Voices from Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  And he saw Mark. Because he was only a child of eight, it took just one of the greenish tick Demons, scurrying on its hind legs, to restrain him and pull him along. Roger saw ribbons of blood twined around the child’s arms, from where the thing’s sharp pincers bit into him.

  "You fucking bastards!" he roared, and began racing after the creature. He saw another one of them close to his right, and at his shout it turned and saw him, too. It whisked forward, chattering, and Roger knew it would catch up to him before he caught up to the one grasping Mark. He spun, ducked under the whooshing sickle of a praying mantis arm, came up and punched the thing in its bony face with its tiny bead-like eyes and blood-slickened mouthparts. He heard its chitin crack, or maybe that was the bones in his own hand, so hard did he strike the thing. It dropped onto its back, and he thought he could hear its feast of gore slosh in its expanded body. But from the ground, the Demon whipped its arms crazily, and Roger found himself dropping, the air going out of him.

  Lying on his side, he looked down his body and saw that his right leg had been severed below the knee.

  The fallen Demon scrambled to its feet, and used one of these to kick Roger in the arm and face, slashing him deeply across his jaw. It then ran to the aid of one of its fellows, who was having a difficult time hanging onto a large black man.

  "Oh no, oh no, oh no," Roger was chanting, as he propped himself into a sitting position.

  He saw Mark—almost at the hatch now—looking back at him as he struggled in his captor’s grip. There were many people wailing and sobbing in the courtyard, but Roger knew his boy’s voice. And he heard Mark call out to him, "Daaaaad!"

  5: Apollyon

  At first, Iblis Al-Qadim had offered Michael a ride from his palace to the city of Apollyon in a black metal carriage pulled by a team of unclad Damned, the connecting chains hooked right into their flesh, but the Angel had taken one look and refused. Now, instead they rode inside a carriage drawn by two shaggy, prehistoric-looking infernal animals of a type he had heard the Damned often killed and consumed for food.

  Dotted across the landscape they traveled through, Michael saw another kind of animal, or was it an animal-like species of Demon? They reminded him of the elephants with impossibly long, thin, multi-jointed legs bearing obelisks on their backs in paintings by Salvador Dali, such as The Temptation of Saint Anthony, except that these would be headless elephants, and their backs were covered in squirming white objects like maggots, which Michael knew were naked human beings, apparently spiked directly to the thick hides of the slowly striding creatures. He could hear the wispy, faraway howling of hundreds of lamenting souls. Mostly the terrain here was barren, featureless, but presently the carriage rattled across a stone bridge spanning a wide river of blood. Distantly, one of the stilt-legged monstrosities waded like a stork through the sluggishly flowing gore to reach the opposite bank.

  Were there children pinned to the tops of those behemoths, too?

  As they rode on, Michael saw the Demon governor turn his head and gaze out his own window for a while. It gave Michael an opportunity to stare at the way the tentacles of the octopus were not only coiling around his neck, but now burrowing beneath his leathery skin. One tentacle had even snaked into a skull socket, putting out its bright little star of an eye. Michael had noted that the green flames erupting from the top of his head had diminished. He had also noticed that the black octopus Demon’s head had ballooned even more, a green glow showing through the stretched membrane. The miniature bat wings sprouting above its eyes fluttered uselessly.

  "Not even human," Michael heard Iblis Al-Qadim murmur. "Because I walk upright? Because I have two arms, two legs? Now I am just a human, too?"

  "Pardon?" Michael spoke up.

  Slowly, the terrible lipless visage cranked his way, the remaining eye seeming to have grown dim in its glow as well. The Demon appeared befuddled for a moment. And then, his voice grew strong and assured again, "Nothing, sir. We are nearly there…"

  Apollyon’s jagged outlines reared from the bleak landscape. Michael regarded the way a bluish glow rose from the city into the air—its atmosphere of weak fire.

  "Do we know where in that big city my son would be?"

  "We will need to ask about, sir."

