Voices from Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  "Mm." Colombo reached his hands around and cupped Teresa’s full bottom, pulling her against him, kissing her on the mouth. Open mouth. Xaphan felt an animal growl rumble in his guts, fought to keep it contained. Breaking free of their embrace, Colombo groaned, "I’m beat…maybe after supper."

  "How was your horrible little fox hunt?"

  "I got one kid. The other got away. But the one I hit, I got with a clean shot right through the eye." He jutted a finger toward his own eye, and sniggered.

  "I suppose I didn’t really want the particulars," Teresa said, turning and walking back toward the row of cubbyholes. But, she was moving toward the one directly to the left of the one Xaphan was hiding in.

  "They don’t die, you know!" Colombo reminded her. "They regenerate…"

  "Whatever. I’ll join you for dinner. I still want to have my dip."

  "You should," Colombo teased, turning away, "you smell sweaty."

  "Thanks, James. Ever the romantic."

  "Hey, you love me for my honesty," called his diminishing voice.

  "Do I?" she called back. "And do you love me for my honesty?"

  "That and your tasty ass," his voice echoed.

  A moment later, Teresa ducked back into the closet with Xaphan. She curled her fingers into his nipple rings, drew him into her arms. "Mm," she moaned, as her husband had done while embracing her, running her hands around his shoulders and across the sleek feathers of his folded wings. "Thank God he’s gone. I don’t know why I married him, X, I really don’t understand it…"

  Xaphan was not moved by her statement, whether it was an honest sentiment or meant only to reassure him. He said nothing, looked over the top of her head at the dark red curtain. Its featureless smoothness soothed him a little, as her skin had done a minute or so earlier. Now that skin, bending with oppressive pleasure against his own, only confused him. What a curse, the skin. There was no escaping it, even in Hell.

  ««—»»

  As had been the case over the past several days, Vjeshitza was one of the Demons who accompanied the visiting Angels on their hunt. Because of this, Xaphan relented when Teresa insisted he take her to his own tiny room, with its red tapestry bearing the symbol for Castle Urian and the matching red sheets on its narrow bed.

  Teresa sat astride him, his hands gripping her breasts, claws extended just far enough to indent their soft flesh. Rolling her ample hips in a slow, circular rhythm, Teresa husked, "I think we’re leaving tomorrow." She said it without lead-in, without segue. Its unexpectedness shocked Xaphan, although the information itself should not have shocked him.

  "Your husband bores so soon?"

  "I suppose so."

  "And you?"

  "Me? I’m not bored, X. But what am I to do?"

  "What are you to do?" Xaphan repeated hotly. He calmed his tone, but stammered with a raw discomfort that made him bitter, "Will you return, then? Or am I never to see you again?"

  "Ohh…darling," Teresa purred, cupping the side of his face. "I will come back to see you again, I promise. We’re both immortal, aren’t we? We have all of eternity to see each other again…"

  "You’re immortal. I’m not."

  "You won’t age. And you won’t die, unless you’re killed. So don’t get killed, all right?" She smiled down at him. "What is it with me? I’ve always been drawn to either bullies or brooders."

  She slid off him, left his cock suspended naked and vulnerable in the air. She rolled onto her belly and raised her rump a bit. "Here," she whispered. He got up over her, lay atop her, began to ease into her again. But she took his shaft in hand, and nuzzled its tip a little higher up. "No—here."

  Lubricated with her juices and with the inner mucus of this orifice, he pressed gradually inside her. She winced, gripped the sheet in her fists, tensed up hard beneath him. A little alarmed, Xaphan said, "Do you want me to stop?"

  "No," she breathed. "All the way."

  "It’s hurting you."

  "I’m immortal, aren’t I? And since when is a Demon afraid of hurting someone?"

  He did as she asked, until he was in her to his hilt and rocking forward and back atop her. Teresa’s eyes were clenched shut and tearing at the corners, but she gasped, "You love me, then, don’t you?"

  "Please don’t make me say it."

