run dry. Michael sprayed the wounded Demon before it could get to him, white fire flashing from the M16’s muzzle, the impact launching the vampire off its feet. He then rushed forward to Roger’s side. When he took his arm to help him up, the British soldier let out a terrible groan, and that was when Michael saw how the front of his shirt was saturated with blood.

"Can you make it?" he asked numbly.

"Listen!" Roger hissed, clinging to the man’s arm so as to hold himself up, staining the Angel’s robes.

From beyond the end of the catwalk, they both heard crying voices. Watery with echoes, distant and ghostly…but distinctly, the cries of children.

"Come on," Michael said, slinging his M16 over his own shoulder and retrieving the shotgun from the floor. He put one arm around the Damned soul. Roger kept his left hand pressed to his chest as if to hold his split body together. Every step made him wince, every other step a stagger that almost toppled both of them. They made it through the bodies of the Demons Roger had killed, loped like a wounded four-legged animal until they could make out a polished door of bone set almost seamlessly into a wall of bone, at the end of the bridge-like catwalk.

8: Avenging Angel

The wall, when they reached it, was made up of plates separated by rippled sutures, like the outside of the Skull itself. Roger leaned against it while Michael took hold of the door’s latch. It was not hinged, but slid along grooved track into the wall.

In the room beyond, Michael saw three Kilcrops hunkering near the foot of a row of coffin-like containers—metal, rusted and riveted—bolted horizontally into the floor. There was a hatch in each one, the hatches currently hanging open, where the faces of those inside the sarcophagi would be. It was from these open hatches that the wailing voices came. One child was sobbing hysterically, another crying for her mother, but Michael couldn’t tell if any of the cries belonged to his son.

There was a hose with a nozzle at its end hanging from the ceiling, over the coffins, and its base end was connected to a huge glass orb in the center of the room. This orb was filled with a yellowish solution, and inside the miniature yellow sea writhed a colony of white worm-like eels or eel-like worms. Their threaded bodies almost formed one immense living ball inside the globe. Following the line of the suspended black rubber hose again, Michael could guess its use: for delivering the contents of the orb into the dozen metal coffins. They were water-tight, then. And he had no doubt the worms were ravenous.

Though the snickering Kilcrops didn’t try to attack or flee, having heard the approaching gunfire and thus waiting to see what the two men intended, Michael treated one of them to the contents of a 12-gauge shell. When the gaunt body had stopped flopping and rolling across the floor, the other two began to giggle more wildly in nervousness, one clutching at the arms of the other. Michael jerked his gun barrel at their grinning faces. "If you don’t want to end up like your friend, open those things up now."

One Kilcrop dashed to the far end of the row, the other to the nearer. They reached to a clasp system on each, and the lids of the sarcophagi began to swing open. An adolescent black girl crawled out of one like a spider, fell to the floor. Roger managed to help her up while still pressing his chest. She started to flee from the room in a panic, her eyes crazed, but Roger held her at the elbow and croaked, "Stay with us, dear…we’ll all go out together."

Michael almost wanted to push past the emerging children to get a better look as the pair of Kilcrops converged at the center to unlock the last two chrysalises.

From one of these, Mark rose into view. His eyes flicked from the robed Angel quickly to Roger. Michael saw recognition dawn on Mark’s face then, and it was a piercing realization—that his son had recognized his surrogate parent, but not him. The boy hadn’t expected to see his father come to this place to rescue him. When Mark spotted Roger, a grin opened in his tear-crusted face. "Dad!" he cried, clambering down from his cocoon. He darted to the man but came short of hugging him, seeing how badly he was injured. Roger smiled, and released the traumatized girl to slip one arm around Mark’s shoulders.

Tears flooded Roger’s eyes. Tears of love, and relief…and pain. Twice now, the boy had called him "Dad." But he felt that when Mark finally turned around and saw who it was that had accompanied him here, the child he thought of as his son would never call him by that name again.

Only when his arms were slipped around Roger did Mark glance at Michael a second time—Michael, who stood momentarily wordless, helpless as if paralyzed. At last, the boy understood who he was seeing. "Dad?" he said. There was a leeriness in his tone, mixed with disbelief and delight. This obvious confusion of feeling pierced Michael again. He could tell the boy was a little frightened of him. The gun in his hands, the blood splashed across his robes. He was still afraid his father was angry at him for causing his and Dawn’s deaths.

"Mark," Michael said, his own eyes wet and agleam. "I came for you."

"Daddy," his son whimpered, face crumpling, regressing into an even younger child.

"Go to him," Roger whispered, and kissed the top of the boy’s head before releasing him.

Mark took a timid step forward, and Michael closed the distance—swept him into the curve of his free arm, clenched him against his body.

"I thought you hated me," Mark sobbed.

"I love you," Michael told his son. "I love you, forever…"

Blinking at his tears, Roger glanced around at the faces of the eleven other children, ranging in age and race but all of them ragged, all of them waiting for the adults to give them some sort of guidance. "Children," he told them, "you stay with us."

"Come on—we’re out of here," Michael said, moving back toward the doorway, his arm still around his son’s shoulders. "Roger…can you walk?"

"We’ll help him," said another boy, and he and the shivering black girl took Roger under both his arms.

Out through the bone wall, across the catwalk littered with cracked and draining tick bodies, one or two with a limb still twitching. Down the spiral staircase. Michael had the shotgun in his hand, at the ready should one of the bodies spring up alive, but none did. He had passed his Beretta to Roger, easier to manage in his condition. Through the steam-filled corridor into which the three flayed faces stared, the children held hands in a chain. Michael saw a Kilcrops dart across the end of the corridor, but didn’t fire at it.

Under the dozen hanging cocoons. "Is that you?" the familiar voice called down. "Did you find him? Hello? How about us, huh? Please? Hello? Hey!"

"Can’t save them all. Not every soul in Hell," Roger whispered into the ear of the tall black girl. "Can we, my love?"

Down the bone corridor. Suddenly, candles and burning incense sticks spilled out of several of the organic-looking sockets in the walls and two ticks emerged, dropped into the hallway, charged with flailing jagged limbs…but before they could pick up speed Michael had let go of Mark and leveled the shotgun, and Roger had pushed the black girl behind him and pointed the Beretta. The children flinched and covered their ears, but it only took a few short bursts from both men to bring the ticks down, and a few moments later the party was advancing again.

The entrance to the Skull was near. Here was where corridors, ramps, doorways branched into numerous directions. And as the party moved toward the main entrance, scores of ticks flowed out of these hallways and thresholds as if coordinated by a silent command, scampered down the clanging metal ramp, descended a ladder fixed to the wall. In just seconds, the humans’ path was blocked by what looked like a hundred of the greenish creatures. They gave off an insidiously low chittering, but it quickly rose into a metallic buzz-saw sound. Again, the children clamped their hands over their ears. "Dad!" Mark cried.

Michael looked back the way they had come. He saw the light going out in the bone corridor as more and more candles were knocked out of their hollows by ticks emerging through the walls. Soon, the corridor would go completely black, masking the advancing rear army.

"Here," Michael said, passing Roger the shotgun. He saw Roger stand as straight and steady as he could so as to accept the weapon. In turn, Roger handed the Beretta to the black girl, the oldest child. Her eyes were still wide and half-frenzied, but she accepted the pistol. Michael took his M16 off his shoulder and leveled it grimly. "Roger…will they dare to stop me?"