  "Ask? And how long will that take?"

  The Demon didn’t answer him. He found this out of character, surprisingly rude, but he didn’t pursue it.

  As they approached the fortress-like wall surrounding the city, Michael realized that it was studded with countless human heads, the bodies they were attached to fossilized inside the wall’s concrete. There was scaffolding erected here and there, on which Demon overseers forced Damned laborers to chisel some prisoners free, and seal new prisoners up. Crows perched on a number of squalling heads, plucking at their hair to make their nests. Michael cursed under his breath. He felt strangely ashamed, should any of the heads peer into the carriage and see him there, an Angel resting in its plush interior.

  Having passed through the wall’s main gate, the carriage soon came to a stop outside a building with statues of winged baboon-like beasts, in something of an Art Deco style, flanking its riveted iron front doors. They disembarked, Michael and the governor and two of his lesser Demons, and mounted the front steps.

  Inside, they were met by a Baphomet, as they were called, another towering breed of high-ranking Demon but with a goat-like head enveloped in a veil of white fire. Iblis Al-Qadim and this thing faced each other, but neither uttered a sound. Michael realized their communication was telepathic, unless they were deciphering meaning in the lapping of their respective flames.

  At last, the governor turned to look down at the Angel. "The child is known to be new to this city, and he is known to have been taken in by a printer who lives here."

  "A printer?"

  "He and others produce reading materials, for the entertainment of their kind. The materials are potentially inflammatory, but they have been tolerated. For the time being."

  "Take me to him," Michael said.

  ««—»»

  When Davina saw the imperial form of Iblis Al-Qadim soaring behind the white-robed Angel, she fell back with an audible gasp. They had come for her lover, she was sure of it—to punish him for smashing the face of that tick Demon…

  Michael stepped through the threshold, seeing the terror on a face already wet with tears, and held up his open palms. "Wait…hang on…we aren’t here to hurt you."

  "What do you want?" she managed.

  Michael looked around him. It was a tiny sort of parlor, with an even tinier kitchen separated by a half partition. And in the kitchen, tacked to one wall, he spotted drawings. They made his heart lurch, and he moved past the woman to study them closely. Davina watched him but was too stunned to move, wilting in the shadow of that hideous giant with his long staff of office in one fist and the mollusk fixed vampire-like onto his neck.

  "He drew these," Michael said softly, standing in front of the drawings, rendered in rough charcoal. One showed a poorly drawn family, barely stick figures, a man and a woman and a child. But who were the man and woman? "Mark drew these…"

  "Mark?" Davina said. "You know Mark?"

  Michael faced her. "I’m his father."

  Davina said nothing, her wide eyes staring. Then, a man appeared in the doorway behind her. He clung to its frame, sort of hopping on one leg, because the other was a stump. But at the end of the stump was a vestigial foot, where the lost one was regenerating. The deep wound on his jaw had almost sealed up, as well.

  Roger took in the Demon official—hunched forward to fit his height inside the little apartment—and the two skeleton things lurking silently behind him, then addressed Michael. "Who did you say you are?" he demanded in a frayed voice, badly attempting forcefulness.

  "My name is Michael Palladino. These things have led me here…they say you’ve taken in my son, Mark."

  "You," Roger stammered, "you’re…"

  "Yes. His father."
>
  Davina grasped Roger’s arm. "He can get him released, Roger. He can get Mark freed."

  "Freed from where?" Michael said, stepping out of the kitchen, closer to the man and woman.

  "He was taken from us…today. A few hours ago. He’s in the Skull, out there." Roger jerked his head toward the one window in their flat.

  Michael went to it, pushed aside a scrap of curtain, looked out. He could see an ivory-hued dome, gleaming above the dark buildings surrounding it. "What am I looking at?"

  "It’s a torture plant. A mobile one. It flew into town today…and they kidnapped Mark. Took him inside it." Roger glared over at the trio of Demons. "Those fucking monsters."