  "Say it. You’re torturing me. Let me torture you."

  "Yes," Xaphan said through gritted teeth, increasing his rhythm now with each thrust until he was slapping against her, until the bed rocked and she began to cry out a little with each stab, "I love you…I love you…"

  ««—»»

  There was a commotion in Castle Urian, which Xaphan with his heightened senses detected, raising his head alertly. Teresa only became aware of it when he halted his thrusts, and she rolled over, her hair in her face, as he slipped out of her. "What is it?"

  "The hunting party is back early," he hissed. "You’d better get out of the Demon quarters…"

  Teresa got up, pulled her robe on. "Bloody hell. James must be more bored than I thought. Or he wants his lunch early, poor dear." On her way to the door, she gave Xaphan a quick kiss on the cheek. "I hope that wasn’t our last time, love," she cooed, but he didn’t think she sounded mournful, wistful. Or would no measure of emotion satisfy him, any longer?

  After cracking his door and peeking out, she darted through it, and closed it after her without a look back at him. Xaphan watched the door nonetheless, as if she might reappear.

  ««—»»

  James and Anthony had indeed wanted their lunch early, particularly since James was in a foul mood. He had wounded a teen age boy by blowing off one leg at the knee, and when he got up close to the boy to finish him off (or to play with him, Xaphan thought, hearing the story at the banquet-like dinner table), the boy had thrown a rock at James and hit him over the eye, splitting the skin and drawing blood. There was no longer any evidence of this wound, but James was still livid.

  "I want that kid tortured for the rest of eternity, Mick," he snarled to their guide.

  "I’ve already had him taken to the tunnels, Jim," the Angel assured him. "They’ll straighten him out for ya."

  "Better straighten him out on a rack," Colombo grumbled, picking through a plate of edible mushrooms grown in the subterranean garden. Vjeshitza had just placed it down in front of him. Xaphan saw the Angel look up at her small, hard breasts as she straightened to remove another cart from her wheeled serving wagon.

  Xaphan was one of several Demons merely standing in attendance like living statues. He had offered to take the men’s guns to their rooms, since their weapons merely leaned against the wall behind their chairs, but Anthony Colombo had waved the Demon away. "Don’t touch our gear, boy," he warned him absent-mindedly, while looking at freckles of drying blood that he had just noticed on the white sleeve of his robe.

  Xaphan watched Vjeshitza place a glass of wine in front of Teresa Colombo, whose hair had been quickly bunched back in a ponytail to hide its disarray. She did not look up at Vjeshitza. Did she suspect that this was her lover’s lover? Or didn’t she even care? She had not made eye contact with Xaphan once.

  But now Xaphan returned his attention to Vjeshitza, muscular and brown, candlelight fluttering on her polished skull. She had placed the glass down already, yet still hovered over Teresa’s shoulder, slightly bent, as if expecting another order.

  Oh Creator, Xaphan thought, realizing what was happening. When he widened his nostrils, he could smell it over the aromas of the food, too…even from across the long table he could smell it. The musk of sex on the Angel woman.

  The Demon sperm, inside her. And with her superior senses, Vjeshitza would even recognize which Demon it had issued from.

  From deep inside Vjeshitza’s guts, from some microcosm of Hades within her, arose a growl that erupted as a bellow when it escaped her wide jaws. Even as Xaphan’s wings spread open (uselessly, as if he might fly over the table), Vjeshitza seized hold of Teresa’s ponytail in one fist, jerking her head
back. Her other hand rose, and panther-like claws slid out of her fingertips. In a flash, she swept that hand down, and ripped open the front of the human woman’s arced throat. Blood leaped like an freed animal, landing in the wine glass, toppling it, and rocking an empty soup bowl which quickly filled to its brim.

  "Mother of God!" James Colombo shouted, bolting upright. Both he and his brother scrambled to grab up their guns.

  "No!" Xaphan roared, leaping up onto the table.

  Vjeshitza turned her feral eyes on her lover. "Traitor!" she hurled at him.

