Voices from Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  They were in Xaphan’s room, which was tiny—but he counted himself as lucky, since Demons in other outposts and cities often had only communal barracks to rest in. A red silken tapestry covered one entire wall, the symbol for Castle Urian embroidered on it in metallic purple thread. The sheets of the small cot-like bed were of the same red material. Xaphan was raised over Vjeshitza on the strong columns of his arms, the muscles and cords in his neck pulled taut, his tight chest looking carved from polished ebony. Her powerful legs wrapped around his lower back, Vjeshitza had one finger hooked through both the rings pierced through his nipples, pulling on them just enough that the pleasure didn’t stray too far into pain. Her feathered wings formed a black pool under her that looked like it might swallow them. His, half open, were a canopy that seemed to be casting that intimate pool of shadow.

  "I helped prepare a perfumed bath for the woman today," Vjeshitza cooed, staring into her lover’s eyes, which were both intensely focused but oddly detached, as if he gazed at some small object that was the only detail he could recall from a dream.

  "Yes?" he grunted absent-mindedly, rocking her hips with his own, their pelvises locked like the antlers of fighting stags. "I imagine she was imperious. Insulting…"

  "No. She was polite. She’s bored, though. She’s only here because of her husband, I’m sure. But I saw her body when she disrobed. She’s a horrible thing. Fat, like a white leech gorged on blood. Like fruit that should have fallen from a branch long ago."

  "She wasn’t born a warrior, like us. And how old is she?"

  "She was forty-two when she died, I heard. Young…for one of them." Both Xaphan and Vjeshitza were only eleven years old. They had left the city of Tartarus, where they had been made, as adults. Had, in fact, been born as adults.

  "She doesn’t strike me as being terrible. For one of her kind," he said.

  "Don’t let her mislead you. They can’t be trusted. They are all of one evil heart…such as we Demons can only aspire to." Suddenly she darted her head like a snake and nipped him on the neck. His eyes clicked onto hers at last, and she grinned bright teeth in her lovely dark face. "Look at me." Then, more seriously, her smile becoming more subtle, she whispered, "Look at me…" She smoothed her hands over the black globe of his skull, as if to read the future in its surface.

  ««—»»

  Earlier in the day, Xaphan had passed Mrs. Colombo in a hallway. He had lowered his eyes and nodded his head respectfully, but when he glanced up he saw that she had given him a smile. Changed out of her Angel’s customary garments, she was wearing a black long-sleeved pullover and black slacks with flared legs. Her clothing was very tight, emphasizing her overripe figure.

  Xaphan felt that his lover had been uncharitable in calling her fat, a leech. Though her body was more voluptuous, more indulged than those of Urian’s devils—which might be taken as a sign of grossness, decadence—he found her shape an artistic abstraction of the features associated with the feminine: her breasts plump, her hips wide (had she birthed children in life?). Also, whereas he, Vjeshitza, and the others had no hair, Teresa Colombo’s flowed down past her breasts, was thick and parted in the center, as black as his own wings. It waved about her face when she moved, and she was always brushing a curtain of it aside to clear her face (with its dark eyes, heavy brows, strong nose, pink lips pressed into that little smile she gave him). Again, compared to one of his kind, her long, heavy hair might seem a sign of lush overindulgence. But the contrast was eye-catching…just as was the brightness of her skin compared to his own.

  Later in that same day, as he was turning into a corridor, he heard her voice behind him (its British accent distinct), and turned to see that she was moving briskly to catch up with him. "Excuse me?" she called, gesturing. She smiled more broadly this time, showing large white teeth. He went to her.

  "Madam?"

  "Can you help me move something?"

  "Of course, madam."

  He went to her, and she led him back around the corner, down a hallway and to a door of one of the opulent guests suites. He realized it must be her own.

  She opened the door, led him inside, and she closed the door after him.

  "The desk under the window," she said, pointing. "Can you move that to the corner, and replace it with that armchair? I like to sit and read, but I prefer natural light."

