“So,” said Jude, quietly. “I’m thinking this is a mouth of Hell, and we’d better shut it.”
“Any ideas?” said Ellie. When he huffed, she responded, “Look, I’m a reaper. We don’t do inside Hell, we bring people to the edge and say goodbye. There’s not exactly a protocol for this. But—” and she glanced up—”I imagine that this might be setting off alarms somewhere, so maybe some mentors will show up and solve it for us...”
But Ellie’s mind was also tracking the results of that possibility. If mentors arrived, then... “Meaning we won’t be able to use him—” a jerk of a thumb to Obadiah Charon—”to find the shards, unless we can disable him before they arrive.”
“Right,” said Jude, but he was eyeing the machete. “Any suggestions?”
“Go for the eyes, I guess,” said Ellie, but then a sound came from the pit behind her, a scraping and scuffing noise, and she looked back just in time to see the fleabitten head of a demon poke out as it scuttled from the hole. It mashed blackened teeth.
“No,” she said, almost as though she could deny reality and that would be enough—
“I am Beezlebub, king of all the earth!” the thing howled, and it pelted forward so fast that Ellie could not even think of crushing it. Instead, as it charged ahead, it ran right under Charon’s machete, and the dark man moved—again, so fast that Ellie had trouble following—and with a puff of smoke the blade pierced through.
“Did it just say bee-zul-bub?” said Jude. “Not bee-el-zah-bub?”
“I can’t remember how to say that name either,” said Ellie, but she was already backing away from the pit, Jude following. They moved just in time—for from the inside came the sound of tapping and clicking, many thousands of feet hurrying along—
The demons exploded from the mouth like vomit, in all their pestilent, gory, mange-moldy and rotting glory. The smell was like rancid meat and diarrhea, and Ellie gagged, turned and ran. There were no souls here to protect, she thought, this is a waste of time—let the mentors be distracted by sorting it all out—
“I hate these things,” Jude yelled behind her, and Ellie turned and grabbed his hand, nearly clicked the knob of her pocket-watch—
Then Charon caught her eye. He was standing calmly, an island in a wave of putrid and misshapen writhing bodies. Damn it, she thought, Can’t leave without him...
But stomping her way through all those demons would not be fun. Steeling herself, Ellie pulled Jude to a halt, was about to tell him what they needed to do—
When one of the demons noticed the mousetrap box. It let out a shriek of delight, high-pitched and squealing like a toddler discovering something new and exciting. And then it barreled forward to the opening propped up by the stick—
And popped inside. But instead of the box snapping down and trapping the demon, the hole remained open, inviting, though the demon did not seem to be inside anymore...
What followed was almost a surrealist painting. Ellie watched the rest of the horde notice the box and move as one, like their bodies were the closest thing biological matter could come to being water, wave after wave tossing themselves pell-mell into the box, even fighting and squabbling with each other at the bottleneck, pouring—
The box seemed endless inside. They kept coming and coming, so many that Ellie lost track of discrete shapes, even as more heaved themselves up from the mouth of the pit, all of them screaming giddily with delight, a wailing siren so loud that Ellie tossed the pocket-watch into her coat and clamped her hands over her ears, shut her eyes—
They’ll empty all the Hells, at this rate, she thought—
And then it was over. One last demon, a wormy body with centipede legs, sashayed into the underside of the box, and its last foot on the way in was snagged by the loop on the end of the rope, neatly tugging the stick that held the edge. The box slammed down.
Silence.
Only when Ellie opened her eyes again did she see what was left behind.
Apparently the box must have only allowed demons through, or else in their desperation to enter they had abandoned their prey anyway. Piled everywhere, silent and still, were the souls of the damned—gory, shredded, mashed and pulped. Less than human.
“Oh God,” said Jude, beside her. He looked like more words were beyond him. They stood outside the mass of bodies, and he took a step forward, reaching as though to touch the nearest one. Ellie almost saw Cookie, in that moment, would have expected her to go running into the middle of them, trying to see what she could do.