"These things? I think they will. They may not hurt you, but they’ll disarm you. Incapacitate you, until they recapture the rest of us. Until they can repair this machine. Then they’ll let you go…and they’ll fly this thing so far away you might never find it again."

"I’m not going to let that happen. They’ll have to hurt me." Michael took a step forward. He saw the ticks at the fore of the group shift back ever-so-slightly, either the gun in his hands or the look in his eyes filling even their robotic minds with fear. He took a second step.

From the left, then the right, two Apsaras appeared. A third, and a fourth. One held a curved sword, and the others carried metal spears. Their movements as eerily graceful as stylized dance steps, their forms beautiful in a nightmarish way, they positioned themselves at the front of the mass of ticks. At first Michael expected them to lead the battalion forward…but they extended their spears at waist-level and turned their nearly nude bodies slowly, using the weapons to urge back the teeming arachnid warriors. The creatures seemed reluctant, but complied. Michael realized what the human-like Apsaras were doing: parting the ticks, opening a path for him—the Angel.

He glanced back over his shoulder. There was just enough guttering candle glow left in the bone corridor for him to see another of the blue-fleshed succubi standing with her arms spread, a sword in each fist, her hair lapping the air. Ticks fidgeted restlessly behind her, but none tried to push around the fearsome Demon.

Facing forwards again, Michael slowly advanced. The children followed meekly, Mark holding onto his father’s robe. His chest wound healing even as he staggered along, Roger kept the shotgun ready…but none of the divided assembly of ticks surged around the Apsaras and the weapons they had used as if to create invisible barriers. Michael entered this living corridor first, expecting it to close around him at any second. It didn’t. He glared defiantly into the ranked, expressionless faces as he passed them.

He turned and guarded the entrance to the Skull as the children cleared the gauntlet, ducked out the doorway and sprinted down the ramp into the city of Apollyon. Its burning blue air had never seemed inviting to them until this moment. He saw them scatter in all directions. The black girl had his Beretta still in her fist but he didn’t call her back. A rebel in the making, maybe. She could not grow up, but she could mature, harden…like a stone sharpened into a spear head.

At last, only Michael, Roger and Mark stood in the doorway, looking back into the Skull—meeting the gaze of all those glittering black eyes, and the more human eyes of the Apsaras.

"I’m immortal," Michael said to the Demons, like troops gathered for his inspection. "You’re not. If you ever touch my boy again…if you ever go near him, or try to take revenge on this man," he nodded toward Roger, "I’ll spend eternity killing every last one of you mother fuckers."

And with that, the two bloody men and the boy between them stepped wearily out of the Skull.

9: The Family

The child slept on the little sofa they had purchased from a shop in the city, where the Damned manufactured crude furniture, and he was covered under a quilt Davina herself had sewn together from scraps of cloth she’d collected. She sat on the very edge of the sofa, lightly caressing his forehead, her brown fingers trailing over the raised U branded there…a wound his body hadn’t been allowed to regenerate. She had told him it stood for "Unbelievably Cute."

Roger sat in a chair opposite, shirtless. The groove in his chest was raw pink with puckered edges, but no longer an entrance to his interior. He watched his lover’s face, the way her uncanny huge eyes glistened. Still weak, he used the chair’s arms to push himself to his feet, crossed to her, took her head against his chest and stroked her thick hair. He heard her sniffle, felt her kiss his healing scar.

"He won’t really stay, will he? He says that now…but don’t you think he’ll change his mind?"

Roger knew the man better than she. "No, my love. I think he means it."

"But he won’t be allowed to, will he? Aren’t they told how much time they can spend here? Isn’t there a limit?"

"I don’t believe there is. I think he can stay here as long as he wants. Forever, if he likes."

"But his wife won’t want to, I’m sure."

"Yes, that’s the only thing. She isn’t the boy’s natural mother." He regretted the words the moment he said them. Davina’s head lifted, as he knew it would.

"Neither am I, his natural mother. But she may love him enough to remain here, too…do you think?"

"I don’t know her, my dear. We haven’t met her. We can’t say."

"I hope she doesn’t love him as I do." Davina looked down at the boy again.

"That isn’t a good thing to wish, Davina."

"But do you want to let him go? After all you went through to get him back?"

"I went through that to take him from the hands of Demons, who meant to torture him. But these are the hands of his father…who loves him enough to leave behind the Paradise most of us down here will yearn for, forever."

"I don’t begrudge him," Davina moaned. "How can I hate the man my son loves? And I thank him, for what he did. But I only wish…I only wish he would go home. Just come back to visit from time to time."

"I know, love." His hand slid down and inside her veil of hair to stroke her wet cheek. "I feel the same way. We just have to wait, and see…"

««—»»

After his experience inside the Skull, Michael and Dawn would not enter into the administrative building of the Demons, with its Art Deco winged baboons flanking the front steps, until a carriage arrived in Apollyon bearing an Angel accompanied by two Celestials—an androgynous heavenly race, almost ghost-like in their silence and with their empty stares, but wearing all-too-solid swords in scabbards.

The Angel had been a priest in life, so in the afterlife had been given a position of some authority. When he and his guardians stepped down from the carriage and the couple moved forward to meet him, he pushed back the hood of his white robe and beamed a smile, extending his hand. Michael felt a kind of disgust for him already. Weren’t the Demons better, in a way? They didn’t hide their hatred for the Damned behind bright grins. Well, except for the Kilcrops…

"So nice to meet you," the man said, next pressing Dawn’s hand between his two. "I’m Reverend Worthy." In life he had been called Father Worthy, but in Heaven there could only be the one great Father. "Shall we go inside to talk?"

Finally, Michael consented to enter the building that he hadn’t been in since Iblis Al-Qadim had taken him here to consult the goat-headed Baphomet. He saw that entity watching them from across the foyer as Worthy led them to a doorway. A corridor beyond, but no Demons waiting to ambush him, no ticks springing from holes in the walls to slash at him. They entered a small office, where Worthy seated himself behind a black marble desk. The Palladinos sat in front of it.

"So…" began Reverend Worthy.

"So," cut in Michael, "my son…Mark. I’d like to take him back to Heaven with me."

The former priest’s smile rippled at the corners. "Ohhh, Mr. Palladino…I’m so sorry, but that is utterly out of the question. It’s impossible—just not allowed."

"Maybe because no one has persisted before. Maybe the Creator could make an exception."

"You must know…many people have persisted before. But the Creator can make no exceptions; it would be against the very reason that Hades, and more importantly Heaven, exist. But I am truly so sorry." He spread his hands, which Michael had found too soft and puffy.

He saw Dawn look over at him, as he lowered his head and nodded. "I understand. I didn’t expect you to say yes…but I had to ask, anyway." He didn’t add that he had promised his wife he would try. That it had been her idea to ask. But he was actually relieved, in a way, by the Angel’s words. How could he think to take his son into Paradise, away from the two people in Hades who adored him? Could all the replica Disney theme parks and replica McDonald’s burger stops and glittering shopping malls in Heaven replace those two Damned souls?

"Well," Reverend Worthy said, "I’m told you were considering remaining in Hades, then."

"Yes." Michael raised his head, but was afraid to meet the eyes of the woman seated beside him. "It’s my choice to do so."

