Hellwalkers

by Alexander Gordon Smith

  She leaned in, still grinning, and the sudden smell of her made him reel. It was sweet, almost too sweet—like rotten fruit. And there was something else just behind it, something that could have been sulfur.

  “Pan,” he pleaded. She leaned in closer and he arced his back, feeling the drop behind him, feeling like it was yawning open. His foot slid again, old bone exploding into powder beneath his heel then falling into the abyss.

  “Everything else was a lie, Marlow,” she said, her breath impossibly hot on his face. “All of that other stuff, it never really mattered. There is only here, and only now, and only us.”

  Her mouth opened wide, too wide, a split appearing down the middle of her nose and in her chin like somebody was peeling her open with an invisible scalpel. There were more teeth there, lining the two halves of her face, needle sharp. He thought he caught a glimpse of metal, tiny components whirring like gears.

  “Pan?” he yelled, and she cocked her head again, her eyes burning holes in him.

  “Marlow,” she said, her voice distorted by her broken face. She laughed, and it was like a mourning cry, like a dozen sobs all echoing from her throat. When she spoke next she spoke with more than one voice. “Why do you keep calling me Pan?”

  HERE WE GO AGAIN

  Pan pushed herself up, her foot skidding in the loose ash. Marlow was fifty yards away with the thing that looked like her, and it had just pounced on him. By the look of things, it was eating his face. She gripped the club in her fist—a two-foot-long femur bone with a heavy joint at the end—and ran.

  Up ahead, Marlow was in serious trouble. The other her had opened up its head like a snake and was trying to swallow him whole. It was making gagging noises that she could hear even over the pounding of her feet, and beneath them an endless, muffled, awful scream from inside. Marlow was throwing wild punches at its body but the doppelgänger didn’t even seem to feel them.

  Twenty yards and Pan swung the bone up over her head. The creature must have heard her coming because it tried to turn and she caught a glimpse of her own head, split in two. She almost hesitated, some part of her unwilling to fight something so familiar, so impossible. That’s my face, she thought, and the anger boiled inside her, driving her forward. She swung the club as she moved, arcing it down toward the creature’s back.

  It hit like a demolition ball, a crack that echoed off the mountainside and out over the cliff. The other her folded awkwardly, collapsing, pulling Marlow down with it. His head was completely inside its gaping mouth and he obviously couldn’t breathe in there because he was kicking like a drowning man.

  “Hang on!” she yelled at him, lifting the club again. She never got the chance to swing, because suddenly the doppelgänger was moving, its arms and legs working like a spider’s as it scuttled backward. Its tissue-thin skin was tearing, revealing something black beneath, as hard as a beetle’s carapace. Black and metallic.

  It moved fast, Marlow dragged behind it. It was still trying to swallow him, its whole body writhing with peristalsis as it forced him down. And all the time it kept those eyes—the same eyes she’d seen in the mirror every single day of her life—on her.

  She bolted after it, chasing it up the slope. Even with Marlow gripped in its jaws it was too fast for her, cutting crablike to the side. Another few seconds and it would lose her in the contours of the mountainside. She dug deep, her lungs like bucking mules inside her chest.

  Come on, come on.

  The thing zigged one way, expecting her to follow, but she broke right, catching it as it changed direction. She swung wildly, the knuckled tip of the thigh bone catching its arm and causing it to collapse. One of Marlow’s shoulders was lost in the cavern of its mouth, its throat bulging obscenely as it worked him down. He wasn’t moving anymore.

  “Marlow!”

  She lifted the bone again and brought it down on the doppelgänger’s back, the noise like she’d struck a fire hydrant. She heard its squeal even past the blockage and she hit it again, her arm muscles burning with the effort. It was choking now, panicking.

  “Die!” she screamed at it, hitting it again, and again. “Just die, you mother—”

  It retched, regurgitating Marlow from its throat.

