by Tad Williams
The thing gave me as much response as it thought my observation deserved, which was none.
“But I’m going up,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. “That is, I need to go up. To Pandaemonium. It’s important.” The thing just stared at me with those glowing egg-yolk eyes. “I’m not joking! I need to go to Pandaemonium!”
At last it opened its mouth. The words came out in sticky chunks, like someone digging in a bog with a shovel. “We have taken control of the lifter. We have been given a priority task by the Mastema. Use of the lifter will be returned to you when we have departed.”
The Mastema was one of the most powerful tools of the Adversary, a security group of sorts, like the SS were to the Nazis. But I had already guessed that this guy was bad, bad news.
In the silence that followed his proclamation, I heard the announcement voice whispering in my ear as we flashed past Gravejaw again, then Greedy Pile, Cellar of Organs, Cocytus Delta, Brownwater, Toe, and Cocytus Landing. In just a few moments we would be hurtling down through Abaddon where I had first entered Hell. My heart was hammering, but I was so obviously outclassed and outranked by the mud man that I dared not make a fuss. Perhaps once he got out, I could simply make the elevator go back up again.
Did I really think it would be that easy? Well, let’s just say I was hoping.
The lifter was dropping faster now, the voice spitting the names of the levels into my ears like a racetrack announcer trying to call a close four-horse finish. Abaddon Heights. Disease Row. Necro Flats. Acheron Fork. Lower Acheron Fork. Abaddon Waste. And then we were through the Abaddon levels and still plunging downward. At first I thought it was just fear that was making me feel feverish, but then I realized that the lifter cage was getting hotter and closer by the second. The sweat vaporized from my skin as soon as I squeezed it out. My blood hammered in my ears.
The mud man ignored my gasps, immersed perhaps in thoughts of the horrible place he was going, the horrible things he would be doing, but now he began to change. His hide, or whatever it was that had made him look like he was smeared with something sticky, peanut butter or some less pleasant material, was beginning to harden like clay fired in a kiln. As he dried his skin grew smoother, stonier, until he really did begin to look like a statue, a seven foot tall golem, dead but for the smoldering, piss-yellow eyes.
I could barely understand the announcements now, the words running together so that I could snatch only fragments: “Flensing Scar Tissue Junction Hook Burning Shrike Fistula . . .” But it wasn’t just the heat that made me feel like I was dying now, it was the words turning into pictures in my brain, with no work from my own imagination. Somehow the depth acted on me like increasing pressure, forcing images into my head, endless halls full of screeching voices, reflex cries for help that the screecher knew wasn’t coming, chambers as big as grand ballrooms full of stone tables, each table with a ruined but still living body writhing atop it, animals without eyes, rooms full of thunder and blood spray, the pounding of metal against vulnerable flesh, barking dogs, howling wolves, and through it all a sensation of unparalleled misery and hopelessness that squeezed my skull like a monstrous pair of pliers.
“I can’t,” I gasped.
The clay thing stared at me for a moment, then looked away, as if I were a leaf that had blown across its path.
The pressure grew stronger, but the other passenger had simply become more compact, more shiny, as if it had been glazed and fired in a kiln.
Punishment. Punishment. Punishment. Every name the voice whispered into my head seemed to have that word in it. Punishment. We were heading down into the ultimate depths, where the worst work of Hell went on in endless night, pain measured out in just the right size doses to last as long as the universe itself.
Even worse, though, I could feel something else now, something that enwrapped and increased the other bad feelings like a crushing, ice-cold fist. I can’t explain it—I’ll never be able to. Although it came on slowly, when I finally could pick it out from the other kinds of horror, it was the worst thing I’ve ever felt. Freezing cold, but I’m not talking about temperature, like ice and snow. This was the cold of the absolute dark, the cold in which nothing could live, the point at which even the play of atoms slowed to a stop. Empty. Nothing. The end. But what was most terrifying about it, what blasted even the horrors of all Hell’s pain and suffering out of my head, was that this bleak void at the bottom of everything was alive. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. It was alive, and it thought, and even though it was still tremendously far away, its presence sent my own thoughts shrieking in all directions like chickens trapped in a henhouse by a bloody-mouthed wolf.
