by Tad Williams
“What . . . what do you want?” I shifted my weight, trying to get into a position where I could throw all my force against the frayed strap. I didn’t think I had done enough damage to break it yet, but it wasn’t like I had a lot of choices. My movement irritated Smyler. He pushed his blade against my upper eyelid. I went very still. A drop of blood caught in my lashes and began to leak into my eye, but I didn’t dare blink.
“What do you want?” I must have sounded terrified, because I was. I had already been down to my very last reserves of belief—of faith, if you will—and now things had become dramatically worse.
“What it want?” Smyler gave a little chortle, as crisply dry as the shake of a rattlesnake’s tail, t-t-t-t-t-t. “It want the feather. Come a long way for the feather. Tell where it is, or it will have the wicked angel’s eye in its pocket and the wicked, bad angel’s heart in its lunch box.” Suddenly the deformed mouth spread in what must have been a grin. “Bad angel is sweetest meat. Bad angel always taste so good.”
twenty-six
immortalized
EVEN WHEN free and carrying a gun, I had barely survived my encounters with this murderous little bastard, but this time I was tied to a bed after being drained by Lady Zinc for many days. I couldn’t really think of anything to do but stall.
“Why do you want the feather?” I asked, knowing damn well he wanted it for his master, Eligor. “I mean, I don’t have it here. I couldn’t give it to you even if I wanted to. I’d have to get back to Earth. You know what I mean, right? The real world?”
Smyler only poked the blade a little harder into my eyelid. I swear I felt it touch the surface of my cornea. Not good.
“Feather,” he said. “Give it.”
“I don’t have it!” I wondered if he was too stupid or broken to understand, and as my already shaky faith in a negotiated solution began to dwindle, I slowly drew my legs up a little closer to my body. “I can get it for you, though, but you have to get me out of here—”
He leaned in even closer. His breath . . . I won’t even try to tell you. Vermin. Disease. Open grave pits. “Want feather,” it whispered. “Now.”
I jammed my feet against Smyler’s skinny chest and shoved as hard as I could, with particular care to aim him toward the dresser stacked with glassware and other breakables. He weighed practically nothing, as light as a nine-year-old child, and I was able to get enough strength into my surprise shove to send him flying like a badly made kite. He crashed into the dresser and took at least half the objects off the top, a cascade of breakage like Hummel Armageddon. I put my full weight against the strap I had been working on for days and yanked down as hard as I could. I felt it give a little as the remaining leather stretched, but it held. It also hurt like eleven bitches on a bitch-boat.
Smyler still had his long knife in hand as he popped up like a jack-in-the-box. His smile was horrible, but he wasn’t smiling now. His shriveled face was a perfect blank, the expression now as dead as everything else about it. In the middle of my panic I realized that in all the years of horror movies only Boris Karloff had ever got it right, that slack, weirdly sullen look of the animated corpse. Then Smyler came over the footboard of the bed like a wolf spider out of its hole, and it was all I could do to take the first nasty thrust with my calf. Hurt like a screaming motherfucker, and that’s all I have to say about that.
My enemy was so expressionless that I began to wonder if I hadn’t kicked him right out of his wits, such as they were. He seemed to be completely uninterested now in anything but trying to stab me, the blade snapping out like a snake’s tongue. I blocked every thrust with my legs or body, but sometimes I had to take it in something meaty to protect my more valuable stuff. The knife kept darting here and there, and I was still tied to the bed. The whole thing was just shitty, and I knew I couldn’t survive the attack for more than a few more moments.
“Stop! I’ll give you the feather!” I gasped, but Smyler seemed to have forgotten about his original purpose. His attack became less frenzied but more considered. He was moving around now to keep the bedpost between my feet and his midsection.
The light changed suddenly, the shadows all jumping to one side as though something had startled them. A cluster of little flames appeared in the doorway, a candelabrum, and beside it the startled face of Belle. “What’s going on here?”
