The New Hero Volume 2

by ed. Robin D. Laws

  That was where all the suicides went.

  Jaclyn and Terrance regarded the bedraggled mass of black and green matter lying in the road. It looked vaguely fetal in pose, although of adult size. The outlines of its form were already vague and the mass was seeping into the street. Cars and trucks drove through it without a disturbance—and through the two insubstantial souls who had come to see it. Nearby, huge old trees wreathed the large expanse of grassy green parkland Jason spent his final days in. Loitering, as they called it, when they hauled him in for being drunk and disorderly. He’d loved that park. It was all he’d had to love, anymore.

  “Jason?” she asked.

  “I think so. His locus is around the corner and I can’t find him. I thought maybe Professor could make sure, you know.”

  “I’m already sure. Did you see it happen?”

  “No. I think I got here just after.”

  “Okay. There’s nothing more you can do. I’ll take care of this.”

  A large truck drove through them. They didn’t even notice.

  “Are you going to get Professor?”

  “Terrance, I know you think Professor is going to make it all better. He’s not. Professor is on a bender. He’s in no shape to deal right now.”

  “But—but I heard something.”

  “What do you mean? You felt someone else?”

  “No. I mean I heard something. Footsteps.”

  “That’s impossible. There’s no such thing.”

  “I know.”

  “So you’re wrong.”

  “Just get Professor, please. He’ll know what to do.” Terrance’s essence had firmed up. Jaclyn could feel it both resolving and retracting from her at the same time.

  “All right. You’ll come with me.”

  “Thanks, Jaclyn.”

  “See if you still feel that way in half an hour.”

  Professor’s home lay north of downtown. Since his suicide the 1930s bungalow had been sold, remodeled, refurnished, and occupied by a young family. When he came here, which was not often, he would pad silently through the rooms and eventually lay down. The people who lived here now would pass through him, unknowing. He didn’t notice. He didn’t notice anything when he was here, not the new paint on the walls or the fashionable marble countertops in the kitchen where he used to chop carrots on scarred Formica or the kids that slept in the room where he graded papers year after unchanging year. Everything was so different and it didn’t matter in the slightest. When he came here it was not to look. It was to feel.

  What Professor felt here in his old home was misery. Absolute misery. From the moment he blinked in his being folded in on itself, forming an existential pocket dimension of agony. He would slide down inside and even the feeble pull of Limbo receded like a dark moon glimpsed from within a deep ocean. Blackness. Blackness and an impacted density of suffering. Years of heartache flaked off and settled slowly to the bottom, a thick sediment, and when he stood in this house the walls of his diving bell cracked and shattered and he sank limply down into that morass.

  Professor was on a bender.

  Jaclyn and Terrance blinked and were there. Jaclyn took them right to where Professor was. Terrance’s relief turned to horror. He reached out his hand but it shook violently, an echo of the palsy that afflicted him in life.

  Professor was only partly coherent. He lay slumped on the floor, legs curling, and his skin was the color of cremains. His face and hands were melting, their definition sloughing into a dark, slick mass. The transition was slow. He would not fully dissolve for days at this rate. But if he did, he would drop through Limbo and plunge silently into the molten core of Hell. It would be a second suicide.

  “Professor!” Terrance cried. His essence was as wobbly as his hands. Professor was his rock, as he was for most of the souls who transited Limbo and ascended. Few ever saw him like this. It wasn’t Jaclyn’s first time.

  Professor didn’t respond.

  “He won’t go,” Jaclyn said. Her tone did not exactly reassure: certain but scornful. “He does this sometimes. Comes back here and just drowns himself for a while. He always comes back.”

  “But why?”

  “Why do you think he spends so much time around people like us? He’s a junkie for suffering. And sometimes he needs the really good stuff. His stuff. Homebrew.”

  Terrance resisted, firming up again. His hands steadied. When he spoke it was almost childlike. “Professor helps us. He saves so many.”

  “Then don’t tell them. When they go on about how great he is you just take this memory and keep it for yourself. You know the truth. He’s a goddamn vampire.”

