Red Spikes

by Margo Lanagan

  And if Raglan managed to live today down, if he came back stronger and crueller than ever, there would always be Diammid Anderson with his awful face and the absolute certainty of his bearing. Anderson would always be there for the Preps; he had said so.

  And even – Rickets breathed happiness into the night – even if he wasn’t, even if Anderson died of his wounds, Rickets would have the memories to hearten him, of Anderson lifting him down from the coat-hook, of Anderson calling Bully ‘Bully’ to his face, of Anderson rising to his bare toes, and running two light steps across the prefects’ carpet, and taking flight over the laden table, and crashing to Rickets’ rescue, to everyone’s rescue, in a magnificent explosion of cakes, and plate, and sparks, and shattering china.

  { Under Hell, Over Heaven

  ‘You always have to go through stuff,’ said Barto. ‘Why couldn’t somebody have made a road?’

  Leah grunted. Yes, it was always a trudge here. But what was the hurry, when it came to eternity? Might as well trudge as run. Might as well be hampered as not. Barto was new here; he didn’t realise. He’d just arrived, and by car accident, so he was still in a kind of shock. He was trying to catch hold of the last threads of his curiosity as it disappeared.

  Right now they were walking through reedy, rushy stuff, sometimes ankle-deep in black water. It was quite dim, too. They were deep in the Lower Reaches; Hell’s crusted, warty underside hung low above them, close enough to feel the warmth. There were four of them: Leah, Barto, Tabatha and King. They were all youngish, so far as that meant anything, and they spoke the same language, so they made a good team. Plus there was the Miscreant Soul they were escorting, on his string. At least he’d stopped moaning. Hard as it was to feel strongly about anything here, the Miscreant’s carryings-on had managed to irritate Leah.

  Well, it was entirely up to you, she’d said to him. You can get away with a certain amount, but you can’t expect to be forgiven everything.

  Why not? he’d retorted miserably. What skin would it have been off anyone’s nose?

  It’s just not the way the system works, King had said. The line has to be drawn somewhere.

  I don’t see why.

  You don’t have to, said Leah. It’s not your business to see.Just count yourself lucky to get any glory at all. Some people never even catch a glimpse. And she’d made sure to walk on the far side of the group after that, so his complaints were mostly lost on the warm, wet breeze.

  He was naked, the Miscreant. He didn’t get to keep the white garb and the little round golden crown. He was just a plump white man, rather the shape of a healthy baby, on a leash of greenish-yellow string and with his hands tied behind his back. He had died of a knifing outside his office building; the big wound that had opened him up from left shoulder to right hip was sealed up shiny pink.

  The rest of them wore the grey-green uniform. It was neither shapeless nor quite fitted, neither long nor short, neither ugly nor attractive in worldly terms; it was not remarkable in any way unless – Leah had seen it on the Miscreant’s face, on the face of the woman at the desk at Heaven Gate – you were used to that other uniform, the white one, and the beaming face above.

  The woman had cleared her throat and some of the light had gone out of her face; when they were so close to the Gate, people didn’t like to look away from it. You have some business with us?

  Tabatha had handed over the satchel, and they’d all stood around as the woman went slowly through the leather pages. The occasional seal shone light up into her face, but she looked less and less happy the more she read.

  This is never good. She’d slapped the satchel closed. This is never a pleasant task. Do you have the appropriate device?

  Tabatha had held up the two lengths of string – Leah had seen King’s fingers rub together, and her own tingled at the memory of rolling the grass-fibres into string on her thigh. The woman on the desk had sighed and stood and crossed the little bit of marble paving in front of the Gate.

  ‘Someone up ahead,’ said King. ‘It looks like a staffer. With a crook?’

  Leah looked up from the reeds and the water. Yes, there was the curl of a crozier against the grey sky ahead.

  ‘He’s coming right for us,’ said Barto. ‘Of course, I don’t mind if it’s not specifically for me.’

  The man was tall, as a Shepherd should be. ‘All hail!’ he cried as soon as he saw them. No one spoke as he toiled forward through the swishing reeds.

