Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  But once she was on Jamaica Road, instead of carrying on to where help might be found, Julia had taken a left up a quiet residential street called Cherry Garden Street, towards the river.

  And then at the top of the road, she’d turned, and bizarrely had made her way back down the very same street, on the same pavement, dripping blood all the way. Then finally, once she reached Jamaica Road again, she’d turned left and immediately left again and so up West Lane, once more towards the river.

  At the top of West Lane, she’d turned east, away from the warehouse where she’d apparently been held prisoner for several days, towards King Stairs, before finally taking refuge in the alley between the banana warehouses. And there she’d collapsed.

  Fillide guessed that Julia had known this area well. But how? It was very much off the beaten track. So Fillide typed DISCOUNT WINE, BERMONDSEY into her e-berry box, and a business name and address flashed up. CHEAP BOOZE! 43-45 Bevington Street.

  She cross referenced with the death scene; the drinks warehouse was just two blocks away from the street where Julia had escaped. She deduced that Julia used to buy her booze in this area, for student parties no doubt. That’s how she knew of the back streets, and about the alley concealed beside the banana warehouse. That’s why she came here to die.

  But why, Fillide asked herself, why in the name of Jesu and Mary didn’t the stupid bitch try to summon help?

  Fillide checked the CAD Room logs and found no 999 calls from a bloodied woman received over the last three hours. That was utterly baffling. Admittedly, Julia was hardly likely to be carrying a mobile phone during her captivity. But why not stop a passerby and ask for help? Or knock on one of the houses and make a similar plea? Julia wasn’t a crooked gang-banger hiding from the law; she was the female middle class victim of an abduction. Hence, why hide in an alley? Why not stand in the street and scream: ‘Somebody save me!’?

  Fillide was intrigued.

  So she charted in detail the girl’s progress on her e-berry map. From the pavement where she’d landed after jumping out of the fourth floor window in the Bermondsey Wall warehouse, to this spot. Nearly quarter of a mile in total, taking her past numerous residential streets, two clubs, a brothel, and a pub.

  Fillide looked around and spotted Ronnie Tindale and called him over. She showed him her e-berry screen.

  ‘You see the problem?’

  ‘No,’ he said bluntly.

  ‘Why didn’t she ask someone to call the cops?’

  Ronnie thought about it. Eventually he nodded, his demeanour revealing that he had thought Fillide was an imbecile but he was now willing to concede she had some sort of point.

  ‘She had a fractured skull. She was out of her mind with pain. It happens,’ he suggested.

  ‘But why the random path through the streets? Why not go straight to Jamaica Road? She knew the area.’

  ‘Same answer applies. Keep up,’ Ronnie said brusquely.

  ‘My point is –’

  ‘I thought you were meant to be doing the house to house,’ Ronnie said abruptly.

  ‘I was endeavouring to be a detective!’ Fillide snapped.

  ‘Don’t. Leave the brainwork to us.’

  ‘You don’t want to hear my theory?’

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘I’ll go ask some stupid questions of stupid householders then.’

  ‘You do that.’

  Ronnie strode away. Fillide threw daggers with her eyes. Arrogant prick.

  He didn’t even desire her; that was the most galling thing of all. There was a time when Fillide had had power over all the men she met. The power to make men desire her, and love her, and sometimes even worship her. And she had used that power shrewdly and well.

  But now, even the meanest and geekiest cur could smell the taint of death upon her. And hence, most men feared her more than they yearned to fuck her.

  Fillide packed away her e-berry. She glanced over at Dougie again, on the other side of the police tape. He was talking to Gina, who was carefully bobbing out of the way of his waving arms, as he argued in support of some grand theory or other. Her vision was acute these days, better than it had been when she was alive. And so she saw, to her surprise, that the guvnor was ashen-faced. He normally took these things in his stride.

  Dougie saw her staring and stared back. She met his glance. She licked her lips. And she glared at him with hate.

  He looked away, and carried on gesticulating to Gina. Fillide felt a tiny moment of triumph.