But Obadiah Charon called out: “Best leave them be, boy. Your only warning.”
At the sound of his voice, the transformation was immediate. As if they had never been hurt at all, suddenly they were just people, men and women, young and old, every race, dozens of languages, sprawled in different states of undress across the fields of what once had been Colorado Springs, blinking their eyes at the Rocky Mountains behind.
Ellie grabbed at Jude’s free arm, said, “They’re just souls, they can be hurt, but they bounce back to whatever they think of as themselves when they get the chance.”
She began to pull him away, unsure whether a mob of souls could do more or less damage to Jude than a mob of demons—either way, she wanted to go around the pack and take a stab at Obadiah Charon, if he did not stab them first. Charon’s shape was lost among all the people, as they began gaining their feet, a forest of heads.
But as they worked around to move behind where Charon was, Ellie began to notice:
The people were odd, somehow. Their shapes seemed distorted. One man stood up and must have been well over eight feet, because his breastbone was at the crown of Jude’s head. A woman was struggling to stand, and no wonder—because her breasts, clearly visible through the netting she wore as her only clothing—were large and pendulous, perhaps the size of watermelons, and as Ellie and Jude hurried past, Ellie glanced back to see that the woman’s waist was perhaps a hand’s breadth in width.
Impossible, she thought. It’s like that woman was from a drawn porno or something.
There were too many people standing, now, and Ellie and Jude halted, scanned the crowd. Jude only shrugged when Ellie asked, “Can you see him?”
Beside them, a round mound of flesh about the size of a cow moved, rolled to what Ellie realized was an approximation of a sitting position, and only then did she make out what looked like a head, except this was only one big gaping mouth, a mash of nostrils, and two beady eyes like pimples, no defining neck or skull. The thing—man, woman, Ellie could not tell—moaned, “Hungry, so hungry...” and stuck out some kind of arm-probuscus, snagged some of the frozen grass, and began stuffing its maw.
Well, Ellie thought, now I know what kind of thing was inside that candy shop in Hell...
Voices began to rise. The damned began speaking, but as if on script, often repeating the same words over and over: “Gimme more, baby, I want you—” “Anybody have a light?” “The earth is flat! I swear it is flat! I can convince you if you listen some more—” “Repent! Repent for the time is near! Donations to the poor need to—” “I can’t say how much I hate you, but if I hated you any more I might explode—” “Listen to me! Aren’t I grand? I am the smartest person who has ever lived. I should be given an award—” “I ain’t never hurt nobody, so why is everybody always picking on me? I am a sweet and generous person, but nobody ever give me the time to prove myself—”
Through the crowd, a chant seemed to be rising: More—More—More—
“Hey,” said a young man to Ellie’s right. His face was dominated by a large pair of overblown lips ringed by tiny teeth. “You look cute. What’s your name?”
“Buzz off,” said Ellie, and turned her attention back to looking for Charon.
“Aw, why you gotta be like that, babe?” said the soul. “I’m just being friendly.”
Ellie did not bother responding. Scanning the crowd for Charon was proving fruitless. She glanced at Jude, but
he seemed distracted, eyeing a hulking figure that seemed made only of chest and limbs, veiny with inflated muscle, as it approached and said, “Hey, man, you lift? I bested the strongman for the Barnum and Bailey Circus in 1923.”
“Barnum and Bailey’s went out of business,” said Jude, squaring his shoulders.
“No way,” said the muscled chest. “I saw them just the other day and won the contest.”
“It’s not 1923 anymore,” insisted Jude. “It’s been like a hundred years.”
“Don’t be silly, man,” said the muscled chest. “If it were a hundred years we’d be dead.”
Ellie nudged Jude. “Don’t bother. If I had to guess, I’d say these souls have been dead for a while, you’re not going to get very far with that one.” She thought of Keith Smithson, and recalled his last words— I’d be happy to spend my life here!—and wondered if her supposition was correct, that these bodies were what happened to souls over time, and what shape someone like Keith Smithson would take.