  “Can we wake him up? What do we do?”

  “He’s waking already. Look.”

  Color came back into Professor’s skin. The seeping mess of his face and hands paled and slowed.

  “We’ll wait in the library,” Jaclyn said. “He won’t talk to us here.”

  The downtown library was a many-angled obelisk of steel and glass, a squat post-modernist toad with pointy edges. In the late day’s sun it glinted and shone.

  Inside, above the cavernous main level intersected by angled steel beams, there was an upper floor where every surface was painted a glistening red. The walls were curved. It was like standing inside a human heart.

  That was where you could find Professor.

  Jaclyn and Terrance waited for what used to be an hour. Few library patrons ventured into this red heart. Come evening, the meeting rooms would be used for twelve-step groups and ardent practitioners of felting. Then he was there.

  “Jaclyn,” he said. “Terrance.”

  Seen away from his locus, out of his bender, Professor was medium height and heavy, with a bushy grey beard and thin hair, in his fifties. His students in freshman English called him Santa Claus, and not kindly. In life he had grown taciturn and snappish, a once good man whom life had slowly, methodically curdled. His funeral was poorly attended.

  His years in Limbo had sweetened his being into a kindly fire. He stoked that fire now and extended it to his companions, reaching out with a mastery of control and empathy far beyond what either of them had learned. Terrance’s essence received the warmth and expanded slightly, smoothing out and becoming firm, Professor working his soul like a glassblower. Jaclyn’s rigidity softened and elevated, buoyant. When she was near him like this she was glad. When she left his presence she hardened and sank as his residual warmth cooled. Her own inner fire burned well but cold.

  Jaclyn, disarmed, answered first. “Professor, Jason’s gone.”

  “Let’s go there,” he replied, glancing briefly at a small group of students who walked the red hall.

  “Professor, wait,” Terrance said, looking a little nervously at Jaclyn. “Are you okay? In your house, I mean, you didn’t look so good.”

  “I’m fine, Terrance. We all have our moments of weakness. Now let’s go attend to the dead.”

  Jason was an oil slick. He had continued to dissolve and now the rendered remains of his essence were spread widely across the road. The sunlight here guttered slightly, filtered by the spiritual residue of his sadness. But he was long gone, plunged into Hell for eternity.

  Professor and Jaclyn were there. Terrance stood yards away, not comfortable getting close. Succumbing in Limbo happened all the time. People came here, tried to get it together, failed, and fell, even some of the ones Professor managed to reach. But this was different.

  Jason had help. Terrance stayed back.

  Professor knelt in the street, heedless of the cars that drove through him.

  “You’re sure he didn’t just succumb?”

  “I saw him this morning,” Terrance insisted. “I mean, he wasn’t great but he wasn’t like this. There hasn’t been time, right? Since then?”

  “No,” agreed Professor.

  “Plus I heard footsteps.”

  Jaclyn looked at him sharply. “He thinks he heard footsteps.”

  “I heard footsteps.”


  “That’s ridiculous,” she said.

  “It’s not ridiculous,” Professor interjected. “Just metaphysically unlikely.”

  “But there’s no sound in Limbo, Professor.”

  “You think so? I suppose you haven’t met Asphodel.”

  The name resonated. Jaclyn and Terrance quivered for a moment. A wave of unease passed over them, as if a distant horn sounded and would shortly be followed by the baying of dogs.

  “Feel that?” Professor said. “He’s looking at us now. Which is good, because I have some questions for him.”

  When he spoke next the word reverberated with a clamor.

  “Asphodel.”

  And then he was there.

  The angel glowed so brightly Jaclyn and Terrance shielded their eyes at first. Eight feet tall and luminous, Asphodel folded his wings with an audible rustle. He stepped forward. The sound of his feet on the pavement was that of a heavy man and his armor made a bright grinding whine of metal on metal. They were real sounds, the sounds of a being who brought his own domain wherever he went, a domain not subject to the rules of Limbo. He towered over Professor. A circlet of pale white flowers lay atop his dark hair and classically beautiful face.

