Hard Case

by John Hook

  She was right. Like coming into the town in the first place, going with her wasn’t necessarily the best thing to do, but I really had no options here. I had to figure out my situation and what I needed to do about it. There was no obvious way to do that. This was as good a possibility as any.

  “I assume I am right, characterizing this place as Hell?”

  “That’s as good as any. Does it surprise you?”

  “What, this place, or the fact that I’m here?”

  “The latter won’t lead to much conversation.”

  “No grievance procedures, I get it. Well, yeah, this place does surprise me. I expected a bit more pain and fire and brimstone.”

  There was a flicker of something deep and sad that passed through her eyes.

  “They are here. If you are lucky you can avoid the worst of them.”

  We were walking down the main street now. The street was lined with shops, all of them closed, many of them empty. As I had noted earlier, other people wandered aimlessly, almost mechanically. Some nodded at us, acknowledging us, but there was no warmth in the gesture.

  “These people are so—gray.”

  “They are ‘the mass.’ The people who stay here are the ones who don’t deal well with the fact that they are here. They retreat inside themselves, show little emotion, just shuffle about. Their skin becomes pale, their clothes drab. I don’t think that will happen to you. Escorts can sense such things.”

  “Special powers?”

  “I guess.” She smiled, but said no more.

  “How does their skin become pale? How come I look like I’ve been working out? We don’t have skin or bodies. Really, I mean.”

  We stopped. Rox turned and touched my chest again. She smiled.

  “Yes, you are in rather good shape.” Her eyes were shiny now, the hint of arousal. I could feel a quickening in reaction. There was a bit of seduction going on here. I liked it. She was beautiful, soft, womanly, while at the same time dark and mysterious. I liked it, but I did not want to be swept up in it. Whatever it was, it was likely a con. As long as I lacked the ability to know for sure, I wanted to avoid getting too wrapped up in anything. I wasn’t letting myself dwell on it, but deep down I was enraged. As far as I could tell, there was nowhere to put it. There was no door I could hammer down to crawl back to New York City or go back and confront Bowling Pin Jesus. Still, I wanted to keep my rage for now. I wasn’t looking to decide to settle down and accept life here.

  “So what is it if it’s not a body?”

  “I can’t give you enough of an explanation to satisfy you. Our bodies here are real, but they are a kind of glamour that reflects how we think of ourselves. You obviously think well of yourself. Those of the mass are indistinct and gray because they don’t really think of themselves much at all.”

  “You said ‘the ones who stay here’ before. There are others, different than these?”

  “There will be time enough to go into all that later.” Rox took my arm again and led me on, obviously not keen to do too much explaining. This was show and tell, mostly show. It made me uncomfortable. It made me feel like I was being offered a deal. Do as you’re told or…what?

  “Come, we’ll head over to my place. I think you are tired. We’ll have some tea, you can rest and in the morning we’ll explore some more.”

  We were emerging past the shops towards rows of buildings made of brick, They looked like they could be apartment buildings.

  “Why were those shops empty? Not just closed, empty?”

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “I’m trying to figure this place out.”

  “You probably won’t, you know.”

  “Probably. Won’t keep me from trying.”

  She smiled. “Probably not.”

  “But you’re not going to answer any question you don’t want to, are you?”

  Rox nodded. “Yes, but mostly because I don’t have the answers.”

  I was about to ask her how long she had been here when two demons raced into the crowd on the street and grasped a man and a woman. They threw them to the ground and then, almost faster than I could follow, were dragging them into an alley. Several things registered all at once. The first was the violence and suddenness of the act. Second was the fact that no one in the crowd reacted. The third was the looks on the man and the woman’s faces—complete horror. Yet neither screamed or shrieked or cried out. They made guttural, mewling sounds.

  I bolted forward and ran to the alley. I could hear Rox shouting after me, but I wasn’t focused on that. I ran into the darkness until the alley opened up a bit. My eyes were still adjusting but I could make out the shadowy blobs of figures in the alley. The man and the woman were both on the ground. As my eyes adjusted to the dark it was like veils being drawn back on a scene of utter depravity. The woman was being held down on her knees, her dress shredded, cuts in the skin wherever those slashes appeared. The man was on all fours, clothes also slashed, held by his hair, scalp bleeding. The demon behind him had let his tunic fall open and was thrusting into him repeatedly. I was grateful I couldn’t see any more clearly. The other demon held the woman, forcing her to watch while its clawed hands moved over her body with rough and humiliating aggressiveness. If she averted her eyes from the man’s misery, she was kicked or slashed. The demons screamed their pleasure.

  What I found most disturbing was the expressions on the couple’s faces, a mixture of fear and resignation. The horror on their features reached depths no one should endure, but there were no cries, no pleading. One of the demons, the one with the woman, looked straight at me. His head tilted and he seemed to smile, exposing rows of sharp teeth. The ball of white heat that I held in my gut was growing hotter. I didn’t much care about my odds, I was about to jump it. I suspect it wanted me to.

  I heard Rox again, shouting my name, sounding panicked.

