Lawyers in Hell

by Morris, Janet

  Time to get back to the beach. If they could find it.

  *

  When Nichols and Pythagoras reached the rocks, they found a series of altars or ceremonial stones there, inscribed with kanji characters, sigils, runes and grotesque figures. The large upright slabs had shackles attached. The stones were stained dark with blood.

  Nichols looked up and away, his attention drawn to a spot at the center point of the horizon. A face like the face of Chaos itself arose from the ocean and filled the entire horizon before him.

  That face scared the devil out of him.

  The vault above darkened to an ominous crimson. A shimmer of gold wreathed the great head rising from the sea.

  Nichols trembled. Suddenly, he was cold.

  Pythagoras shook him: “Are you all right, Nichols? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Nichols shook his head, as if he could shake the fear out of his brain. The apparition disappeared (if it had ever been there). The horizon was merely horizon: sea and sky, nothing more.

  Nichols didn’t daydream. Something had been there; now it wasn’t there.

  He grabbed Pythagoras by the arm, dragging him toward the helicopter: “I’m fine. Let’s go – we’ve got work to do.”

  *

  As the party reassembled at the helicopter on the beach, Nichols outlined his plan of action: “First, we emplace a data-link repeater on top of the mountain. This will be the only conduit that permits real-time communications with Achilles on the Yamato. Then we set up a VHF data transceiver and digital image transmitter outside the mouth of that cave entrance we spotted from the air. Within mutual line-of-sight of the repeater and the transceiver antennas, we can control the transceiver remotely via the comm link. Same for the multi-spectral video recorder we’ll carry into the mountain with us.” Everything depended on a MIL-SPEC fiber-optic cable, rugged enough to be unraveled as they moved through the cave, but light enough not to bog them down.

  Nichols continued: “Second: Achilles, after the comm link is in place and we’re working our way into the cave, you return to the Yamato. With you in reserve, at least part of the team will be safe and Welch will have his report for Satan. Stay alert. Be prepared for an emergency extraction if things get too hot.”

  Achilles, hero of the siege of Troy, began bitching: “Here we go again – you guys go off and have all the fun while I have to cover your rear. Why can’t I –”

  “At ease, cowboy,” Nichols cut off Achilles in mid-sentence. “We’re running a military expedition here. You know how to play the game. If you didn’t want to come, you shouldn’t have let Welch volunteer you.”

  Achilles scoffed but said nothing more.

  “Third: Powell, as our geologist, you’ll lead the party into the cave system and determine the most expedient course to our destination.”

  Nobody argued the details. Achilles and Merkerson took the helicopter up again while the rest of the party remained on the beach.

  *

  Nichols handed his binoculars to Pythagoras, who winced as he watched Merkerson execute a rappel out of the helicopter: quickly drop face-down from the helicopter to the top of the mountain. When the repeater and antenna were emplaced atop the mountain, Nichols angled the antenna so the main lobe would have maximal line of sight to the repeater.

  With the comm check apparently successful, Merkerson grabbed the rope, put his foot in its loop, and Achilles ferried him back to the beach at the mountain’s base. Pythagoras was certain that Merkerson would fall any second to a grisly death.

  In a wash of stinging sand and beaten air, Achilles gently lowered the helicopter. When Merkerson was low enough to comfortably drop into the midst of the team assembled on the sand, Achilles released the line suspending him.

  With the last team member safely disembarked, the helo went invisible, as if by magic: no sign of it was left save the residual sand its rotor blades kicked up.

  *

  Meanwhile Powell, undertook a cursory inspection of the cave mouth, pronouncing it a natural entrance based on the exposed karst resulting from limestone dissolution, and kept up a running dialogue in Nichol’s earbud: the cave descended in a gentle incline for as far as he could see, and appeared totally unremarkable.

  “No matter how natural it looks, stay alert, Powell,” Nichols said into his wire. Now was not the time to let down their guard: he knew damn well that in hell appearances could be deceiving.

  The party donned helmets with headlamps and connected a safety line among them in thirty foot intervals; Nichols took the rear: they’d be screwed if the fiber-optic cable tangled with the ropes they’d need to stake off for any upcoming vertical descents.

