Voices from Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  "In one of our sacks, of course."

  "If we get caught with it, now or later…"

  "Never mind the cat!" Wally moaned, as if trying to reason with children. "We have to start widening that hole. Every day, a little more. We have to at least explore what’s beyond! Can it be any worse?"

  Eleanor turned toward the old man gravely. "There are sections of Hades that make this bog look like a resort beach, Wally. Yes. It can always get worse."

  "I don’t care what you say!" he persisted, and began scrambling over the rock again. "I’m going to see what this hole is about…"

  "Wally!" Eleanor cried, trying to snatch hold of his tunic. "Don’t scare the cat!"

  "To Hell with the cat!"

  Patrick thought for sure the cat would start slicing at the old man’s advancing hands, then. Instead, without even another hiss or yowl, the creature—oddly both bedraggled and regal—turned nimbly and scampered down the rock face toward that split in its surface. It darted into the fissure…disappeared inside.

  Wally was after it on all fours, as if by imitating it he might gain access, too. His palm slipped on a slick portion of rock and he scraped his elbow badly, but it only slowed him a moment. He reached the crack before his two companions could stop him, and thrust his arm into the crevice.

  "Arr!" he cried. He was up to his shoulder in the hole. Patrick saw him lying on his belly, saw the alarm or surprise on his weathered face, and thought: Something has him…

  A horrible dinosaur trumpet, not far away enough. Had one of the Buddha overseers heard Wally’s cry…noticed their absence, finally?

  "What is it?" Patrick whispered frantically, taking hold of Wally’s shoulders. Eleanor grabbed onto the back of his shirt. They began to haul at him.

  "The rock is closing!" Wally groaned.

  He was right; they could hear it. The rock seemed to creak, to squeal, at the stresses which reformed it. As their flesh could be regenerated after injury (after all, their bodies were no longer truly flesh), so did the stone begin to reknit itself. The only trouble was, Wally’s arm was still buried in its maw.

  "Ohh…oww!" he moaned. His moan rose at the end, in the start of a wail.

  Just as the rock jaws were gnashing shut, Patrick and Eleanor managed to pry their friend free. The split in the rock ground shut a moment later, making a sound like the brakes of an out of control eighteen-wheeler screeching. Sparks leapt into the air.

  Wally cradled a badly bleeding arm, a lot of its skin torn from it like the leaves husked from a cob of corn. The bone showed in one place through the stripped meat. He was sobbing, and Eleanor pulled him against her, wrapped her arms around his chest, rocked him.

  "Well, old man," Patrick panted, "now you really have a pain you can complain about."

  "Patrick!" Eleanor chided him.

  "It could be worse." Patrick patted the man’s bare foot, still bloodlessly white and wrinkly from hours submerged in slimy water. "You could have lost your whole arm. It’s happened to me. It isn’t fun. Regrowing it is worse."

  "You scared my pussy away, Wally," Eleanor scolded, but she kept rocking the sobbing man.

  "Wally would scare anyone’s pussy away," Patrick said, peeking up over the top of the rock. "I thought they’d heard us. But they haven’t noticed, thank Heavens."

  "Bugger the Heavens," Eleanor said.

  "So, Wally," Patrick went on. "Did you feel anything on the other side?"

  Whimpering now, as his damaged nerve endings began the process of repairing themselves, Wally opened his mauled hand—which had been clenched into a fist until this moment. In it, he clutched only a strip of the dirt-caked gauze or linen which the cat had been tangled up in.

  "The little thing just took a wrong turn," Patrick said. "I hope he finds the right way, now."

  "I hope he sends us help," Eleanor joked.

  Patrick licked at the blood sluicing from the fruit he had offered to the cat. Why not drink blood? They were the undead, weren’t they? "Maybe he was a soul, after all. Maybe he was a reincarnated person."

  "Shh," Eleanor mocked. "Don’t talk blasphemy. There is no reincarnation, remember?"

  They helped Wally sit up. Recently, he had finally relented and begun drinking the juice of the blood fruit, and allowed Patrick to feed him some now. Already, his own blood was flowing less copiously.

