Haunted Worlds

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Then he returned to his bunk, finally fell into a doze.

  He dreamed of Eva, in fact. She was crouched down compassionately beside several African children with cadaverous faces, emaciated limbs, bloated bellies, flies crawling in and out of their nostrils. They stared back at her benevolently smiling face with glazed yellow eyes.

  She was handing each one of them a Bible.

  8. The Holiday

  “Wake up, my friends!” Eva’s cheerful voice, her hands clapping, like the nicest drill sergeant in the history of humankind. “Rise and shine!”

  She appeared beyond the spiked bars of Andrew’s cell. “Time to get up, Andrew! Merry Christmas to you!”

  He sat up on his bunk with a groan and was thankful Eva and her companions continued on toward the next occupied cell so he wouldn’t have to return her greeting. He put on his shoes, stepped out into the corridor. Others were doing the same.

  “Everyone on to the hall!” Eva called back to those behind her.

  They trailed after her like a train of obedient, groggy children. They followed her into the great hall, where she swept around to beam at them and watch their reaction.

  The hall had been transformed as had Ebenezer Scrooge’s home upon the visitation of the Ghost of Christmas Present. A feast had been spread upon the massive table of ebony wood that put to shame the party snacks of the night before. Heaps of steaming vegetables, golden roasted birds, more bread, more fruit, more jugs of beverage. The centerpiece was a whole roasted boar with rows of fantastical tusks curling out of its jaw, rows of horns curling out of its skull.

  And in the middle of the table stood a Christmas tree, its trunk fitted into a heavy iron candle base. It was a coniferous tree, like an evergreen, but its needles were obsidian black. The infernal tree had been decorated with pine cones painted gold and silver. Throughout the black branches flashed tiny red lights. These, Andrew recognized, were an infernal insect, a bioluminescent beetle like the earthly lightning bug. Except that these beetles, which inflicted a nasty bite, drank the blood of the Damned. Somehow they had been directed to lie passively upon the branches of this beautiful, this terrible, Christmas tree.

  The miniature cloud that provided the hall’s light had condensed greatly until it was a mere disk, hovering just above the top of the tree like a crowning star, or a halo. So concentrated, so radiant, it was hard to look at directly.

  “Merry Christmas, everyone!” Eva and the rest of the Carolers cried out as one.

  The tree—and the Angels—went barely acknowledged as the Damned dug into their repast. Andrew found himself standing beside a portly white-haired man who was piling his plate with several types of mashed vegetables. This man said to Andrew, “I’m a Jew. Do you know what I used to do every Christmas day? I’d volunteer to serve meals to homeless people. Not to insult, but how many Christians do you think ever spent one day feeding homeless people? So do you know why I’m here in Hell?”

  “Because you’re a Jew,” Andrew said.

  The man chuckled humorlessly. “Mm-hm.” He pointed his fork at the boar carcass. “And I’m not touching that thing. Not kosher.”

  While the Damned feasted, true to their name, the Carolers serenaded them with Christmas songs. They were able to goad only the twelve-year-old into singing along with them, robotically, her expression shellshocked. Mercifully, she had probably lost her mind many years ago. Andrew had heard her tell Eva in her ghostly, empty voice that she’d died from a scarlet fever outbreak in 1874.

  “O Christmas Tree! O Christmas Tree! Thy leaves are so unchanging!”

  Andrew heard one Damned mutter to another, “I hate them worse than the Demons.”

  “What?” said the other person.

  “The Demons don’t talk to us. They aren’t full of shit. They don’t lie to themselves that they care about us.”

  “Thou bidst us true and faithful be, and trust in God unchangingly.”

  After the Damned had eaten much—the boar a torn, partly skeletal ruin—and after a good number of Christmas carols, Eva went to the door at the far end of the hall and motioned for several Rapes to enter. Between them they pushed an odd contraption on wheels. Within an elaborate brass setting that was also the framework for the mobile cart rested an apparently glass orb the size of a basketball, cloudy gray marbled with milky and inky swirls, like the globe of an alien world.

