Voices from Hades Read online

  VOICES FROM HADES

  Jeffrey Thomas

  ««—»»

  Dark Regions Press

  2010

  FIRST DIGITAL EDITION

  Text Copyright © 2008 by Jeffrey Thomas

  Cover art © 2008 by Travis Anthony Soumis

  Digital Edition © 2010

  Cover design and Kindle formatting:

  David G. Barnett/Fat Cat Graphic Design

  www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  Also available in a trade paperback

  ISBN: 1-888993-55-3

  Publication History:

  THE ABANDONED first appeared in The Art of Hades, a bonus book accompanying the 26-copy slipcased edition of Letters From Hades, Bedlam Press; second appearance in the anthology A Walk on the Darkside, Roc.

  BLACK WINGS first appeared in the chapbook Unknown Pleasures, Raw Dog Screaming Press; second appearance in the book Tempting Disaster, Two Backed Books.

  SIREN first appeared in the anthology Damned, Necro Publications. SWEET OBLIVION first appeared in the anthology Dead Cat’s Traveling Circus of Wonders and Miracle Medicine Show, Bedlam Press.

  THE BURNING HOUSE first appeared in the collection Thirteen Specimens, Delirium Books.

  THE SECRET GALLERY and PIECE OF MIND are original to this collection.

  Dark Regions Press

  PO Box 1264

  Colusa, CA 95932

  Contents

  Introduction by Jeffrey Thomas

  A Prayer For Lost Souls

  An Introduction to the Taiwanese Edition of Letters From Hades

  The Abandoned

  Black Wings

  Siren

  Sweet Oblivion

  The Secret Gallery

  The Burning House

  Piece of Mind

  Biography

  Introduction

  by Jeffrey Thomas

  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.