by Tad Williams
A deep, reverberating snarl made me leap forward just in time to avoid the hellhound that came barreling out of the passage behind me, an unlucky commuter in his huge jaws. The beast shook the poor, screeching bastard like a terrier with a rat, then dropped the limp body when he spotted me.
I backed toward the lifter column, guns drawn, as the hound came toward me. I had tested Riprash’s pistols enough to know I couldn’t trust any shot much beyond ten paces, so I waited. But as I tried to keep my gun hand steady and the barrel pointed at its sloping forehead, two more hounds scrambled out behind, one of them chewing contemplatively at the tattered remains of a leg wrapped in a bloody dress.
I might have been able to take out one of the monsters with the bullets I had in the crude revolvers. I was a lot less sure about three. And even if I managed to shoot every hellhound dead without having to reload, I still had to deal with Niloch and his huntsmen who must be close behind. I could only see one chance open to me now, so I backed up a little farther, until I was standing beside a wall of partitioned stalls.
“Ah, yes my dear, there you are,” said a voice as rotten as week-old fish. Niloch made a whistling noise and the hounds backed off. The commissar shuffled forward out of the entrance maze, something like a long buggy-whip in one hand, a jagged knifelike blade in the other, his bone-frills fractured and charred. “You’ve led us quite a chase, Snakestaff, but now that silliness is over. I can get on with the important business of making you wish you’d never heard of my beautiful, beautiful Gravejaw House.” He turned his bony head toward the soldiers following him out of the maze; they had to kick the torn corpses of several Blindworm citizens aside to force their way onto the open concourse. “Here he is,” Niloch told them. “You wouldn’t think to look at this puny creature that he could be dangerous, but he is, my sweetlings, oh, yes, he is. So look lively. If he does anything silly, cut him down immediately.”
Several of the soldiers had guns, long and impressively trimmed rifles currently pointed at my favorite person in Hell: me. Others had swords and axes. Either way, getting “cut down” was going to be painful.
“And what if I just shoot you before anyone can stop me?” I asked, turning my revolver from the nearest hellhound and pointing it at Niloch himself, aiming right between those shiny little red eyes. “I could live with that result.”
The commissar laughed, a fluting noise like a breathy, delicate sneeze. “Oh, perhaps you could—”
I didn’t bother to let him finish, because I hadn’t meant to start a conversation, just make him think that’s what I wanted. Like most of these lordlings of Hell, Niloch loved the sound of his own voice. I shot him in the face.
It didn’t kill him, of course, or even slow him down much, but I hadn’t thought it would. You don’t get rid of a major demon that way, even on Earth where the physics are against them. I was more interested in distractions: one of the lifters had chimed its arrival, and I knew it was now or never. As Niloch fell back toward his soldiers, his skeletal head temporarily a blossom of shattered bone, I threw myself at the row of lifter stalls as hard as I could.
I wasn’t particularly strong by Hell’s rigorous standards—I doubt I could have stood toe-to-toe with Niloch—but I was just strong enough to rock the flimsy, partitioned wall and start it collapsing. Again, I was lucky that Blindworm had been adapted for isolation rather than constructed that way from the beginning. The stalls were little more than the infernal equivalent of plywood. Even as the first soldiers got clear of flailing Niloch and began to fire their guns in my direction, the stall structure wavered and then collapsed sideways like a row of dominos. I took cover behind the wreckage and began firing back at Niloch’s troops.
As shocked as the waiting passengers were to have the structure fall on them and then find themselves in the middle of a gunfight, they were even more shocked to find themselves face to face with, or even literally tangled up with, their fellow citizens, the very thing they feared and avoided every waking minute. Needless to say, they shrieked and fought like only the terrified insane can fight, and within a few seconds the fracas was spreading through the terminal as customers were confronted by the twin horrors of hellhounds and their neighbors.
