March till Death (Hellsong Book 3)

by Shaun O. McCoy

  Avery grimaced. “Good hunting.”

  “Quickly, we must keep up with Malkravyan,” Galen said. “Follow me.”

  As they left, Arturus looked back to see Avery one last time. He was looking at the ceiling, his arms crossed.

  “It’s just me then,” Aaron said as they jogged through the rock strewn corridor. “I’ll be the only hunter to return. All my men are dead.”

  Galen shrugged as he ran. “You aren’t home yet.”

  That’s my father. A big old softy.

  . . . as foolish children might, they killed, gluttonizing upon the herd of the sun god—so that he who was the creator of days took from them the day that was to be their homecoming.

  —Anonymous Greek

  Cavé, lest the wanderer find that horrid fear to be true: that his journey home might, in the end, be itself sweeter than his destination.

  —Kent

  From Gehennic Law: Old Man Sisyphus

  Hermes, on a day when all seemed well but all was dark, found himself supremely troubled—and in hopes that a stroll might facilitate his thinking—he took to walking. When his thoughts became too troubled, he began wandering the underworld so that the scenery would match his mood. He paused at the base of a mountain where he sat down and pondered his woes.

  He heard then a great clamor as a boulder came careening down from the heights. It eventually came to rest at the base of the mountain close to where Hermes sat. Sisyphus came trotting down afterwards—for it was his eternal fate to uselessly push this boulder up the mountain as a punishment for fooling the gods.

  “Hermes,” Sisyphus said, “I had not thought to ever see you here, or to see you so troubled.”

  “I’m worried I do not exist.”

  Sisyphus shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like a big deal to me, either way, but why would you worry so?”

  “I am a god, so I understand the concept of infinity. Imagine a dartboard, and assume I throw a dart at it. There are an infinite amount of points on the dartboard where the dart can strike. I contemplate the probabilities of it hitting the dartboard at any point. It must be possible to hit the dartboard, yes? But if we assign any probability whatsoever to the dart hitting a point, and knowing those points to be infinite, then the total sum of the probabilities must end up higher than one—thus precluding that the dart could ever miss the dartboard.”

  Sisyphus nodded. “Sounds like you’ve been talking with Xeno. Look, I am a man, so I cannot claim to understand infinity, but as a man, I have a working knowledge of the infinitesimal. The odds of hitting any one point on the dartboard are infinitesimal. There are an infinite number of infinite sets of infinitesimal numbers which, when added together, will never reach one. Also, when Max Planck dies, he’ll explain to you just how many points are on the dartboard, but that’s not important right now.”

  Hermes was grateful. “Thank you, Sisyphus. This problem had bothered me for some time. Is there any way that I can repay you for your insight? Perhaps I could have Hades free you from your torment?”

  Sisyphus thought about this and said, “I don’t much mind the eternal torment, but maybe you could see if that bastard has a bigger mountain.”

  Carlisle did not know how many epochs he’d lain there. Those fools in the old world, the ones that believed in evolution, they had talked about a thing called deep time. They were fools for two reasons. First, they denied God in their hearts. Second, the world wasn’t billions of years old, it was only six thousand. Who would take a man’s word over God’s? A fool, that’s who.

  But they had been tragically right in a way, too, Carlisle found. He did not need to eat or drink. It was not possible to sleep. All that remained for him to do was lie there. He began to grasp the meaning of a decade. On Earth, it had been impossible to fathom because people and things were always distracting you. You could blink, and a decade was gone—or you could get so caught up in a moment that it seemed like a decade was an eternity. But now, lying here without moving or speaking, he began to understand time. He didn’t know what portions of his stay were longer than a decade, only that they were—and that they passed. And that more passed. And that hundreds and hundreds of them had passed. And then thousands and thousands. And then millions and millions. And finally, billions and billions.

