“I do hope you were genuinely trying to help it,” observed Jeremy. “He watches everything.”
“Hell’s full of lies.” Muthoni shrugged. “Maybe when two lies collide, you get some truth? Though I do believe, in a funny way, I was trying to help it. Ah, well: Muthoni Muthiga M.D., counsellor to evolving machinery! I guess it’s no stranger than Herr Professor Heinrich Strauss, Ordinarius in Chemistry, master alchemist by appointment of God.”
They climbed up the ladder into the tavern of the broken shell, quickly, in case the machine should change its mind.
SEVENTEEN
From inside, the shell seemed to Sean much larger than it had from outside. Perhaps this was because it was the first interior he had been into in Hell? He had become hyperaware of little details, and now experienced a magnified perception of the grain of the wooden benches and trestle tables, the chiaroscuro stencilled out by the hanging lanterns, the texture of casks and leather bottles and cups; and his ears were assailed by the interference patterns of a dozen simultaneous garrulous conversations—a gallimaufry of seduction, innuendo, levity, coarse jokes greeted with roars of laughter; while his nostrils were flooded with the heady tang of spilled wine and the rich smell of meat turning on a spit (what sort of meat? long pig?) . . . then there were all the faces and gestures of the tipsy revelers to be taken in: features haggard, florid, cyanotic, exuberant. Relatively, this could well be the pleasantest place in Hell: a haven, inside the stone body of Knossos, a blind spot out of sight of God or Devil. But its minutiae rather overloaded him, dwarfing him . . .
Hands plucked at the four newcomers. A wench broached & cask. Thumping a beaker of wine down on the table, she plumped herself into Sean’s lap. A grizzled, grinning man slid his arm around Denise’s waist. A tall black man—whose features, however, were oriental—bowed tipsily to Muthoni. Jeremy slipped gladly on to a bench and drained a flask, having apparently forgotten his own warning about the wines of Hell.
The tavern was expanding subjectively to occupy the whole of their attention, only the broken entrance with its glimpse of burning gloom and starlit wastes reminding them of the torrid winterscape of war and futility and caprice outside. At the far end of the tavern—but how far?—a narrow ladder led up and out of a hole in the roof. This seemed to serve mainly as a chimney, bearing away the reek of vinous breath and the fumes of basted meat.
“So you made it,” grinned the wench on Sean’s lap. She was rosy, plump and merry. “Welcome to Last Stop Inn!” She kissed him fulsomely. It tasted like a perfectly genuine, friendly kiss. Everything about the tavern seemed convivial, if rather overdone.
“What are you people doing here?” he asked her, foolishly.
She winked. “Getting drunk. Making love. Feeding our faces. Having a gay time.”
Bagpipe music wailed down the vent from the roof, prompting a few people to a vigorous stamping dance.
Sean tasted the wine. Even this sip made his senses reel. His throat ached for more. He quaffed deeply, and a few moments later found himself partnering the wench in a body-rubbing, smoochy glide around the room. Denise and Muthoni had partners too. No one seemed put off by their bruises or baldness; Denise no longer seemed to notice her missing toe. Soon the separate couples fused into a conga line of people winding their way around the tables, butting and prodding each other, till eventually everyone collapsed upon the benches or the floor. Some copulated openly, others crawled under the tables. Voices gasped for madder music and for stronger wine.
Sean’s head buzzed. There seemed to be nowhere else he could possibly be, any longer. Though why was he lying on the floor? Someone’s lips and hot mouth engulfed his penis. Rosy the wench? He engorged, but didn’t look to see.
“Trapped, trapped,” mumbled Denise plaintively, nearby; then she began to groan with pleasure.
“Whazamatter?” slurred a winsome blonde girl, her fingers working between Denise’s legs, her cheek upon her chest. “All friends here. All good friends. No enmity. Nobody feels any pain ...”
Shortly after climaxing Sean fell asleep, deliciously.
Somebody trod upon his hand. Which woke him up, some time later. The revelers lay about snoring. The fire had gone out under the remains of the roast. He raised his head, but immediately let it sink back on to the floor to give his skull and eyeballs some sense of definition. He squinted sideways instead. The girl who had trodden on him was stepping unsteadily between the sprawled bodies towards the distant ladder—impossibly remote from where he lay. Presently she began hauling herself up to the hole in the roof.