  Several hundred meters into the subterranean void, Powell reported the first vertical chasm. Powell warned that he was lighting a flare and dropped it into the hole, revealing the chasm was several hundred meters deep, and ended in water. Saying that the cave system still sloped ahead of him, Powell asked for and received Nichol’s permission to continue down the gentle slope.

  At the rear, Nichols played out his comm cable, hoping that the makers of the altars outside were long gone.

  Another five hundred meters in, the tunnel widened into a long horizontal gallery. Lights from their helmets illuminated stalactites and stalagmites, glorious and eerily serene. They trekked through an enchanted forest of crystalline columns, sink holes and helictites until a wall blocked their path, featureless but for a narrow squeezeway.

  Traveling through the squeezeway set Nichols’ teeth on edge: weapons were useless in such close confines. Persevering for thirty meters more, they then found themselves in a second gallery (lower-ceilinged and much shorter), leading to a long, tight crawlway.

  From here, they must belly their way forward. After forty meters, the second gallery abruptly opened up into a downward sloping cavity, leading to a crevasse dropping fifty meters, straight down, to a solid floor leading into a tunnel.

  Powell swung his rock hammer, firmly anchoring a piton into the cliff top, then undid his safety to allow Merkerson to come forward. Powell was good, but Nichols couldn’t take the chance that his ghostly right arm would disappear during the abseil – not without a belay-man to prevent his fall. So Nichols had Merkerson make the initial descent and take up the belaying position.

  Pythagoras and Houdini were next, with Powell talking them through the procedure, checking the safety of their sit-slings and carabiners and murmuring encouragement.

  As Pythagoras expected, Harry Houdini didn’t hesitate to take the initial step over the edge: Houdini was a veteran escape artist and had thrilled many an audience straight-jacketed, suspended high in the air.

  As Houdini’s body disappeared over the edge of the cliff, Pythagoras heard him call, “Don’t worry, Pi, just lean back into it. This is the fun part. Relax and enjoy it.”

  If you weren’t worried, you didn’t understand what was happening, Pythagoras thought as his feet went vertical against the face of the precipice. He froze there, unable to move, equally unwilling to go back up or follow Houdini down.

  Powell coaxed Pythagoras from above and Houdini coaxed him from below. His clumsy progress down the cliffside to the waiting team members seemed never-ending. Safe. Relatively.

  From high above, Powell called, “Let me show you how it’s done,” and descended the entire distance in two bounds.

  Pythagoras, still queasy, muttered “braggart” and opened his canteen to water his painfully dry mouth.

  Nichols, still at the top, unreeled the fiber-optic cable and lowered the box-spool casing to Merkerson. He then mimicked Powell’s fast-bounding descent.

  Leaving the ropes in place for their return, they ventured into the tunnel. The tunnel fed into a wide circle; the circle in turn opened into yet another passageway, sloping sharply downward.

  While Powell staked a piton for a safety line to facilitate a hasty rappel down the sharp incline, in the light from his headlamp, Pythagoras noticed something stra
nge.

  A dead thing, so far below ground? The carcass was not fossilized, yet somehow preserved. And it was grotesque. Perhaps it was a deformed ker or harpy, or a stunted erinys, some supernatural personification of the anger of the dead. But no, it was too ugly for that. Perhaps it was a baby phorcyde, one of Phorcys and Ceto’s monstrous children. Or a member of some more ancient demon race? A pair of wings was attached to its headless round body; its belly had a gaping mouth, frozen open in death; its leathery flesh was grayish, almost invisible in the light of their headlamps.

  Houdini prodded it gingerly with the tip of his survival knife and said quietly, “What in the underworld is this?” to Pythagoras.

  Pythagoras shrugged, saying, “It might be some unknown species of subterranean bat. Don’t let it bother you, Harry. We have more immediate concerns. Look there.”

  Ahead was a steep incline of about a hundred meters, opening into an intermittently self-illuminated cavern. Stalactites and their shadows appeared to dance in uneven rhythm, as if the light was moving randomly.

  Powell, up ahead, slowed to a stop where the tunnel opened onto a ten-foot ledge.

  When Pythagoras joined Powell, he discovered the source of the eerie light.