  "Torture plant?" Michael whirled to blaze his eyes at the Demons as well. To Davina, watching him, dark-haired Michael with his goatee and furious face looked as much like a Demon, if not more so. And ironically, her Roger, though damned here, was as blond and blue-eyed as an seraph.

  "Yes, sir," Iblis Al-Qadim replied simply.

  Michael lunged forward, to snarl, "They have my son in a fucking torture chamber?"

  "This is Hades, sir," the thing intoned emotionlessly.

  The pistol that Michael ripped out of the holster on his belt was a Beretta, of the type he had carried in the Gulf War. He thrust it forward to point up at the Demon’s face. "You son of a bitch! I want you to get my son out of there, right now, do you understand me?"

  The octopus’s arms slithered, shifted, and the beating of the wings increased in tempo, but the host creature did not flinch. His zombie-like voice rattled, "I cannot do that, sir. It is beyond my power."

  "What do you mean? You’re a Demon…a governor of Demons! You’ll do it or I’ll blow your fucking skull apart, and I know I can kill you…and you know I can kill you."

  "Be that as it may, sir, I cannot arrange it. Hades exists because it is the will of the Creator. It is the will of the Creator that those in Hades should suffer. I was able to take you to the place where he is located, but I may not interfere in this process."

  "I’m an Angel, do you hear me? I’m an Angel and you have to do as I say!"

  "Even Angels, sir, are bound by the laws of the Creator. The will or desire of all the Angels in Paradise combined could still not sway the Creator from His purposes."

  "You mother fucker!" Michael extended the semiautomatic, which visibly shivered in the air, another inch.

  "You can kill me, sir, but it will avail you nothing."

  "I don’t understand you. You’ve helped me to this point." His eyes switched to meet those of the octopus, appraising him enigmatically.

  "We’ll have to wait," Roger croaked, sagging onto a roughly upholstered chair. "These mobile factories…they only stay a few days. Then they release their prisoners and move on."

  Michael pivoted slowly, his eyes still feral, lowering his handgun somewhat. "Just wait? Just wait for what? My son to endure who knows what kind of agony? Even one day, one hour inside that thing is too much!"

  "Do you think I don’t care?" Roger snapped. "That boy is like a son to me."

  "Like a son to you? Well he’s my son, do you understand that? Mine!"

  Roger dug his fingers into the armrests of the chair, and tears filmed his eyes. Through gritted teeth he hissed, "You sanctimonious bastard. Look at you…all dressed in white like a saint. You, living in Heaven with your fountains of wine and your golden toilets while we rot and burn down here. Don’t you feel this? The fire you’re breathing?" He waved one hand through the pale bluish tincture of the air. "This is what we inhale, what licks at our skin, every day. Your son…here…while you tan on some beach in Paradise."

  "Look—I didn’t send my son to Hell. Do you think I’m happy he’s here? I didn’t abandon him. These aren’t my fucking rules…I don’t even understand them!"

  "You can’t take him from us," Roger said, raising his chin defiantly. "You can’t bring him back with you and you know it. So take your pompous anger back to Heaven and leave him here. He’s in good hands."

  "Good hands? He’s in a torture chamber!"

  "Yes. As your friend there said, this is Hades. Welcome to it. That poor dear boy is suffering. And I’m in as much torture as he is, just knowing it. But in a few days, he’ll be released. He’ll heal. And we’ll take him back here, and care for him as best we can…as we have been doing."

  "Fuck that." Michael confronted Iblis Al-Qadim again. "I am not waiting any few days, while my son is torn apart in that thing out there. I want you to do something, you son of a bitch…there has to be something you can do! Put me in there. Put me in his place."

  "Impossible. An Angel, tortured? It could never be…"

  "I’m being tortured now!"