“Hey,” he called vaguely. The call gonged in his head.
But apparently she heard him. The bagpipes were no longer playing; the air was still. She paused in mid-rung. It was the same blonde girl who had been goosing Denise.
With some difficulty he hauled himself up into a sitting position, propping his head against a bench.
“Where are you off to?” he whispered loudly. She could hardly have made out the exact words, even though the room was silent. With a rueful smile, she waved and disappeared through the roof. Up the chimney. What was supposed to be up there?
“The revels are over for that one,” muttered the oriental negro who had been squiring Muthoni the ‘night’ before, and who now batted a bleary eye. “This is Last Stop. Of course, you can stop at Last Stop for ever.” The man grabbed vaguely for a table top but only managed to bark his knuckles. “I’ve a powerful thirst. Pass me some, there’s a good fellow. Devil’s Ruin, we call it.” Sean groaned at the prospect of more drink, even the mention of it; as Jeremy had warned, he had a Hell-sized hangover—but presumably Jeremy would also have one when he woke up. “This stuff sets you up in no time. Sets you off on the round of joy. Up and away. Well, up but maybe not away.” The man’s fingers encountered a beaker this time. As he drew it toward him, Sean caught his wrist feebly.
“Where’s she going?” he croaked. “Why are the revels over for her?”
“Why, she’s drunk and guzzled and fucked her way through all this. So will you, so will you! You’ve got to be well set up to meet the Devil. Kindly let go of my wrist? I ask you sweetly. Please. We’re all friends here. I ask you, who else is friends in Hell?”
Sean had no strength in his grasp, anyway. He let go. The oriental negro swallowed half a beakerful of wine and brightened almost instantly. “We’ve all come through, is what. That’s why we’re all friends. We’re all on the brink.” Struggling erect he went to carve a last slice of meat for his breakfast.
He talked as he munched. “You see, this Devil’s got a massive intellect. Brainy type, he is. He’ll tie you up in knots, analyzing this and that. He’s the big brain inspector. Stagger up to him drunk with a kingsize hangover, that’s the neat way. Slip through his gob while he’s trying to ask you questions. He wants to know what it’s all about as much as the next bugger. Keen as mustard, that lad is. Of course, you can try to beat him on his own terms. Tried that myself last time round. The old syllogistic caper. I tell you, that bugger tied me up in knots. Different strategy this time. You don’t get through by thinking about it.”
The man hiccuped, raked his teeth with a fingernail, and burped. Raising his cup, he swigged from it then topped it up. “This is holy drinking, man. Communion. Time to start the revels. Yow-oooh!” he yodeled. The sprawled sleepers began opening their eyes.
At least, thought Sean, this was genuine conversation of a kind with somebody in Hell—other than machines—who didn’t seem entirely entranced by monotonous rituals in the way of the musicians or the warriors. At least the man seemed to have some notion of what he was doing, however crazy his rationale. Unless his revels were another orbital ritual.
The man brayed with laughter and upended his beaker over Sean’s head, drenching him. The fumes of spilled wine intoxicated him; and Sean felt his head begin to clear ... at least of pain, though not of the merry sense of revelry which now returned, full-blown.
Denise blinked at him from
the untangling heap of bodies. “J'ai la gueule de bois,” she groaned, holding her head.
“Sniff some wine, Denise.” Sean fetched a beaker. “It’ll clear your head.”
The eastern negro chuckled. “So Dionysus is a lady! What a party we’ll have today!”
The bagpipes began to bleat tentatively overhead: the first post at Last Stop. Soon, people were drinking and singing in a breakfast party . . .
The negro squeezed on to the bench between Muthoni and Denise, embracing the both of them while grinning grandly at Sean.
“If this isn’t love it’ll have to do till the real thing comes along. Now, I propose a toast! To the fair lady Dionysus. And the fair, or rather half-fair . . . what was your name, darling?”
“Muthoni.” (Still subdued, she was beginning to bounce back.)
“The only Muthoni.” His fingers tickle-walked across her skin. “Me, I’ll play on the black squares.”
“You said the Devil is an intellectual?” asked Sean.