  *

  Below Powell was a pool about a hundred feet in diameter, with a phosphorescent glow and a thousand eyes. Beside Powell was Pythagoras, frozen in shock at what they both saw. Was this pool alive? Cognizant? The thousand eyes on its surface roved in every direction. The ground around the pool was shrouded in mist. Lights bobbed around its edges. Its surface became agitated as its eyes looked up at them.

  Now the pool’s surface moved constantly – creating creatures, limbs, organs at random in horrific combinations: winged eyes; clawed tendrils; fleshy feet and arms, all spewed into the air above, only to be swallowed up as the protoplasmic pool created razor-teeth to devour the grotesques as fast as it created them. Some few creatures escaped the beastly pool that mothered them.

  These landed on the cavern floor, flopping helplessly. Some oozed back into the swirling protoplasm. Others, self-propelled, wandered into the several tunnels that dotted the base of the cavern surrounding the roiling lake of pandemonium.

  The horror below Powell was whispering to him, crooning at him to come join the fun. In the pool, he’d never be alone again, it promised. The thing in the pool had gotten into the mind of a solitary man and was promising his heart’s desire….

  Powell had to get out of here. Now.

  He tackled Pythagoras, dropping the philosopher to his knees on the ledge, then slammed into Merkerson’s chest, hoping to escape into the tunnel.

  Merkerson shook him, but Powell just shrieked, “Got to get out! Out!!” and tried to push past, more terrified than he’d ever been before. On the narrow ledge, Merkerson stepped aside to let Powell get past, then cold-cocked him.

  Powell barely felt it when they dragged him into the tunnel’s mouth and left him there.

  *

  Merkerson watched Nichols sweating the result: one man short, with Powell out of commission. Nichols wasn’t happy.

  Pythagoras scrambled to his feet, less interested in the protoplasmic being below than in a circular area scintillating on the far wall of the cavern at roughly the height of their ledge. Turning to Nichols and Merkerson, Pythagoras said, “Mister Nichols, if you please, ignore the beast below us. Rather, have your Captain Merkerson fire a stake into that turbulence over there.”

  “Do it,” Nichols ordered.

  Merkerson was happy to oblige. As he painted that nebulous region of space on his smoothbore piton projector with its laser rangefinder, the laser registered infinity.

  Merkerson fired. His “plain-vanilla” piton shot forward and out of sight as it entered the suspended circle of ever shifting space on that rock wall.

  Pythagoras whooped. “Just as I thought! I believe that is the dimensional doorway or time portal we seek, and I’m fairly sure it is the source of the time perturbations that have Satan tied in knots – or if not the source, the way to the source. Come, we must be like my frater Aristotle: ‘espy, see, behold, remark and observe.’”

  *

  Discipline was breaking down. Nichols was now shifting to Plan B, his go-to-shit plan, as fast as he could, stuck on this six-by-ten ledge with a bunch of fools. Powell, the stolid major, had turned out to be the liability, not the batty old-dead philosopher, who was now giving orders as if this was his mission. Hell of a note.

  “Friend Merkerson,” Pythagoras commanded, “use your rangefinder to give me a distance to that large stalactite there in the center. Also, to the far wall of the cavern.”

  Then Pythagoras sat down cross-legged at the ledge’s edge and opened his hellpad on his lap.

  Houdini in tow, Nichols edged forward to get a better look at this ‘dimensional doorway or time portal,’ as Pythagoras called the glitter on the far wall. Dimensional gateway or time portal be damned: hell was full of anomalous regions. You didn’t name them and claim them; you avoided them.

  Houdini stared blankly, awestruck.

  Nichols let out a strained, almost inaudible whisper: “Devil take me.”

  Nichols’ concerns about team stability and Powell’s breakdown were instantly overshadowed. Satan’s demons could make a strong man void his bowels, but this…?

  What in all the blazing netherworlds of creation was this? A willful incursion into hell – from the outside? Who’d want to do such a thing; more to the point, who could?

  Nichols promised himself that the next time Welch looked at intel and told Nichols: “None of this means shit to me,” Nichols was going to take sick leave, not volunteer to find out what was what. Welch was an operational master and the smartest damned soul that Nichols had ever met. But Welch had stayed home on this one, sending Nichols in his stead because Welch was busy trying to keep a lid on Satan’s troubles. So, being Welch's right-hand man, Nichols got command on this operation, because he was accustomed to being sent on missions requiring field experience and Welch trusted Nichols to ride herd on whomever, whenever.”