  The giant Demon half turned, seemed to sway. Propping himself with his halberd-like staff, he took on that distracted, unfocused aspect again, that Michael had observed in the carriage. "Things are…very confusing at this time. An Angel…wanting to be tortured. An Angel…who I am ordered to deny. My flame…drawn away from me." The creature staggered before he caught himself again. In a tone that almost sounded hurt, he said, "I am betrayed…"

  Michael remembered what he had overheard the Demon mumbling inside the carriage. "Because I walk upright? Because I have two arms, two legs? Now I am just a human, too?" As distantly human in appearance as the governor was, could it truly be that his kind was one of those slated to be eliminated, for being too much like men? Because one particularly human-like Demon race had begun a growing rebellion, a genocide was being waged against other strains the Creator deemed a potential threat. Even this creature’s barely anthropomorphic species, as well? His loyal service, up to now, no longer taken into account? "I am betrayed," he had just said.

  He saw Iblis Al-Qadim go more rigid, regain his composure. But Michael was aware now what was happening. That parasite, affixed to him, was wrestling back the control that had momentarily slipped away from it.

  When Iblis Al-Qadim turned his imposing frame in Michael’s direction again, it was to see the Berreta rising.

  "Wait!" cried Roger, half starting up from his chair in alarm and disbelief, even as the room thundered with the enclosed sound of three gunshots in rapid succession.

  The projectiles tore through the bulbous, sack-like head of the mollusk being, green-glowing muck splattering out of it. As it collapsed upon itself like a burst balloon, its wings stopped beating and its tentacles came slithering out of the holes they had burrowed into the host Demon’s neck and head. It oozed down his shoulder, hit the floor with a splat like wet leather. Iblis Al-Qadim stood oddly naked, swayed again. Then, he tottered back, fell against the wall behind him, and slid into a broken pile of insect-like skeletal limbs.

  "I am…freed," he rasped.

  "Now—free my son," Michael told the Demon.

  The crumpled entity gazed up at the Angel with his remaining eye glinting inside that pit of a socket. For several moments, Michael felt hypnotized, as when the globe-headed Demon had rummaged inside his brain. And then, he and the others in the room heard a booming thud from outside, in the city. It rattled the one window in its frame and sent a vibration up their legs through their soles.

  "What’s happened?" Davina asked.

  "I have…contacted the Skull," Iblis Al-Qadim said. "I have brought it down for you, sir."

  Michael swept to the window again, looked out. He could only see a bare crescent, the very top, of the vast bone sphere this time. It had lowered, crashed, all the way to the street.

  When he looked back at the Demon, he saw that both eyes were black and empty now, and no more emerald fire flickered inside the miter atop his head.

  Michael then faced the two lesser skeleton Demons, lingering by the door to the flat. He was prepared to raise his gun and aim it at them if they surged forward, but they did not move, as if they awaited instructions from a new commander.

  "I need more guns," he told them.

  6: Tortures

  While the two creatures wer
e off on their errand to the Demonic station where Iblis Al-Qadim had consulted with the Baphomet, Michael and Roger wrapped the dead governor’s surprisingly light scarecrow of a corpse—and that of his parasite—in several blankets for the departed underlings to take away with them, later.

  They returned promptly. Though Demons generally preferred swords and other such primitive weapons to firearms, they used them occasionally or stocked them for the use of vacationing Angels anxious to do a little hunting of the Damned. Thus, the two Demons came back with their bony arms laden. There was a knapsack heavy with various types of ammunition. Michael had asked for an M16 with a grenade launcher beneath the barrel, but he had to make do without the grenade launcher. Before the silent pair had left, Michael had asked Roger, "What kind of guns are you familiar with, if any?"

  "Why?" Davina had spoken up.

  "I can go alone," Michael said, his eyes remaining on Roger. "But I thought you might want to come with me."

  "You’re an Angel," Davina said. "They can’t do much to you. But Roger is Damned. If they catch him, they could lock him into one horrible torture for centuries."

  Ignoring her comment, Roger replied evenly, "I was a soldier…killed in what I’m told you people now call the first World War."