  Skip back eight years.

  To the day when Fillide was resurrected.

  She could feel that something strange was happening. Colours were suddenly more colourful. The crushing heat was for the first time ever alleviated by a faint breeze. And then the void that she had drearily endured for so many centuries abruptly opened up, like a flower on a spring day. Reality bent itself and rippled. The cruel and empty expanse around her blinked with hope. And she could smell perfumes and the stench of sweat and the reek of smoky candles wafting through the choking brimstone and sulphur murkiness of her warped plane of existence.

  Without a wasted thought she ran.

  Through the opening chasm she ran, on legs invigorated by hope. Past lashing winds and torrents of hate and hands clasping at her to stay. Escaping the horrifying contempt of the universe that had been her home for tens of decades. She jumped through air that was like tar and she landed and rolled and stood, and she could feel actual ground under her feet once again.

  There was no more screaming, no more burning heat, no more confusion of time and space; no more endless dread. Instead she was standing naked and cold in a wood-panelled room, with markings daubed in blood upon the stone floor and the dark wooden walls.

  Incense flares were burning in holders, spewing out rich aromas of wood ash and spices and scorched lapis lazuli. And six men with long grey beards surrounded her, like cardinals in their richly red cloaks and effortless authority.

  Standing slightly apart there was a seventh man, unbearded, and younger by a decade or more though still grey of hair. And he stood nervously in a white robe, awaiting her.

  ‘Where am I?’ she asked but none comprehended her. She spoke more slowly, ‘Where am I?’ but still they could not understand.

  Then one of the grey-beards spoke in a language she did not know, a language that made her skin crawl with fear. A language that felt older than time. And she spoke again.

  ‘Where am I?’ she asked again, and now their eyes were alight with comprehension.

  ‘This is a ceremonial room in the Freemason’s Hall, where all creatures such as thee are bade to come,’ said a grey bearded one.

  ‘I am in Rome?’

  ‘London.’

  She had never been to London. Nor indeed had she ever dwelt anywhere other than Siena and Rome. The name ‘London’ carried with it an exotic air.

  ‘Blessèd city,’ she said courteously.

  ‘You have been exvoked.’

  She knew the word. It was a term used by magicians; a few of her former clients had dabbled in such work.

  ‘I remember –’ she began; and was not sure what she did remember. She remembered dying, but after that - ?

  ‘You died.’

  ‘I died, indeed I did, good sir. And it was slow and painful. And then – then – then I was in Hell,’ she concluded.

  ‘There is no such thing as Hell,’ said another grey-beard; a leaner one, with a withered old face. ‘Foolish superstition.’ And he mock-spat, with utter contempt.

  ‘Then where have I been? For all this time?’

  The Grey-Beards shuffled, clearly at a loss how to answer in a simple or intelligible way. She wondered if they were angels, except she had been told by someone, or rather some thing, that angels were vermin who long ago had been exterminated from all the realities.

  She did not, she decided, trust these grey-bearded ones. But at least she could smell their flesh, and the fumes of tobacco upon their beards. At l
east they were real.

  ‘Are you familiar with multiversal chthonic post-dimensional theory?’ another of the grey-bearded ones said, in tones as dry as parchment.

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Call it Hell,’ said a third grey-beard, smiling. ‘It’s just a word.’

  ‘Come with me,’ said the white-robed unbearded one, gently. He smiled, reassuringly. And he bowed, in proper fashion, to set her at her ease. In return, despite her nakedness, she curtsied.

  Fillide was well aware that this man was admiring her naked body. He put up a feeble pretence of lowering his eyes, or glancing everywhere but at her. But she could tell that he was seizing every covert chance to dance his eyes up and down her flesh; taking in her long, dark, flowing hair and her beautiful oval face; savouring the fullness of her breasts, and hips, and buttocks: admiring the all of her womanhood.

  Old skills, long in abeyance, were coming back to her.