  He patted the satchel on his white-robed hip. ‘I have papers here for an infant, Jesus Maria Valdez.’

  There was a slight sag among the four of them at the word infant. The Miscreant narrowed his eyes at the staffer. So he had been hopeful, too.

  ‘There are a lot of infants back there,’ said Leah. ‘Get through this boggy stretch; look out for a copse of dark trees on your right. They’re in there, on the ground and up among the branches, heaps of them.’

  He was on his way. ‘I’ll try there,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘Praise be.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Barto softly. Oh, he minded a great deal.

  Leah shook herself and walked on. Out here, you got to know too well all the different shades of disappointment.

  ‘What was that all about?’ said the Miscreant, watching the glittering crozier recede. ‘Someone else’s paperwork got mixed up?’

  ‘Probably a posthumous baptism,’ said King. ‘Or an intercession, you never know. They don’t have friends, babies, but sometimes there’s a very devout grandmother. Come on.’ He tugged the string gently.

  The Miscreant resumed his trudging. ‘So that baby gets to Ascend?’

  Leah didn’t hear any answer – she was watching reeds and water again – but the Miscreant asked no more, so someone must have nodded.

  Actually, Hell would be so much worse for the Miscreant, now that he’d been inside Heaven Gate and experienced that eternity. It would be worse than it would have been for Leah herself, who had only seen the Light, only felt it, from here in the Outer, and only for a few seconds at a time. And it was hard enough for her, this ache that never left her bones, this endless dull knowledge that things weren’t as they should be.

  They came to the edge of the marsh, up onto a rise covered with brown grass. There were quite a few people there. Two groups prayed to a Wrong God, the women wearing head cloths woven laboriously from grass fibres – where did they get the energy, for the praying, for the weaving? Babies floated here and there in their greenish swaddling, some sleeping, some awake and waving their arms, kicking their legs; another one screamed inconsolably in the distance. Other people wandered alone, meeting no one’s eye, or lay on the grass looking up at the carbuncular ceiling, which was just like the surface of Heaven, except that it rumbled occasionally, and leaked dirty-yellow puffs of sulphur.

  Leah’s party passed on into the grasslands. The going was drier, but pricklier underfoot, and the grasses had sharp edges that made long, light cuts on their bare legs.

  ‘You never know, do you,’ said Barto quietly at her shoulder. ‘You see a bloke with a cut throat, like back there, and you don’t know whether he did it himself, or whether he got murdered.’

  Leah nodded. ‘About the only suicides you can be sure of just by looking is slit wrists. Not that you can’t just go up and ask. It’s not like people are embarrassed about it, or won’t tell you.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Barto. ‘I’ve never been much of a going-up-and-asking type of person.’

  ‘It’s different here,’ said Leah. A sigh escaped her – it seemed so wearying, to explain. The thing was, nothing would change, whether it was explained or not explained. ‘No one takes offence; no one thinks any the less of you. Just like no one plots against you, or gossips or anything. It’s restful. It’s pointless; everything is pointless, but nothing is a bother, either.’

  ‘Come on,’ said King behind her. The string was at full stretch, and so was King’s arm. The Miscreant was dragging his feet, his eyes cast fearfull
y upward.

  Leah turned impatiently from the sight. She had lived a virtuous life, if a short one. Her only sin was one of omission, and not even her omission, but her parents’: she was one of the billions of unbaptised who walked the Outer.

  The breeze was very warm now, and Leah could smell the sulphur. The smell, the rumbling and the occasional sprinkle of pumice on her head and into the surrounding grass, were the only indications of the sufferings going on overhead. At least she didn’t have to worry about finding herself in Hell; her only question was when, if ever, she would be granted admission to that better place.

  Mostly Leah didn’t get to see much inside Heaven; clerical errors usually went the other way from this one, and Souls delivered to Heaven slipped in quickly, as soon as the Gate opened the merest crack. This time, because the Miscreant had made such a fuss, some force had been needed to remove him, and the Gate had had to be opened comparatively wide. The four members of the escort had been tortured long and hard by the sight of the Eternal Benediction, of that constant rain of powdery shimmer – was it food? was it love? – that fell through the rays of Light, that clung to the clouds, that brushed past the beings. The snatches of music, the humming of crystal, the tang of harp strings, the celestial harmonies sung by voices so human, so joyous – Leah, accustomed only to the whistling breezes in the Outer, to the weeping and mumbling of the Souls Pending, had listened fiercely. She resolved to memorise a single phrase, to take with her, to give her heart during the grey times. And she had; she’d caught a little flourish of notes and hammered them into her memory.