  Then something caught me from the side. I hit the stone wall of the alley hard. I couldn’t move, could hardly breathe, something held me in place. I looked up. I was in the strong grip of what appeared to be a man, but he was different from anyone else I had seen. He was large, with flexing, bulging muscles under a sleeveless leather tunic. His eyes were dark and lifeless, a sneer frozen on his face, black hair knotted in a braid.

  “Rox, he isn’t supposed to be here.”

  “I know.” My eyes shifted. Rox was next to us, eyes downcast.

  “Maybe I should save us time and trouble and turn him into a proto now.”

  “Geret, please. I’m sorry. I was careless.”

  Geret, moving faster than his bulk would suggest, gave me a knee to the midsection. While I was trying to figure out how to breathe, Geret backhanded my face into the brick. Whether our bodies were real or not, we could sure be hurt. Geret put his face close to mine and ran his tongue up it. “Maybe you like what you see, maybe it gets you off. Maybe you wanted to wait in line to pull a train of demons. Maybe after those demons are done with her there will be one orifice that isn’t torn beyond recognition, maybe you can still fuck her.”

  Geret sneered.

  “Geret!” There was a different quality in Rox’s voice, but I wasn’t in much shape to analyze it. I did notice that Geret pulled his face back and loosened his grip slightly. There was something almost commanding about her voice. “You are not making my job any easier.”

  “Just having some fun.” Geret looked at me with displeasure. He looked back at Rox with disdain. He threw me at her. She grabbed me and rushed me out of the alley. Behind me I heard those awful articulations of quiet pain by the couple and the shriek of the demons. We rounded out of the alley and continued up the street.

  “What was that? Who was he?”

  “I’d rather not talk about that just now. He was a shirk. They serve the demons. You must never… never… follow a demon unless ordered to, and you really don’t want that to happen.”

  “But those people…”

  She pulled me with her and turned in to one
of the buildings. She had a key and let us in the door. Still saying nothing but pulling me with her, she frantically took us up a flight of stairs. With another key, she opened up a door on the second landing. She let go of me and pushed the door shut.

  Rox held the door, head bent, eyes closed, breathing, maybe listening. She stood that way for moments, but it felt much longer. Hunched over like that, I could see a tattoo peering from the small portion of exposed back, though I couldn’t quite make out what it was supposed to be. I touched her shoulder, a reaction to how shaken she seemed. It was comforting to see that she was upset by what just happened. No one else had reacted. It was just that she wasn’t upset for the same reason I was. I was apparently her charge, for now anyway. She was upset because I had put myself in danger. I got no sense that her concern was for what was being done to the couple in the alley. Geret was probably embellishing what they were going to do in order to get into my head. He had succeeded, by the way. Nonetheless, no one should have to endure such torture.

  Rox turned and laid her head against my chest. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if they did that as we went by as a test, but I failed you. I’m supposed to be preparing you for your life here. This is their world. They are evil, in whatever way you want to characterize that word. We are here to supply them our pain, nothing more.”

  She looked up at me. Her eyes were moist. “Don’t ever interfere. No one will for you. It will only make things worse, for the others as well as you.”

  Rox moved around me and walked over to the kitchen area. I took in the apartment for the first time. It was disturbingly normal. Simple furniture, lace curtains, shelves with knickknacks. No TV or other electronics, no pictures on the wall, but no goats’ heads or upside down crosses either. Tasteful, even cozy, if a bit old fashioned. There was no technology that I could see. Rox had a cabinet from which she took a pitcher and poured us drinks. No refrigerator. No stove. She handed me a clay goblet. I took a sip. It tasted like sweet water.

  “I don’t know what it is. They make it, but don’t like it. We like it for the memory of drinking, but we don’t really need food or drink anymore.”

  I had noticed that.

  “And, this being Hell, there’s probably no decent scotch here.”

  “You will find other vices here, just as pleasurable. It is not all pain here.”

  “So this is it. We just spend eternity here as abused pets of the demon class?”

  “Yes, pretty much. But I don’t want to talk about that. You shouldn’t either.”

  “And this is our fate… why?” I could feel my not-entirely-real stomach tighten.

  “Please, I don’t want to talk about this. Not now.”

  There was pleading in her eyes and behind that fear. I decided to let it go for now.

  “I noticed a tattoo earlier. Is that a glamour too?”

  She smiled. She turned her back with a look that was clearly “come hither.” “Unfasten my dress and have a look.”

  I knew where this was going, and I didn’t want to go there. I’m not sure why. She was probably the most fascinating woman I have ever encountered. But I didn’t trust anything in this place. To me, intimacy required trust. Nonetheless, I stepped over and began unfastening her dress down her back.

  “Are the clothes part of the glamour too, or just our bodies?”

  “All of it. The tattoo too.”

  The tattoo was magnificent. What I had seen at the neck were the tips of arcing wings. The wings fanned out from the back of a jaguar whose sleek feline body was almost luminous, one moment silver like moonlight, another with hints of gold. There was nothing obviously ferocious in the pose—no extended fangs or claws. However, the strength and intensity of the animal was unmistakable, especially in its eyes, and it almost seemed to loom up and separate from her back. It picked up the candlelight in the room and shone in many colors against her light skin.

