by Tad Williams
In theory, all I had to do was keep the lifter station behind me, and I’d be heading straight out across the level on a radial track. Problem with that was that once I was a hundred steps from the station, I could no longer look back and see the huge lifter tower through the murk. I’m not joking. The tower was the size of the Empire State Building, a giant cuboid reaching all the way to the roof of this level, and it was already hidden by the dense mist. All I could do was try to maintain my direction by picking an object that I could see, then heading toward it, then picking another target by my best guess at the same direction. Efficient and fun, especially in a drizzling gray nothingness of skeletal trees and deadly quicksand bogs. And it got worse when I began to encounter the suicides.
In The Inferno, written in the days when the Church and other important moral influences still thought suicide was a cheater’s way out, the Wood of Thorns was where all of those folks wound up after death, stuck inside the trunks of trees. “Stuck inside a tree forever,” you say, “hah, that doesn’t sound so bad.” But in the poem, there are all these harpies flying around, things that looked like tubby owls with women’s breasts—which doesn’t sound frightening so much as just plain weird. The harpies would pluck limbs off the trees, which apparently really hurt, and would make the suicide trees weep. All together, a creepy setup. Tip of the hat, Mr. Alighieri. But if you offered every one of the souls in the real version of the Woods their choice, I think they’d have voted unanimously to move to Dante’s version, which would have seemed pretty much a romp in the park compared to what they had.
I didn’t know that yet. I didn’t know that until I stumbled across my first self-murdered soul.
At first I thought he was a large lump of moss dangling from the limb of an ancient, gnarled oak tree, but as I got closer the mist cleared between us, and I could see the whole shape, including the pale feet and hands. Compared to some of the things I’d already seen, that wasn’t much. Then as I got a bit closer I saw that the hanging man was alive and struggling.
I really should have figured it out at that point. I mean, Forest of Suicides, right? If killing yourself was a crime—or had been when these people were judged by Heaven—why would they be allowed just to hang around peacefully in Hell, being dead?
As I slogged through the mire toward it, I could see that the corpse was twitching, even clawing weakly at the noose around its neck. Yes, I know, I said “corpse,” because that was sure what it looked like, with all the signs of post-mortem lividity (see, I’ve watched cop shows, too), eyes sunken, tongue black and protruding. But dead or not, this poor bastard was definitely suffering. I pulled out the big knife Riprash had given me, then scrambled up the spider-legged cluster of roots until I could hack through the rope. The first thing the suicide did when he hit the ground was to grab at the noose and loosen it around his throat.
“You shit!” he gasped, his voice as rough as you’d guess with someone who’d spent a good part of forever hanging by his neck. He was on his hands and knees, craning his head around on his lengthened neck so he could glare at me. “What have you done? Why did you interfere? I don’t even know you!”
Interfere? I took a step back. The odor of rot that rose off him was so strong that even demon-senses couldn’t entirely deal with it.
He struggled to his feet, although he could barely stand, and to my astonishment he began trying to throw his now-shortened rope over the branch so he could hang himself again. I took a breath before stepping closer, then grabbed at him but caught only his decaying clothes, which tore in my hands. His rope had been tied to the tree at one end, and I had halved its length by cutting it. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get enough rope over the branch to hoist himself aloft again. When he turned toward me, I saw to my astonishment that he was weeping, viscous tears like snail’s tracks edging down his bluish cheeks. “How could you!” he half-shrieked, half-wheezed, then clumsily began to swing his fists at me.
I had only a moment to figure out what was going on and to remind myself that my philanthropic efforts never did me much good even outside of Hell, when something dropped out of the fog that surrounded us and attached itself to the struggling corpse like a vampire bat in a Friday night horror movie. The hanged man was screaming in pain as well as weeping now, and although I knew I’d almost certainly regret it, I had to try to help him.
Remember when I mentioned Dante’s harpies, the creatures who policed the suicide woods in his literary version of the Inferno? The real ones were a lot less pleasant than owls with tits. They looked more like gobs of phlegm the size of koala bears, with insect wings and faces that were mostly flat, square teeth. And it wasn’t just one of them dropping down out of the murk, it was quickly becoming a lot of harpies, and they obviously weren’t just there to punish the suicide, because another one of those horrid vampire boogers leaped onto my neck, beating its horrid fly’s wings in excitement as it tried to gnaw a hole in me. By the time I managed to impale it on my blade, three more were crawling over my body, looking for a way to burrow headfirst into my guts, and I could hear the wings of dozens more as they swarmed toward us through the mist. And while all this nightmare bullshit was going on, my enemies were only getting closer.
forty-one
the pain report
SO THERE I was, being attacked by winged mucus-monsters in the Suicide Forest, wondering what could possibly make my day any worse, when I heard the one thing that unquestionably could: the distant baying of hellhounds. It was like a dagger made of ice right between my shoulder blades.