I was a little crazed at this point, as you can imagine, but I also thought my best chance would be to set Belle or her mistress on the freak that was trying so sincerely to stick holes in me right this minute, so I yelled, “That’s her! Kill her, just like I told you! You can free me later!” (I have no idea if this fooled anybody, or did anything at all except make me look like an idiot, but I’m going to guess it was what saved me.)
Belle slammed the heavy candelabrum down on Smyler’s arm, making him drop his blade, then she shoved the candles into his face and burned his cheek, which made him hiss and strike at her. Staggered, she dropped the candleholder on the floor. The candles bounced out, but enough remained burning to make long, extremely grotesque shadows from the two struggling monsters, the small, skinny one biting and scratching at the big one like an angry ferret.
I got my legs under me and pulled against my right arm strap as hard as I could, shouting in agony despite myself. It felt like I was going to tear my entire arm out of the shoulder socket. I had frayed the strap just enough, because it finally tore, and I was swinging only by the other arm, the good arm with the uncut leather cuff. This was another kind of miserable, but I had work to do, so I started gnawing at it with my sharp demon-teeth. The sounds from the floor were becoming more animal by the moment. I couldn’t tell who was winning, and to be honest, I wasn’t rooting for either of them.
It was hard work, but I finally chewed through the thick restraint. The first seconds of freedom were glorious, but lowering my arms after a week or two of being tied in crucifixion position was kind of like being stabbed in both armpits at the same time. Still, I’d become pretty used to pain at that point. I sort of fell off the bed, grabbed my pants, and ran.
The fact that Vera hadn’t shown up to see what all the fuss was about told me that she was either in another part of the house or, if I was lucky, out altogether. Still, even if Vera really was gone, Belle and Smyler also had to maim each other badly, because there wasn’t a snowball’s chance that I could beat either one in my current condition.
Belle’s long, thick leg lashed at me like a grumpy anaconda, but she was still tangled with Smyler, and I jumped over her and into the hallway. Vera’s bedroom was only a few doors down. If milady was out of hearing range then the room should be empty, and I needed some things from there.
Vera had been careful, in her weird, old-fashioned flirtation with me, to let me see her boudoir several times, either inviting me in for morning tea—she received me in a high-necked dressing gown—or “accidentally” leaving the door open long enough for me to notice the undergarments artistically draped here and there. Because of that, I had no problem finding her room and also had a fairly good idea of where she might keep her jewelry and perhaps some cash. On my way to the suspect dresser, I paused to lift the poker from its spot beside the fireplace. (Yes, they have fireplaces in Hell. In fact, some parts of Pandaemonium are hot enough to use fireplaces as air conditioning.) The poker had a good heft to it; I was pleased to finally have something I could protect myself with, but I also kept my eyes open for more conventional weapons. I knew I could have found some sharp stuff in the kitchen, but I didn’t want to cross the house—there were exits closer to where I was.
I found a few dozen copper handfuls (that’s what they’re called, “handfuls”) hidden in a jewelry box with Vera’s rings and necklaces. As I stuffed my pockets, I noticed a strange shadow at the back of the room. One of Vera’s pictures, a fruit tree whose limbs swarmed with birds, looked as though it was thicker on one side. No, I saw as I stepped closer, the painting itself concealed a door that hadn’t quite shut all the way.<
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I froze. Did that mean Vera was here? But why the secret door? Was it an escape tunnel? Had she heard the shouting and decided discretion was better than valor?
I opened the door and discovered a passage, walled with brick, that stretched ahead and down, vanishing around a corner. A lit torch hung in a bracket. Someone was almost certainly down there. But just as I was turning away, I heard the Smyler-Belle donnybrook crash out of my bedroom and into the hall behind me, thumps and gasps and the wet slish of knife in flesh. No matter which one of them survived, my route to the rest of the house was blocked. I had nowhere to go but down.