  She turned and dropped her dress. She was beautiful, self-assured, not at all self-conscious. She came up to me and put her arms around my neck. Her lips parted and she kissed me. I felt her tongue plunge into my mouth. As she did so, I felt a calm, like a quiet fog, settle over my building anger. The feeling was unwelcome.

  With some effort, I stepped back and gently pushed her away. “I can’t.”

  She looked hurt for a moment. “You aren’t attracted to me?”

  “Yes, quite. I just can’t do this. Yet.”

  “But you want to.” Rox slipped a thin, very short robe on. She pulled her raven hair out and tossed her head slightly. Every move she made was inviting, not demanding. I could feel the pressure of desire building, competing with the anger.

  “Yes.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “Yet.”

  “Why?”

  “Hard to say.”

  She came back over to me. “It will help if you do. There is a lot building up in there. This has been a hard day for you.”

  I laughed.

  “What?”

  “Missing your bus and having a sudden downpour without an umbrella and then the store is closed by the time you get there—that’s a hard day. Finding that you are about to spend eternity in Hell is a little more than a hard day.”

  Rox reached up and touched my face. None of her moves were obvious or profane. Her body brushed against me for just a moment, her sweet smell filled my nostrils. I knew I had to do something or I was going to give in. I took her hands and very gently moved her off, away from me.

  “I can’t.”

  The hurt look again. “Please…”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you feel it, the connection between us?”

  “I feel something. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what anything in this place is.”

  The hurt turned back to pleading. “You must. You are supposed to.”

  “Supposed to.” Suddenly I heard a sound, a scratching sound from outside the door.

  Her voice dropped to a frantic whisper. “Please, if you find me pleasing at all. I promise you will enjoy it.”

  More scratches. Rox could see that I had heard.

  “You don’t know what they will do if you don’t. Not just to you. To me.”

  Now I was off balance. She was clearly scared. After what I had seen in the alley, I knew that horrible things happen here. But I equally strongly, perhaps irrationally, didn’t want to comply.

  The decision was taken out of my hands. The door flew open with a violent clap. Several demons were at the entrance. The next thing I knew, I was thrown into the wall of the hallway. I could hear Rox screaming. Several demons bounded in and the door slammed. I could hear screaming from the other side. Although I was still a bit stunned, I rushed the door. It wouldn’t give. Before I could hit it again, I felt a stinging sensation at my back.

  I realized there were still two demons in the hall with me. One had sunk his claws into my back. I tried to elbow him and was cuffed into the wall again for my trouble. I could hear the screams from beyond the door. I could see the demons poised to leap on me. I knew how fast they could move.

  Something just snapped. The white hot ball in my stomach shot up through my chest and filled my nostrils. I swung my leg, hitting one demon full on the side of the head with my knee. I hadn’t yet realized how powerful a body I had “glamoured” myself. I heard a cracking sound and the demon was on the floor with his jaw hanging in a gruesome, unnatural way (if anything about these creatures was natural). There was no thinking going on in my head, just some kind of savage instinct.

  I grabbed the other demon and used its head as a battering ram. The door splintered, but would not break. I could only hear shrieks getting louder and more terrified. The demon worked free. Even as angry as I was, he was stronger. I bolted to the hallway window and jumped through, falling one story into an alley.

  I looked up at Rox’s windows. I wanted to get back up there… to do what? Two demons stood at the window. Even from here I could see they were covered with b
lood. I knew my adrenalized strength wouldn’t last forever and it had only helped when I had the element of surprise. I turned and saw other demons watching from the mouth of the alley.

  I bolted and ran. I was sick inside. I felt as if I were a coward. Worse, I felt as if my decision brought Rox some unbearable punishment, maybe death. If death were possible here.

  No, not me. Them! Them! Them!

  I didn’t care if this was their world. I was going to find a way to make them pay. Assuming I found a way to stay alive, that is.

  4.

  I ran from the town and just kept going, crashing through the low rough bush like a frightened rabbit. I was mad enough to fight, but I just didn’t know what kind of numbers I was looking at in the town. I hadn’t seen that many of the demons out in the wild areas. I intended to put some distance between me and the town to buy myself some time to think out my options. Actually, just to figure out if I had any. That, if nothing else, was hammered home by my excursion into town. This was their world. They were meaner, tougher and they made the rules. There was no humanity, there was only pure atavistic sadism in how they regarded us. They must get something out of us, because they could easily exterminate us. Maybe they had. There seemed a pretty small population so far compared to how many people I would have expected to find in this place.

  I had to remind myself, I still didn’t know the rules. Any of them.

  Not actually having a body seemed to have some advantages. While I was tired, my “body” wasn’t giving out on me. It certainly would have if I had put a real body through all this, new buff look or not. I kept plunging ahead. I made my way up over the rim, across the sloping grassland and up the next set of hills. As the terrain banked steeply up I had to slow down. The terrain was also changing, becoming more wooded. These weren’t ponderosa pine forests but more like high desert. There were short trees that grew everywhere, like weeds, and leaned in many directions. I had no idea where I was going, as usual. It didn’t matter, I just needed to be away from the town.