I realized that I had fallen on my knees, clutching my head to keep my skull from exploding, retching out what little was in my stomach. Still the pressure and the sense of the thinking, waiting darkness grew worse. I was shrieking, babbling—I might even have screamed that I was an angel, for all I know—but the clay creature sharing the lifter paid no attention. I could feel my eyes forced out of their sockets from within, could feel my guts crushed like I’d been rammed from both sides by garbage trucks, could feel what was left of my sanity pouring out of a me-shaped hole like dirty water down a drain. And then we stopped.
When the shuddering ended, I lay in a limp blob where I was, unable to stand or speak. Something closed on me like a claw in one of those arcade games, lifting me up until I dangled in midair, wheezing and moaning. I could dimly see the stale yellow eyes of the mud man as he looked me over, then the door of the lifter opened and he threw me out like a dirty shirt. A moment later, as I wriggled on the baking stone floor outside the lifter, helpless as a waterlogged earthworm, the lifter door hissed shut. I heard the pressure build again, then it was gone, the cage clanking and groaning as it dropped into the depths.
For the longest time I just lay where I was, boiling inside like an Ebola victim. The physical constitution of my demon body was apparently enough to keep me alive, but not enough to save my mind if I went any deeper. I didn’t think I’d last very long even if I didn’t—my head was still hammering so hard that I could barely think. I had no idea where I was, but I knew I had to get out, go up, even though moving my fingers was nearly impossible, let alone my entire body.
Up, damn you! I stared at my hand, willing it to extend, to help me lift myself, then I saw the feet of the first thing approaching. They were hooved, but not with anything so simple as cow’s or horse’s hooves. The great single toe and its nail were metal, dull gray metal. It stopped beside me. I would not have looked up even if I could have.
A moment later something else flapped down and landed. All I could see were legs as thin as a flamingo’s but with blue human hands for feet. A third creature joined the first two, thick legs ending in a cylindrical foot, covered in thick hair and gleaming spines.
“Well, look here,” said one of them in a voice like a rusty leg trap being pried open. It was pretty clear what they were looking at. “Breakfast is served.”
“Let’s make it run first,” another said in a scratchy mumble. It might have been a parrot with half its beak torn off. “I like them when the blood’s really moving. Warm and tender.”
“Piss on that,” said a third, gruff as Baby Bear on steroids. “I’m hungry. Let’s just divide it up now, then you can make your piece run around all you want.”
twenty
block
I SWEAR I would have managed to turn myself over eventually, but someone did it for me, scooping me onto my back as easy as a fry cook flipping a burger—not an association I wanted to make, believe me.
I was in a high-roofed chamber, the Punishment Level equivalent of a lifter station, but it was clear this station didn’t get many casual travelers. The ceiling looked like it had been liberally splashed with things meant to stay inside of people, which had then dried into stalactites. The cracked rock and dirt of the floor beneath me was splattered with dried black blood and scarred with the countless marks of priso
ners and cages being dragged across it. The location was the least of my problems, though. The pressure of these depths was still so strong that it took long moments to lift my head and focus on the creatures surrounding me.
The last one who’d spoken, Baby Bear, looked more like a hairy washing machine than any cousin of Smokey’s, his already disturbing body made more so by all the bits of machinery that had been awkwardly attached to him with bloody rivets. The other two, who I’ll call Bird and Porcupine, were just as unpleasant in their own way: A cross between a stork and the victim of some terrible Third World, flesh-eating virus, Bird had feathered bat wings, a jaggedly sharp beak, and eyes that were only holes in the bird-shaped, partially exposed skull. Porcupine was even less humanoid, four-footed, with huge flat front claws like a badger and a series of bumps on his back which could have been heads, because they all had eyes.
“I’m . . . suh-suh-suh . . .” I was finding it really hard to talk because of the pressure in my head. Hard to think, too. On the plus side, the feeling hadn’t got dramatically worse since I’d been thrown out of the elevator by the mud man, and I was beginning to think the pressure alone might not destroy me, at least not right away. That was the only good news. “I’m somebody . . . important.”