  “Friends,” Eva explained, “this is another gift we’ve arranged for you. It’s a device normally reserved only for use by Demonic administrators. This is a scrying ball, which can be used to view scenes greatly removed from the viewer . . . in Hades, or Heaven, or even in the mortal world. For our use today, those who lent this fantastic device to us have adjusted it in such a way that any soul who gazes into it will be able to view a loved one, alive or dead, to whose soul they’re connected. The scrying ball can detect and trace that connection.” She let this sink in, watching her audience’s faces. “We’ve arranged for each one of you, if you choose, to be able to view one loved one . . . whether they be alive on Earth, or whether they’ve passed on to one of the afterlives.”

  The Damned still stared mutely. Still absorbing, chewing their food dumbly.

  “Who’d like to go first?” Patrick asked, sweeping his arm toward the globe like a stage magician asking for a volunteer for the box of piercing swords.

  Finally, one of the Damned raised her hand and stepped forward. She approached the device meekly, Eva taking her by the arm to help position her. Leaning forward hesitantly as if she expected to see some rotting corpse’s face swim up in the glass, she asked, “Do I have to tell you who it is I want to see?”

  “The scrying ball will know,” Eva told her.

  They all watched her as the woman watched the sphere. They couldn’t see what she was seeing—from where he stood, the globe looked unchanged to Andrew—but within seconds the woman clapped her hand over her mouth and behind it said, “Oh! Ohh!” Tears flowed down her cheeks. After a few seconds more, one of the Angels helped her walk to the table and sit down. The woman cast a longing look over her shoulder, back at the globe.

  “Who’s next?” Patrick asked, looking quite satisfied, like the proud inventor of some remarkable new invention, or a car dealer who had just made a sale.

  Another of the Damned stepped forward.

  Andrew came up alongside Eva and said, “You can’t let Ravinder look into it. That would be cruel, Eva, not a kindness. What’s he going to see? The mother he’ll never be reunited with?”

  “I understand that he couldn’t put something like that into perspective, Andrew,” she replied. “That’s why he was given the toys instead, for his gift.” Indeed, earlier Patrick had handed the little boy several gift-wrapped packages to open, containing miniature cars and jointed little figures, toys such as children in Paradise no doubt played with. Contentedly, he sat on the floor playing with them even now.

  “How thoughtful of you,” Andrew said. “How concerned. And tomorrow, when our special holiday is over, do you know what will happen to Ravinder? A Rape will grab those toys away and smash them on the floor in front of him . . . right before it sodomizes him.”

  “Stop it!” Eva said.

  “Do you think I’m lying? I’m just telling you how it is here. Why wouldn’t they do that? And what could you do to stop it? Order the Rapes, order all the Demons in Hades, not to touch the boy’s toys? Never to harm him again? You don’t have that kind of power, any more than you have the power to take that one boy back with you to Heaven.”

  “I’ve done what I can for him, Andrew!” Eva snapped, tears warping the surfaces of her brilliant blue eyes. “I’ve done what little I can to relieve your suffering for a day or two at least!”

  “A day or two of eternity? And will we at least have this respite to look forward to again next year? No . . . you already told us you Carolers are spread too thin. Next year it’ll be another spot of Hades you’ll visit. Right?” She didn’t dispute this, only looked at
him in helplessness, tears streaming. “You should have just left us in the pool. We were better off in there, without your mercy . Why do you think they let you come here? They knew it was only a new kind of torture. Whether you wanted it this way or not, you’re just Demons with halos.”

  “Oh, Andrew,” Eva sobbed, wagging her head.

  He brushed past her, toward Patrick and the scrying ball. “Okay, let me have my turn. Let’s get this punishment over with. The sooner this farce is finished, the better.”

  Patrick glanced at his mother dubiously, but she nodded at him. The Angel shifted aside so Andrew could stand over the orb and look down at its glossy, clouded surface.

  But it didn’t remain clouded for long.