Not that I could do anything about it right at that moment, because the toothy little snot-harpies were swarming me, experimenting with different ways to get through my skin. The suicide I had tried to help had staved off his own attacker long enough to get his shortened rope over a lower branch. He tied it, then let himself go limp until the noose began to strangle him once more, this time with his feet on the ground. As he choked and struggled, the harpies rose from him like flies off a buffalo’s back and headed toward me instead. Unpleasant as they were, there was no way I was going to throttle myself just to get rid of them, and there were far too many to stab or shoot, with more dropping out of the murk every moment. So I ran like a motherfucker.
I’d finally made a good decision. As I got farther from the spot where I’d tried to save the hanging man, the harpies began to drop away. Apparently they were territorial. Either that or lazy.
The farther I ran, the more bodies I saw. And “ran” is a relative term here, because trying to go fast over soppy, muddy ground through tangles of thorns and low-hanging branches was a bit like trying to sprint through barbed-wire bouillabaisse. As with the first suicide, none of these were exactly going quietly. Some were drowning in streams and ponds, often in less than a foot of water; others had blown their own brains out, or slit their own throats, or jumped from the tops of trees onto rocks and lay whimpering quietly as their brains, and other things that should have been inside them, dribbled onto the forest floor. All of them were clearly suffering, but I’d learned my lesson the hard way, and I ignored them. Hundreds of souls in pain, and angelic me just running right past them without a second glance.
Behind me, the howls of the hounds rose in volume, but then faded away again, till I began to hope they had lost my trail. The forest was getting darker and the mists thicker and thicker, until I could scarcely see more than an arm’s length in front of me and reduced my pace to a cautious walk. I had gone several minutes without seeing any of the restless dead, so I hoped that meant I was getting close to the edge of the level.
A rock outcropping the size of a small tower loomed out of the tangle before me. No bodies lay beside it, which made me more than ever sure I was getting near the edge of the forest. I climbed it, so tired that my trembling arms and legs barely supported me, but when I got to the top I could finally see a bit of my surroundings past the mist.
Of course the news sucked: the forest looked like it went on forever,
in all directions. I couldn’t see anything except foggy treetops and the occasional lump of stone sticking up like an ancient skull eroding from the ground. For a brief moment I considered just waiting on top of the rock until the hounds and soldiers arrived, so I could at least take a few of them with me, but then I thought of Caz, of her face as she sat in that horrible, shrieking theater beside Eligor, and knew I couldn’t condemn her to be that monster’s prisoner forever.
I climbed down and stumbled on in the direction I had been going.
I hadn’t seen any bodies for quite a while, until I stumbled over a girl in the stream, facedown in a very shallow pond that had gone largely red. I stopped, still a prisoner of my treacherous angel reflexes. She looked young when I turned her over, scarcely past puberty, her face white as the most determined goth made up for her Facebook profile. Both wrists were cut so deep I could see the tendons, because the blood had mostly run out. She moaned at my touch and shivered. I fought the urge to lift her up, to bandage her and try to heal her. I shouldn’t have touched her at all, because I really didn’t need any more harpies, but for some reason I couldn’t just ignore this one as I had so many others. I didn’t recognize her, of course, but she looked like the kind of person I might actually know—some poor soul condemned by God’s justice to commit suicide over and over until all the stars burned out. I couldn’t remember anymore what it was like when things made sense.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
Her eyes opened but didn’t really focus on my face. I think I must have been something like a dream to her. “Because I could think of nothing else. Because I even dreamed about it. Because I wanted peace.”
“But you didn’t get it.”
She closed her eyes and moaned again, a sound far too deep and dejected for such a slip of a girl. In the real world she would have weighed no more than eighty or ninety pounds, if that. She should have been playing tetherball or studying fractions for a math test. “God hates my sin.”
“I can’t believe that.” And I couldn’t. I had never lost a client just for suicide; I think the prosecutors have to prove serious selfishness to get a suicide condemned these days. I asked again. “Why did you do it?”
“Everywhere I went, they stared at me.” She shook her head and tried to crawl back toward the crimson water. “No. Don’t make me talk. You’ll bring the harpies. When it stops hurting so much, they come.”
So it wasn’t just the act of suicide, it was the pain as well that you had to keep experiencing here. I thought how, in their last moments alive, almost every pathetic soul in these woods must have thought, “At least it’s all over now,” only to wake up and find out not only wasn’t it over, it had barely begun.
My God, my God, I thought. How could you allow this in Your Name?
I heard flapping in the mist above us then, so I stood. The wrist-slitter turned over and sank her face back into the pond. I hurried away, but I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen.
I hadn’t got past the suicides at all, it turned out, I’d merely been crossing a less crowded patch of the forest. As I stumbled on I passed a seemingly endless variety of living corpses, despairing humans who had killed themselves with fire, or water, or poison, or guns, a museum of final moments that would never end. I had learned not to touch them, and after the girl in the pond I didn’t want to speak to them either, but I couldn’t avoid them. In places they lay on the ground as thick as at Jonestown, other times they remained hidden and almost invisible until I nearly stepped on them, like macabre Easter eggs. And still the suicide forest went on, with nothing changing but the howls and shouts of my trackers growing louder as they began to close in on me once more.