  "Certainly, madam." He did as she had instructed. As he lifted her desk, he noticed there were a few books strewn upon it. They were some of those written by the Damned themselves, and published by them as well in the larger cities like Oblivion. These crude booklets had found their way to Castle Urian in the possession of this and that Angel over the years, and Xaphan himself had read several of them in his idle hours (though Vjeshitza had scolded him for it, and had hissed that she didn’t think it was wise for Demons to allow the Damned to express their thoughts in this way, let alone disseminate them to other Damned). He saw that she had a bookmark in one slim volume titled Letters From Hades, the author calling himself Dan Alighieri.

  Seeing his eyes on it, Teresa lifted the book and riffled the pages. "There isn’t much to do here while my husband’s out hunting."

  A little while ago, Xaphan had heard distant gunshots. "There is a subterranean garden, and a pool, down in the labyrinths," he offered.

  "I’ve been to them. Yes, the pool is nice and hot, and the garden is pretty, if you like mushrooms and moss. A bit dungeon-like down there for my tastes, though." She set down the book and unexpectedly moved closer to him, reached out a finger that almost but not quite touched one of the perfect, unbroken onyx rings that passed through his black nipples. Her almost-touch made him flinch harder than an actual touch would have. "How do they get these things in you? I don’t see a break in them."

  "They put them in my species of Demon while we are still forming."

  "Huh; I see. How strange. And these?" She indicated the slashed scars on both his breasts. He explained to her that he had inflicted the wounds upon himself, in a ritual marking the end of his training as a demonic warrior.

  "Rrr," Teresa said, pretending to slash her own fingernails down the raised scars on his chest. Then she chuckled smokily. "Sorry." He didn’t know whether to smile or to feel mocked, so he remained stoic.

  She moved around behind him now, and though they weren’t as sensitive as his skin, he could tell she was fingering the glossy black feathers along the edge of one of his folded wings. "Pretty," she said behind him.

  "Thank you, madam," Xaphan muttered.

  "Do you really fly?"

  "No, madam."

  "Hm. They’re rather pointless, then, aren’t they?"

  He found their reflection in a mirror over a dressing table. She was obscured behind him in the silvered glass, but he felt her hand alight softly on his lower back. Slide into its hollow. Then around his side, along his hip. Now he could see her white hand on his dark skin in the mirror. He saw it glide over his hard belly, and then lower. Until it cupped his prick and his balls, and held them firmly. Her thumb stroked his demonhood, coaxing blood into its tubes.

  "I’m bored," she whispered against one wing, as she slid her cheek back and forth across its silken sleekness.

  "Yes, madam," he managed. She was pumping him languorously now. He grew hard quickly. Her hand barely fit around his black-veined dusky shaft. Its glans gleamed like the head of an obsidian scepter.

  "My God," she husked, and she ran her tongue along the skin of his hard-muscled shoulder as if to taste its salt. Then she moved around in front of him, and sank to her knees. It made Xaphan uncomfortable that an Angel should kneel in supplication before a Demon. But when she took as much of him into her mouth as she could accommodate, he let out a small groan, and a moment later could not restrain himself from putting both hands to her head.

  He had never touched a human woman’s head before, except in the course of tortures he was obligated to perform. Her hair was a mass that shifted under his palms. That tangled between his fing
ers. His listened to the slick sounds of her mouth as her head worked forward and back. He felt her nails against the balls they cupped. Sharp, but not painful like the teasing claws of Vjeshitza.

  Before he could find release inside her human head, Teresa rose before him, her dark eyes shining with something like a madness. "Undress me," she whispered.

  And he did. He pulled off the form-fitting black pullover, the tight-fitting slacks, as if unpeeling a fruit. Her breasts hung heavy in her bra, and he held them in his hands, his thumbs spiraling across her nipples until they pressed at the restraining material. Then he lowered one of his hands, slipped it under the elastic waistband of her briefs, and fingered open the moist slit hidden in the coils of her secret hair. He had never touched this hair before, either, Vjeshitza as denuded there as a newborn mortal. A dark musk arose, and liquid sounds like her mouth had made at his cock.