I scrambled along the floor toward the lifter column and then stood up and shoved my way through the panicked crowd until I found the open door. There was only one passenger, a tall, scrawny demon with a face like a depressed mortician, frantically palming the wall to get the door to close. I grabbed him and shoved him out to absorb any random bullets flying around, then called out the name of a lifter stop on a level above Blindworm. I needed to go down many levels to get out of Hell, but I didn’t want my pursuers to know that. In fact, since I had no idea if they could trace or even override one of the lifters and imprison me between levels, I didn’t even want them to know which one I was riding.
The door began sliding shut, but then clanged to a grinding halt around the broad neck of a nightmare head—one of the hellhounds. The sheath of its face pulled back as the wet pink snout came out. It didn’t have regular jaws in that awful jack-in-the-box muzzle, just a round, toothy mouth like a lamprey’s. It damn near reached me as I emptied the last of my bullets into it. Foul blood and bits of tissue sprayed back at me, then I put my foot on the beast’s chest, doing my best to avoid the ragged, wounded snout, and shoved so hard that I fell back on my ass. That would have been it for me, but the hellhound stumbled back just far enough for the doors to close, and a moment later I felt the lifter car coughing and vibrating into movement as I headed back up toward Pandaemonium.
Panting, forearm bleeding from a bullet wound that I hadn’t even noticed, I slapped the wall and called out the name of a nearer stop, then quickly reloaded my gun out of the oilskin bag as the car slowed. When the door opened, I stepped out in as relaxed a manner as I could manage, and several other passengers stepped in, clearly oblivious to what had happened just a couple of levels down. A few of them noticed the bloodstains on the floor and the pair of hellhound teeth in the corner, both as big as my thumb, but this being you-know-where, they didn’t seem too upset.
I didn’t even look around the new station, but simply got onto the next open lifter, which was also going up, then got out and went down a couple of times, then up again, making sure that I wasn’t leaving Niloch and his hunters an easy trail to follow. When I thought I’d mixed it up enough, I jumped into an open, empty lifter in Ragged Armpit station and told it to take me to the Abaddon level, far below.
I was exhausted, of course, and skin-crawlingly nervous every time the lifter stopped and new passengers entered, but after I had traveled downward for a good while unhindered, I began to think I really was going to make it.
Then, at the seventh stop, two of Niloch’s soldiers got on.
forty
grey woods
LUCKILY, THE lifter was crowded and the two soldiers were talking to each other. Also luckily, they were just Murderers Sect and not the tougher, smarter Purified, the Mastema police. I sank back against the wall near the door, as much behind them as I could manage, and tried to look like just another infernal commuter on his way home, splattered in the blood and dog-brains of an average working day. Because of all my up-and-down trips to confuse the trail, I’d let Niloch’s hunters get past me, which meant I might run into them anywhere from here on down.
“His lordship is steaming,” said one of the soldiers, a bear-headed fellow with a neck big as my waist and shoulders you could build a house on.
“And he doesn’t look too good, neither,” said his companion with a guttural laugh. He was as big and ugly as his friend, although a little shorter. Both looked as though they could separate my head from my body with just a thumb and forefinger. “Did you see the commissar’s yap? Splinters on top of splinters!”
“If the spy hadn’t ruined my day with all this running about,” said Ugly Number One. “I’d shake his hand. ’Course I’d still rip it off him after that.”
&nb
sp; “From the description, sounds like someone else already did,” said Number Two. His laugh was starting to annoy me already, but he was looking around the car now so I slouched back even farther and dropped my eyes. If he saw me, he wasn’t really looking at me, because he then said, “Why are we going down to Beggar’s End?”
“You dumb shit-hole,” said Number One. “Why do you think? The commissar’s putting us and a lot more on every level between Tophet and Lower Lethe. This escaped spy can’t go below the top Punishment Levels, see? He tried it once, and it made him sick. I heard some Mastema muckamuck was in a lifter with him when it happened, that’s how they know. So we start down in the Lethe levels and then we work our way back up, some on the lifters, some on the roads. Commissar’s got boats out on the rivers, too, ’case he tries that way again.”