  He slid free—a lump of wet meat—and the thing scuttled away, its metal parts glinting. It took one last look at her, its mouth a grotesque open sack, its tongue hanging out like old rope. Then it pushed its face into the ground and tunneled like a digging dog, vanishing.

  Somehow Pan found the strength to move, crawling to Marlow’s side and placing a hand on his neck. His skin was streaked with layers of dark metal, Engine metal, but there was no sign of gears, no moving parts. She pressed her fingers there, searching for a pulse.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  “Come on,” she said, using her other hand to pound his chest.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  “Come on!” she yelled. “You’re not leaving me here alone again!”

  Nothing. Nothing. Thump.

  He sat up, a spray of black fluid erupting from his mouth. His hands grabbed her, fingers gouging her skin, and for a second she thought she’d been tricked, that this wasn’t really Marlow at all but another doppelgänger.

  His eyes, though. His eyes were copper pennies, glinting, but so full of terror that there could be no doubt. Those eyes were human.

  “Hey, hey,” she said, both hands clutching his shoulders. “Hey, Marlow, it’s me.”

  She didn’t exactly blame him for not believing her.

  “It’s me,” she said again.

  Marlow was hauling in breaths like he was having an asthma attack, shuffling backward. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to end up retreating off the cliff.

  “It’s me,” she said again. “Pan. Your name is Marlow Green, uh, I met you on Staten Island, you lived with your mom, your brother’s name was Danny.”

  Marlow slowed. His face was slick with gunk, his hair plastered to his scalp. Flecks of iron glinted darkly, his irises burning machine-bright. He gulped, then shook his head.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said. “That … that whatever the hell it was, it knew stuff, too.”

  “It didn’t know you snore like a warthog,” she said. “It didn’t know that you were jealous of a Frenchman called Taupe. It didn’t know that the first time you tried to kiss me I kneed you in the family jewels. Hard.”

  He lifted a hand to his mouth, biting his knuckle like he hadn’t eaten in a week. But she could see the way his body relaxed, she could hear the gentling of his breaths.

  “Technically you kissed me,” he said eventually, his voice shaking.

  He managed a smile, and for an instant she thought about kicking him off the cliff herself. Instead, she did something that took her by surprise, something she didn’t even know was happening until she’d thrown herself to her knees and wrapped her hands around him. He fought her for all of a second, then she felt his arms around her, squeezing, and suddenly her body was betraying her again. She buried her head into his neck, into the disgusting sulfur stench of him, and she began to cry.

  “I didn’t think you were coming,” she said, or tried to say. The sobs were too powerful. “I thought I was going to be … I thought—”

  “Hey,” he said, and she realized that he was crying too. “Hey, Pan, it’s okay.”

  She wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that, bound to each other in hell. It could have been a minute, it could have been forever. It was Marlow that started to pull free, and she wasn’t sure if she could let him go.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that you’re kneeling on my leg and it’s really painful.”

  She was, she saw, her knee planted in his shin. She rolled away, pushing herself to her feet just to prove that she was still capable of standing. Marlow held out his hand and she hauled him up, both of them smudging tears from their faces. She tried not to notice the fact that he was naked.

  “Better?” she asked whe
n she could find her voice again. He spluttered a laugh.

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” he said. “Never been better, Pan.”

  “What happened back there,” she said. “You did it, right? You destroyed the Engine.”

  “In the ten seconds after they took you?” he replied. “Even I’m not that good, Pan.”

  She frowned.

  “What are you talking about? Ten seconds?”

  “The demons came for you, Pan,” Marlow said. “They tore you to pieces.”

  “Yeah,” Pan said, “but that was, like, a day ago.”

  She had no way of knowing for sure, of course, because this place—wherever it was—seemed to flick from day to night in a heartbeat. But it had certainly felt like a day.

  “What?” Marlow said, shaking his head. “No, Pan, it was just now. Minutes.”

  Pan blew out a long breath, staring over the edge of the cliff. It didn’t make sense, but then nothing that had happened in the last few weeks—few years—made any sense. Marlow took a step toward her but she held out her hand to stop him.