  "Fuck me," she murmured against his chest. With her tongue, she flicked the ring through one nipple, and then pulled slightly at the ring with her teeth. Then, again: "Fuck me."

  He fumbled at her bra; she helped him. He skinned her panties down her legs. Seeing her entirely nude, he nearly ejaculated into the air itself. That vista of white flesh, its whiteness only heightened by the black growth below her rounded belly, and pouring down across her rounded shoulders. There were no hard ribs, points of hip bones, sharply defined arm muscles. She was like the offer of a soft bed to a monk who had been sleeping on a stone floor.

  He took her body up in his arms, carried her to the bed she shared with her husband, and lay her on it. And without hesitation, he was on and in her and already plunging, pumping, making the bed dip like a boat on a storm-tossed sea, and her breasts jounced and she threw back her head and moaned deeply.

  His wings opened fully above them like a black canopy.

  Distantly, Xaphan heard the crack of a rifle shot echo across the desert flatness. Somewhere, a Damned had probably just died. But he or she would resurrect. Being already dead, a Damned or an Angel could not be killed a second time. In this way, the Demons were more like the mortals had once been than the mortals were themselves. Though their powers of regeneration were great, a Demon could be killed. And so the gunshot made Xaphan tense up a little. What if the husband should return and find them this way? Would he allow his wife this entertainment, see it as nothing more than a dip in the spring-fed pool? No more than his own entertainment hunting the Damned? Or…

  But his mind drifted from the gunshot, as Teresa took his head in her hands and pulled it down to her breasts. He lost himself in their white softness, as if they filled all creation…all life and afterlife. Xaphan had never seen the Creator—not even Angels had seen Him—so he could blasphemously imagine that He was a She. An embodiment of fertility, like this woman. He imagined all life pouring forth from the hole he was now stirring (like an alchemist’s pestle in a mortar), and all life feeding at the orbs he himself suckled at avidly.

  Yes, she was a goddess…and he worshipped…

  ««—»»

  The bathing pool below Castle Urian, fed by hot springs that made steam curl from its surface, was enclosed by a circular wall carved out of solid rock as red as muscle. Into this curving wall, small curtained nooks had been incised so that visitors could change in and out of their clothes. The pool itself was currently empty—no Demon would dare use it while Angel visitors were staying here—but one of these small changing niches was currently occupied by the Demon Xaphan and Teresa Colombo.

  She had bent over a stone bench carved into the wall, her palms spread on it, while Xaphan gripped her waist and took her from behind. When they were finished, she sank down onto her knees, her breasts and elbows resting against this rock ledge—Xaphan sinking with her, still embracing her, gently wilting inside her. On impulse, he pushed aside some of the thick black hair that was stuck to the expanse of her back with sweat, and he kissed her on her damp shoulder.

  "Sweet," she whispered, in almost a little laugh, reaching up to cup his cheek for a moment. She lay her head down on one arm and sighed heavily. "Well—that was rather nice, wasn’t it, my Demondingo?"

  "Demondingo?"

  "It’s a joke. Mandingo? Demondingo? Never mind. Mmm…keep doing that."

  Xaphan was running his hand across her back, spreading the spilled ink of her hair, feeling the bony plates of her shoulders like unsprouted wings beneath her taut skin. "I hated you when I first saw you," he muttered, more to himself than to her.

  She lifted her cheek off her forearm a little, seeming amused by his confession. "You did? Why?"

  "I’m sorry…"

  "No, tell me. Why?"

  "Because you are valued by the Creator. And we are nothing more to Him than inanimate things. And sometimes, we don’t see the difference between us. We can’t understand what it is He values in you."