  Harry Houdini knelt beside Pythagoras and asked him what the next step would be. Pythagoras said, sotto voce, a single word, “Freedom.”

  But Nichols heard it, loud and clear. Great. Mutiny. Here it was, the hidden agenda he’d been sensing: fools in hell are three-for-a-penny.

  Still, mission trumps all. As the two conspirators talked, Nichols set up a multipurpose video surveillance camera to record multispectral digital images of the portal as well as the pool for analysis later. To insure that the information would survive even if they didn’t, he sent the digital data back via ruggedized fiber-optic cable over the VHF line-of-sight data link to Achilles on the Yamato.

  Have fun, Achilles. Only an ego of heroic proportions like yours could be jealous about missing this cluster. Pythagoras meanwhile, finished computing the exact length of rope needed to swing from the ledge to the twinkling point in space. Merkerson fired a depleted uranium piton, with climbing rope attached, into the base of the twinkling rock outcropping.

  On impact, the rock-penetrating piton imploded at the base of the stalactite, embedding a brace that would hold if the rock was solid.

  Putting his hellpad into his backpack, Pythagoras stepped forward, grabbed the rope and said, “Fraters, we extend the boundaries of knowledge from hell itself! I salute you!”

  And the old dead Pythagoras stepped off the rock and swung, like a decrepit Errol Flynn, until he reached the nadir of his arc....

  A large tentaclelike pseudopod shot straight up from the pulsating mass of flesh and congealed around Pythagoras, pulling the philosopher into its gelatinous mass. The climbing rope, rated for eight thousand pounds, snapped.

  Pythagoras screamed.

  Powell had regained consciousness. Now, seeing Pythagoras consumed, he crawled to the edge of the ledge. Before Nichols thought to intervene, Powell grabbed his entire satchel full of explosives, affixed a det cord and tossed
the bag into the heart of the beast.

  It ‘swallowed.’

  Then there was a phantasmagoric display as flesh and limbs and organs exploded into the air in a deafening mix of concussion and screeching. Writhing bits of flesh showered the pool, wriggling and pulsing as they returned to their source.

  The pool devoured each and all, hungrily sprouting new razor-toothed mouths.

  Everyone in the party fired at will, unloading several clips before realizing that the rounds, slamming mercilessly into the writhing protoplasm, had no effect.

  Nichols watched Powell, not the pool, until Powell collapsed against the wall of the ledge, eyes glassy.

  Nichols realized that the pool creature probably considered them a threat as it deliberately spewed forth a gilled and scaly humanoid, about seven feet tall, with a face like a carp, who proceeded to climb the sheer wall to their ledge.

  Nichols fired his Desert Eagle into the scaly creature’s crested head.

  The creature fell back into the writhing pool and was lost.

  Merkerson and Houdini were shouting that the only way to reach the time portal was to build a one-rope bridge and crawl across before the monster tried something else.

  The protoplasm pool below spawned a man-sized lump of flesh, with arms and legs for locomotion but no other visible organs, which scrabbled across the cavern floor, away from its progenitor and down a tunnel at the cavern’s base. Two more followed it.

  Nichols let them go. He was conserving ammo, playing sentry while the other two readied the rope bridge. If the bridge failed, they’d all be dumped into the protoplasm pool, where they wouldn’t exactly get dead. Not getting dead meant no express trip to Slab A, no way out of that pool. And Nichols had no intention of being stuck here in a pool of spare parts.

  Something Nichols recognized crawled out of that pool: an ogre demon, with red skin, rippling muscles, a black spade beard, two horns on his head, fangs and claws. It too stormed out into one of the cave openings.

  Nichols absently noted that each time a creature emerged from the pool, the glowing lights in the surrounding mist flickered and danced. Then he’d shoot each creature. It would fall down or fall back, more like a video game or training film than real life. After staking his line to the ledge with his piton and tying it down, Merkerson fired a depleted uranium piton at a stalactite about six meters out, and pulled himself, hand over hand, across to the stalactite.