  While Wally sat on the rock to recover some more, the other two slipped back into the water to continue harvesting fruit. They passed him orbs to tuck into his own bag, as well. One of the patrolling behemoths noticed them at last, but it must have seen that the old man was injured, merely resting until he could regenerate, and it didn’t come after them. Patrick and Eleanor made a good show of it, working double fast. Patrick purposely bumped his hip against hers at one point. She gave him a flirty smile in return.

  Wally looked at the place where the crack had been. Just a jagged black line there, a scar like fossilized lightning, nothing more. He reached out his healing hand and laid it flat against the stone.

  "Take care, kitty," he said quietly, as if afraid to let his new friends hear the softness in his tone.

  "So where do you think my puss has gone off to, my love?" Eleanor asked Patrick as they worked.

  "With any luck," he told her, "sweet oblivion."

  The Secret Gallery

  "After her death Dante realized she was more alive than ever."

  — Dante Alighieri, on his love Beatrice

  The Demons did this from time to time.

  For a good number of terrestrial years—but who could tell, when there was no true day or night by which to measure?—a print shop might be tolerated, and the bookstores that stocked its humble chapbooks and broadsheets. Restaurants that made the best of indigenous vegetation, infernal animal forms, were abundant and varied in larger Damned settlements like the sprawling cities of Oblivion and Carceri. Clothing stores that offered attire more diverse and cheery than the black uniforms they all started out with. And then, without any extra provocation, without any forewarning, the Demons would come. They would strip a shop of its wares, expel the staff or perhaps round them up for transportation to a torture factory, and burn or demolish the very building itself. There were all sizes of Damned settlements, from tiny villages to great metropolises. Sometimes the Demons would raze the whole settlement to the ground. Not often would the large cities be destroyed, because they often housed a Demonic population as well, but it had happened.

  There needed to be no explanation for these raids that took place so suddenly, when these establishments had been in operation for so long. It was to be expected. They looked the other way for quite a while, let you get comfortable, let you forget just a little bit where you were. And then, one day (if such it could be called), they came to take it away to remind you where you were. Letting you have it for a while and taking it away was more cruel than not letting you have it at all, wasn’t it?

  The Demons that had surged into Wanda’s gallery were reptilian, like bipedal lizards. Like what dinosaurs might have evolved into had they not gone extinct (and if evolution had existed), or what the Creator might have envisioned for Demons in the early days of the Earth, before He had made His plan more ambitious and designed human beings. Wanda knew it was more likely, though, that their animal-like nature had to do with the recent rebellion throughout Hades of several of the most human-like races of Demons. It had been decreed that those traitorous races would be annihilated, however long the process took, and less human—hopefully, less willful—breeds of Demon mass produced to replace them. These new kinds of Demons were often sent forth with the genocide of their brothers as their mission, but today their assignment was more modest. The demolition of Wanda’s gallery.

  It was only moments after she heard the commotion up front, the crashing and the cries of Rita at the counter, that Wanda saw the first of the Demons. It burst into the gallery, tearing down the black door curtain as it came and wearing it on its spiny shoulders like a cape,
all naked muscle sheathed in glossy red scales, jaws brimming with teeth, eyes dead black, its head festooned with a fringed yellow crest like a tropical bird. Striking as it was, Wanda had seen more creative-looking devils in artworks like Schongauer’s The Temptation of St. Anthony or Breughel’s Fall of the Rebellious Angels, and so wondered numbly if perhaps the imagination of humans was more extensive than the imagination of the Creator Himself.

  The Demon was more intent on the artwork than her. It barely seemed to notice her as it snatched the first framed painting off the gallery’s brick wall, and tore it into two pieces with a sound (too familiar to Wanda) like flesh ripping. It was a scene, painted from memory, of Maine’s forested and rocky coast near Acadia National Park, by a man named Paul. She was glad Paul was not here to see the destruction of his work. On a more primitive level, Wanda was ashamed that she was relieved it was the painting and not her body that was receiving the Demon’s violence, despite the fact that the torn flesh of the Damned would always regenerate. To be torn again, and again.

  Discarding the mauled painting, the Demon raged on, swatting a clay bust of a child off its base to shatter like a skull under a mallet in one of the torture plants. It was a portrait done by a woman of her child, again by memory. She had died in 1959, when her child had been seven-years-old. That boy would be fifty-four now, but was forever a child in his mother’s eyes. When she had accepted the sculpture into her gallery, Wanda had wondered just how accurate the bust could be after all these years. She had admired its detail, authentic-looking right down to the lovingly rendered intricate lines meant to represent its strands of hair, remembered as much by the mother’s fingers as by her brain.