  “Hello, Asphodel,” Professor said respectfully.

  “Still here? No matter. You may shun God’s grace a thousand years yet still assume your place. Though self-murder may not be your final crime / for pride undoes even the best in time.”

  “This man isn’t guilty,” Professor said, indicating Jason’s black remains. “He was reasonably well just hours ago. Now he is long gone. No one succumbs that fast.”

  “You think you know another’s soul? / Only the bearer is in control. He above and They below may jostle but the choice it lay with your apostle.” He spoke the last word with a tinge of mockery.

  “I’m no messiah. And Jason was not this far gone. You call it self-murder—I would remove the ‘self’ from that statement. Someone took him.”

  Asphodel gave him a withering look.

  “Neither I nor you wrote the laws we only suffer their every clause. Souls leave Limbo up or down and every day are more to be found. ’Tis a net suspended above Hell for a fisherman to fill full well. Some may leap overboard and add their puny tally to the score. What’s more— a suicide’s fate is no great thing so Professor, find another gong to ring.”

  “I like the one I strike. Why don’t you help them, Asphodel? Isn’t that your job? You just sit in your damned meadow day and night. These people need your help. They can be saved!”

  Asphodel did not deign to reply but his lip curled slightly. With a sweep of his hand, the final remains of Jason atomized and disappeared. No sign of him remained. The angel departed without even bothering to glare at them.

  “My God,” Terrance said. “That was an angel?”

  “Great guy, wasn’t he?” Jaclyn said. “If they’re all like that Heaven must be a real paradise.”

  “It is,” Professor said.

  “You’ve got a lot of faith for a suicide,” Jaclyn retorted. “All we’ve really got to count on is ourselves. Look at that angel! He’s no help. Make it or break it, it’s up to us.”

  Professor looked thoughtful. He carefully thinned an outer layer of his essence, shedding emotion and identity and becoming a soap bubble of subtle sensation. Then he expanded it, growing in volume until, unnoticed by the others, it encompassed all three of them. Within his sphere of profound awareness he could observe them deeply, if briefly. He did not know their minds but he knew their souls and in probing Jaclyn’s he discovered a lattice of swollen, painful scars. She had suffered like no human he’d ever met—and by an order of magnitude at that. He recoiled from the archive of pain encased in her being and the fragile sphere of his distended awareness collapsed. He sighed. “Well, even Paradise has its meliorists.”

  “So the footsteps I heard,” Terrance said. “That was him?”

  “I doubt it,” Professor said. “I don’t think angels are in the business of murder. But maybe someone who was once like him. Tell me, how long has Jason been in Limbo?”

  “Not long,” Terrance said. “Maybe a few days. I’ve been helping him.”

  “I’m glad you tried. Please make the rounds, both of you—see how the other recent arrivals are doing. I think whoever is doing this is picking off the weakest, those whose sense of self is too fragile and wounded to resist. See who is the most in jeopardy of succumbing.”

  “So where are you going?” Jaclyn asked.

  “I’m going to check in on a new friend.”

  “Professor, wait,” Terrance said. “What do I do if I hear footsteps?”

  Professor thought for a moment.

  “Blink,” he finally said. “Keep blinking. Don’t stop until you find me. And above all, don’t doubt in yourself.”

  Maurice was sixteen and skinny, with frizzy hair and sloppy clothes. Gay. His family told him he was going to Hell. The guys at school didn’t bother with theology—they just hit him, tripped him, shoved him in his locker, pulled his pants down in class, scrawled graffiti about him on the walls, left gay porn magazines on his desk, made a Facebook group devoted to wild estimates of how much cock he sucked. The assistant principal told him maybe he should try dating a girl. His life was Hell on Earth and then he killed himself.

  Professor had been working with him for a couple of weeks. The first part was the toughest—just unrolling Maurice from his tight little ball of shame and self-hatred, getting him to open his eyes and understand where he was.

  Professor knew the key was projecting confidence. Confidence that a suicide could be saved. Confidence that each person could find their own forgiveness. Confidence that Limbo was a second chance. These souls needed that, required his confidence as a foundation for their own.