"It’s…something you are allowed to do. But do you know how very awful it is in this place?"

"I believe that’s been well illustrated for me," Michael said ominously.

"Yes…of course. Well, as I say, it is permissible. An uncommon request, but not without precedent. And you…Mrs. Palladino?"

At last, Michael summoned the strength to look over at her, but now it was she who lowered her head and murmured, "I won’t be staying."

The former priest nodded slowly, looking suitably pained by their dilemma. "I see. But you know you can visit your husband here any time you wish…and he can visit you, without his son, as often as he likes."

"Yes," she said quietly.

"Will you be returning with me, then, to the palace?" It was the palace where the governor Iblis Al-Qadim had resided, also housing the portal through which these Angels had entered into Hades.

"Yes, Reverend. I just…I just need to talk to my husband alone, first."

"Of course, of course." Worthy floated to his feet, out from behind the desk. Michael hated the perfumed proximity of him. "I will leave you two alone to talk for as long as you wish. In the meantime I will be speaking with the Baphomet, Mr. Palladino…to instruct him that you are not to be interfered with."

"And my son. And those two Damned."

"I cannot guarantee that any Damned soul will not be punished…all I can guarantee is that you will not be opposed, if you step in to protect them."

"However you want to phrase it," Michael said darkly.

"A devoted parent, to be sure. You are to be admired."

"If only the Father of all children were as devoted…eh, Reverend?"

"Michael," Dawn whispered.

The former priest’s smile faltered more than before. "I know your pain makes you…unaware of what you say, Mr. Palladino."

"I am only too aware of what I say. And maybe now you think Hades is the place I should have been sent to all along."

"I would not think that. The Father, in His great love for you, judged that you should be in Paradise."

"I’m sorry to disappoint Him, in not wanting to be there any longer. Then again…He’s been a disappointment to me, too."

For several moments Reverend Worthy looked horrified, as if afraid to be consumed along with Michael should a lightning bolt crash through the ceiling just then. But there was no sign at all that the Creator was even in attendance, and now it was Michael who reached to shake hands, squeezing the other man’s filmy silk handkerchief of a hand in his own firm grip.

"Goodbye, Reverend."

««—»»

There was a knock on their door, and Roger went to it with his shotgun ready. He let it droop when Michael crossed the threshold.

"You won’t need that anymore," he said, gesturing at the weapon.

"I’ll still feel better to keep it." Roger tilted his head toward the sofa behind him. "He’s sleeping."

Michael stepped close to the sofa to gaze down at Mark’s gentle profile, his mouth open against a pillow. The room’s stinging blue light made it appear as though the boy had fallen asleep in the glow from a TV, as when he had been alive. "Let him sleep," he whispered, then he looked up at Davina—who had risen to her bare feet. "Thank you, for taking care of my boy."

She nodded, but crossed her arms tightly.

"Back at the Demon outpost, there, I acquired a lot of the money you people use here, when I told them I’d be staying in Hades."

"I don’t want your money," Davina told him.

"I didn’t mean it the way you think, Davina. What I was going to say is, I paid your next door neighbors, over here, to move to another apartment…so I can have that one." He turned to study one of the room’s walls, rubbing his goateed chin. "We could put a door right there, don’t you think? So Mark can go through it, any time he wants?" He shifted his eyes to meet Roger’s. "So that one house is no more his house than the other?"

Roger’s eyes began to fill. "Thank you," he managed.

"Well, I’m not as unselfish as all that," the Angel replied. "It’s for this guy." He smiled down at his child, but a half-stifled sob made him look up at Davina. She came to him, put her arms around him. He laughed uncomfortably, patted her back, "Hey, you can share my son, but you can’t share me…sorry." He flicked his chin at Roger. "This guy is pretty bad-ass…I wouldn’t want to mess with him."

"What about your wife?" Davina asked huskily.

He slid out of her embrace, his smile strained. "No," was all he could answer.

««—»»

Another knocking at the door, and this time Michael rose to answer it. Despite what he’d told Roger earlier, he brought his M16 with him. Mark was awake now, and watched his father with concern.

Michael unlocked and opened the door to see Dawn standing in the hallway beyond, escorted by the two eerie Celestials.

"Honey…" Michael said.

He saw that her eyes were red, but she smiled and told him, "I’m staying, too."

Michael pulled her through the door, into his arms. The ethereal Celestials looked on without feeling. After they had held each other for a good minute, Dawn peered over her husband’s shoulder and said, "Hi, baby…"

Mark approached them uneasily, but Dawn gathered him into their embrace.

"I’m sorry, Dawn," he mumbled.

"Shhh. I love you, baby," she said, her lips moving against the top of his head.

Roger slipped his arm around Davina, should she become troubled by the sight of the reunited family, but she was content and whispered to him, "What about Mark’s real mother, when she dies? She was an atheist; she’ll be here. But we Damned can’t see our loved ones from when we were alive—we’re kept impossible distances apart. So do you think Michael can make them bring Mark’s mother here, too?"

"I don’t know if that’s possible," he told her. "But this man is…rather determined. And there’s always the apartment of our neighbors, on the other side." He indicated the opposite wall.

"Hm." She pressed her smile into his neck. "I’m so very proud of you…my husband."

"And I, you…my love."

Piece of Mind

— For Minh Nguyen

1: The Underworld Wide Web

Out of the sea of fog rose black metal towers like stove pipes or chimneys, a forest of them. Recesses gaped in the towers at various heights, and suspended in each black socket was a glass globe containing a luminous orange fluid. Floating in the fluid of every globe was a human brain. And attached to each and every brain by threads of nerve/muscle/blood vessel were two eyes that could not blink, that could do nothing but stare. Watch. Observe. Witness, like the unblinking lens of a television camera.

From underneath each brain sprouted a long structure like an immense spinal column. It emerged through a watertight rubber collar at the base of the sphere and extended into the distance like a tightrope, like a telephone line.

And so this was all that remained of Leon Brown besides his brain and eyes. All that was left had been stretched and extruded, broken and torn and then woven together again into one long rope. All his muscle tissue. All his veins and arteries. His bones, pulled apart into thin white fibers. And his nervous system, of course—most importantly. All of his body drawn out like taffy, like a bundle of cables, reaching far across the misty void until the other end was secured to a metal ring in another tower. Just as the cord of a person confined in that tower was secured to a ring somewhere above his globe. He could not lift his eyes to see it. But he could see the great web spread directly in front of him, of which his body was just one of countless crisscrossing strands.

He watched with dread, wanting to weep tears but lacking the mechanism, as a spider-like form picked its way across the neighboring strands. Slowly crept toward his own.

The orange fluid in which his consciousness floated did not preserve his brain tissues, per se. Instead, it prevented them from regenerating, as they normally would. In Hades, no matter what injury was inflicted upon the human body, it would always reconstitute itself. Burned flesh would go smooth again. Bullet and sword wounds would close up. Severed limbs would grow back like the arms of a starfish. It was a miraculous form of healing…but only so that more tortures could be inflicted afresh. All this was possible—the miraculous healing of flesh, the spinning of flesh into a far-reaching cord of yarn—because it was not real flesh, of course. It was flesh as hallucinated in the mind of the Creator.

