Voices from Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  "Look," the Angel snarled, retaking that step he had lost when the monster had entered the portal chamber with him, "I want my son located immediately, do you understand? I don’t care if it takes every Demon in your jurisdiction…I want him found! I want my boy brought to me!"

  "We will do that, sir. But you understand, of course…even when we find him, you may not bring him out of Hades with you. You cannot take him to Heaven. He will still be one of the Damned."

  "I am only too aware of that, believe me. I am only too fucking aware that my son is damned for all eternity because he didn’t have a little holy water dribbled on his head by some fucking child-molesting priest…doomed the same as murderers and rapists because a few words weren’t said to placate the Creator that I’d put my trust in for my entire fucking life!"

  "It is a pity," the Demon stated in its emotionless, sepulchral hiss. "But as a religious man, sir—if I may presume to ask you this question—why did you not have your child baptized, since you and your wife obviously were yourselves?"

  "My wife is my second wife; my son’s stepmother. She was a Catholic in life, as I was. But my first wife—my son’s mother—was always an atheist. She was very adamant about my son not becoming baptized or even attending church until he was old enough to make that decision for himself, as an adult."

  "And you gave in to her desires."

  "I gave in. Yes, I gave in." Michael was still seething. His voice trembled with his stoppered fury.

  "It must have been a great source of enmity between your wife and yourself—you being devout, and she denying the Creator."

  "That’s why she’s my ex-wife…isn’t it?"

  "And she is still in the world of the living?"

  "She’s alive, yes. She’s there, still breathing…still not believing. Maybe even disbelieving more than ever, in her grief. But she’ll learn one day, won’t she? Learn how wrong she was. When she joins her son in Hades. And then she can apologize to him. She’d fucking damn well better apologize to him!"

  "Come, sir," Iblis Al-Qadim said, sweeping his arm, in a tone that almost sounded sympathetic. "Let me take you to your quarters. And I assure you—the search is already underway."

  "Why did I listen to her? Why was I so weak?" the Angel lamented.

  "Sir?" The Demon had his hand on the metal door’s wheel.

  Michael grunted, and in starting forward met the eyes of the mollusk-thing poised like a parrot on one of the Demon’s shoulders. An uncanny intelligence glowed in them. He remembered what Iblis Al-Qadim had said—the human-like Demons being gradually phased out, because of the revolts incited by several demonic races. Was he looking at Iblis Al-Qadim’s replacement-in-training?

  He saw that one of its glistening tentacles had reached out and curled with insidious slowness around the handle of that great iron staff.

  2: The Damned

  Before they became lovers, both of them had lain with Demons.

  In one region of Hades, Roger had been captured in his wanderings by a group of Apsaras, as their breed had been named by the Damned (since the Demons themselves tended not to give appellations to their many races). The blue-skinned Apsaras were beautiful and terrifying, with voluptuous perfumed bodies and long black hair that swam in the air above their heads endlessly as if they were drowned women under the sea, their dark eyes blazing and tusk-like fangs curving up from their lips. During his confinement, which may have lasted a year or more (how could he judge?), the Apsaras would seize him and arouse him against his will…rape him. Somewhere in the course of this—like a female mantis consuming the head of her mate as he copulates with her—the Demon would rip his throat open with her fangs, or dismount him as he climaxed and tear off his manhood with her powerful hands (it seemed to be a sport, with the Apsaras, to pluck the organ just as it squirted), or bite off his member as she fellated him, or slash his scrotum open with her long nails to eat the savory oysters of his testes. But there were male Demons in this territory as well, incubi known as the Asuras, and they had performed their own brand of sex acts on him, or forced him to perform acts upon them, followed by the usual mutilations. These torments became almost mundane (if no less excruciating) with time, and of course he always fully recovered later on, regenerating whole once more so that he could be rent afresh the next time around.

  Davina, on the other hand, had served as one of the living spawning machines in the city of Tartarus, where many species of Demon were manufactured, so to speak, by Damned laborers. Usually the processes employed were more mechanical in nature; Demons were baked from various ingredients like cakes or injection-molded like plastic, grown in dark cellars like mushrooms or developed in bubbling solution like fetal clones—but certain types of these homunculi, these infernal golems, gestated inside human hosts. The sort of Demon that had been grown inside Davina’s body were dubbed Kilcrops—ghastly cadaverous things, always laughing, that never seemed to mature beyond adolescence. She had been captured by a roving Demon squad, taken to Tartarus and put to this use. On a regular basis, she had been raped by the incubus breed called the Asuras. She had lost count of the pregnancies (maybe two hundred?), each lasting what she thought of as thirty days. There was no actual day or night, but the Damned counted days in terms of work periods. Then again, the work periods were so very long.

  The farm girls, as they thought of themselves, were treated fairly well, aside from the rapes that planted the devil seed, but even those were intended more as business than punishment. Not that it made much of a difference to Davina. To her knowledge, no laborer had ever escaped a city so full of Demons as Tartarus, but after a while the farm girls and other workers were released and replaced with new souls. Her understanding of this was: rather than being a mercy, or a thanks for their service, it was to insure that they did not get too comfortable in Hades. Again, even a torture could seem commonplace and predictable with repetition. A man, say, locked in a hanging cage and pecked at by an infernal breed of crow would be liberated after a time (maybe a week, a month, a decade by human measurement), so as to wander free for a while and encounter fresh manifestations of anguish.