Something tugged at her hair, and Ellie reacted faster than even she expected—she only glimpsed the giant lip-boy with his fingers curled in the tangles, and then her backhand had practically torn his fingers off as she sent him flying.
Good old reaper strength, she thought; they’re still just souls, after all.
But the effect of tossing lip-boy was to focus every eye upon them. And then every soul that could move was shuffling in their direction, forming a ring, asking, Hey, what did you do that for? and I don’t like violence! and Give him another! and Where have you been all my life? and Why don’t you pick on someone your own size, bitch?
They seemed to be egging each other on, Ellie noted, even as many were unable or unwilling to see many of the other souls right next to them. But while Ellie knew she could barrel through them all, the hassle of that was exhausting just to think about. Still, to find Charon, she was beginning to think tossing souls around would be necessary.
As if he was thinking the same, Jude said, close to Ellie’s ear, “I don’t actually want to hurt these guys. I think they’ve suffered enough, yeah?”
“One can never suffer enough for stupidity,” Ellie said back, trying not to sound too tired.
Jude huffed out a laugh. “You’re so salty. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Not in those words,” said Ellie, moving her reaper’s tool and the remaining shard from the Spindle of Necessity to her breast pocket. Then she charged forward to grab the arm of a woman, as thin as a finger’s width, who shrieked, “I’m still too fat!” as Ellie tossed her like a frisbee over the heads of the assembling crowd.
Chaos. A wall of hands rose up, grabbing pinching poking slapping punching. Ellie barely felt any of it. She took what holds she could—there were a lot of options—and flung souls left and right like sparks from a fire. In brief glimpses she saw Jude doing the same—an admirable job, she thought, for someone who wanted to hold back.
How long this lasted, Ellie could not say. Time was meaningless. But as she began to tire, moving sluggish, she noticed that the souls who were tossed were merely rising up again to rejoin the horde. No wonder, she thought, wiping sweat from her eyebrows, it’s us versus all of them. Do damned souls even get tired? We’ll be worn down at this rate.
And that was when Jude yelled, “Ellie! They can’t climb!”
She had lost track of where he was, but his voice was still recognizable even in the cacophony of complaining and howling souls. Spotting the crater that had once housed a building on her left, Ellie tossed her next victim into the ditch.
The man, waddling with his pants around his ankles and exposing the smallest weenie Ellie had ever seen, was unable to climb out of the hole. But then tossing in a man taller than any basketball player had the same effect. And so Ellie adjusted her throws.
Makes sense, she thought, I guess souls in the pit of Hell wouldn’t be able to climb out.
The ditch was almost completely full when Ellie tossed in her last attacker, a boy shrieking “Damn the redcoats to Hell!” She turned and saw Jude twenty paces off, in much the same state. Finished, they both hunched over, bracing hands on knees, to gasp for air. The chill Colorado autumn was hardly any help at this point.
In the ditches before them, the souls of the damned shrieked and raged, milled in circles, bumped each other and hardly reacted, but Ellie and Jude were still their focus.
“Zombies,” Jude called, loud enough for Ellie to hear over her own ragged breathing.
Straightening up, Ellie saw that they had not emptied the fields of the damned—for stretching out before them were dozens, hundreds more, but these seemed to hold no care for either her or Jude, were merely staggering in circles or rolling in the grass. And no wonder there were still so many, Ellie realized, when she noticed that at the mouth of Hell there were hands reaching up, and bodies pulling themselves aloft.
So much for the damned not being able to climb, Ellie thought, and glanced suspicious at the crowd in her and Jude’s chosen holes. But even they were beginning to calm down, even as they still did not manage over the rims of their earthen containers.
“Not bad,” called the voice of Obadiah Charon. Only then did Ellie see that he was standing further off, watching, machete ready. “I was rooting for you at the end.”
“Right,” said Ellie. She staggered over to Jude, who was panting as much or more as her herself. They were going to be poor match for Charon in this state.
She glanced at Jude, saw that he was thinking the same. Her mouth formed a grim line.