It was all I could do not to groan. How was I going to get to the Neronian Bridge if Niloch and his thugs were going to be looking for me all over? For that matter, how was I going to get off this rotten damn elevator?
Well, somebody once said fortune favors the brave. I think it was my buddy Sam, shortly before he drank himself to death. (Well, really, he only drank that particular body to death, but that’s another story.) Since I didn’t have a plan, or even any hope to speak of, I figured that I might as well do something, so I quietly slipped Riprash’s huge dagger-sword out of my belt and then, when the lifter lurched to a stop at the next level, I shoved it into Ugly Number One’s side as hard as I could, with all the force of my legs, back, and shoulders. As I think I mentioned, I’m pretty strong as a demon, and I was hoping to shove it all the way through both of them at the same time. As it was, by the time I got it all the way through armor and Number One, I only gouged about a three inch hole in Ugly Number Two, but the collapse of his wounded partner knocked him off-balance, which gave me time to get out one of my guns and shoot him in the head.
The door slid open. The customers inside the lifter stared down at the two dead soldiers with wide eyes. The passengers waiting to get on suddenly noticed them, too. Nobody moved for a couple of seconds except for the quiet rattle of scales shivering together. Not many heroes in Hell, thank the Highest.
“Step out,” I said to the nearest passenger, a woman with no eyes. Just to make sure she understood, I pressed the barrel of my revolver gently against her forehead. She stepped out. The other passengers quickly followed her. I waved my gun at the passengers outside; they got the idea, moving back from the door. When it closed again and the lifter started down once more, I was alone with the two motionless soldiers, each an ugly, lumpy island in a spreading sea of blood.
I knew they weren’t dead in any ordinary sense, although these bodies might never be functional again, but I didn’t want to take the risk that they might regenerate on me, so I stopped the car at a random floor, checked to make certain nobody was waiting to get on, then dragged the two semi-corpses out of the car. It wasn’t easy—it took me the best part of three minutes to wrestle all that weight by myself, and when I got the door closed and the lifter moving down once more, I looked like I’d just taken a blood shower. I probably didn’t smell all that great, either, but I had bigger things to worry about.
You know how when you’re trying to think of something really important, these other, much less important ideas keep jumping into your head like bunnies on crystal meth, boing, boing, boing, anything except what you’re supposed to be thinking about? You don’t? It’s just me, huh?
Maybe it was Eligor’s crab-demon flexing in my skull, or maybe just exhaustion, but as I was doing my best to figure out what I should do next, I kept getting distracted by ideas that really were not very important right at that moment, like if Hell was no more of a physical location than Heaven was, why was it so much more realistic? Why did people bleed? Why did they eat? Why go to all the trouble of making a permanent torture chamber, then giving it its own ecology and unnecessary shit like that? Was that God’s idea or the Devil’s? What agreement did they have, exactly?
Then I’d catch myself and try to start thinking about survival again.
I really only had one choice of an escape route. From what the two dead guards had said, Niloch’s soldiers were looking for me everywhere from Abaddon on up because they’d learned from that Mastema mud-man who’d commandeered my lifter how badly I’d reacted to the Punishment Levels my first time, when I’d freaked out so badly he’d tossed me out for the Block and his freaks to chew on. It might even have been Eligor who passed the information along to Commissar Niloch, just to torment me in a new and interesting way before having the intracubus in my skull shut me down. But wondering whether Eligor was playing me for a fool or not was a game with no useful ending. What was more important now, Niloch and his thugs thought they had me figured out, so my only hope was to surprise them. If they knew for a fact I couldn’t survive the Punishment Levels, well, that’s precisely where I had to go—right where they didn’t expect me. And if I survived that return visit, I just had to pray that Eligor really wanted that feather back badly enough not to help the ones chasing me, since for all I knew, the intracubus in my head was keeping him informed of everywhere I went and everything I did.
And a great holiday, I thought, just keeps getting better and better.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t ask the lifter to take me down to Satan’s Parlor or anything, but only a few levels lower than Abaddon. After that I could climb to the level with the Neronian Bridge. After all, I figured, I’d gone a few levels farther below that when I experienced the Punishment Levels before, and I’d survived more or less intact.