  ««—»»

  Hades was full of settlements, either constructed and populated entirely by the Damned, or else by the Damned and the Demons in combination. There was everything from thatch-roofed hamlets to metropolises of soaring high-rises, these skyscrapers either familiar or uncanny in their varied outlines. Many times the look of the town or city had to do with the period of human history its Damned citizens came from, though mostly these characteristics became blurred and blended with the coming of new generations.

  Certain colonies of Hades alternated between freezing cold and scorching hot, as if each day contained the seasons of a year. Some were built in the shadow of glaciers, where it was eternally frigid, sleet ever stinging the skin, the rooms of the buildings heated with whatever meager measures the Damned themselves could devise.

  Other cities were ever burning. Maybe not with blistering, charring earthly fire—how then could the citizenry move about freely, so as to roam to the next place of suffering?—but with a lesser blue flame that nonetheless consumed a city like Apollyon entirely, the flames lapping high into the air so that every street, every room was filled with this hot blue light, so that it filled your mouth when you spoke or slept. It needed no fuel, it never ran out, it was silent and did not crackle. After a while, you could almost forget the pain it caused in every nerve of your body. Almost.

  Roger and Davina had drifted to the city of Apollyon at about the same time; it was where they met. He had been an atheist in life, a British soldier killed by a German machine gun in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, when he was twenty-eight years old. In September of 1993, at the age of twenty-three, Davina had been killed along with eleven-thousand other Indian people in an earthquake. She assumed all eleven-thousand victims, being Hindus rather than devout Christians, must be here in Hades with her. He assumed a fair number of the million-plus casualties of t
he Somme offensive were here for one reason or another, as well. But Hades was infinite. Hades had room enough for all.

  The first time Roger and Davina had made love, the sea of flame they were submerged in caused so much pain to their uncovered bodies that it left little room for pleasure. But they stared at each other’s faces as he lay atop her. And they smiled.

  Later, they had met the boy. Mark had died only recently, and Apollyon was the first city he’d encountered. He told them he had burned to death at the age of eight, and it was his opinion that he was in Hades not only because he wasn’t baptized, but because he had caused the fire that had killed him…and his parents.

  Roger and Davina had pitied the child. They had taken him in as a kind of son, and it was this act as much as their love that made them kind of a husband and wife. Kind of a family.

  ««—»»

  At least paper did not burn in the blue flame, and the Demons of Apollyon apparently did not deem it worth their time to otherwise destroy the books that Roger and his fellow workers produced, nor the presses they printed them on. Roger was adept with machines, and had helped improve these presses and the binding equipment—all designed and built by the Damned over many years—since settling in Apollyon. Currently, he was inking up one of the presses to resume work on a slim volume called Beautiful Hell, a memoir written by a Damned author who had stumbled upon this city and left the manuscript in their care until he should return.

  "Mark," he called, looking up but not seeing his boy. "Bring me a fresh can of black, will you?"

  A clatter, a clunk (please don’t have spilled another can of ink! thought Roger), and the child appeared from another room, bearing a metal can, looking eager to be of help. His adoptive father even paid him several coins of the netherworld’s currency, every "week," for the scraps of work he performed about the shop.

  Roger noticed a smear of red on the boy’s beaming face, and grew concerned, straightened up. "Did you cut yourself?"

  Setting the can down, Mark touched his cheek, examined his stained fingertips. He laughed. "No, Rog…it’s red ink. I was putting some cans away!"

  His own hands slicked with black pigment, fashioned from native minerals and flora, Roger reached out and dabbed some ink on the boy’s other cheek. "There. You can at least be stained in the same color as me."

  "Hey!" The boy flashed out his own hand, and ran his reddened fingertips down Roger’s forearm, leaving smudges. "Now you’re stained the same as me!"

  "Watch it, watch it," Roger said, drawing back in a futile attempt to avoid the swipe. In doing so, he felt an unpleasant grinding sensation in his chest, as he did from time to time depending on the nature of his movements. He often felt it while making love with Davina, and she swore she could feel the outline of the shape tucked against his ribs, though he himself could not.

  "Why did you ever do that?" she would scold him in her musical accent, her heavy black brows lowered.

  "You can cut it out of me if you want," he would tease.

  It was not only groups, large and small, of Demons that had begun to revolt and skirmish with the Celestial infantry sent to squash them, and with their own brother races of Demons as well. No, even groups of the Damned had taken up weapons against their Demon and Celestial oppressors alike, lashing out through guerilla warfare, terrorist acts, even full-scale battle on occasion. There had even been cases where Demons and Damned had fought together in uneasy alliance. It was a turbulent time for the eternal afterlife.