My head was aching with unwanted movement, as though the thing Eligor had put there was excited by the sounds of my pursuers. Even the hardy demon body I wore would run out of strength soon. I had a sword—well, a large knife—but I wasn’t going to have much luck fighting off giant hellhounds with the kind of blade they used down at the hoagie shop to slice rolls. I had guns, of course, and enough bullets to shoot a few of my pursuers and still save one slug for myself, but that idea wasn’t very appealing either, especially not after spending time in this particular forest. More importantly, though, if I gave up, Caz’s last chance was gone. I might not have managed to free her, but at least while I was loose there was still a chance.
I could glimpse my pursuers now only a few hundred yards behind me, dark running shapes that appeared and disappeared in the rolling mist. I wondered if I should go guerilla-style and pick off a few to improve the odds, but I suspected that trying to hide from the hellhounds and their snuffling, wet, pink snouts would be a bad move. No, I was simply going to keep running until I found a good place for a final stand, then make as much of a mess as possible before they took me down.
But plans change. I burst into a clearing and a momentary thinning of the mist, and was startled to find myself only a few steps from a deep ravine. I swayed for a moment on the edge, windmilling my arms to keep from falling in, then began to track sideways along the lip of the canyon looking for a way across. I could see farther here than I had for hours, clear to the other side of the canyon, and I could even make out a deeper shadow beyond the ravine. I tried not to let hope distract me at this crucial instant, but I prayed that farther shadow might turn out to be the outer wall of this level of Hell.
The ruins of an old bridge or causeway lay tumbled on the slope on the far side of the canyon. The near end of the bridge must have rested in the place where I had almost fallen. I started to make my way down the damp, crumbling cliff. Great chunks of earth and stone had fallen when the bridge went, and they provided the handholds I needed. I let myself slide to the ground at the bottom, and lay there in a heap like a sock monkey leaking stuffing. I might even have fallen into helpless, exhausted sleep for a few moments, but the howls of the hellhounds startled me awake again. Worse, either the howls or my sudden movement woke up Eligor’s intracubus too, and the little cancer started moving restlessly in the back of my skull, each twitch shooting a bolt of fiery pain right through me. I had been trying to stand but could only drop to my hands and knees and sag there, facedown, hoping it would stop. But it didn’t. The intracubus was fidgeting like a frog on a hot stone, and each time it moved it made me want to puke my insides out.
I had to get up. I could hear my pursuers very close now, perhaps moving along the top of the rise just above me. Everything sensible in me was urging me to get up and run to keep that from happening. By now, the nature of Hell was clear to me. Run and run and run or be punished forever. Sanity demanded I get with the program.
But I didn’t.
Was the thing in my head really only a failsafe against me giving up Eligor’s feather-secret if I was captured? How would it decide that my escape was no longer viable and hit the Destruct button? How was a crab-monster in my head going to judge? And maybe—this was a big one—maybe Eligor had lied to me in the first place. Maybe this was all just some kind of new torture the grand duke had devised, letting me run while all the time the intracubus was transmitting information to Niloch and his hunters as well. The hounds might be following my scent, but the commissar and his gang had certainly found me quickly enough here in the Grey Woods, and now the foreign thing in my head was making it hard for me to escape them again. Could all this be the Horseman’s particularly nasty, drawn-out trick? Maybe he’d given up on getting the feather back, or maybe the intracubus was meant to spy on my thoughts and find out where the feather was really hidden, since Eligor had said he didn’t find it, or my body, in the Walker house.
Once I started thinking this way it was hard to stop, and for some reason it made the intracubus even more fidgety. Nerves and muscles spasmed all over my body as the little ball of hate moved around in my head, and it was all I could do not to cry out and give myself away. One hard clench hurt so badly it knocked me off my all-fours crouch and onto my belly.
No more. I had learned Hell’s m
ost important lesson several times over by now: Don’t trust anyone, and especially don’t trust Eligor. It was time to do something I should have done hours before.
I still had the flask of demon rum Riprash had sent with me, dangling on my belt with the pistols and the swords. I took a long swallow of the godawful stuff and let it burn its way down into my belly like a river of lava, but I didn’t take too much. Next I took the knife in my left hand because I didn’t trust the misfiring, regenerating nerves in the other, and bent until I could rest my forehead on the damp, muddy ground like a monk at prayer. Then I poured the poisonous swill that Riprash had given me all over the back of my head. I swear it burned as badly as Eligor’s crematory flames. I had to shove my face deep into the mud to silence my screams.
Things got worse from that point. My demon hide was healing so quickly that flesh had already grown over the crude stitches, so I had to cut through my own skin just to reach the knots before I sawed them open. Riprash’s knife wasn’t the sharpest, either, and what I was doing set the intracubus into a panic of claws and teeth. I’ll let you imagine the details for yourself.
It’s for Caz, I told myself as the worst of the pain shook me like a million volts, but what really kept me going was another, much darker thought: Fuck you, Eligor. The only good thing about Hell is knowing you’re in it forever.
I kept pouring Riprash’s booze over the wound as I worked. I’m happy to say that the intracubus hated the stuff, but that only made it struggle harder. I came close to passing out several times before I finally got my fingers around the horrible, horrible little thing and yanked it out—it felt like I was taking half the insides of my head with it. After that I did go black, but only for a short while.