  That was torture enough, but there was something worse. On Earth, a man could forget things. He would forget how to speak. He might even, given long enough, get used to the idea of nothing. Eventually, a person might become a passive thing that just watched without the need to measure the passage of time. He could be like a rock. For all intents and purposes, his soul would be in oblivion, not Hell.

  Carlisle was denied this comfort. Insanity never came for him. His internal monologue never stopped because he could not forget the English language. He could never get used to nothingness because he could always remember, and somehow continue to expect, that something was supposed to be happening.

  He could not imagine an agony like this one. Of all the tortures of Hell, of his infuriating pair of deaths at the hands of the Infidel, of the ruthless pain of the dyitzu, of the horrors that Mephistopheles had needed to inflict upon his mind so that he might climb the ladder of souls—none of them, not one of them even in the slightest, measured up to the horror of eternity. Nothing that he had ever imagined measured up against the Hell that was deep time. And yet, there was something more terrifying than even that. He didn’t know how much farther down he had to go to meet a horror greater than this—or even if he had come far enough down already—but one thing was certain, eventually he would find a Hell that was worse. Sooner or later, one of these people was going to ruin this eternity by speaking too loudly, and then the demons would find him.

  They would claw apart this small accident, this Hell between Hells that their friend kept alive with the power granted to him by Aezcherbaelyn. That terror was in his thoughts. It had been in his thoughts through this deep time, digging a narrow trench of cowardice ever deeper towards the infinite depths of his own empty soul.

  Then, one day, billions of years, perhaps, after he had fallen, that trench hit bottom.

  He turned to the man next to him.

  “The people,” Carlisle whispered, “the ones through the cracks, they’re the same.”

  The man nodded. “The light here is slow. That’s because time is wrong.”

  “How long have we been here?” Carlisle asked.

  The woman glared at him with her beady eyes. Be silent, those eyes said.

  “I came here from that Hell.” The man’s soft voice answered. “My best guess is that people survived there for a year or so. To stay alive you have to keep yourself together. The waves of color try to tear you apart with their motion. You have to accept pain to keep yourself in one piece. You have to experience sorrow to move among the waves. You try to take on as much sorrow as you can to find a calm spot, but it destroys you, so you start taking on too much pain. You try to find a balance, and sometimes you can do alright . . . but then the storms come, and they tear you apart. I am so glad to be here.”

  “They only live a year? We’ve lain here less than a year? How much less?”

  The man shrugged, and then turned away.

  So Carlisle waited through the deep time. He had never thought about time before, not really. He began to understand its infinite nature. As long as he had been here, he could wait that long again. Then he could combine those two times and wait that long. And then those two, and so on and so on—forever. And ever.

  So Carlisle lay down again. The epochs passed by. He could only guess at them. There was no way to really measure what millennia went where, and what million years went there.

  “You speak English?” Carlisle asked.

  “Yes,” the man whispered back. “In Hell, souls pull at each other. We probably drew you here. The more similar, the stronger the pull.”

  And he waited. He waited as long as he guessed between his fall and him speaking to the man about time.
Then he waited a little longer to be sure. Then he added those times together and began to wait again.

  After a while, Carlisle saw a man walking up towards him. The man was wearing the same featureless grey clothes that the rest wore, except that he, like the servant of Aezcherbaelyn, had a medallion around his neck.

  “Be wary of him,” the man whispered. “Be wary of the Walker. Do not trust him. He has set out to explore this place. I don’t understand it, but the woman over there, she says the tunnel he walks down is like some math thing called Gabriel’s Horn. It goes forever, and gets forever smaller. He’ll try to take you there.”

  “How is it different from here?” Carlisle asked.

  The man sat up and gripped his arm. “How many times can you die?”

  Carlisle shrugged.