  Several "months" ago, a major clash had spilled over into Apollyon. The wounded remnants of a Damned rebel outfit had taken shelter in the city, pursued by a type of Demon Roger had not as yet encountered despite his many years here; a race of bipedal tick-like creatures with pale greenish chitin. He assumed it was a brand new breed, designed as a replacement for one of the humanoid species, deemed less trustworthy now. The Damned fighters had had a few guns among them. Roger figured they had stolen these weapons from some Angels who were in Hades as tourists, or to hunt the Damned for sport, or to help out in the fight against the Damned for the sheer joy of battle (being Angels, they could quickly reconstitute after even the most grievous wounds).

  Roger himself had been a witness to one messy clash, in which the last of these particular rebels were overpowered and captured by those immense ticks with their awful, scythe-like praying mantis forelimbs, and other sets of arms ending in hooks, blades and pincers like surgical—or dissecting—instruments. One of the rebels had been dropped to the cobblestoned street, an arm lopped off, and had met Roger’s eyes as he wailed. Roger had wanted to look away in shame for not going to the man’s aid or defense. But the carnage he had experienced on Europe’s battlefields, the horrors that had sent his immortal soul here, had scarred him in a way his mock cells could not repair, however miraculous their mending abilities. Or was it simply that his time in Hades had made him cowed, defeated, a dog with his growl beaten out of him? One might think that having participated in so much violence in life and endured so much violence in the afterlife would make him inured to killing, make it easy for him to resume his life as a soldier…but Roger could not see himself ever taking part in a war again.

  Even though he had not gone to the wounded man, however, the gun the fighter had been gripping went spinning out of the hand of his severed arm and ended up not far from Roger’s boot. He was standing outside the print shop, and a co-worker of Roger’s had hissed at him from behind, "Rog! The gun! Get it…"

  Mindlessly, Roger had taken a step toward the gun, a little semiautomatic pistol of a type designed after his time on Earth; a .25 caliber, he deduced. The gun was closer than the injured man. He might furtively retrieve the weapon without entering into the battle itself, as he would if he gripped that man’s remaining, outstretched hand.

  He didn’t know if it were because he scooped up the little pistol, or because the Demon mistook him as one of the actual insurgents, but as he rose he saw a tick scurrying at him, blood from the Damned sloshing darkly in its swollen abdomen, its arms flailing, and the next thing he knew he was on his back, his chest split wide, blood spraying up from him in a fountain. He had to close his eyes against it. The spray went into his own mouth, as if to keep the fountain recycling.

  Bullets from somewhere—another of the rebels—crashed into the Demon, causing both its and its victims’ blood to spatter the cobblestones, and it fell convulsing with a terrible screech. Demons could die, because they had no souls, and this one proceeded to do so.

  "Rog!" his co-worker cried. This man and another dragged their friend back onto the sidewalk, then around the corner, out of sight. His co-worker took the gun from Roger’s hand, examined it a moment, looked down at the wound that would have killed a mortal man. "Rog, you need to keep this. We need to hide it." He pointed the little weapon at that terrible pumping gash. "Let me put it in there, Rog. No one will find it, and you can always get it out again if you need it."

  "No," the other man said, "it could be found if he’s tortured and cut open some day. They’d put him in a snake pit for a fucking century, for having that…"

  "Quiet! Rog…"

  Did he nod or gurgle his assent? Maybe he did, in his delirium, or maybe his friend simply interpreted Roger’s agony that way; he couldn’t himself recall, so blanked with pain was he at the time. But the next thing he knew, his co-worker was stuffing that hard lump of metal deep inside him like a crude lover.

  The co-worker had vanished from Apollyon a week later. Rumor was that the fighting had stirred him, and he himself had joined the rebel movement. And the gun…the gun still lay inside Roger’s chest, healed without trace of a scar—not even the scars of the German machine gun bullets. Inside him like a black pearl. A hunk of shrapnel. Like a dead, cold organ.

  "You okay, Rog?" the boy asked, noticing the wince, seeing the man’s hand involuntarily touch his upper chest. "Did I hurt you?"

  "No…I’m fine, fine." Roger smiled at him, but sadly. He hated to hear hi
m fill so quickly with guilt, with self-blame. And he wished Mark wouldn’t call him Rog. Or Davina, Davina. Maybe someday, he hoped, the boy would truly think of them as his parents.

  ««—»»

  Roger and Davina were awakened by the sound of a child’s screams.

  There were two bedrooms in the little flat they rented; Mark’s room was the smaller, but that was like saying the other room was the larger of two closets. Both had space enough for the bed they contained, and not much else. There were lanterns and candles for light, but even with them extinguished the air had that constant blue glow. Cold burning fire, filling each room to its ceiling. When Roger and Davina opened their eyelids, it took a blinking moment or two to readjust to the pain against their bare eyeballs. It was Davina who slipped out of bed first, her skin very brown against the white pajamas she had made for herself, and shuffled barefoot from the room. Roger trailed after, not as swiftly. He knew what the screaming was about. It was not the first time.

  "What is it, my baby? What’s wrong?" Davina cooed, sitting on the edge of the bed and gathering Mark up into her embrace. He wrung her in his arms, his face pressed into her chest.

  "Fire," the boy spluttered through his tears. "The fire…"

  "I know, my darling. I know." Davina rocked him. She glanced up at Roger, framed in the room’s threshold.