The spider-like thing was drawing nearer, so that Leon could see it more clearly. Not that it was the only creature of its kind. They were all over the web, diligently setting new globes into the hollows in the metal totems, or taking old globes away to release the brains at last, so that they could finally regenerate after having been part of the web for months, perhaps, or even years of terrestrial time. But mostly, these creatures seemed to be nibbling at the strands. Plucking and sawing at them, as if to set off a vibration only they could hear. A kind of music; an orchestra of suffering.

Yes, Leon could imagine those multiple pincers and claws and scalpels of the insect-thing when it finally climbed onto his cord. His cord with its raw, exposed nerves, which it would scrape and abrade, slice and gnaw.

The approaching Demon—for such it was—lifted its head to look his way, and orange light from the many glowing spheres flashed back at Leon’s naked eyes, flashed back from the mirror that was the Demon’s face.

2: Hell on Earth

In a way, Leon Brown was probably better prepared than most of the people who found themselves committed to Hades. In life, he had been a television news journalist.

In Sierra Leone in 1995, he had seen numerous people who had had their hands cut off with machetes by rebels. One woman whom he interviewed said that after a rebel had lopped off her left hand she had begun sobbing prayers to God. The rebel had told her if she pointed to heaven with her remaining hand, God might spare her—then he proceeded to hack at her right hand. But after three failed attempts he had to leave it dangling partially attached. This woman told Leon that she felt her appeal to God had prevented the machete from cutting all the way through her wrist. Leon did not have the heart to tell her that if God had felt like dispensing miracles that day, He should have had the rebel trip and fall on his own machete. Or struck his machete with lightning when he uplifted it. Or prevented men from looking for hands to chop off at all.

Twenty-thousand people—children included—had lost limbs in this way. And as if that hadn’t been enough of a demonstration of inhumanity, instead of inspiring compassion the amputees were shunned by their neighbors as "half people." Because they frightened their neighbors. They were a reminder of the dangers that could come so easily amongst them. They were a reminder that all was not right in the world.

Who were really the "half people"? Leon wondered.

He had been to Somalia, where tens of thousands of people had died of starvation. Americans had been sent to capture Mohammed Farah Aideed, who was considered to be the obstacle in the way of aid distribution. Ultimately, some of these Marines had their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, beefy American carcasses flaunted by jubilant thin-limbed Somalians.

Brown had wondered what their parents felt. When they saw those pictures, did they remember the milky smell of their babies’ heads when they kissed them, their first Halloween costumes, crying a sweeter brand of tears as they sent them off for their first day of school?

He had been to Rwanda, seen heaps of machete-hacked bodies (always, always, the machetes). Hundreds of thousands had been exterminated by the interahamwe—"those who attack together." Even tall Hutus, mistaken for Tutsis, were slaughtered. When the murderers became too exhausted in their work, they would slash the Achilles tendons of their victims to prevent them from fleeing until they could be "processed" the next day. In addition, thousands of women had been raped, and even those who survived the machetes or sexual mutilation often found themselves HIV-positive later on.

He had covered the issue of violence against women in Senegal, where two out of five women suffered physical abuse, often from husbands who believed the Koran gave them the authority to beat their wives.

Brown had been in Liberia, where thousands upon thousands of people had been killed in their civil war. Practitioners of juju had committed ritual murder and rites of cannibalism. Children had been forced to rape their mothers. He had personally witnessed the killing of a man by a group of Krahn militiamen. One of the killers had been a nine-year-old boy, who had stabbed the fallen man in the back with a kitchen knife. Later, he had seen this boy and others playing soccer with a human skull still dressed in rags of skin and hair.

Leon knew why he had been sent to these places in particular. He had been told on a few occasions that it was good to have the perspective of an African-American at these African locations, but he knew it was not that so much. It was because he was a "good" black man. While reporting these horrors, his civilized demeanor and articulate delivery on camera would reassure American TV viewers that they need not fear or hate their black countrymen. He was like the "good Mexican," perhaps a cook or sidekick or pretty senorita, included in a western movie to offset the "bad Mexican" villains.

Whatever had caused him to be in these places, Leon had always come back horrified, disgusted, sickened in his very soul. If he were indeed to consider these "his" people, it was frustrating to him that they should be killing their own kind. But he was sure the Hutus had not thought of the Tutsis as "their" people, any more than the Crips of Los Angeles County thought of the Bloods as "their" people.

Leon would wonder if the hard lives human beings endured excused them somewhat for their evil acts. Was empathetic behavior a luxury that only affluent and civilized societies could afford? Did achieving a better way of life result in compassion and mercy, or did compassion and mercy lead to that better way of life?

Leon had sometimes forgotten in which country he had seen this or that specific murder scene or howling orphaned child. He and his crew had repeatedly been stopped in their van and threatened by militia with AK-47s and mobs with machetes. But somehow he had lived through it all himself. Somehow he had come back without a scar.

No—it was in the United States, in his apartment in New York City, that Leon Brown had died, at the age of forty-eight. Of a heart attack, of all things. He had been murdered by one of "his" people: himself. As if all of the suffering he had ingested—the smell of blood that stung his nostrils, the taste of rot that got into his very mouth, but mostly it was his eyes, his eyes taking it all in—had accumulated in that one small organ in his chest. A malicious genie’s bottle too small and frail to contain it. But he knew of course that his heart had not been the true repository.

It had been his brain, of course, entrusted with that solemn responsibility. His brain was the videotape. The glossy news magazine. The archive, the history book. It was his complex and miraculous brain that proved he was the masterwork of all creation. But it was also his brain and all it had soaked up that told him "his" people—that is, the human race—never should have come into existence at all.

As he lay on his kitchen floor dying, wishing he could phone his married son…his remarried ex-wife…he had felt a physical panic, of course. That much was a primitive instinct. But he had also felt a kind of desperate yearning. A yearning for his physical pain to end…a yearning for all the pains of his life to end. Because his one life seemed to contain the lives of all the people he had seen killed, crowded into one skin. He yearned to escape from those countless ghosts into his own private nothingness. The videotape wiped clean. The history book burned. In dying, he wanted to forget it all. Forget even himself.

3: The Ritual

"Hey, it’s Leroy Brown," said Dan, turning just his head because the rest of him was bolted into the wall. "Baddest man in the whole Damned town."

Men, women and even children were affixed to the metal walls of this fluidly twisting and turning labyrinth of corridors, crucified like frogs for dissection. Leon and other Damned souls, dressed in their ragged black uniforms, marched through the high-walled corridors slowly, each carrying a burning stick of incense. The incense filled the maze like steam.

He knew he would be released from this sector of Hades soon; set free to explore its infinite reaches again. Of course, only to be captured by new Demons, with new methods of torture. But maybe the next sector wouldn’t be as harsh as this one. There were even communities of the Damned. Cities. He would try to reach one, maybe find work there for a while. He had started out here as a mere set of brain and eyes, forced to watch the taut thread of his essence as it was worried at by the Demons. Then, he had been one of the crucified ones, like Dan. And now, after an unknown passage of time, he was one of the harvesters—those forced to look after the Demons’ needs. But once every "day" (if eternity could be broken into such units), he and the other harvesters were required to march with their incense through the maze of the crucified. And torture their own kind.

In neighboring passages, Leon heard people cry out and curse. A child screamed from around the bend of a nearby branch. Leon had hoped never again to have to hear such a sound.