  “You can die forever. You will die forever. But somewhere, far far below us, there is something staring back up at us from the end of infinity. That is evil. It is the essence of evil. It is what people called the Devil, except our imaginations of it fell short. Just now, after all these deaths, I have begun to grasp the slightest inkling of the nature of the darkness that created us and it is more horrific than any human mind has ever been able to dream. They told you when you were growing up that the mind of God was incomprehensible, well maybe it is, but I’m telling you that this thing is incomprehensible, too, except in the other direction. Love and hatred, good and evil, they aren’t even the right words. The concepts are too limited, too human. That thing out there, that thing staring at us from the other side of eternity, it’s a horror that we have always tried to describe, but we have failed. Do you understand me? All our wars, all those children raped and murdered. All the deaths and torture and pain of all the animals that ever existed over all these billions of years . . . and we haven’t yet, as a mass effort, begun to describe our master.”

  Can this be so? Could I have been so horribly wrong about existence? I must have been wrong about something. I thought I would go to Heaven.

  Carlisle turned away from the old man and saw the Walker standing above him. The Walker bent down and looked into Carlisle’s eyes, his silver pendant dangling down. The Walker seemed familiar, somehow. Carlisle tried to remember when he’d seen the man before. Was it the Infidel? The angel’s get? Pyle? Benson? He tried to get a handle on who this man was, but he knew it might take him some time to be able to. All his memories were available to him, but because he had been lying down in this Hell for so long, for so many eternities, those memories were almost impossible to find. They were like little grains of sand amidst a beach the size of a universe.

  “Carlisle?” the Walker whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “I have come for you.”

  Carlisle turned to the other man.

  He was shaking his head. “Don’t go.”

  Carlisle looked to the woman. Don’t go, her eyes said.

  “You don’t deserve this, Carlisle,” the Walker said. “Something has gone horribly wrong. You were brought here by . . . well, let’s call it an accident. You’ve been mishandled. I am here to take you to the fate you’ve earned. Surely you know you deserve more than this.”

  And Carlisle thought about this. The Walker had to be right. Was the Walker Jesus? Had Carlisle somehow been tricked into Hell when he deserved something else? He couldn’t remember all of his musings on his fate, at this point it would take him whole eras to collect them all, but that was a possible explanation.

  “I’ll go,” Carlisle said.

  He followed the Walker across the soft blackness. They wove their way around the cracks in the universe, past the tortured souls on the tempests of malignant color. Then they came to the funnel.

  “Gabriel’s Horn,” Carlisle whispered. “The old man said there was something at the end of it, staring back at him. Something he feared.”

  The Walker nodded. His eyes were a light brown. They were so familiar.

  “He told you what he knew of the truth,” the Walker said.

  “He told me not to trust you.”

  “I have no reason to hurt you, Carlisle. I simply know that you got a fate you did not deserve. I intend to correct that. I do this because I serve one greater than even Aezcherbaelyn.”

  Carlisle nodded. “I understand, tell me more.”

  “Gabrielle’s horn is an infinite thing. It goes on forever. Is there a being that you know of that is infinite?”

  Carlisle nodded. “God.”

  “That’s right,” the Walker said. “Not the Devil. God. That’s why that man was so afraid. God is mad at him, Carlisle, but God’s not mad at you.”

  He must be Jesus. Those light brown eyes. Soft, caring eyes.

  “I understand,” Carlisle said, and he felt joy rising in his heart. “I understand.”

  Tears were welling up from within him.

  It had all been a mistake. A horrible mistake. He hadn’t deserved Hell. He’d known it. He’d known it all along. Something had gone wrong, probably something that he’d done but that wasn’t quite his fault. God was going to correct it. God was full of love. Carlisle had done the only thing that he’d needed to do. There were no unforgivable sins. God was love. The one thing he had to do was give his heart and soul to Jesus Christ, and he’d done that. And here Christ was, leading him to where he was wanted. To where he belonged. To where his family was. To that field where his blessings hung over his shoulders like a flight of angels.