  Maurice responded. Slowly, grudgingly, he accepted his reality and took ownership of what brought him here. Professor intended to move him onto the next step in the path: getting Maurice’s help with another new arrival. Nothing puts your own problems in perspective like someone else’s, and taking some responsibility for another human being builds confidence in yourself. And when you succeed in helping, it gives you hope.

  That was Professor’s playbook. It worked about half the time. The rest of the time these bedraggled suicide souls flailed, faltered, succumbed. And then they went to Hell.

  Professor went to see Maurice because Maurice had been slipping. The guy Maurice was trying to help had succumbed. Professor asked Jaclyn to work with Maurice but he wasn’t optimistic. He’d put a lot of time in with this kid and if Maurice was succumbing, he might be the perfect target for whomever was doing this.

  He might be bait.

  Maurice stayed near his locus. He’d hung himself in the basement, suicide note posted online. Today Professor found him there, on the floor, curled up and wailing.

  Nearby, Maurice’s mother folded laundry. She couldn’t hear him. There was nothing new about that.

  As a soul in this place slowly succumbed, the loss of self-manifested as a failure of the body. It wasn’t a real body anyway, just a projection of self-image. Maurice’s self-image was starting to collapse. His face was a mass of sloughing tissue leaving a gaping red hole where his mouth had been. That remnant of a mouth keened, tongueless, lipless, unable to speak any language but pain.

  Then Jaclyn was there. Professor scowled briefly at the interruption.

  “Professor?” she said.

  “I asked you to make your rounds.”

  “I am.”

  Professor remembered tasking her with Maurice and nodded. “Of course.”

  “Let me work with him, Professor. There are others you can help.”

  “Shh,” Professor said, growing still and quiet. For a minute no one said anything.

  “Maurice,” he finally said, gently. Maurice’s being was a white dwarf star of compacted torment, the size of a small stone but as heavy as the world. Professor tried to warm it, embrace it
, unfold it. It didn’t yield.

  Professor closed his eyes. He needed every ounce of awareness and will he could muster. He probed Maurice’s essence until he found a tiny fissure, a slight opening where hope might get in.

  “You will never be alone,” he said. “When you get where you’re going you will always have friends. They will understand you. They will accept you.”

  The fissure widened just a little. Something resembling a consciousness seemed to become aware of Professor’s presence. The wailing faltered.

  Jaclyn was astonished. She knew Maurice very well by now and she didn’t expect that Professor could make any progress with him. She pushed her essence out a little farther, trying to observe the miracle Professor was starting to work on this poor young man’s soul.

  Upstairs, a heavy footstep fell.

  Professor’s soul wobbled a little. He wrapped Maurice in his own being, trying to shield him, disguise him, anything.

  “Professor, we should go,” Jaclyn said nervously.

  Another footstep, a heavy tread. Maurice stirred uneasily.

  Then the footsteps had a voice. Loud and guttural, like a trumpeting elephant.

  “MAURICE,” it bellowed. “FAGGOT.”

  “Professor, now,” Jaclyn pleaded. “We can’t stay here. It’s coming!”

  More footsteps.

  “Come with me,” Professor pleaded with Maurice. “Come with me. We’ll go away from here. Right now. Come with me.”

  No response. The pebble at the center of Maurice’s being shuddered with fear and shame. The tiny fissure snapped shut.

  “Professor, let’s go!” Jaclyn cried.

  “WE’RE COMING, FAGGOT,” the voice bellowed. “KICK YOUR ASS, FAGGOT.”

  The footsteps came down the stairs. The wood creaked.

  The demon turned the corner.

  It resembled an angel—as seen in the broken shards of a mirror. Once it stood eight feet tall and regal. Now it was stooped and hunchbacked, legs permanently bowed and bent, feet deformed, plates of once-holy armor painfully embedded in gnarled, warty flesh with patches of exposed muscle and bone. The wings were long gone, painful stumps left behind that were eternally inflamed and oozing, wounds that could never heal.