  “I thought you might have destroyed it,” she said. “I thought that’s why … I thought maybe it’s why you…”

  She couldn’t bring herself to say it and the unspoken words hung in the air before her. I thought that’s why you hadn’t come. Because she’d spent the last day thinking she was alone here. Thinking that she would be alone for the rest of time.

  “Herc and Charlie are still there,” Marlow said. “They might be able to end it.”

  “Without contracts?” Pan said, shaking her head. “You and I made the deal to travel between, to stop time. Without us I think they’d have been pulled back into the present, into the Engine. They’d have ended up right in his lap.”

  Ostheim. If that was true, then he’d have murdered them without a second thought. Marlow wiped his eyes again, staring out to the distant horizon.

  “A day,” he said. “You see anything?”

  “Sure,” she snapped back. “I read the guidebook. Checked out some sights, bought a snow globe with a demon in it.” She took a shuddering breath as she looked out over the landscape of ruin. “Look, I appeared here, same way you did: the ground, I don’t know, making me.” She clenched her fists. The thought of it, of those little threads that had woven her from the dirt, from the black liquid inside those glass tubes, made her want to scream the world away. “I didn’t do much. Couldn’t do much. It was all too … I don’t know. Then it got dark. I spent the night here, and the next day I started exploring. Didn’t go far, I kept coming back, just in case…”

  “In case what?” Marlow asked.

  “In case you, somebody, anybody, showed up,” she said. “Far as I can tell, this place is, I don’t know, it’s a city, long dead.”

  “A city?” asked Marlow. “So we’re on Earth? Did you see any landmarks, anything we can use?”

  She squinted at him through the dust. Then she turned to the horizon, to a distant smudge of darkness that polluted the sky like an oil slick.

  “I saw … something.”

  A noise broke the silence of the hillside, a rattle of gravel and bone. Pan flinched, scanning the rocky terrain, expecting to see another her or another Marlow walk toward them, smiling. She searched the ground, found the femur, and hefted it up.

  “We should go,” she said quietly. “This place, it’s not nice. Not even close.”

  “You have any idea what this place even is?” he asked as she started walking, her bare feet crunching through bones, through skulls, tatters of skin caught between her toes. How many dead were here? How many corpses did it take to make a mountain? She thought of the creatures that squirmed down there, wearing stolen faces, ready to open their mouths and swallow her whole.

  “Hell,” she said. “How could it be anything but hell?”

  PUT SOME DAMN CLOTHES ON

  “Look, I don’t want to lower the tone or anything, Marlow, but you do realize you’re naked?”

  Marlow ignored the question, staring at Pan, studying her properly for the first time. Like the imposter that had tried to eat him, she was made up of layers of flesh and metal, her skin streaked and striated like she’d been chipped from the wall of a copper mine. Her face was her face, but marbled by a diagonal streak of dark metal that stretched down her cheek and over her chin. In one hand she still held that leg bone, swinging it with every step. She was wearing a white tee and jeans that looked like they were held together by a hope and a prayer.

  It was a good look.

  He half thought about covering himself up but the honest truth was that it didn’t seem to matter anymore. He was in hell. He was doomed to an eternity of suffering. Clothes didn’t exactly seem like a priority. All the same, he angled himself away from Pan, asking, “So, where’d you get the T-shirt and jeans?”

  She looked down at herself, brushing a cloud of dust from the shirt.

  “Found them,” she said. “Just lying there. There’s stuff all over. Must have belonged—”

  She cut herself off and Marlow finished the sentence in his head.

  To the dead.

  “Look, just put this on, yeah?” she said, tugging something free from the dirt and lobbing it at him. He snatched it, hard enough to release a halo of dust, shaking it out to reveal a section of gray cloth. It was filthy, and greasy to the touch, but he wrapped it around his middle like a beach towel just so that Pan would stop staring awkwardly at the horizon.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Where were you at Christmas? It’s what I always wanted, a loincloth from a dead man.”