  A second Demon charged in, threw Wanda a quick glare that was almost like a physical blow, making her back into another of the brick walls. But the creature moved on to pluck down a framed charcoal drawing: a chiaroscuro still life of wine bottles, a man’s smoking pipe, and a stack of beautifully bound books (not like the crudely produced books available at the shops here in the city). Again, a remembered sort of scene. Like much of the art she’d gathered, maybe a little idealized, maybe a little sentimental, but real. Maybe not real here, but real from a life before this afterlife.

  One of the artists had been in the gallery, visiting Wanda to discuss a special showing of her work scheduled for several days from now. The artist, Natalie, made the mistake of moving between her paintings and the first Demon. An impulsive action that she no doubt instantly regretted, as her screams pierced Wanda’s ears and her blood sprayed her canvases. The second Demon rushed forward to seize hold of the woman’s flailing limbs so the first could continue its shredding of the canvas of her flesh. Wanda had to look away, and her horrified numbness cracked just enough to permit tears to trickle free.

  Several more Demons entered, storming from room to room. They made no sounds, no animal roars or human speech, except for the clamor of their rampage. A couple of patrons fled past Wanda the other way, one bleeding heavily from a hanging flap of scalp. The unwounded one gave her a frenzied look as if to urge her to flee along with them. She didn’t. She didn’t know why. Still too numb with horror, with fatalism, or was it a kind of loyalty? The captain going down with his ship?

  Then, into the little museum strode an entirely different brand of Demon, as if another artist had designed him. An earlier, somewhat more anthropomorphic type (though not perhaps so human-like to be considered a threat under the new mind-set), apparently of considerable age. He was so tall that he had to duck his head through the threshold. A more classical rendering: great curling ram horns, frayed dragon wings folded against his massive back. Gray skin rough and pitted as pumice, eyes like empty holes drilled into that stony flesh, and a mouth even more overflowing with daggers than the jaws of the lizard Demons. But instead of seeking out overlooked pieces of art to rip and stomp, the Demon—likely an officer—turned to blaze his empty eye pits down at Wanda.

  "You are to come with me," his booming voice rumbled in her ears, inside her very chest.

  A torture factory, she thought. No, no…not one of the torture factories again.

  But that wasn’t to be the case. Far from it. As far as one afterlife was from another.

  ««—»»

  Wanda’s first assignment in Heaven had been as one of the workers fashioning an exact replica of Brussel’s central market square, often called "The Grand Place." This magnificent complex was the home of Pastor Ed Calvin of the Eastborough Baptist Church, who had passed into Heaven a year earlier after having long served his Creator by preaching such wisdom as "When Fags Die, God Laughs." Wanda supposed there had to be some kind of limit to what souls coming into Heaven could order for their domicile, but she figured Calvin had been especially rewarded for his decades of filial service. Calvin wanted to entertain his fellow Angels by inviting them to sit in the square and listen to concerts as they were waited on by his staff of Celestial servants.

  However awe inspiring her surroundings as she worked on the last of the square’s ornate and opulent houses, Wanda had been glad she’d come late to the project. The sizable crew of Damned carpenters and artisans was working from precise plans, which had been drawn up in part by several of the very same architects who had rebuilt the original buildings in the 17th Century after their destruction by the order of Louis XIV of France. Thus, there was no flexibility in the proceedings, no room for personal artistic choices. It was not what Wanda was accustomed to, or preferred. She was much more gratified by the project she had now been switched to. As gratified as she could be by this labor, at least.

  Wanda had only met Calvin personally once, and he had looked her body up and down as if to demonstrate that he wasn’t one of his hated homosexuals. Wanda had grown afraid then, because she knew she was attractive, and she had heard rumors that Calvin and other Angels sometimes took the Damned to bed, and could be as rough with them as the Demons in Hades were. But Calvin’s attention had been diverted elsewhere a moment later, to her relief, and he’d seemed to forget about her after that.