“So,” she called to Charon, trying to think, buy time. “What exactly is your plan?”
“I was wondering the same,” said another voice, and Ellie inhaled, turned her head to see, but even as she did, before she saw him, she realized it was Niles.
Niles, who stood tall at the corner of the ditch where Ellie’s attackers were housed, with Josephina and Oliver Carson beside him. Niles took in the scene, glanced at Ellie with a look that read: You’d better stay put. Josephina pursed her lips, gazed at Obadiah Charon like he was an insect, and Carson seemed to bite extra hard at his cigar.
There was just enough time for Ellie to think: Three mentors. We’re screwed—and to nudge Jude—before the souls of the damned spotted the mentors.
Ellie had never heard such screaming.
Three years as a reaper on the accident squad, and she had seen terrible things—men crushed by cars, women falling through glass, construction mishaps, home accidents, people cutting off limbs and in one case even getting a pole pierced through the eye socket. If someone could die in a stupid way, she had likely seen it.
And they were messy, too—people lingered, wailing and crying their way toward death, and when Ellie had drawn them from their bodies they had looked relieved, but only for a second, before they were begging to be given another chance to live.
Yet nothing compared to this. Even the people who had burned alive. If the souls of the damned were about to be human sacrifices, about to be tossed into the volcano, maybe Ellie could have predicted such a reaction, but all they did was notice Niles and the other mentors. That was enough. The reaction spread like fire.
It was like the demons, who had run like the rats of Hamelin, gaily crying with joy to their doom. Now the stream reversed course, and the horde of the damned fled for the mouth of Hell, hurled themselves headlong into it, took swan dives, clawed at each other to reach the bottleneck first. In their frenzy they began to climb atop each other, formed a tower—a writhing stack of distorted bodies descending under gravity.
All the while they screamed and screamed, kept avoiding looking at Niles and the mentors as though they were physically painful to look at, wailing like storm sirens.
Hell was better, they seemed to scream, Hell was better, I want to go back!
The last shrieking ghoul, a boy perhaps no older than ten with an inflated belly like a balloon, tossed himself inside, not even holding up
his arms to brace for an impact. The sheer abandonment in the movement nearly knocked Ellie’s breath away.
Silence. Her ears rang, even though her hands had come up to try and block the noise.
Looking around, Ellie saw the damage, the ditches sides caved in in the souls’ hurry to climb out and escape, the grass frozen in time but trampled to mud anyway. As she watched, Josephina approached the pit, gently picked up the three reaper’s tools, and then held out her own golden set of scales: the pit vanished with a sucking noise. Carson was already kneeling over the three mangled bodies of the other reapers.
Niles approached. He glanced again at Ellie, said only, “Are you both all right?”
Ellie only nodded. But Jude, sounding breathless, said, “Yes, Sir.”
At that Niles turned to Obadiah Charon—who, Ellie now saw, looked astounded. As Niles drew near, Charon managed to ask, “What just happened?”
Pausing, observing Charon’s blade, Niles said, “We are the closest thing to God left on this world. That damned souls as old as those can see, anyway. Of course they ran.”
Something about that sentence was odd, Ellie thought, even as her breath thinned, as her mind tried to unpack what Niles meant. Niles was—the closest thing to—
“You?” laughed Charon. “You’re the closest thing to God?”
“In a way,” said Niles. “That is still visible to the damned. You lot are rather blinded.”
“Well then,” said Charon, recovering himself. He held up his machete. “You’re one of those top reapers, yes? I’ll have you know, I’m of a mind to cut you up.”
“I am ‘a-tom,’ ancient Greek for ‘incapable of being cut,’” said Niles, calmly. “You could try, but you’d find out the truth for yourself. But, may I ask why?”
“Because,” said Charon, “God and I are enemies. I am on a mission to kill Him.”
Ellie expected that Niles would laugh. She considered that he might respond with some flippant word, a vocabulary lesson from his repertoire. But instead, he shrugged.
“All right,” Niles said. “Go ahead, then.”
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