  She smiled, and covered her bushy sex with one hand, coyly. Then she lifted one bare foot almost off the ground, and tilted a naked shoulder. Her large nipples were erect in the cold and musty room, and she knew her figure was voluptuous, and her nude body wondrously well formed.

  But she also knew that every man there was wondering about that part of her that they could no longer see; the junction betwixt her legs she had covered with her cupped hand. That meant she had them: their imaginations had been impaled, and now they burned with yearning to see what they could no longer see.

  ‘I’d like to get changed now,’ she said, with long practised shyness. ‘Or rather, clothed.’ And she smiled, sweetly.

  The white-robed one smiled in return. His lips were clearly dry, and he moistened them with a flick of his tongue.

  All was proceeding as these things should.

  Two maids in white gowns and white masks led her away. They made her stand under water in a room surrounded by glass so she could wash off the reek of other realities. Then they led her into a dressing chamber and clad her in underwear with no bones and no corset. Her breasts were cradled in a strange apparatus, and the dress she wore was as soft as silk, though it didn’t smell like any silk she had ever worn.

  The white-robed one, who the maidens had told her was called ‘Roy Hall’, rejoined her.

  ‘Some things you need to know, darling,’ he said.

  For three days, and three glorious nights, Roy taught her his world.

  On the first day, he took her into a room that moved upwards with lights flashing until it opened up on to a rooftop that overlooked the city. There a flying machine was awaiting with metal bars that spun, making a sound louder than a hurricane and causing her hair to form into a comet’s tail.

  She clambered inside as Roy shouted things she could not hear, and then the machine took off and they flew above London.

  The ‘helicopter’, as she later learned to call it, swooped and soared with her inside. She saw below her a domed cathedral that reminded her of the churches back in Rome. And she saw too another building by the river that was like a Gothic cathedral, with crenellations and carvings and soaring towers. She saw stranger buildings too. Buildings of glass and metal, and a dull-grey building by the river that had words in English that she miraculously understood, and which lit up and changed as she watched. Also along the banks of London’s great river was a huge wheel that slowly moved, with people inside each glass cage. A prison, perhaps? she speculated. Where malefactors could be publicly shamed?

  She saw also very many carriages without horses, which moved exceedingly fast, and lines painted on the roads as if this were a city full of mischievous urchins daubing their marks upon every carriageway.

  But the thing that shocked her most was the sheer size of the city. There were buildings everywhere, as far as the eye could see. It was like a hundred cities crushed together to form a great sprawling metropolis larger than a mountain range. She could not imagine living in a place so vast, populated by so many people.

  It was a nevertheless a very beautiful city. And when the helicopter landed, and her hearing returned to normal, she told Roy Hall how much it pleased her. He was visibly delighted at her enthusiasm, and proud too of the city in which he had been born. Hackney was his birthplace, he told her; he was a real North London boy.

  That was her first day in London, and her first night too.

  During that night, she and Roy made love. It was her first fuck in hundreds of years, and she relished it. Roy was still a fairly young man, though admittedly not in great shape. His arms were skinny and he had grey chest hairs to match the grey hairs on his head, and a body that was puckered with bullet marks and a paunch which, he grumbled, he ‘couldn’t shift’. But even so, he was a supple and virile lover.

  He could not sate her; what man could? But it was a grand evening all the same.

  Then in the early hours of the morning, he showed her his ‘television’. And the ‘internet’ on his ‘computer’, which had a screen that could be folded up like parchment. And his ‘phone’ which he also called an ‘e-berry’, as if it were a kind of fruit. He taught her how to text and surf the web on this small device; he showed her how to find herself as a red dot upon a map on the screen. He made her listen to its different ring tones, which he found considerably more exciting than she did. And he explained how she could make images of other people appear by pressing the central button.

  Eventually it dawned on her this was primarily a machine for talking to other people at a distance. No need to shout your lover’s name from your balcony; no need to walk a mile or more to see if a friend was in. The machine bridged the gap, and she liked it a great deal.