  Then one gun roared like the voice of yet another Demon. Followed by several more deafening shots.

  Xaphan alighted beside Vjeshitza and caught her just as she fell. Her eyes were still on his, though in those last seconds he knew she might not even be seeing him. As practiced as the hunters were, all three bullets had hit her in the chest. One of these projectiles had struck her in the nipple, punching it in, a leaving a hole streaming blood like a profusion of poisoned milk. Below her, on the stone floor, Xaphan could see a fragment of the once unbroken onyx ring that had pierced her nipple, like his own.

  He lowered her slack body to the floor, then reared and spun around, wings still open wide, talons fully extended. He saw Anthony Colombo’s gun swing in his direction.

  One of the goat-headed Baphomets, also in attendance like a statue, drifted forward a foot or two so smoothly that it seemed to float. Apparently having seen this, the guide McDonald raised his arms and shouted, "Whoa, whoa, whoa! Let’s not go crazy here, people, please! Please!"

  Anthony lowered his gun warily. His brother James helped support his wife, who despite the fact that the front of her robes were soaked in gore was able to stay on her feet. Because she was an Angel, she could heal faster than one of the Damned that her husband hunted. She was in agony, Xaphan knew, but unlike a Demon, she couldn’t be slain. She had an immortal soul, where the Demons had been fashioned without them, like a tin man without a heart.

  "We’re out of here!" James Colombo cried, incensed. "This is outrageous! Fucking outrageous!" And he began half-dragging his wife toward the doorway, with Anthony covering their retreat and McDonald still blubbering for them to calm down.

  Another Demon had come forward to rest a staying hand on Xaphan’s shoulder, claws extended to bite into his skin. Xaphan shook him off, and before he knelt down beside his lover’s corpse, he met Teresa’s eyes for a final time as she was swept backwards out of the dining chamber.

  Her eyes were wide with pain. But was it merely physical anguish? The Demon had no way of telling if there were loss…regret…guilt…or only severed nerve endings that would soon weave together again, leaving no scars behind.

  Though as a Demon, Xaphan was expected to be a master of pain, he realized its nuances were as mysterious to him as the emotion of love.

  He took his eyes off the retreating Angel, and crouched down over Vjeshitza, picked up the halved fragment of her onyx ring. Clenched it in his fist until it bit into him. Clenched his eyes shut like fists, and wished he could take her in his arms and spread his wings and fly both of them directly up, up into the very eye of their Creator.

  Not so that He might heal her.

  So that they might blind Him. If He wasn’t blind, already.

  Siren

  Just because one had gone to Heaven didn’t guarantee that one could get laid.

  Heaven was a far from perfect place, in Stephen Petty’s estimation. His first disappointment had come immediately upon waking up to realize he was dead, and taking in his new body, made from the stuff of his spirit. He was not disappointed that he could touch and be touched, smell, taste, and even feel pain (though his chronic indigestion and frequent back aches were no more). Being so convincingly corporeal, without fear of a second death, was something to be grateful for, relieved about. As he had neared the age of fifty, he had begun to feel the shadow of his mortality—and with good reason, having died of a massive coronary just shy of his half-centennial.

  But shouldn’t this new, faux flesh he inhabited, this miraculous golem, be in the form of some celestial Adonis? Instead, he had been reincarnated, so to speak, as himself—and he had always hated his appearance, as much as it seemed women did. In grade school he had been "Tubby," in high school "Moon Face" because of its shape and pocked craters. The most he had been granted, upon being reborn, was to find that his fifty-year-old body had been reinterpreted as his twenty-five-year-old body. He supposed this was because he had been the least unhappy with his appearance at that time of his abbreviated life: his ravaging acne hadn’t petered out until he was in his early twenties, and after thirty the bald spot on the back of his head had spread swiftly. But even at twenty five he had possessed a prodigious gut. Though he doubted his new lungs were actually breathing in the sense that his mortal lungs had, he still wheezed when he exerted himself. His face was still ridden with scars as if it had been nibbled by rats and healed badly.