I held the poker in front of me like a rapier as I crept forward into the tunnel, since it was going to be a lot easier in that low, narrow passage for me to stab than to swing. The brick walkway curved then curved again, always sloping down, so that within just a few moments I knew I must be lower than the house itself. Soon I could hear voices, or perhaps one voice thickened and complicated by echoes. I took a few more steps, then saw there was more light ahead of me, so I made my way as quietly as I could down the passage, staying close to the wall and stopping at every bend to peer ahead, until suddenly the corridor widened dramatically.
I was in a subbasement, I guess, but that doesn’t do it justice. It was a cave, was what it was, a cave underneath Vera’s house, complete with stalactites and stalagmites, all pointing in the proper directions. As I moved out of the light of one torch and through a darker area toward the next torch, I suddenly heard Vera’s voice clearly. I couldn’t make out all the words—something about “disappointed,” and “you certainly know”—but it was obvious she was talking to someone. That worried me. I had no urge to fight with Vera, who was quite a package by herself, and if she had allies I definitely wanted to avoid a confrontation. I thought about just turning and heading back, but by now either Belle or, more likely, Smyler had finished up with the other and would come looking for me.
I did my best silent slink. It was more than a cave, I could now see, it was some kind of warehouse or distillery or both. On all sides of me, barely visible in the dim light, stood dozens upon dozens of thick glass vessels, each about the size of a restaurant soup kettle, stacked in rows on shelves that reached to the low ceiling. It looked like Vera was running some kind of medical supply warehouse down there.
“I do not blame you, of course,” I heard her say. “I don’t blame you at all. Every one of you has earned his place here. Every one . . .”
As I tiptoed forward, trying to find a vantage point through the crowded shelves so I could see who Vera was talking to, I caught an odd flash in one of the jars and let my gaze drift back to it.
Something looked back at me. A head. A bodiless head.
No, I realized as I bent down, it wasn’t completely bodiless, because it looked like many of the pieces that would constitute a body were bobbing in the jar with it, only none of them were connected to each other. I looked at the other jars and saw forearms with hands attached, the fingers splayed against the glass like gray-green starfish. I saw feet, and faces that had been removed from the skull and now looked more like masks, and of course penises—quite a few of those, too (although no more than one per container). And in every jar, as if it were the sun around which those nasty pale planets revolved, floated a head.
Revolted, I let my eyes slide back down the row, then up to the rows above, and then ahead to those that still lay before me, shelved on either side of the central passage. I knew I must be looking at Vera’s Immortals, all the lovers she had honored, the men who had treated her as she expected to be treated.
Fat lot of good it did them, I thought.
Then the nearest bodiless head winked at me and grinned.
Generally I try not to squawk like a frightened child when in surveillance situations, but it was too late to take it back now. Not only had I alerted Vera but I had probably been loud enough to let Smyler know where I was, too. In fact, I had probably let the people down in the Abaddon levels know where I was. Even the heads around me were beginning to wake up, rolling their eyes to see who had sent little-girl-scream waves through their formaldehyde.
No use pretending or skulking now. I stepped out into the center of the walkway and went forward. Vera stood at the center of the cavern room in the midst of rows of sturdy, ugly shelves, each nearly full of glass jars, each glass jar with its own set of hands and hearts and balls and staring eyes.
I underestimated Vera. I had expected her to be surprised to see me, or at least to weep and shriek at me before she attacked. Instead she came after me immediately and without a word, arms spread wide. She swung her hands toward me as if trying to claw my eyes; I wondered why, because she was too far away for that to make any sense. Then about three thousandths of a second later those horrible little fingernail-filaments of hers snapped past me like taser wires, just missing my face.
Her toxin-tubes obviously weren’t just for close-up work.