Bird clacked her beak as those empty sockets looked me up and down. “Hark at the creature! Of course you’re important, little thing. You’re our num-nums!”
Porcupine growled and pushed at me with his front head. I couldn’t see a mouth, but even through the general stench I could smell his hideous breath. “Too much talking. Eat it. You two take what you want, then it’s my turn.” He reared up, legs spreading wide like a caterpillar climbing to a new branch, and I finally saw his mouth, which ran down the vertical length of his belly like an unfinished autopsy incision, lined with sharp teeth as if it was an ivory zipper.
I confess that I might have made a noise of dismay. Okay, I sort of squealed like a terrified pig—the unwilling guest at a very ugly luau.
Baby Bear folded one of his claspers around me, crunching muscle and bending bone. I shrieked again and rolled with it, since if I didn’t he was going to tear my arm right off. “Stop!” I wailed. “You don’t understand! I’m . . . I’m on an important mission. For the Mastema!”
A moment of silence followed this. Well, it would have been silence except a low growl was coming from Porcupine’s horrible red, toothy stripe of a mouth right next to my ear.
“Just eat it,” Porcupine said. “It’s talking shit.”
“No, I’m not!” It was so hard to think! “I was . . . attacked. While I was on the Mastema’s business. You don’t want to have that on your heads, too, do you?” I looked back at the more-than-necessary number of eyes regarding me. Baby Bear was drooling what looked like motor oil from a mouth full of crude metal teeth. Bird had tipped her skeletal head sideways as if thinking. “If you get me back on the lifter, I can make my report! You’ll all be rewarded.”
“Hah.” Porcupine dropped back down on all fours and shoved me with its lumpy head. “Now it’s really talking shit. Reward? Eating this little piece of gristle is our reward. Enough of this.”
“Hold a bit, dearie-dove,” said Bird. “Maybe we should take it to the Block. I know you’re aching for your nummies, but you shouldn’t ever fuss with Mastema business.”
Porcupine growled again, and Baby Bear echoed him. “Mastema business,” said the furry half-appliance. “Fuck ’em sideways. What have they ever done for us?”
“It’s not what they’ve done for us,” said Bird sweetly, still watching me with those empty eye holes. “It’s what they might do to us. Do you remember what happened in Lesser Organs? When they came for Mudlips?”
Both Porcupine and Baby Bear quickly took a step back, much to my relief.
“Can we eat some of it, at least, before we take it to the Block?” Porcupine whined. “I’m so fucking, scabbing hungry!” I could hear its stomach-incisors clicking together.
“The Block,” said Bird firmly. “But don’t feel bad, chummy—we still might get to eat it all. Maybe play with it a bit, too.”
“We’d better,” said Baby Bear.
I could barely walk, but it didn’t matter, because Baby Bear dragged me behind him like a toddler’s toy. I had no idea what the Block was. All I knew is that the needles on my Going To Get Eaten Now dial had temporarily swung back out of the red. I had a feeling that I might have been able to beat these things or at least escape them if we were someplace else, but here in the crushing depths it was all I could do to stay conscious and even slightly sane. It wasn’t just the feeling of pressure that was crippling me; everything I had felt on the way down, especially that singular, fearful . . . presence . . . was still in me like an awful sickness, a horror hangover that had me trembling, nauseated, and all but helpless.
The trio of demons dragged me down long corridors echoing with screams and less articulate noises, past room after room, each one a laboratory where new kinds of pain were devised and put to use. I saw prisoners torn, smashed, pulled to pieces, scalded with steam, boiled into nerve-spaghetti and then stretched on hot wires until the nerves vibrated like plucked violin strings in screams I could feel without hearing. On we trudged, through long stretches of flickering darkness, past horror after moaning, gurgling horror, until what little command I had over my thoughts began to slip again. It felt pointless to keep struggling, to try to stay sane. Why fight? Even if I got out of here somehow, Hell was practically endless, and I still had to walk right into my enemy’s stronghold and try to steal Caz right from under the grand duke’s nose, then escape him and all his power and somehow get back out of Hell again.