He had come to a stop in front of Dan. He smiled painfully. "I’m sorry, Dan," he said. "That time again."

"Hey," said the man, spread-eagled naked against the black metal, "better you than someone else. And better me than you have to do this to a kid, huh? Aren’t we the lucky ones?"

Dan was the soul that Leon, in the mysterious logic of Hades, had been assigned to torture daily. But for the moment, he stood motionless with wisps unfurling from the orange glow at the incense stick’s wavering tip. "You’ll be free like me soon," Leon assured him.

"Free? Is that what you are, man?" Dan licked cracked lips and grinned again. A movement above them drew his glance upward. The top of the maze was covered over with only a metal mesh, and they saw one of the Demons crawling up there, its claws making a clinking sound. It paused to swivel its flat, circular mirror face down at them. Leon saw himself and Dan reflected in it, like images on a TV screen. Dan hissed, "Hurry up and do me, man, before they get after you."

But the strange being continued along toward some infernal errand or duty. The Demons were black, looked like insects, looked like skeletons, but Leon was of the opinion that they were actually machines. Automatons.

Rumors found their way even among the Damned, and rumor had it that a rebellion had started up in Hades. It had two faces. On the one hand, it was the Damned who were arming themselves with the weapons of Demons and those people who, having gone to Heaven and become Angels, liked to venture into Hades on occasion to hunt the Damned for sport. These Damned rebels were emboldened by the fact that they could not be killed a second time. Recaptured and tortured in yet more horrific ways, with no period of respite, yes, but these brave souls were willing to risk it.

The other face of the rebellion was this: that some of the more human-like species of Demon themselves were going against the infernal order. They were battling other strains of their own kind, sometimes even joining forces with the Damned, as unthinkable as that was. As a result, it was said that all of the most humanoid races of Demons had been condemned to eradication. From now on, only nonhuman Demons would be created to restock those who were killed in the war (and Demons could indeed perish, since they were not immortal souls as the Damned were). And so this was why Leon felt the mirror-faced, metallic-looking insect Demons were actually robots, instead of imitation flesh and blood like the human-type Demons, and like the Damned. As safely removed from humanity as the Creator could devise.

Thinking of these things now, Leon again tried to reassure his friend. "The rebels will find their way here, Dan. And when they do, they’ll free us. And we’ll join them."

"That’s the spirit," said Dan, but it sounded like he was just humoring Leon. Leon didn’t take it personally. Mockery was Dan’s way of coping.

Leon let his eyes return to the cruel orange embers floating between them. "But I won’t spill a drop of blood myself. I’ve seen way, way too much blood. I’m not going to do that. I’m not that way."

"So what will you do when this big revolution reaches us? Do a news report on it?" Dan deepened his tone of voice. "This is Leroy Brown, reporting live from Hell. Back to you, Stacey."

Leon chuckled. But they both heard the nearing claws of another Demon, crawling on all fours somewhere overhead. He said to Dan, with smile fading, "Where do you want it today?"

"On the end of my dick. Just kidding! Do it on my face, man. My cheek. That way I can press it against my shoulder afterwards, you know, for just a little comfort until it heals."

"I’ll do the shoulder instead," Leon said, stepping closer. "You can do the same thing. Press it against your cheek."

"Whatever. Go for it, brother." Dan closed his eyes and tensed up as Leon touched the end of the incense stick to his bare shoulder. A sizzle, and the smell of blackening flesh.

Leon winced as much as Dan did. "I’m sorry," he kept whispering over and over. "I’m sorry, Dan…"

"I don’t hate you, Leon…don’t worry," Dan said through gritted teeth, still squeezing his eyes shut as they both waited for the prescribed amount of time to pass before the ember left his seared flesh. "I don’t hate you. They can’t make me hate you!"

4: Harvesting and Sowing

Demonic life came in all sizes and forms, and Leon smashed a blood-sucking insect against his own brow. As he wiped its juices away, his fingers ran across the raised B branded upon his forehead. It marked him for his sin: Blasphemer. The sin of blasphemy, as judged, was not merely taking the Creator’s name in vain, but feeling a real hatred for Him in the process. When he had first arrived in Hades, and been told the crimes that had sent him here, Leon had protested that there was a mistake. All of this was insane and unfair. He came from a religious family, had been baptized—and while he had stopped going to church decades earlier, he had never renounced God.

"We know your soul better than you do!" the skeleton-faced Demon official in his metal miter had hissed at him. "You have cursed your Creator. You have despised your Creator. Many times."

"People!" Leon had cried as he was dragged away. "It was people, not God!"

But was that true, really? Wasn’t it really both?

He stood knee-deep in marshy water from which sprouted a forest of bamboo-like stalks, mist rising off the water making them appear as ghostly silhouettes as they receded into the distance. And here and there, vastly larger silhouettes reared up from the marsh, their tops lost in the fog of the sky, though orange points of light glowed dully like a constellation of dying suns. These were the metal towers that supported the great web, and the orange suns were the globes containing the brains of imprisoned Damned.

Leon heard the whack of curved, sickle-type instruments like the one he clutched in his own hand, as other Damned laborers cut down the tall stalks and further chopped them into segments small enough to fit into the woven baskets they carried on their backs. Later, Leon and the other harvesters would insert a stick of this sweet, sugarcane-like infernal plant into a circular opening in the midsection of each Demon. Food, said those who felt this race of Demons was organic (so to speak), but Leon thought it was fuel for mere machines.

Either way, it was yet another humiliating punishment. Being forced to nurture the very entities responsible for their enslavement.

He had hacked a thumb-sized segment of the sugarcane for himself and now withdrew it from his pocket to bite into, sucking out its sweet fluid and then tearing off some of its tough fibers to chew on, before returning to his sweaty labors. It gave him a defiant satisfaction stealing this pleasant sensation, though his mock body did not actually need it for nourishment.

In the distance, beyond the whacking of blades into stalks, Leon heard another sound. He had heard it often enough in life to recognize it.

The crackle of automatic gunfire.

He paused again and listened for more, but none came. Just some Demons, he thought. Their many races seemed to prefer swords, if they adopted any specific weapon at all, but it was not unknown for them to use guns. More likely, though, was that he had heard a hunting party of Angels, drinking beer and shooting at pretty women and fleet-footed children.

But…what if it had been something else?

If there were Demon rebels out there, should he fear them? Should he fear them, even if they were Damned rebels? He had seen the handiwork of many a rebel in his time on Earth. Then again, he owed the creation of his country to rebels. One man’s rebel was another man’s murderer. One man’s freedom fighter was another man’s terrorist. One man’s God was another man’s Satan.

Leon detected movement sloshing his way, and flinched—expecting a Demon to materialize from the fog and punish him for growing lax in his duties. But it was a human figure that came toward him, silhouetted, and resolved itself into a woman. She wore her thick, curly red hair tied back behind her head, her face pale but freckled, short of stature in her black uniform. Like him, she carried a wicker basket on her back.

She smiled at Leon as she approached him. She was attractive; he thought he should recognize her, since she was obviously at the same level of decreasing punishment as himself…but he didn’t. "Hello," he said to her in a cautious whisper.

"Hey." She nodded. "Taking a little break?"