What I probably should have thought of, though, was that the last time I had descended to the Punishment Levels and escaped, I didn’t have an intracubus burrowed into my head like a demonic tick. To say I was astonished when I got down to Itching Stump, still several levels above Abaddon, and the inside of my head began to burn, is probably a bit of an exaggeration—I’m a pessimist by nature and, after all, I was already in Hell—but I was definitely astonished by how much it hurt. It got worse every level down. By the time I was getting close to Abaddon itself, a place I’d already survived quite easily, that red-hot robot tarantula was doing Jazzercise in my cerebellum, and I was twitching like a marionette with its strings caught in a power mower.
Like I said, I probably should have guessed things might be different this time, but what with everybody trying to hack me to pieces or torture me I’d been a bit distracted. So now I had a new crisis: I couldn’t afford to get out of the lifter yet, because Niloch’s troops were working their way upward from Abaddon. But every second I stayed was making me more and more certain that my head was going to explode in a splatter of flaming nerves and brain goo.
As the levels passed, and my limbs jerked and my nerves sizzled, I kept singing cartoon theme songs over and over in my head just to keep myself from thinking about how much I was hurting, but Spider-Man was already doing me less good than the Flintstones had, and I had a feeling I probably wouldn’t even get to start Yogi Bear. Still, I hung on in desperate agony until the lifter sank past the Abaddon stop, then I gasped out the name of the next level. When the lifter ground to a halt and opened, I stumbled out into the deserted little station at Grey Woods and then out into the city beyond the station. Except there was no city.
At that exact moment I was having trouble focusing, what with something inside my head chewing on my neural fibers, but I realized a little later that I was in one of the places I’d actually read about, not in any Camp Zion briefing, but in the words of Dante himself. (We read The Inferno for extra credit, even though it’s mostly made-up. Surprisingly, old Dante got quite a few things right, including the idea of Hell’s vertical arrangement.) If you’ve read him too, you might remember “The Wood of Thorns,” or, more directly, the Forest of Suicides. That’s where I was now. The lifter building here was like a remote stop far out on a suburban train line, one of those little places where you think there couldn’t possibly be en
ough passengers to warrant a station.
Not only was the station empty, outside the station was a sort of platform, which was really just the edge of the building, and then . . . nothing. Not literal nothing—although this being Hell, that would have been possible too, I guess—but nothing resembling infernal civilization. The woods stretched as far as I could see and were as gray as reported, a heavy, dripping forest of oak and alder and other ancient European trees tinseled with thick moss. In the spots where you could see ground through the mist, it was covered with grass of such a dark green that it appeared nearly black.
The good part was that I was only one level below Abaddon now. The bad part: I was only one level below Abaddon, and that’s where the commissar, his hounds, and his troops would be looking for me, and if they were thorough, they might come looking for me here as well. Then I’d be in Niloch’s nasty, rattling hands.
No, I realized, if I was captured, Eligor’s crab-grenade was going to go off in the middle of my thinkers, and then my next conscious thought would be, Oh, shit, I’m in the Infernal Transfer Lounge for Souls and everyone’s staring at me. After that, the real pain would begin. Eligor had held back from my utter destruction because he wanted something from me, but the big bosses of Hell wouldn’t be so kind. The whole operation here was expressly set up for just the kind of things they’d be doing to me, and they’d do them forever.
So I did the only thing I could do at that point. I pulled up my big boy pants and headed out into the Forest of Suicides.
It would have been an awful, awful place even if it had been right beside some lovely college town, five minutes from great nearby schools and nifty places to walk your dog, but as it was, a real estate agent would have had trouble finding anything cheerful to say. The Grey Woods were halfway to being a swamp, the ground treacherous and squelchy, and the constant mist made it difficult to get any idea of where you were or even where you’d already been. But I knew the way up to the next level would be somewhere on the outskirts, and that fact alone was what gave me any kind of chance of finding my way.