  Despite his appearance, Petty had at last found a wife at the age of twentynine. But Brenda and his seventeen-year-old daughter Christina had both been killed in an automobile accident two years before his own death. Christina decapitated, Brenda’s head flattened and her brains pushed out her mouth. That was what she got for letting their wild, out-of-control daughter behind the wheel. In those last few years of her life, Petty had almost come to hate the defiant, foul-mouthed (and, he suspected, promiscuous) Christina…had only prevented himself from doing so by recalling her as the younger, sweeter child she’d once been. That child had died years before the seventeen-year-old. He had mourned them both, as if they had been two daughters instead of one.

  He’d missed Brenda, too, so he had at first been delighted when he and Brenda had encountered each other by chance a short while ago. She had recognized him, though he would never have recognized her in her present form. Brenda now occupied a twelve-year-old version of herself. She explained that she had been happiest at the age of twelve. And he had to admit she was prettier at twelve than she had ever been in the years he’d known her.

  But when Petty tried to goad her into sex, she rebuffed him angrily and stomped off, pigtails jiggling haughtily, and he hadn’t seen her since.

  So much for Heaven.

  ««—»»

  The boat bounced as it sped across the crimson waves, and Petty clung to the rail tightly, feeling his guts roil. The hood of his white robe had blown off and the monk-like circle of his thinning hair ruffled. He squinted and flinched as droplets of red spray misted across his face. The robe itself was of a shiny, silky material, and fortunately the blood beaded and trickled on it instead of soaking through. As if the boat’s speed wasn’t bad enough, the stinging metallic tang of this ocean of gore was nauseating.

  "Do you think we can slow down just a little?" he shouted to the pilot, Captain Eridan, who stood beside him at a control panel raised like a podium, either caked in rust or accumulated blood.

  Eridan smiled without taking his eyes off the prow as it ploughed up the waters of the Red Sea ahead of them. "We want to move through this section quickly, sir. The eels are thick through here. A bit further ahead they’ll be less plentiful."

  "They can hurt us, too? Not just the Damned?"

  "We’ll taste bad to them. That doesn’t mean they won’t try a taste. And you’ll heal faster than the Damned. That doesn’t mean it won’t hurt."

  Captain Eridan was not an Angel like Petty. He was a Demon, who had never been a mortal man as Petty had been; the Demons were homunculi, manufactured in factory-cities like Tartarus. They came in many forms, and Eridan’s breed was adapted to dwell in cities like Sheol at the bottom of this scarlet sea. Perhaps out of camouflage, or simply out of the Creator’s sense of aesthetics, these aquatic Demons were fire-engine red and preferred to go nude, showing off their layers of glittering scales and the wing-like fins (or fin-like wings) that flared from their backs when they weren’t folded up like fans. Petty and another tourist from Heaven, vacatio
ning here in Hades like himself, had joked that Eridan looked like the Creature From The Red Lagoon. Eridan had looked over at them when they’d chuckled at his expense, but he was a mere Demon despite his rank, and bound to serve each visiting Angel as if he were the greatest of dignitaries.

  Something slapped across Petty’s chest like a whip, rebounded from him and was left in the jet boat’s frothy wake. Almost dislodged from the rail, Petty let out a cry and looked back behind him. He saw something twist and writhe in the air. One of the eels that flew rather than swam, as disoriented as he was after their collision.

  "Sorry!" Eridan called out cheerfully, weaving the boat between furrows of the lapping blood. "I’ve been trying to steer us through the thickest clouds of them." He tilted his chin to indicate a swarm of the airborne creatures, off to their left. The animals squirmed like boiling maggots, a living storm cloud above the surface of the waves.

  "What attracts them to one spot like that? Fish in the sea?"

  "Maybe. Or a Damned, escaping from Sheol, or from one of the Obsidian Islands. If you think they’re thick here, sir, you should see the Valley of Steam. The air is a solid mass with them."