The word for that, it seemed pretty clear, was “impossible.” I hadn’t thought it was a great plan even before I got to Hell, but as my friends often tell me, I have a tendency to be way the fuck too optimistic.
At last, after I had been dragged past too many rooms full of shrieking meat to care anymore, we arrived at a desk in front of a big, black door. The female creature sitting behind the desk had a lovely golden-curled head like a postcard angel, but the rest of her body was a giant centipede’s, and she had to coil her segmented body around the arms of the chair to stay seated properly behind the desk. She eyed my captors with suspicion.
“Wha?” The golden centipede girl had the slurred voice of an ancient rummy or a punchdrunk fighter. “Wha you want?”
“We have to see the Block, lovely one,” said Bird. “We need to show him.”
“Nah gon’ habben.” I could see now that the reason the receptionist (or whatever she was) talked that way was because she had a mouth full of smaller centipedes. A couple of them fell out onto the desk and then began to climb their way back up her body, heading toward the mouth. “The Block do’ wanna be disthurh . . . disturh . . .” She paused to gulp down the ones who’d returned, then lifted a pincered claw to keep the rest from making an escape in the confusion. “Disturbed.”
“Oh, he doesn’t?” snarled Porcupine, but Bird waved a feathered claw.
“He’ll want to see this, sweetling. He truly will.”
Golden Girl stared at Bird for a moment, her head so completely human that I couldn’t help wondering if she’d looked that way in life, like a goddess of dawn. Then the reception-thing broke the impasse by slithering over the back of the seat and making her way, on all those tiny little legs, along the wall to the door, head waggling like the unstable burden it must have been. She pulled the door open a bit with her front legs and said something through the opening, causing several more little centipedes to tumble out of her mouth to the ground, where they began their long crawl back to, presumably, comfort and safety. Then the ruined goddess swiveled her golden head around to us and said, “It’s to go in alone. The rest of you lot stay out here.”
Getting up was hard enough. Walking was harder, and I couldn’t make it happen right away. Baby Bear finally gave me a shove, and I lurched through the door, catching myself in
the doorframe so I didn’t go in on my face.
The room was dank and dim, only one tiny oil lamp on the desk for illumination. The thing that sat behind the desk seemed almost human at first glance, eyes, ears, and nose in most of the right places. His facial skin, however, had been peeled down and hung in a fringe around his neck, like a particularly horrible Renaissance ruff. His facial muscles and exposed tissue were white and red, like raw bacon, but his eyes were alert and disturbingly intelligent. He wore the remains of what looked like a fairly modern military uniform. He grinned at me, or at least bared his teeth. Every tooth was black and too big.
“So what are you?” Words like hot fat dripping. “Eat or punish?”
“Neither, great Block, neither!” I had no idea who this wet, red fellow was or what rank he held, but I wasn’t in a position to bluster. One look told me that this was the kind of minor functionary who ruled over his personal corner of Hell like a little tin god. “I am a traveler from the upper reaches—Snakestaff of the Liars Sect.” The Liars supplied Hell’s advocates, my usual opponents in my angelic business. I knew a little about them even before Lameh’s briefing, so I’d chosen them as my cover. “I’m on the Mastema’s business here in the lower levels, but I was attacked.”
“By Polly Parrot and her little crew?” He really thought that was funny. For a moment I had the insane hope he’d choke himself laughing, but then I remembered he was that color of red all the time. “Oh, good. Very good!”
“No, I was attacked by . . . hirelings in the service of my enemies, who were angry that the Mastema favored me with a commission.” I was improvising, but considering that my head felt like it was stuck in an industrial paint mixer, and that I’d just vomited out my brain, I thought I was doing pretty well. “My enemies cornered me in the lifter,” I went on, “but I was able to escape them here, on this level.” I did my best to sound calm and in control. “The ones who sent me will know how I was treated, both there and here.” Appeals to altruism weren’t likely to be my best approach, so I said, “Of course those who get in my way will be punished, but I promise those who help me will be remembered and rewarded.” It was hard to sound authoritative when I could barely stand and felt like a baked turd, but I gave it my best shot.