  He followed the Walker into the horn. It got smaller, and smaller, but Carlisle’s soul fit. Souls weren’t like bodies, they could get as small as they wanted—almost.

  Anna McNamara’s mother was wrong. All those doctors were wrong. Maab had been wrong. And he, he’d been right. All along, he’d known. Faith wasn’t a thing that could be defeated. He’d had his dark moments, but through it all, he’d had his faith. Even Hell couldn’t shake faith. Faith was pulling him onward, sending him along with this Christ into Heaven. What a fool that Lilith had been! What an idiot! She’d tried to shake him, but she couldn’t. The Devil had tried to fool him, but he’d failed.

  God, I love you so much. I don’t know how to thank you.

  The gratitude inside him was so overwhelming he almost fell. Had he been in possession of a real body, he would have fallen. That emotion, so powerful as to dwarf all others, it was his connection with God. He felt it overwhelming him in his chest, it was a fire in his mind, it was a tingling in his fingers, it was an upswelling of a kind of indescribable hope that he had never felt so purely before. Oh, sure, he had tasted it at church in the old world, but this, this was a tsunami where the other had been a drizzle. And the feeling only got stronger as he walked down the horn.

  Carlisle had been right! This feeling was too grand to be a delusion. Too powerful to be fake. Too real to be a lie that he told himself. It was beyond wish thinking. It was beyond reason.

  There was a light, a brilliant light, like a train at the end of some tunnel. And then it all made sense.

  He had heard of near death experiences. People on the edge between life and death would find themselves traveling through dark tunnels. Their family and friends would be there. The man far behind him, the one who had told him to be still, he had been an idiot—but he had spoken at least one truth.

  Like souls draw each other together.

  Of course those people who’d nearly died before coming back had seen their family! Who else could be more similar to a person than their own kin? This moment, now, this trek through the horn, it was the moment they had all been talking about. Always there had been a person, or an entity, or a force drawing them onward towards that beautiful light. He could feel the light. Its warmth was the warmth of a thousand suns. Its Love made human love, even true human love, even the love spoken of by poets and playwrights, seem like a tawdry and insincere thing.

  I am in Love with God.

  He stepped up to the edge. He felt the Walker behind him. He turned around to look into the eyes of Christ the Walker.
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  But I never knew Christ on Earth. I never saw him, so those can’t be Christ’s eyes.

  The Walker’s face bore an expression of pure hatred. “Goodbye, Father.”

  The euphoria in Carlisle’s soul died.

  No! This is some mistake!

  The light behind him was not a light of love, but of torture. It wasn’t even light at all, but a darkness so putrid that it had seemed like light.

  “No!” Carlisle protested. “I don’t have a son! My boy died before . . . you’ve got the wrong . . .”

  “You made me kill my mother!” The Walker screeched. “I was going to die no matter what, but you made me kill her.”

  The man’s eyes. Anna McNamara. The Walker had his mother’s eyes.

  Oh.

  With one hand on his medallion, the Walker pushed Carlisle backwards through the mouth of the horn. Carlisle spun as he fell, facing the darkness—facing infinity. He felt a malevolence that defied his feeble mind. It dwarfed his imagination. It was so far beyond him as to be past his scope for analogy. It was a hatred, or an apathy, he couldn’t tell which, that was made all the more horrible by the fact that it wasn’t even directed at him. He was just in its way somehow.

  Carlisle looked into the depths of infinity and there, on the other side of endlessness, something was staring back at him.

  It was hard for Arturus to tell as they made their way up the shores of the Kingsriver when the features of the rock and the styles of architecture went from simply seeming familiar to actually being familiar. He only knew that with each passing room they traversed he became more and more sure that he had been in them before.

  Aaron had a look on his face that conveyed more joy and more sorrow than Arturus thought any man could feel at the same time. “It must be night, in Harpsborough.”

  “How can you tell?” Kelly asked.

  “There’d be hunters in these rooms if it were day.”

  She nodded.