  He looked at the corpse Pan had pulled it from, nothing left of it but a knotted section of spine and half a pelvic bone. He rubbed his throat, grimacing. It hurt to move, hurt to swallow, hurt to breathe. He’d almost been one of the dead too, swallowed into that awful, airless, crushing dark. One of the deader than dead, really, because he wasn’t sure how that really worked when you were in hell. He glanced at Pan, still wary. He had no idea if it was actually her but this one seemed right. And what choice did he have? Anything was better than the thought of being here alone.

  She started walking again and Marlow followed. Every other step his bare foot would plunge ankle-deep into the bone dust, shards embedding themselves in his skin. He stood on those glass tubes, too, releasing gouts of black fluid that was as dark as ink. Pan was leading them along the edge of the cliff and now the path they were on—if you could call it a path, because it was just another section of crushed bone—sloped eagerly downward. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been walking. Time was slow here, treacle thick. It felt a hundred degrees hotter. Marlow wiped his brow but it was bone-dry up there.

  “I know,” said Pan. “No sweat. Weird, right?”

  “It’ll save money on antiperspirant.”

  Pan stopped, planting her hands on her hips.

  “Marlow, you seem pretty chill about this whole ‘going to hell’ thing.”

  He blew a laugh from his nose, but there wasn’t much humor in it. Pan was right. He should have been rolling on the floor screaming away the last of his sanity. But the truth was his brain was doing a remarkable job of taking it in its stride. This was weird, yes. But he’d seen weirder. He’d seen worse.

  “Hey,” he said with a shrug. “This is bad, but it’s gotta be better than the old ’hood back on Shaolin, right?”

  Her frown deepened.

  “You’re nuts,” she said.

  “You don’t have to be crazy to work here,” he said with an insane giggle, “but it helps. Besides, you’re not exactly losing it.”

  “I…” she started, then shook the words away. He didn’t push it. He didn’t need to. Pan had arrived here alone, nobody to talk her through the horror, nobody to hold her. He couldn’t imagine what she must have gone through when she first opened her eyes. That was it, he realized, the reason he felt so calm: that no matter where they were, no matter what would happen next, Pan was here. She wiped a hand over her face, her who
le body shaking. Then she looked up at the sky. It was bright, even though the sun was hidden behind the clouds of ash.

  “It’s going to get dark soon, I think,” said Pan. “We shouldn’t be outside.”

  “You got somewhere to go?” he asked.

  She stuck out the femur bone, pointing at the city below. They were low enough now for Marlow to make out the streets, or what was left of them. Most were hidden by sweeping dunes of dark ash and buried in shadow from the ruined towers. Bands of black dissected the view, huge snakelike constructions that might have been pipes or conduits, stretching as far as he could see, converging on the horizon, ending beneath a distant, darker cloud. There was a hum in the air, he suddenly noticed, one that seemed to make his entire skull vibrate. He stuck a finger in his ear, wiggling, but the noise was coming from all around him.

  There was a smell, too. The familiar, gagging stench of sulfur.

  “There,” Pan said, pointing to a cluster of skeletal shapes. There was something red fluttering between the white, reminding him of the scraps of meat in the teeth of the creature that had tried to eat him.

  “What?” he said, then, understanding, “Wait, you want me to wear it?”

  “Marlow, that towel is going to come off any minute. You either put some clothes on or watch me gouge my own eyes out.”

  “Nice,” he said, blushing as he hopped across the path and pulled the cloth free. It was a pair of shorts, covered in stains from substances he had no desire to identify. “Really?” he said, holding them up to Pan.

  “Really.”

  He stepped into them, tightening the drawstring. Trapped beneath the same collection of old bones was another scrap of cloth, this one harder to retrieve. It came free with a tear and he held it up like a tattered sail—a T-shirt, the logo faded beyond recognition. He was just pulling it on when there was a rattle behind them, toward the top of the slope. Pieces of bone pattered down around his feet. Pan held up a hand, holding them both in silence for a full minute.