Her question made him suspicious, but why? Did he expect her facade of skin to tear open like a cocoon, a mirror-faced Demon emerging from inside her? He realized he trusted no one anymore. Not even his fellow Damned. His life as a live man had showed him that fellowship often merely consisted of hacking people up alongside your fellow sadists. Causes were excuses for hatred. And hatred was the way people expressed their unhappiness for existing at all.

"Just catching my breath," he told her. "Did you hear that? The gun?"

Stopping near him, the red-haired woman grunted, "Mm. Maybe someone tried to escape?"

"The Demons around here don’t use guns," he said. And shouldn’t she know that?

She shrugged again. She was playing with the weight of the sickle in her hand. "You’re right; they don’t. They aren’t really much better armed than we, are they?" She gave a lazy swipe through the air between them. Leon tried not to look concerned that the blade might touch him.

More sloshing, behind him. Leon felt oddly reluctant to take his eyes off the woman, and not because she was attractive, but he half-turned to see another figure moving toward them through the swampy water. A tall black man, his skin a darker shade than Leon’s. He wore the standard black uniform and basket on his back. Carried the standard sickle in his hand.

"Hello," the man said. That one word, spoken in a deep rich voice, gave away an accent. An African, though he would need to speak more at length before Leon might hope to identify the accent specifically.

"How’s it going?" Leon asked, wary. He didn’t recognize this fellow worker either.

The man joined them, nodding to the woman in familiarity. Well, at least the two of them recognized each other.

"I’m Leon," he said, switching his tool to his left hand so that he might extend his right. "I don’t recall meeting either of you before." He was going for a casual tone.

The black man switched his sickle, too. His grip was strong: solid meat. Not a hollow flesh sleeve hiding a bony Demon arm. "I’m Salim."

"Salim." Leon still couldn’t place the accent. "Where are you from?"

"Darfur. I was killed there, in the genocide." The man seemed to be watching Leon’s face for a reaction, watching him as if he might even recognize him from TV.

Darfur. Leon knew about that genocide; hadn’t the death toll already been 400,000, at the time he died in his safe little apartment in New York? Children with their heads bashed in by rifle butts, men castrated and then shot, women raped—by the Arab Janjaweed militias brought in by the Sudanese government to do their dirty work. He had wanted no part of that story, had even turned down the assignment offered him, no matter what his superiors thought of him for doing so. He had drawn the line at Darfur.

Was it a coincidence that he should run into a victim of that genocide here? Not with 400,000 dead, at least, Leon thought. In fact, he was surprised he had never before encountered one of the victims of the holocausts he had covered in his career. But Hades was big. So big.

"I’m Megan." The woman shook his hand, too. Though she didn’t have an Irish accent, with her name and her red hair he cynically wanted to ask her if she had died in some old IRA bombing, but he didn’t.

Despite the introductions, Leon still didn’t trust them. He knew there were those Damned who worked closely with the Demons, as spies and snitches and betrayers, in order to minimize their own punishment. But these two seemed suspicious of him, too. Did they fear the same thing?

Leon returned his attention to Salim, and saw that the man had caught a flying insect that had been feeding on his blood. He pulled off one of its wings, and then the other. The Demonic creature’s legs writhed. He flicked it away, then wiped the thing’s blood on his trousers. Involuntarily, Leon touched the smear of blood on his own forehead. He had told his friend Dan that he would never spill a drop of blood here in Hades. But he had, hadn’t he? When he’d crushed that tiny primitive Demon against his head just minutes ago. Yes, some of it had been his own ingested blood. But not all of it.

The tall African craned his neck, gazing off into the swaying forest of tall shoots. "We should move on…before the Demons catch us talking."

Megan nodded, and then looked at Leon again. "See you around."

"You two stick together?" he asked.

"You don’t approve of interracial relationships?"

"No, no…that wasn’t what I was thinking."

She smiled. "We aren’t a couple, anyway. We just like working together."

Looking back as he started away, Salim said to Leon, "Maybe you can work with us, too, sometime."

Leon stood watching the strangers as they vanished again, like ghosts, into the fog.

He found himself listening for more distant gunfire. Waiting, and listening.

5: Feeding and Digesting

As he pushed a segment of stalk into the orifice of the Demon before him, Leon surreptitiously kept an eye out for Salim and Megan. Shouldn’t they be feeding the harvest to the Demons, now, too? But he saw neither of them. It confused him, and inflamed his suspicions, as unformed as they were.

Leon tried not to feel disdain, specifically, for the man who’d called himself Salim. It made Leon feel a kind of shame, but it was hard to avoid. He had seen so many men who looked just like Salim with blood on their hands, bloodlust in their eyes. It was hard for him to think of any of them as victims, now. Then again…he had seen men who resembled himself on his assignments, as well.

A scream, and he jerked his eyes to the right to see that a woman had been struck down by the Demon she had been in the process of feeding. What had she done to enrage it? Turned her head to look away, too obviously? Pushed the stalk in too roughly? Or was there any reason at all, beyond that she was here in Hades? Diminished level of punishment or not, their masters didn’t want the Damned to become too comfortable in their station.

The woman’s body gave ghastly jolts, some of her brain matter bulging out of her riven skull. But she would regenerate, without any loss of memory. Too bad, maybe, for that.

Leon made sure he kept his eyes forward now—as the next Demon in the queue stepped up for its meal, rising on its hind legs—but his mind wandered back to Rwanda.

It was an anecdote that his network had not allowed him to relate. Leon had interviewed a father who had found the murdered body of his son, his head hacked open by a machete. A chunk of the boy’s brain lay apart from the body, and there were ants feeding on it. The father said he felt strangely angry at the mindless ants for the way they desecrated his boy, more angry at that moment than at the men responsible for the crime. The father had picked up the fragment of brain to deny the ants their meal, had brushed them off it. And he had saved that piece of his child in a bottle, where it had shriveled like a holy relic, the remnant of a saint. It was a strange thing to keep in order to remember one’s child, but Leon wondered if maybe the father felt his son’s memories of him resided in that scrap of his mind.

Leon lifted his eyes from the stalk, as he fed it like a pencil into a pencil sharpener, to the mirror that was all the Demon had for a face. His own face framed there, serving as the Demon’s. Why? So he would hate himself? A symbol, to show him that he was responsible for his own damnation?

Later, during the rest period that those in this level of lessened punishment were allowed, Leon was told why that woman had had her skull split. She had explained the reason herself to her fellow Damned, now that she was mostly mended already.

The reason the Demon had struck her was that she had seen her face in the mirror, and out of a strange compulsion—a defiance she had not planned—she had stuck her tongue out at herself.

6: Trojan Horse

Gunfire awoke Leon Brown, and he thought he was in Sierra Leone in Liberia in Rwanda in Somalia in New York City. He opened his eyes, sat up on his bunk in the barracks of the Damned. The man who had the bunk above his jumped down, and Leon asked him, "What’s going on?"

"The rebellion!" another man cried, delirious with excitement, as if mere bullets could blast them a hole in the wall of Hades itself. "They’re here!"

They? Who were they? Demons? Damned? Both?

More and more gunfire, from everywhere at once.

A man burst into the barracks, with a submachine-gun in each hand and a revolver tucked in his waistband. "Here! Hurry!" He passed one submachine-gun to the man nearest him, and the pistol to a woman. Another man lunged into the structure after him, with two sawed-off pump shotguns and two semiautomatic pistols.