So, I had a fireplace poker; she had, whipping from the fingers of either hand, six-foot jellyfish tendrils that could poison me. Vera lashed out again. I threw myself down as her stingers swept a jar off the shelf behind me. It crashed to the floor, belching broken glass and foul liquids, ejecting body parts in all directions. I had to jump over the corpse-hands, which immediately began crawling toward Vera. She snapped out both her arms at once. I dove under the nearly invisible strands and rolled, then jabbed with the poker when I was close enough, ramming it into her gut as hard as I could. It doubled her over but that seemed to be all: I was still staring at her when she yanked her hands back and tried to catch me in the trailing strands again. One of them got me, wrapping around my neck like a thread of burning napalm. As it tightened on my throat I could feel the ability to think running out of me like sand, the pain getting stronger, darker, like a powerful electric charge, no, like an entire eel, wrapped around my neck and squeezing the life out of me.
The surge of agony lessened. From the corner of my eye I saw Vera kicking at something. One of the hands from the broken jar was clinging to her ankle. She finally managed to shake it loose and turned her attention back to me, but by then I had my idea.
I grabbed the stinger around my neck with my hand. It was like holding a white hot wire, but as I said, by this point I could do pain. I yanked at it hard, then braced myself and kept pulling, even though it felt like I was cutting my own head off with a power saw, until the tendril finally snapped. Vera let out a screech of rage, but she sure didn’t sound injured. Those translucent folds snapped over her eyes as she hissed in fury and heaved her filaments at me again. I ducked, then smashed the closest jar with the iron poker, then smashed another. As she pulled back her tendrils I struck out around me as widely as I could, knocking one jar into another, sweeping the unbroken ones as well as the shards off the shelves. Glass was everywhere, and the stinking clouds of the preserving liquid all but blinded me.
But there were body parts all over too, and like a school of slow, slow fish they were making their way through the glass and spilled liquids toward Vera.
Now I pushed over whole rows of jars, trying to fill the floor with broken glass and free as many of Vera’s immortals as possible. As they piled around her, different parts from dozens of different bodies built bridges with each other, clinging, climbing. Hands worked together to lift a head up to other hands. Many-headed, many limbed piles of dripping meat built themselves up from the sloshing floor like volcanoes being born. The composite creatures quickly surrounded Vera, and despite the love she had lavished on them and the kindnesses she had shown them, none of her immortals seemed willing to miss out on this reunion.
She had forgotten about me and was trying to fight her way free, but the coral reef of fingers and feet and kidneys and faces had already risen to her waist. Hands climbed her body like crabs—many already clung to her dark, loosened hair. She shrieked and tried to knock them away, but more flung themselves onto her and then made chains so that other hands could cross,
until Vera swayed at the center of a crowd of these teetering, squirming piles, white-faced and astounded, still screaming but almost without sound now because she had shrieked herself hoarse. Hands scuttled closer and pulled themselves to her so that the heads could kiss her. As the body-meat piles grew higher, the heads ran their tongues over her, tongues that sometimes came loose and dropped to the floor like overfilled leeches.
Much as I hated the bitch, I didn’t stay to watch. The moment I could see a clear space, I stumbled past the bizarre reunion, ran, heart ratcheting, until I found the stairs at the far side of the cellar, then climbed for what seemed like days upon lightless days. Vera’s hoarse shrieks followed me for a long part of that journey, until I finally found myself in a regular part of the tunnels near the Terminus. From there I was able to make my way upward, to stand free at last beneath Hell’s vaulted, claustrophobic night sky.
I could never have guessed how glad I would be to see that terrible blank firmament again.
twenty-seven
chancery
ONE GOOD thing about Hell is that there’s never any problem getting rid of stolen goods, no matter how late it is. I’d had a lot of time to think between visits from Vera and her vampire groin, and I’d come up with a few ideas of what to do next if I ever got the chance. Now I had it.
Vera’s fancy neighborhood was on the edge of Sulfur Lagoon, a prestige location close to, among other things, the Night Market, a vast array of stalls and tents and shacks made of various awful things where you could buy or sell pretty much anything. Limping and bloody (two things that fortunately don’t attract much notice in Hell) I made my way to the market and asked around until I found the bazaar of a fellow named Saad Babrak who looked like a hairless tarantula from his neck downward and had a reputation as a discreet disperser of goods. In other words, a fence.