  But then the Gate had closed and silenced the music, and the Miscreant Soul had stood naked and dismayed before them, subdued by the string but still panting from the fight. Leah had run the caught phrase through her mind several times and it had fallen dead, all its brilliance and mystery and beauty gone, a series of notes as bland and grey-green as the clothes she wore. The four of them, whose pure yearning towards Heaven had fused them elbow to elbow into a single being, had fallen apart, four blockish, clumsy entities excluded into a quieter, greyer eternity. One needed nothing here, not food or drink or love – but a glimpse of Heaven woke a hunger, a hunger to hunger, to long for something, anything, and have that longing satisfied, to feel any feeling but this bland resignation, this hopeless doggedness, this pointless processing of oneself forward through unmarked, unmemorable time. Oh, and then the hunger went, and left you frowning, trying to fathom how you could have felt as strongly as that about anything.

  Walking through the grasslands was tedious now; Leah’s shins stung with grass cuts. There were few Souls here, either floating or walking, and they kept their distance – if you weren’t a Shepherd, no one was interested in you. A few children stood and stared, head and shoulders above the grasses, but anyone in their teens or older hunched and turned and swayed slowly away as the escort came through on its business.

  The rumbling overhead became louder; the shell of the sphere was thinner the closer they approached Hell’s Gate.

  ‘I can hear people screaming, I think,’ whimpered the Miscreant.

  ‘Not yet,’ said King. ‘You’re imagining it.’

  ‘Put another loop around his neck if he’s feeling resistant,’ said Tabatha. ‘That’ll keep him moving.’

  They paused while King arranged this, Tabatha instructing him. ‘You want it firm, but not tight, and you don’t want it to get any tighter when you pull on it, just like the first one.’

  The grass clumps grew farther apart now, and the ground between was bare and red, uneven and littered with sharp stones. It was quite hard to keep an even pace, and the whole team slowed, picking places to put their feet. The stones grew bigger and bigger, broader and more treacherously balanced.

  ‘This is like gibber plain,’ said Barto. ‘I remember when we went on our round-Australia trip. Except there’d be no creatures here. We looked through these binoculars that could see infrared light and there were all sorts of things – little mice jumping around, lizards, spiders . . .’

  No one answered. Leah had barely understood him. Australia? Binoculars? Infrared? And she wasn’t going to reiterate, No, there are no animals here. Animals are old-world stuff; they just circulate in that system. And then he’d ask, So why are there plants here – aren’t they old-world too? I don’t know, she’d have to say. Did I create this? If you ever get to Heaven, I’m sure it’ll all be made clear. It was all too boring and took too much energy.

  A frail tower of scaffolding appeared on the horizon, leading up to Hell’s lowest convexity. The escort picked their way towards it, swearing under their breath as the stones bit into their feet, staggering off balance now and again. The Miscreant fell once, opening a cut on his forehead and bruising his cheek.

  ‘I couldn’t put my hands out,’ he complained. ‘Maybe you could just untie my hands, for this part?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ King brushed the red dust off the man’s belly, genitals and thigh. ‘We’ll just walk a bit slower, shall we?’

  ‘You know,’ said the Miscreant, ‘it’s almost good to feel pain! The pain is better than the nothingness, don’t you think? What a terrible place this is! Do you get a lot of people purposely hurting themselves here?’

  ‘When they first arrive, sometimes,’ said Tabatha. ‘But they calm down after a while, and fit in with the rest of us.’

  Leah watched the red ground pass. Tabatha was a bit of a goody-goody, she thought. The rest of us – how cosy. What a cosy little community we are.

  ‘After all, you can’t end this, yourself,’ Tabatha went on. ‘You can’t self-harm your way out of it. Only way out is to pick up brownie points, or by intercession from someone back in the old world.’