  Fillide didn’t sleep that night, though she needed to now. After years in which her only sensations were ceaseless pain mingled with desolate ennui, her body was now vulnerable to fatigue, and hunger, and thirst. She even needed to piss and shit.

  On the morning of her second day on Earth, Roy served her croissants and coffee and fresh orange juice. And they fucked a second time and she lay back on the bed and stayed there awake but indolent until noon.

  That night he took her to dinner in the ‘West End’. There were more of those machines on wheels to be found everywhere, moving extraordinarily fast, as well as carriages pulled by bicycles that he called rickshaws. Pavement vendors sold food and drink and varied spices. The air was thick with pungent smells, the stench of wind-dried chickens blending with the perfumes and body odours of the hurrying shoals of pedestrians who crowded the pavements. The women wore a strange variety of clothes. Some were like men in breeches and jackets. Other wore dresses that revealed more flesh then they concealed, garments that even a whore like herself would consider indecent. There were also men dressed as slutty women; she spotted several of them, and Roy laughed and said, ‘That’s Soho for you.’

  They had champagne at a tavern on Berwick Street, then strolled round the corner, past a theatre showing a play called 42nd Street, and dined at Roy’s favourite Italian restaurant, La Sicilia. The food was largely unfamiliar to her, but she enjoyed the antipasti and the Chianti was good stuff. The waiters bantered with her in Italian but she struggled at first to understand them because of their strange accent. She had realised by now that a magic spell of some kind turned her words into English, and allowed her to hear the English of these Londoners in her own tongue. But modern Italian – well, that was a whole other thing.

  As they ate, Roy told her a little more about her situation.

  ‘You’re not the first, or the only one, you know,’ he said. ‘There are many like you. Resurrected. Reincarnate. The formerly damned, returned to Earth.’

  ‘But how? Such a thing – I’ve never heard of such a thing. Jesus raising Lazarus yes, but nothing like this.’

  And so he explained it all. The Occlusion. The Breach. The influx of demons and damned through the ruptured Gates of Hell; the bloody Battle of London; and the eventual peace treaty that allowed the hellkind who had entered London to live there freely, side
by side with their human neighbours.

  And he spoke too of the warlocks, who had appeared from nowhere to save London from the invading demons, forcing them to negotiate terms; and who had then sealed the Breaches for, it was hoped, all eternity.

  ‘Warlocks have lived on Earth for all of history, you see,’ Roy told her. ‘But for the last few millennia they have kept their existence a secret. They have been hidden from view, practising their magic covertly. But on that day, when the Sun was Occluded and day became night, they revealed themselves.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well because – they had no choice. The wall between Hell and Earth had cracked. They had to save London and they did.’

  ‘And you, too, are a warlock?’

  Roy smiled; she sensed he was a little irked at the question. ‘Not exactly. I’m a Mason.’

  ‘But you have magic powers?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve learned a few tricks. But a warlock is born, not initiated. They have great powers, greater than mine, no one knows how great. And their identities are a carefully guarded secret. Well, except for the Chief Warlock that is, Brannigan, everyone knows him. And so they live among us but they are – not like us.’

  He would not speak further on the matter.

  She was uneasy to hear that there were now demons living freely in this city, cheek by jowl with humans. And alarmed too to hear about the many hordes of them who dwelled in their own city-state, just off the Strand, in the area where many of the tallest buildings were clustered.

  The thought of encountering demons again rekindled fears and anxieties that she did not like to think about. But she banished her qualms. And she lavished a smile upon her saviour. ‘Thank you so greatly, Roy,’ she said. ‘For everything.’

  After brandies, they went to a club in a deep basement near Leicester Square, and she and Roy danced and took drugs. He showed her how to suck an incense stick to get an exhilarating high. The music was loud, it made her entire body shake, and she couldn’t hear a word anyone was saying. But though it was dark she found she could see quite clearly, as if it were day. Her hearing was more acute also; and her body was stronger and more beautiful than it had ever been in the days when she was alive.