  The woman whose home she was currently working on, however, struck Wanda as being much more pleasant, and she even watched her work on occasion. Presently Wanda was sketching in a figure with charcoal, making it life-size, as befitted the mural that would run the length of the entrance hallway on both walls. The woman had pretty much only specified that she wanted the vaulted ceiling to be blue with fluffy clouds and flying birds, and that lovely figures should adorn the walls, as if guests to her home would be entering a Heaven within Heaven. The homes of the Angels demonstrated that Heaven could be shaped to the vision of each blessed soul, but this woman—not being an artist—trusted Wanda’s artistic ability in envisioning her vision for her.

  "It’s wonderful," the woman said, as Wanda roughed in one of the figure’s hands, reaching out to touch the hand of a smiling child. "You don’t even need to work from photographs. You have it all up here." She tapped her own temple, as if her brain and all its complex cells resided within her skull, though in reality that brain was beginning to rot in a coffin somewhere in the material world. They were both animated statues, in a way, created in the likeness of their mortal selves—the artwork of the Creator Himself.

  "Thanks." Wanda smiled over her shoulder at the woman politely.

  The woman, whose name was Suzanne and who had died at the age of fifty-three from cancer, shifted her admiring gaze from sketched figure to figure, in their present state a waltz of transparent ghosts. "Did you go to school for this, Wanda?"

  "No, actually. Art was my hobby. I worked in Human Resources for an electronics manufacturer." Now she was part of Hades’ Inhuman Resources, she thought.

  "Oh my. Well, I envy you. What I wouldn’t give to be able to paint, or play an instrument, or do something creative." Suzanne sighed wistfully. "Though I suppose I have all eternity to learn something like that, now. Maybe you could teach me, hm?"

  Wanda smiled at her again. She knew it was said playfully. B
ringing Damned laborers into Heaven to construct and adorn houses for Angels was one thing, but she sincerely doubted that the Damned would ever be employed as art instructors or the like.

  Suzanne soon excused herself and drifted further into her house, to see what other progress was being made. A moment later, though, Wanda heard another voice behind her. Its quality might have made her confused as to whether or not it came from a man or woman, had she not already recognized the owner of that voice.

  "You should try not to engage the Angels in conversation," it said.

  Out of an apprehensive respect, Wanda turned around fully to address the speaker. "I’m sorry, but she initiated the conversation. It would have been rude of me not to respond to her." She had tried not to sound argumentative in her self-defense.

  This new person let the matter drop, as it directed its eyes to the mural behind Wanda. "You work quickly. Good. It’s coming along well. When do you think you can begin the actual painting?"

  "It will be soon." What could she say—a few days? A week? Again, there were no real days, though the Damned did still use that term, based upon the rest periods that broke up periods of work or, if one were in a torture plant for instance, grueling suffering.

  The Celestial stepped closer to the sketched mural, absorbed, as if filling in the brush strokes to come with its gaze. Wanda had learned this sort of Celestial being was dubbed a Seraph. This Seraph, whose name was Zaraiah, was one of the Overseers for the construction of Angels’ dwellings, and thus in charge of this particular project. Until meeting these Overseers in the course of her work in Heaven, the only Celestials Wanda had ever been exposed to were the ones who accompanied Angel tourists into Hades to serve as their bodyguards, such as when those tourists hunted the Damned for sport. That Celestial caste of warriors was also sent into Hades to oppose uprisings of the Damned, and to do battle with factions of rebellious Demons. Therefore, with all the current turmoil in Hades, Wanda had seen quite a few of these beings. But they were mute, even struck her as automatonic. Zaraiah could have been one of them, at least in appearance. The Seraph had white-blond hair, shoulder length, and skin so white it gave off a subtle luminescence. Eyes of such an uncanny glowing blue that when the entity turned its head, brief afterimages of blue light marked the air as when a child twirls a flashlight in the dark. The toga the being wore fell loosely from a frame that was slim but athletic, and which was as androgynous as the face with its fine cheekbones and full, cupid-bow lips. So androgynous that Wanda still didn’t know whether to consider Zaraiah a male or a female. She supposed that, owing to what the creature was and the fact that its kind had existed before men and women had come into being, its sex could not be an issue. Its kind were the direct creations of the Father, not of procreation. The Creator’s perfect art, not human offspring like copies degraded through repetition.