  9. The Gift

  The sphere became clear, became a lens, revealed to him a distant scene. It was obviously a landscape in Hades: an arid lakebed of dried mud split into tiles, as if the party of people he saw moving across this hellscape were walking upon the vast scaly body of the Creator/Satan Himself. There were three men and two women in this little group of Damned in their dusty and torn black uniforms. One of them carried an assault rifle, identical to those of the Celestial guards in this room. Another carried a compact sub-machine-gun. Several of them wore swords in scabbards . . . swords such as many races of Demons carried. Swords that had to have been stolen, like the guns, either from Demons or Celestials. Demons or Celestials who had been killed .

  One of the members of the party, with a pump-action shotgun in his arms, was his eternally fifteen-year-old son. His tongue no longer bulged from his mouth, his toes no longer touched the earth ever-so-lightly. He tramped solidly, determinedly, across the desert floor, his eyes squinting and hard. He looked to be in search of something.

  More Damned to join their little band. More Demons to kill.

  His son wouldn’t be aware that his father had killed himself after his own suicide. Wouldn’t be able to reach his father even if he did know, no matter how long he and his friends marched. But he was fighting back. Defying the keepers of Hades. Defying the order of the Creator. He was young. Defying was what the young did.

  Gray clouds spiraled in to cloak the orb once more. Andrew staggered back from the scrying device, turned toward Eva with tears on his own face to mirror hers, but he was also grinning. “Thank you, Eva,” he said. “That was a wonderful gift you gave me, after all.”

  She pivoted to watch him, uncomprehending—only he had seen the vision in the orb—as he crossed the great hall to seek out his cell and wait for the end of their holiday.

  10. The Gray

  One more gift awaited the group of twenty Damned, come the next morning.

  Eva and the other Carolers had departed. They’d tried to round everyone up to say goodbye first, but Andrew had avoided them. He heard from the young woman who had been a temporary surrogate mother to Ravinder that Eva had gently taken his toys back, promising to return them next time she saw him. A lie, but Andrew appreciated that she had done this, rather than have Ravinder lose them in the way he had described.

  The Rapes led them all from the building, outside again, and from there the looming Torus took over, conducting them along a trail back to the crater. Back to the drowning pool. Andrew had never been so grateful—that is, aside from his glimpse the day before into the scrying ball.

  When one of the Torus picked him up and hurled him into the pool, he didn’t resist. As his lungs filled and he sank, his body fought against it but his mind did not.

  He welcomed the gray void. Welcomed the dreams.

  The Temple of Ugghiutu

  Summer storms would often attack the Great Plateau with all the unexpectedness and devastating rage of a bored god once again angered by human indiscretion. On one occasion Nir had been tending his herd under a bright, if hazed, sky . . . only to be racing desperately a minute later to lie in a stream bed as twin cyclones came snaking across the horizon. Several of his goats had been swept up in one of the whirling black titans, their bodies flung or carried so far that he hadn’t seen a trace of them after the funnels had marched into the distance . . . again, like the striding legs of some towering deity.

  This summer it had been calm—too calm. There had been a drought, and the fields had gone a dry, brittle yellow. Nir had been letting his herd drift further from his village every day, until at last he was camping at night under the sky, contemplating the stars that seemed so tiny, so silent and placid, but which the priests solemnly advised were each and every one a seething inferno, its own raging hell. Each with its own demons, perhaps.

  His drifting eventually brought him near to the eastern edge of the Great Plateau, where the general flatness of the land became rocky and broken before dropping off sharply altogether. Here, in the shade of towering outcrops of jagged stone, a little more shielded from the sun, the grass was not as yellow. Nir’s lean goats grazed anxiously in what seemed by contrast fields of plenty.

  But as if they had trespassed upon some holy land, black clouds like rolling mountains came, billowing and spreading like ink under water. Nir saw the sheets of rain that were sweeping in his direction like a solid wall from the west. Forked tongues of lightning flickered as if from a writhing mass of gigantic snakes in the heavens.