“Oh very. Unless I’m lying. But I never lie, ha ha. Here’s to the Devil. May he have joy of us. May we be a tasty bite.” He leered. “He’s smelly, though. The way out’s a real cesspool. Keep your nostrils well washed in wine. We’re his shit—and that’s our final adjustment to the whole organic beast we are! Ah, the old anal delights!”
Sean tried to say something more, but words slipped and slid about his tongue. His lips would rather have let loose a stream of scabrous anecdotes. So much easier. Schiaparelli, he mouthed to himself: a one-word prayer, invocation. To the wrong God, though . . .
Here is revel, he thought. And it is holy revel, once you could see that it is. It’s only a membrane away from the pleasures of the Gardens. It’s only the negative of those pleasures, waiting to be turned into a positive. And here are the people who have reached the last stage: of Dionysiac laxity, close by the laxative Devil. Here in this tavern they suppress the intellect deliberately. Because the Devil is an intellectual. This is the route, perhaps, of those who have thought overmuch, who have ratiocinated about these unconscious events. Now they choose to drown their thoughts, to dizzy them with liquor.
Perhaps, thought Sean drunkenly (this intuition arriving like an afflatus from the wine), it’s the Devil who is dutiful, not the capricious, though Knossos-indentured God. The Devil is the legalistic, analyzing side of God, alienated from Him because the whole God is paradox. So the Devil sits in Hell, gobbling, digesting and evacuating person after person, puzzling his brains about them like one of those valiant machines . . .
Sean staggered to his feet.
“Come on,” he ordered Denise and Muthoni. Catching
sight of Jeremy smirking vacantly, he called to him too, “We’re on our way.”
“Go to the devil,” laughed Muthoni. “I’m having fun.” “That’s just where I intend to go. To the Devil. Up, Doctor Muthiga. We’re only passing through.”
“You tell that to the Devil,” the eastern negro suggested with a guffaw. “He might appreciate it! Passing through. Heh. Ha! I like it.”
“I just might do that,” nodded Sean. “Do you know who we are? No, of course you don’t. We’re from a recontact survey ship—from Earth. ”
The eastern negro stared at him, nonplussed. “What’s Earth?” he asked innocently. He rubbed his brow fiercely, as though it might burst into fire with memory. “Something. No. You’ve got it all wrong. This is the Earth. The Earth is in three parts: Eden, Gardens and Hell. One day the Sun may shine on Hell and Gardens will grow here too.”
“What do you think those little lights are in the sky?” “Hmm. Stars. Set in a crystalline sphere around the zodiac?”
“Suns, man. Other suns—far away, with worlds. One of those worlds is called the Earth. You came from there.” “Ah, you’re up to a bit of devilry yourself! Disputatious type, eh? You won’t go down well!”
“I see what you mean,” sighed Muthoni. “Okay, on our way. Before we forget ourselves.”
Sean hauled Jeremy up by the scruff of the neck. “You too.”
The four of them walked to the ladder. Waves of cheers buoyed them up as they climbed. On these waves, they rose through the roof.
EIGHTEEN
The domed roof was deserted. One step up from it, the bagpipes moaned of their own accord on the millstone disc. The sculpted features of Knossos loomed below that disc. Jeremy stepped over to where the dome fell away more steeply to stare down at the monumental image. The face was wistful, as though accepting the necessity for a Hell, while pitying the hellish aspects of it—which were a part of himself that he had come to terms with, so that it couldn’t possibly harm him or confuse him. Hell—the thrash of the hindbrain —had become a fossil, no longer kicking away on top of his spine, but turned to stone; to The Stone, which was now the firm skeleton and foundation of his mysterious activities in the Gardens . . .
The stone face kept watch, too, over something else . . .
Jeremy pointed out across the tarn of ice which gripped those broken boats where Knossos’s feet were rooted.
The land rose beyond the shore then dipped into a red laterite valley. High up as they were, they could see into the valley—and it glowed with a furnace light. The scene in the valley seemed magnified, brocken-like, as though the hot valley air formed a lens.