"Where did all this come from?" Leon shouted.

"A bunch of rebels infiltrated the area yesterday!" one of the men dispensing weapons said. "They pretended to be harvesters, but they had guns in their baskets!"

Salim, Leon thought. Megan. And others he hadn’t met.

But why hadn’t they told him, when they had talked with him? Maybe they hadn’t been ready to reveal themselves yet? Or was there a vibe about him that had made them feel he was untrustworthy? Or at least, ineffectual? The latter was even more insulting.

A shotgun was offered to one older man, but he backed off with his hands in the air. "Don’t involve me! We’re almost phased out of this sector, anyway."

The man offering the gun looked incredulous. "What are you, crazy? We can overthrow these bastards, make them pay!"

"Yeah? Are you going to overthrow the Creator, too?"

"He’s probably a spy," a woman snarled, glaring at the older man. "Is that it, Marty? You one of their spies?"

"What, you wanna shoot me? You want to shoot me, too?" The man named Marty spread his arms wide. "I’m not a spy, but I’m not a fool, either. You can’t do anything except make them angry!"

"Maybe you aren’t a spy," said the man with the shotguns, as he pushed past Marty to approach Leon. "But you’re definitely a coward." Now he offered the sawed-off twelve gauge to Leon instead. "Here, man, come on."

But Leon only stared at the weapon, too.

"What is this?" the woman exclaimed.

"Their spirits are broken," the man offering the gun said in disgust.

The woman snatched the shotgun herself, with a withering look at Leon.

"I just hate violence, okay?" Leon said. "I don’t want to be like they are."

"Are you saying we’re like they are?"

"I’ll come with you. I’ll help free the others. But I’m not killing anything."

"They’re just Demons! They don’t have souls! Anyway…I think these Demons are just machines."

So, Leon wasn’t the only one of that opinion. Still, he wouldn’t take one of the weapons.

But when those who had armed themselves with guns—or with the bamboo legs of tables and bunks—poured out of the barracks, Leon went with them to do what he could. Even so, he felt a bit removed from the action. Like a reporter, just tagging along.

Ineffectual.

7: The Rescued

The streaming prisoners branched off in several directions. Leon veered toward the maze where Dan was crucified to the wall. After all, Dan had been assigned to him. It was Dan he would free.

But just outside the maze, a man plunged out of the mist straight at him, moving swiftly despite his hobbled gait, a sickle in one fist and a wild grin on his face. At first Leon didn’t recognize Dan, because he had only ever seen him bolted to that wall. Blood still streamed from the stigmata of his wrists and ankles.

"Leroy Brown!" he blurted, stopping before him. He held the sickle out to him. "You better take this, brother. My wrists are still killing me; there’s nothing I can do with it until I heal a little bit."

Leon looked down at the tool. Maybe because he had used its like before, he accepted it.

Dan said, "You were right, man. I didn’t believe you, but you were right."

"Right?" Leon said numbly.

"The rebels! They’re here! We can fight these monsters!" He pointed beyond Leon. "Come on. Let’s go to the towers."

Leon glanced behind him. Distantly, he saw the ghostly outline of the nearest metal tower looming into the ceiling of fog. "The towers?"

"Yeah! We have to free them, too, right?"

They ran side-by-side. They joined several others racing toward the tower, which became as wide as the base of a lighthouse. Rungs that the Demons used to mount it were welded to its black iron flank. Dan waited for the others to crawl up the side like ants, and then waved for Leon to follow them. "I’d better go last, with these hands."

Leon obeyed his instructions, too dazed to think for himself. He began climbing, keeping the sickle in hand. He glanced down and saw that Dan was making his way up, albeit slowly. And he still had that rapturous, mad grin on his face.

Much of the gunfire—automatic bursts, blasts from shotguns—came from above him, and when Leon was high enough for the "living" web to be visible through the haze, he was shocked at what he saw. Damned with guns, at the very tops of the towers or clinging to their sides, were not just shooting at the spider-like Demons crawling along the webs. They were shooting out the spheres of luminous orange fluid. The brains within, with their eyes like the horns of snails, were either blown into gobbets, or slithered whole out of the shattered globes to plummet far below.

But after the initial shock, Leon realized this was their way of freeing the brains from the containers that would not allow them to regenerate. Now, the prisoners would be able to reconstitute from their mutilated state, as Leon himself had done after his stint in one of the iron towers.

He continued climbing, until he came level with the lowest strands of the vast web. One of the spider-things was scurrying nimbly toward him along its tightrope. Below Leon, Dan cried, "Cut it! Cut the cord!" But Leon could not raise the sickle. Could not slice the strand, because it was the attenuated body of a Damned, with nerves that felt pain. He knew that only too well…

Thunder from someone’s twelve gauge. Sprayed with buckshot, the Demon was knocked off the web and vanished into the clouds of fog below.

Leon climbed on. He did not know why…what he could do. The Damned were being freed with bullets, the Demons killed with bullets. But he had been swept up in the furor. Maybe he was just here to witness. There must always be witnesses. It was a sacred responsibility—was it not?

That’s what he told himself, as he reached the top without having shattered a globe with his blade, without having severed a cord along which a Demon moved.

The obelisk tapered toward its summit but still provided a flat surface, and up here a man was firing bursts from his submachine-gun at another spire in the distance. He was so absorbed in this, and Leon absorbed in watching him, that they didn’t see the Demon pull itself up onto the platform until it had lashed out with its multi-bladed limbs. With a shriek, the machine-gunner toppled over the side and plunged out of sight. The Demon then turned its mirror face Leon’s way—and surged at him, arms slashing.

Leon raised his left arm. A chop from the Demon sliced his forearm to the bone. He fell onto his back, struck the rear of his skull on the floor in so doing. The Demon jumped over him. It pinned his head down with one pincered claw that gripped his hair. The other foreleg cocked itself back and he saw a corkscrew-like digit click into place. He saw his own face hovering above him.

Not his face…not his face…he couldn’t be grinning like that! Blood splattered on his skin, and his tongue wolfishly lashing over his lips, like that…

An explosion, like a bomb going off. Deliriously, Leon thought a plane had flown right into the side of the metal tower. The Demon suddenly flew off him, as if it had jumped away. A man stooped over Leon in its place, a shotgun in one hand. With the other, he helped Leon to his feet. He recognized the black man. Salim.

"You must be the good Mexican," Leon mumbled.

Salim frowned. "Mexican? Are you daft? I told you…I’m from Darfur."

Dan was there, too, taking his other arm. Together they supported him, while he recovered his senses.

The three of them surveyed the scene before them. They couldn’t see any more orange suns through the mist. No more Demons scrambling along those strands of the web that had not been hacked away.

"Can you make it back down to the ground?" Salim asked Leon.

"Yeah…yeah," he said, but he was still a little disoriented as he stooped to retrieve the sickle he had dropped.

8: Bloodlust

As they reached ground level, a line of the Damned was marching past them. The group was bloody and torn, but there was a triumphant gleam in their eyes. Toward the end of the miniature parade, Leon recognized the woman who had glared at him back in the barracks. She was carrying a bamboo rod against her shoulder, and bound to its end by its hair like a hobo’s sack was a severed human head. Leon recognized this person, too: the old man named Marty. His eyes rolled frantically and his mouth moved like that of a fish, opening and closing without a sound. There were some other living heads being carried, too. Displayed as traitors.