  "Well, perhaps if you could understand that, then you would be the same as us." After a moment, Teresa twisted around to look up at him, no longer smiling. "Sorry, X. No…I don’t suppose there is much difference, is there? I was going to point out the horrible things your kind do to the Damned. But right now, my hubby is out in the desert hunting some teenage boys that he saw and liked in your bloody kennels down here." She snorted, lowered her head again. "I don’t want to know why they aroused his interest, in particular. Aroused perhaps being the key word."

  Still rubbing her skin, as if contemplating it, as if expecting to at last discern something about it that would distinguish its illusory substance from her mortal skin, wherever that lay moldering right now, he asked, "How did you and your husband die?"

  "In a plane crash. Private plane. We were going skiing, in Colorado. We met on a skiing trip in Aspen, actually. I’d moved to the States a few years earlier, and…"

  "Did you have children?" Xaphan interrupted.

  "Two. Ten and seven. They’re still alive." A few empty beats. "I don’t want to talk about them, X."

  He changed the subject, his voice retaining the quality of a sleepwalker. "Your flesh is so different from Vjeshitza’s," he murmured.

  "Whose?" A look up at him again.

  Tensing up a little, Xaphan let his hand go motionless upon her.

  "A mate?"

  "A lover," he admitted solemnly. "We don’t need to mate."

  "But you fuck." A carnal smile. Was there a hint of jealousy in her dark eyes, or was it merely flirtation that pretended jealousy? He hoped she was jealous. It would cause him pain if she wasn’t, he realized.

  He was jealous of her husband, he realized…

  "Yes," he whispered.

  "I’m different from her, am I? I won’t ask who you like to fuck more. It’s apples and oranges, isn’t it? A bright morning sky is lovely. And so is the black night sky with stars."

  Xaphan grunted derisively. "Your theologian Swedenborg said, ‘corporeal loves appear gross, dusky, black and misshapen, while those that are heavenly loves appear fresh, bright, fair, and beautiful.’"

  "That must bother you, to have troubled to memorize it."

  "It bothers me," Xaphan admitted.

  She took the hand that didn’t lay upon her skin, brought it to her lips and kissed it. "Don’t worry—you’re a beautiful midnight sky, aren’t you, my love?"

  "Don’t say that."

  "Say what?"

  "Love. I’m not your love. You don’t love me."

  "Why are you…" she began to chuckle.

  "Don’t mock me!" he hissed.

  "I’m not mocking you, X! It’s an expression, isn’t it? I didn’t realize love was such a touchy subject for Demons. I didn’t even know whether you can feel it." A moment. "Well…can you?"

  "I’m not sure I understand it," he grumbled evasively.

  "Well I guess we’re not so different after all. I don’t understand it either. I mean, I know I loved my mother, and my children…there’s no ambiguity there." She veered the conversation, again, away from the children who had survived her. "I used to have a neig
hbor, who told me that he and his wife had once taken in a stray cat. They had it for about ten years, I suppose. My neighbor was an older man, very gruff, an old war vet. And he told me his cat was hit by a car in front of their house one day. He said to me, in his very gruff way, ‘I don’t know why we ever got that damn cat.’" Teresa smiled. "That was the greatest avowal of love I’ve ever heard…"

  "Terry?" a voice called out, echoing in the circular, domed cavern beyond.

  "Shit," Teresa whispered, getting to her feet as Xaphan let go of her. She grabbed up her balled robe from the stone bench, and began slipping into it. In so doing, her elbow struck the deep red velvet of the cubicle’s curtain, causing it to sway.

  "Terry?" The voice had turned in their direction. "You there?"

  Pushing Xaphan back against the wall with one hand, Teresa parted the curtain with the other and slid out into the humid air of the bathhouse. "I was just going to take a dip, darling," she said. "Want to join me?"

  Xaphan peeked out through the slit in the soft curtain. He saw James Colombo’s loathsome face. Could he not smell the sex on his wife’s sweat-moist body? The film of slickness spread across her inner thighs? With his superior sense of smell, Xaphan himself could clearly detect the musk of his own lifeless sperm, nestled inside her in a miniature version of this secret closet he lurked in.