  Nir urged his goats into a chasm in the tortured rock, thankful that his herd was of small, nimble goats and not of cattle. He hoped for a cave, or at the least a protruding shelf of rock to cower under when the deluge passed this way. But the rains came quickly, and though the walls of rock to either side did protect him to some extent, he and his little flock were still pounded by the torrents. He didn’t fear lightning, down in the chasm, but this fear was replaced by another when there came a clattering around him. At first he thought it was the hooves of the goats, echoing off the walls, until he saw the white pebbles of ice bouncing off the stone floor around him. Hail. Soon it was pelting him, and one stone struck his shoulder with such force that it was like having a cane brought against it. The offending stone, when it fell to his feet, was as large as a fowl’s egg.

  The goats continued on ahead, until the floor of the chasm sloped upwards. Nir followed them, hoping their instincts would guide him to a better shelter. He tucked his head into his shoulders as larger and larger stones crashed around him, wincing when one missile impacted against his backbone. He saw a stone the size of a man’s head fall from the sky and shatter against one wall of the chasm like a skull thrown from a great height.

  The slope ended in a rise, and Nir mounted it. His goats went on ahead, trotting across an open stretch, but Nir stood rooted on the spot. It wasn’t the fear of venturing into the open that gave him pause, but rather the imposing sight that had been revealed before him.

  Though he had never seen the structure before, he knew it from the sermons of priests and the boasting of youths who had stolen out to the east edge for a look. Those youths, that is, who had returned, and those youths who had been able to find it. For it was said that the Temple of Ugghiutu was not always to be found on the same spot. Sometimes it was here, sometimes there, sometimes nowhere to be seen. The priests said the temple alternated between this world and the world of Ugghiutu, the ancient god to whom some unknown worshippers had erected the structure. One youth had said he never found the temple where it had last been reported, but saw a broad path dragged through the dirt as if the temple had been pushed by an army off the edge of the Great Plateau . . . yet when he went to look over the edge, he saw nothing at all below.

  But here was the temple now, perched on another rise a short distance from the rim of the plateau, looming through a rippling caul of rain. It was an edifice like no other Nir had seen, its style of architecture nothing like the work to be found in any village or town he had ever visited, or even like any of the other ruins scattered here and there across the Great Plateau.

  It was all made of a dark purple stone, as others had testified, smooth and glossy as if each inch of the great building had been obsessively polished by ha
nd. It had few sharp angles, few straight lines; instead, it flowed and curved, bulged and tapered, fluid and symmetrical in some awesome alien way. There was a great central dome or rotunda, and spires or minarets of spiraled design swirling upward to end in points. There were few windows, round or oval-shaped, and there was but one door. Those who returned said this door was always sealed tightly shut. Those who didn’t return, it was said, had found the door open.

  The door was open, and Nir’s goats had already begun filing inside the building as if they had been called by some other herdsman within.

  Nir almost called out to them. But another peal of thunder blasted his ears, the flash of lightning illuminating the temple, better showing off its weird color. The hail was not just painful now—it was deadly. It was a definite danger, one to be dealt with immediately. The dangers of the temple were the stuff of myth. Those who hadn’t returned may have ventured from the Great Plateau altogether or been killed by men rather than the spirits of some ancient cult. Or been killed by a hailstorm, for that matter.

  Nir depended enough upon animals to trust their instincts, their sensitivity. If his goats found the temple inviting, then he would follow them. His mind made up, Nir tucked his head in even more and dashed out into the open, up the slope toward the Temple of Ugghiutu, which loomed larger and larger until Nir actually plunged into its dark interior.

  *

  The goats milled in the large foyer, not straying far. One started up a ramp to a second story, but changed its mind and rejoined the others. Nir took a quick count of the beasts as he twisted and wrung out his long hair in his fists. Only two animals were missing in the storm—unless they had entered the temple also and, more adventurous than their fellows, had wandered off to other chambers.

  Nir peeled off his soaked jacket and wrung it out also, draping it over the edge of the ramp. His bare arms were chilled and he rubbed them as he looked around him. Though it wasn’t the central rotunda, the foyer had a domed ceiling lined with arches of support. Even the arches had smooth, rounded edges. Sharp angles must have been anathema to the people who constructed this wonder. Their aesthetics were not so based on mathematical geometry, obviously, as on the more graceful forms of nature.