The woman spotted Leon, and her eyes hardened. She looked like she was about to point him out to the others. But then she apparently noticed the sickle in Leon’s hand, and she nodded at him, as if in approval. She tramped away with the rest.

Leon realized he was wagging his head. Numbly wagging his head.

A thudding sound of bodies colliding and an inarticulate cry close behind him made Leon spin around, to see that one of the Demons had descended the tower, head-downwards like a fly, and launched itself onto Salim. It had him on his back, striking madly at him, perhaps recognizing him as one of those who had smuggled the rebellion into the heart of this particular Demonic enclave.

"Shit, shit, no! You bastard!" Dan was shouting, crouched as if he might jump upon the Demon’s back, but knowing he would have no chance against its strength.

Leon pushed Dan out of the way, drew back his arm, and swung his sickle down squarely into the Demon’s jagged spine.

Red blood squirted out of the wound he left. It was a shock to Leon. Yes, he had seen red blood on the Demons during this battle, but he had seen red blood on them so many times before. He had thought it was the blood of the Damned, as it always was. But now he realized that they had red blood of their own. That they were not machines, mere robots, after all. Alive, in their way. Just as he was alive, in his way.

The thing made no sound, but jerked its mirror face around at him in a fury that needed no voice, no face of its own. Anonymous and distant and hidden, like the Creator of all this. Leon swung the sickle again, into that mirror. Shattering it.

The Demon fell off Salim, and Leon kept hacking at it, again and again, ignoring the pain in his own slashed left arm. Dan helped drag the badly lacerated Salim to his feet, and Leon went on smashing the creature with the tool’s heavy curved blade.

He crouched over it, panting. It lay quivering on its back. It was dying. Blood ran from a dozen deep gashes. It had regurgitated a greenish ooze of partially digested sugarcane from the orifice in its midsection. It was pathetic, vulnerable, lying there. Spread-eagled like a beaten woman waiting to be raped. So with one final, extra-powerful swing, Leon buried his sickle’s blade into the center of its bony black chest.

He grinned, gasping, felt the thing’s splattered blood trickling down his face. It dribbled onto his upper lip, and unconsciously he licked the drops away with his tongue.

And then, even though the thing’s mirror face was broken, he saw his own face reflected. In his mind. The mad, lustful leer glowing through the war paint of gore. The wolfish tongue…

"You bastards," he croaked. It was the Demons’ final humiliation. Final punishment. Once, they had forced him to feed them, care for them. And now, they had forced him to kill them. To break his vow. To spill blood.

Tears welled up in his eyes, at what they had made him do. As if this creature had planned it; yet another psychological torture. He wanted to strike it again, he was so filled with trembling rage, but he only tugged his sickle out of the dead thing’s heart. It would not regenerate, as he would. It was dead forever. And that made him hate it all the more. Because it made him envy it.

"Damn you," he sobbed at the creature. "Damn you…"

9: The Rebel

Leon, Salim and Dan eventually caught up with the group they had seen marching past—this time with Leon and Dan supporting Salim between them, since he was the most badly wounded, with one hand almost severed and one eye gone from a gouge to his face. They had waited a little bit, until he was able to walk, until he was not moaning terribly with the pain. By now, Dan’s stigmata was nearly gone and the wound in Leon’s arm had become shallow.

They found that the group had congregated at the area where once they had fed the queues of Demons, and even more Damned had joined them. There were tables upon which they used to pile the freshly cut segments of those sweet-tasting, bamboo-like stalks. But now, on one of these tables a row of glass containers had been set. They were spares of the globes that had formerly been mounted in the hollows of those black iron minarets, in which brains like Leon’s own had been stuffed and an orange fluid added to prevent the brains from regenerating until they were released again.

These globes had been inverted, with their black rubber seals at the top instead of the bottom. But the entire rubber collar on each globe had been pried off to make the opening wider. This had been done to accommodate the larger objects that had been forced into them. Not just brains, but an entire row of human heads. More than a dozen of them.

Marty was one of them, and all of the heads possessed mouths that worked as if trying to breathe or speak, eyes that blinked and followed the movements of their captors.

Leon turned to see that someone had stepped up to Salim, and put a hand on his shoulder. The red-haired woman, Megan, concern on her face. He smiled at her bravely through his agony.

Megan switched her gaze from Salim to Dan. She motioned with her head toward the row of glass spheres. "Are these the people you felt were working with the Demons?"

Dan looked over her shoulder. "I guess," he said reluctantly.

Leon was still staring at them. He was reminded of tales of the French Revolution, and the guillotine. How it was claimed that every so many heads lifted from the wicker basket had eyes and mouth still moving. A few horrid seconds before the life went out of them. But here, the life would not go out of these heads. Not ever. For all Leon knew, one of these Damned might even have died during the French Revolution, only to find himself here in Hell. This place where all mortal suffering was rewarded with more, and more, and more. Eternal, no real death, no oblivion, no forgetting, a suffering always alive and eating the brain from inside as the Demons ate at the outside. There were two Hells. This infinite macrocosm. And the microcosm within one’s skull. Both could not be escaped from…

He stepped forward uncertainly, unconsciously, like a sleepwalker.

He stepped forward with the sickle in his fist, its scimitar blade painted in Demon’s blood. Dan started to say something to him. And the woman who had glared at him in the barracks looked up, recognizing him as he approached the table.

Leon reversed the sickle in his hand. And when he struck the first glass sphere, it was the back edge of the harvesting tool and not its blade that shattered it. The luminous orange fluid spilled out like a pregnant woman’s water bursting, and from the fanged glass womb rolled Marty’s head. It dropped off the edge of the table and lay on its side, gasping soundlessly for air. The eyes turning up toward Leon. But Leon had moved on to smash the second glass globe.

"Hey! Hey!" the glaring woman shouted. She and others surged toward Leon.

"Stop!" a man’s voice shouted.

Everyone turned. Salim stood tall despite his severe wounds. And Megan left his side, to cross toward the table. She moved between Leon and the crowd. They still had guns and lengths of bamboo and sickles of their own in hand.

"Leave him be," Megan told them. "He’s one of you."

Leon watched the stalemate for a moment. Would the next war begin so soon? The war between Damned and Damned? It was inevitable, wasn’t it? It was the way of things.

But the crowd recognized the woman as one of those who had come amongst them to sow the rebellion, and free them, so they did not move on Leon. They watched him, as he resumed breaking the containers and liberating each head so that it could fully regenerate again, into a whole person.

And with each person he freed, it was like he freed another part of himself, bottled up and trapped inside him. Something demoralized into numbness, something beaten into submission, something terrified into helplessness. With each bottle he shattered, with tears in his eyes, he felt his own wounds healing. For the first time in what seemed all eternity, he felt like a whole person, himself.

Biography

Jeffrey Thomas is the author of the following books from Dark Regions Press: The Fall of Hades, Voices From Punktown, Thought Forms, Nocturnal Emissions and Doomsdays. Other of his books include Punktown, Blue War, Deadstock, Health Agent, Monstrocity, Letters From Hades and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers. Some of his short stories have appeared in such books as The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Year’s Best Horror Stories, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. He lives in Massachusetts, and his blog can be found at: