Letters From Hades Read online

  "He was probably born in the city of Tartarus. That is where most of the Demons in this region are spawned."

  "Have you ever been there?"

  The woman turned eyes of marveling horror upon me. "Go there? No one would go there! Not willingly…"

  We were coming up on the massive gates to the city, which were set into grooved tracks and could be slid shut and bolted, closing the city off. I asked my companion what the city might want to shut out.

  "Sometimes armies of Angels come here to lay siege to this city or that. War games, for their entertainment. They expect us and even the Demons to put up a good fight."

  The exodus into the city was log-jamming at the gates, trickling through it at a slower rate. There were several Demons posted there, prodding people in the crowd with longer versions of the metal pike I carried, herding them in or out through the entrance. And I saw that these Demons were like the one I had rescued—very human, very white, with jagged dragon-like wings. These were the only devils I had seen in Hell that resembled Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy—the beautiful muscular bodies (but without the horns and tails). And I had thought the Demon I rescued had been stripped naked by her tormentors, but I could see these four males were nude, as well.

  One of the Demons stabbed a man in the buttock with the sharp end of his lance. "Move, hog! You’re blocking traffic!" And he barked a laugh.

  His companion laughed, too, until he abruptly turned to face…me. He had an alert look as if he recognized me from somewhere, and didn’t like what he saw. He shoved into the crowd to get to me.

  "What?" asked his friend.

  "Don’t you smell it, Vetis?" he growled. "Demon blood…from this one!"

  The pike in my hand, I realized with terror. I wanted to fling it away from me but it was too late. I saw the Indian woman squeeze ahead between two people to get away from me. I didn’t blame her.

  "Wait," I said, frozen in my tracks while other souls uncomfortably flowed around me, eyes averted. "Listen…"

  The first Demon to reach me snatched the iron bar from my hand, and raised it to his nose. The one named Vetis soon joined him, seizing me by the hair of my head and pushing the bloody tip of his pike under my jaw. I groaned as it scratched my skin.

  "It’s female blood," the first one snarled. "It’s Chara’s blood!"

  "He must be one of those who attacked her…wounded her," snarled Vetis. I felt the lance’s tip break my skin, and blood flow in a thin stream down my throat.

  "Chara," I babbled desperately. "Is she the one who was nailed to a tree?"

  "Ah, so you admit it!"

  "No—I’m the one who set her free! I pulled that rod out of her stomach!"

  "Chara didn’t say anything about any worm setting her free."

  "She didn’t? Well, didn’t she say how she got free? I did it…I helped her! Ask her!"

  "We’ll take you to her, worm. And if she identifies you as one of her rapists, you will suffer like no soul has ever suffered in the history of Hell."

  "Then take me to her…please!"

  And so I had a personal escort through the gates of Oblivion.

  Day 40.

  I spent the night in this cell, with its low ceiling and walls of mortared stone, and even slept on its cement floor for what I judge to be a few hours. After searching me for weapons, my captors allowed me to keep my organ pouch containing this book and my spare clothing from Caldera. It’s at least given me the opportunity to jot down my approach and introduction to Oblivion.

  My one cell mate must either be mentally ill or driven mad. And he has been severely wounded…yet, and this is something I haven’t witnessed previously, he has regenerated oddly, mutating, his head an impossible tormented flower of flesh, a row of puckered anus-like holes ringing its misshapen skull and his brains dangling from these orifices in ringlets of dry gray tissue. Perhaps his insanity has distorted his healing process. He sits in one corner hugging his knees to his bony chest, pounding his head back against the stones and whispering a series of numbers that might be mathematical equations or purely random.

  It’s surprisingly cool in here, which is refreshing, though I’ve been given no food, water or blanket, unsurprisingly. Beyond the corroded bars of my cell I see a murky corridor and hear echoey shrieks, reverberating wails, and somewhere a baby crying. Behind these, muffled, is the ratcheting grind of great rotating cogs.

  On the wall above me, inserted into it like the mortared stones themselves, are two globes that contain a milky-white gurgling fluid. I’ve touched the globes and they have a fleshy, resilient feel. The fluid does not emit light, so their function was not at first clear to me. They remind me of an organic aspect to Oblivion that wasn’t readily apparent until I was inside the wall, really. Mixed in with the external plumbing and the gears and such detail on the intricate exoskeletons of Oblivion’s buildings were grayish orbs like immense blind eyes or diseased organs…snaking, branching pipelines like gigantic black veins…and some of their composition seemed to be more of charred black bone than of metal, though the bones of no known creature…perhaps grown expressly for these purposes.

  I wondered if the buildings were, at least in a very primitive way, alive. Each, perhaps, a vast half-sentient Demon, with the Damned dwelling inside them like parasites.

  This book in my lap, I stroked its leather cover until the drowsing eyeball centered on the front awakened. As I had done before, I spoke to it soothingly. The single blue eye seemed to focus on my mouth, and it was then that I finally realized it might be able to read my lips somewhat if I spoke slowly and exaggerated my words.

  "Can you understand what I’m saying?" I asked it. "If you can, blink two times."

  The eye didn’t blink. Changing my tactic, I tore a page out of this book, and wrote a message which I held up in front of the book’s cover:

  "If you can read this, blink twice."

  The eye blinked twice. I had known the book was conscious of me, but I’d never been able to judge how much of a mind lay behind it. All along, I had been carrying about a mute companion. I felt less alone, and eagerly wrote:

  "Tell me your name. I’ll recite the alphabet. Blink twice when I reach the first letter of your first name. Then the second letter of your first name. And so on."

  It was a time-consuming process, but at last I had spelled out the name of the soul who had been trapped as the cover of this book, and thus prevented from regenerating. The prisoner told me his name was Frank Lyre.

  "What crime is it that makes them trap some people in books, when the rest of us can go freely? I’ll recite the alphabet again. Blink twice when we reach the first letter of the first word you want."

  The answer that was laboriously decoded was: "Writers who angered Creator."

  "I thought it was something like that," I wrote back to the eye. "I wanted to be a writer myself. A novelist. But I had no luck, I’m afraid."

  "Just as well," was the reply. "Might be like me."

  "Will they ever free you?" I asked.

  "Don’t know."

  "What would happen if I pried your eye out of this cover? Would you then regenerate? Well, the leather of the cover is part of you, too. If I tore off the covers and burned them, would you then finally regenerate whole?"

  "Don’t know," Lyre repeated.

  "You might just regenerate as this cover again," I mused aloud, "just a hunk of skin with an eye in it." I changed the subject, and wrote to Lyre, "Are you aware of anyone ever escaping from Hell?"

  "No."

  "Is it possible, do you think, to at least send a message out to living people? To warn them, prepare them? Something like this book itself. Is it possible to smuggle out an object?"

  "Doubt it."

  "I’d like to find out," I replied. "I’d like to try to send this book back home. Maybe it would work if I stripped the covers off, because they’re your soul. Maybe somehow I could find a way to deliver just these inanimate pages."

  "
Don’t know," said my living journal.

  Hours have passed. I would have thought the Demon Chara would have already been brought to look at me. I reasoned that she must still be recovering from her ordeal. I wondered, too, if she had caught up with Caroline before Caroline made it to Oblivion. But what would it matter, really? Caroline was destined to be mauled and mutilated by many Demons through eternity; one was as good as another.

  Gripping the rough bars of my cell, I pressed my face between two of them to peer out into the dimly-lit corridor beyond. Intermittent bare light bulbs glowed inside little metal cages like miniature cells in themselves. There were other cells like mine, but the one directly opposite was in pitch blackness and I wasn’t sure if it was occupied, though I thought I heard a slight rustle of movement within. A rushing gurgling caused me to lift my eyes to the low ceiling. Along it ran a thick pipeline that was translucent and organic. Dark fluid was flushing through it, and seemed to be bearing along gobs of refuse. But it wasn’t sewage; the fluid was red, and the refuse borne along was offal, viscera, blobs of raw flesh. It was like listening to a train pass in the night, and when the cloacal flow had dwindled away, it looked like a few stray scraps of sundered meat lay inside that vein-like tube, its interior beaded red.

  "That’s from the torture plant," chuckled the unseen occupant of the opposite cell, apparently amused by my wary upturned eyes. "That’s where we’re headed. You and I."

  "Maybe you," I said. "Not I."

  "Ha! I see…your lawyer’s gonna get you out of this, huh? A last minute appeal?" The figure of a raggedly dressed man emerged from the dark to grin at me between his own bars. "Maybe they’ll turn you into a book, too," he said, nodding at the volume I’d left on the floor behind me. "That’s where it’s done." Another chuckle. "Still got your book…that’s funny. What are you doing, postgraduate work? Going for a degree?"

  "Hey…aren’t we on the same side, here?"

  "Side?"

  "Never mind. Look…you said they make these books in the torture plants?"

  "Yeah. I seen where they do it. I used to work in a print shop, so it was pretty interesting. Watching the bindery and all." He snorted. "This will be my third time through a torture plant. I don’t take no shit from these fuckers. I don’t care. I’m not about to bow down."

  "You aren’t scared?"

  "Course I’m scared. You think I’m crazy? But all I got left here is my pride. When I lose that, they win. They can’t break me. I have to show ’em all…I got to show the Big Man…that I’m still my own person. I have my will. They can tear this phony body all apart and flush me down the drain but they can’t tear apart who I am. See? In that way, we can win. If you look at it like that, in the end we can always win."

  "I hear what you’re saying. But I want to make things as easy on myself as I can. I’m afraid of the pain."

  "That’s what they count on. That’s what they enjoy. You can’t give in to your fear, no matter what. Some people just go crazy from pain and fear. Others go blank like robots, just fall down in one spot like a rock and lie there. Like in a coma. Don’t do that; if they find you, they’ll gather you up and do some really extreme stuff to get your attention again."

  "Do you know what my cell mate did?"

  "He’s an autistic."

  "And for that he’s in Hell?"

  "If he didn’t know enough to accept the Son, then that’s what he gets."

  "It just isn’t fair," I hissed, glancing back at my cell mate, who continued to murmur an unending stream of numbers. Maybe the days that we would be here, the hours of eternity.

  "Fair? Oh man, you’re a virgin in Hell, aren’t you?"

  As I was looking back at my cell mate huddled in his corner, those burbling fleshy spheres inserted into the wall caught my attention. There was an eye floating in both of them, unnaturally large, perhaps magnified by the milky liquid within. The eyes blinked. When they recognized that I had seen them, they withdrew…became blurry and disappeared. So, was this then some viewing device for my captors to check on me from a distance?

  The eyes had looked familiar to me. Long, lynx-like, with heavy slitted lids. Irises grayish in color.

  I swore they were the eyes of the Demon Chara.

  Day 41.

  Today I was awakened by the sound of my cell door creaking open. Startled, I looked up from the floor to see a handsome Demon standing naked in the threshold, his wings folded to his back.

  "Get up," he commanded. "You’re free to leave."

  "Free? I thought Chara would come to identify me…"

  "She identified you. You weren’t one of her attackers. She confirmed that you helped her, as you claimed." He gestured at the hallway behind him. "So you can go."

  Scrambling to my feet, I gathered up my book bag and threw a last look at my pathetic companion, still counting off numbers in the corner, and then followed the Demon out into the corridor.

  I looked into the cell opposite mine. It was dark, but I sensed it was empty. While I had slept, its occupant had been taken away to the torture plant.

  As I walked along beside the statuesque guard, I knew that it had indeed been Chara who had spied on me through that organic device in the wall. But in an odd way, I was disappointed that she had identified me in that manner. From afar. I realized I had actually been anticipating her arrival at my cell with more than just the desire to be freed. I had wanted to see her again in person…

  Insane, I told myself. You’re going insane.

  "Do you know where I might go to have this arrow taken out of my shoulder?" I asked the Demon as we walked. "It’s…"

  The guard looked over at me, stopped in his tracks, took hold of the crossbow quarrel in one fist and jerked it out of my body.

  I dropped to my knees, my vision going black for several moments, the ripped wound streaming fresh blood down my back. With his free hand, still holding the arrow in the other, the Demon took me by the elbow and hoisted me to my feet…helped me along as we resumed walking. Though his medical assistance and his grip were rough in nature, I still sensed that there was some consideration in his actions. What I had done for Chara had not gone fully unappreciated.

  We passed through Moorish archways into new corridors, some lined with more cells and others lined only in damp grimy stone. As we neared the outer reaches of the prison, passing what I took to be offices with closed black metal doors, the hallways became cleaner—formed of glossy obsidian blocks mortared like bricks. At last we stopped outside one of the closed iron doors and the guard opened it to usher me inside. Behind a desk, also bolted together from slabs of black metal, sat one of the those skeletal demons with glowing eyes and the top of its head immensely swollen like a balloon fit to burst, like the ones new arrivals filed past when first being admitted into Hell. Without a word, the cadaverous entity looked up at me, seemed to stare into my very brain, then nodded at the guard. And that was that, whatever that was. We left the room, the guard shut the heavy door, and a minute later I was ushered out the front entrance and into the open air of Oblivion.

  As I’d immediately been arrested upon entering the city, this was really my first exposure to life on the inside of its surrounding walls.

  Stumbling down a broad flight of black marble stairs, I looked back at the looming prison. It was wide and tall, but there were wider and taller structures; I imagined that most of it existed below street level. A number of huge translucent veins of varying thickness—like those that coursed along the ceilings in some of the prison’s corridors—ran out of one face of the prison, connecting with a taller building that rose up next door. I watched as a wash of blood and pulped matter flushed through one of these connecting pipelines. The neighboring building must be a torture plant. From its flat roof, two vast brick smoke stacks soared against the lurid reds, yellows and oranges of the lava sky, billowing black smoke that filled the air with a noxious scent of burning flesh.

  This street was very wide, paved with cobblestones, and through
its center ran two far-spaced rail tracks such as a streetcar might ride on, but there were no motorized vehicles passing along the road. Did Oblivion have a public transport system?

  I turned the corner of the block, and found myself on a much narrower street lined primarily with smallish tenements of black brick. On street level, I was surprised to see shop fronts glowing yellow against the dark faces of the buildings. The inviting smells of a bakery nearly masked the air’s pollution. There were several clothing stores. As I trudged along, my own clothes still wet with blood though my wound was already sealing, no one gave me so much as a second glance.

  Two teenage boys came pedaling up the street on crude bicycles, wobbling and squeaking maniacally. An old woman ahead of me on the sidewalk pulled a rickety wagon loaded with groceries. As he passed her, one of the boys on the bikes reached down and swept up a sack from her wagon. She cried out, and I yelled, "Hey!", but the boys turned the corner whooping triumphantly.

  Every fifth building or so, a wire was strung across this street, and hanging from these wires like drying laundry were rows of headless skeletons, each blackened as if charred, their joints wired together as if they were classroom displays. They swayed in the breeze, and clattered softly against each other like bamboo wind chimes. As in the case of Caroline, if a person were beheaded, the head would grow a new body…but the headless body would simply rot. Yet this was the first time I had seen human bones in Hell. I didn’t doubt that the torture plant one street over had contributed these macabre decorative displays to the city, perhaps to mark its outer borders.