  Brownie points, was it? Leah wondered what the All-Mighty would think of that phrase.

  Wooden stairs zigzagged up inside the scaffolding. The canvas enclosing its middle two sections rippled in the breeze. ‘Up we go, then.’ Tabatha started to climb.

  Leah brought up the rear. She hung back a little so as to have the Miscreant’s grubby feet at her eye-level, rather than his flabby white bottom and bitten-nailed hands.

  In the first canvas room they took woven bootees from the water trough and tied them to their feet. Water squeezed from the thick soles and rained between the floorboards onto the steps below. They slopped upstairs to the second room.

  ‘This is where we turn over,’ King told the Miscreant. ‘Don’t freak out – it might feel a bit weird.’

  ‘Whee,’ said Tabatha, somersaulting off the top step into the shadows.

  ‘You out of the way?’ Barto jumped after her.

  ‘It’s quite enjoyable.’ King turned in the opening and addressed the Miscreant upside-down. ‘It’s about the most fun anyone gets in this place.’

  The Miscreant’s boots lifted off the step. ‘No, wait a minute—’ He kicked out, and water flew into Leah’s face. He misjudged everything; his head banged on the top step. His frightened, wounded face stared out at Leah for a moment before he floated up into the dim landing-space.

  ‘Christ, King, you’re supposed to be looking after him.’ Leah’s hair rose and the weight lifted out of her spine. She checked the air above and let go into it. Bodies revolved in the dim tented space, and water-drops wobbled, unsure which way to fall. ‘Let’s move along now,’ she said.

  They bounced and sprang along the weightless landing to the far door, and dropped out onto the upper stairs. Now the creased, pockmarked grey rock of the Hell sphere was the ground, and the sky that hung over them was the red stony plain. The air was close and smelly.

  Down they went onto the rock. Their boots hissed on contact with it.

  ‘Not far now,’ said Tabatha.

  ‘I don’t care how far it is,’ muttered the Miscreant.

  Leah peered around him at the machinery and the desk in the distance, and the staffers moving about getting ready for them.

  Tsss, tsss, tsss, tsss, went the bootees for the
first little while. Then the soles dried out, and the smell of charred grass began to join that of sulphur. It was uncomfortably hot. The ground was creased cooled lava, easier to walk on than stones or swamp.

  ‘Pick up the pace,’ said King to the Miscreant, ‘or our boots’ll run out on the way back.’

  ‘Oh, poor you,’ said the Miscreant, obediently starting to jog. ‘How you’ll suffer.’

  As if you had cause to complain, thought Leah. It’s not as if you weren’t warned. Everybody gets warned somehow, even if they’re brought up under a Wrong God. Oog – she made herself look away from his jogging bottom – so much flesh. If I’d grown that old, I never would’ve let that happen to me.

  ‘Ahoy there,’ cried a woman in a silver firesuit up ahead, clapping her gloved hands. ‘You got a Clerical there for us?’

  ‘I don’t know what he is – that’s not my privilege,’ said Tabatha. ‘All I know is, he goes in here.’

  ‘Good-oh,’ said a firesuited man. ‘Helps us tell one moment from another.’ He shot Leah a cold grin.

  The man at the desk was small, hunched and pernickety-looking. He took the satchel and peered down his nose at each paper in turn, as if keeping an invisible pair of reading glasses on his nose. Then he dropped his head, glowered at them above the same glasses and pointed a thumb at the machinery.

  Leah had been here twice before. Both times she’d been picking up, and the Soul had been waiting for them, sitting happily on the desk swinging his legs. She’d never seen the machinery operate before.

  One of the firesuited people slapped a switch and the whole black affair shuddered into life. All the staffers had their head-pieces on now – they were silver all over, with flat black faces. They each took, from a hook on the machine’s slabby side, a silver pole that divided at the top into many vicious little spikes.

  The wheels turned. The chain tightened on the eyebolt in the ground. The circle of the lid was suddenly clear in the rock, outlined in knee-high puffs of smoke. Human screams rushed out with the smoke.