They saw a three-legged throne: a high chair with legs as tall as stilts. Upon it perched a blue, bird-headed King of Hell who wore a cauldron for a crown—the canonical Devil of Bosch. He (or it?) must have been four or five meters tall if he (or it) ever stepped down from the throne. But could he ever step down? His feet were imprisoned in amphoras, stone wine bottles fastened securely to the cross-bar of the high chair. The Devil sat there, immobilized, like a gaunt baby on its potty, emptying his lax bowels into a gaping hole in the ground beneath. What he voided down this hole—through a bulging sac of bowel gas—was: people. The occasional person. Very occasional. Though they watched for a long time through the magnifying air, only two men and a woman came up to speak to him. After more or less conversation he snatched one man and one woman up in a great clawed hand, stuffed them whole into his beak, swallowed them then voided them out of his nether end. The other man he dismissed and sent away . . . indigestible? No more petitioners came, and the Devil was left quite alone, fasting in his throne-valley.
“God’s backside,” murmured Sean eventually.
They scrambled down the shrouds of one of the boats encasing the tree trunks of the Knossos colossus, down to the deck. Overboard onto the ice they stepped, and slipped and slid across to the shore. Sweating again, flushing in the lurid orange glow from the valley beyond, they breasted the rise.
Immediately the Devil fixed them with a glossy black eye. As they walked slowly down towards him, a chemical stench drifted to them from the cloacal hole beneath his high potty throne: dissolution of the flesh, digestion, elimination . . .
From what they thought was a discreet distance they stared up at the Devil. And its beak clacked open.
“Now, you have been this way before, dear Jeremy,” it chirped mournfully. “So what can I expect to learn from you, except that the operation must be performed many times over before it can succeed? Must I sit here for ever? All these men and women—and the beasts and fishes who will surely follow them: oh I am in gross discomfort! I have indigestion. Nourish me! Fill my belly for once! Stay within me. This is no real Hell, when I cannot keep the souls that I gobble up inside me. I might learn something from them if I could. Ah, I am kept in ignorance. I may not know who I already Am. And Was. And Will Be. Ah, me.”
“Poor old devil,” sympathized Jeremy cautiously.
The Devil jerked a claw towards the stone features of Knossos, visible over the rise. “That person binds me here, and he unbinds my bowels. If you could possibly heap that hilltop a little higher, so that I can’t see him? Or melt the ice around his boats so that he sinks a little? You must appreciate my predicament, petitioners. After all, I am a very human devi
l. Will you call me the Father of Lies? But what is a lie? An untruth. An anti-truth. So, into my hands is given anti-truth and anti-knowledge; so that He, Who I Am, may know Myself. If only I weren’t forever digesting all these damned people! Oh for the old simplicities, before there was any good and evil, any speaking and silence, and right and left, or plus and minus, or mind and unmind—the whole damned turmoil of it all.”
Sean spoke up. “Hasn’t this whole world been forced upon the God—by Heinrich Strauss? But how can you force something upon a God . . . ? I take it that you are part of the God, incidentally? A part estranged from Him, by Himself— some sort of antithesis? So that, in a sense, I’m speaking to the God right now?”
“Ah, so we have a philosopher to digest! Now, who are you?”
“Don’t you know that already? God seems to have been greasing our tracks for us so far! Or else Knossos has.”
“Tush, am I supposed to know everything? Fool, I am the Father of Ignorance, the Son of Chaos. What is chaos but information so scrambled that none of its content or structure can be recovered? But let us debate. First, a bite to whet my appetite.”
Casually, but so quickly, the Devil reached down. He plucked up Denise and popped her into his beak. She thrashed, she screamed once in a muffled way, then she disappeared down his maw.
Muthoni and Sean started forward, collided, and drew back sharply as the Devil cuffed them with a claw-mailed fist. Or was he greedily trying to catch them too?
A few moments later, Denise slid from the Devil’s anus through the blue, prolapsed gas balloon. Waving her arms wildly, she fell right through the bottom of the bubble, down the dark hole beneath. The Devil’s tongue and beak produced appreciative smacking noises.
“Yum. A flavor foreign to my palate ... I am intrigued. Now, don’t be shy, my dear. The only way out of Hell is through this body of mine. And there’s only one way into the old anatomy. At least, no one’s every tried rear entry! It’s really unfortunate the way you all keep on slipping through! I suppose it stops me from getting fat. Do you taste foreign too, my piebald nigredo?”
Watson, Ian - Novel 08 Page 14
