Hellwalkers

by Alexander Gordon Smith

  “What?” Marlow asked.

  “You don’t feel that?” Pan said, nodding at the conduit. It wasn’t really much of a pipe, more a snaking piece of machinery. This section must have been thirty feet tall, sculpted from a thousand pieces of iron. Black, fleshy veins as big as her arm ran the length of it, weaving in and out of the mechanical components, pulsing gently. She watched as Marlow put his hand to it, as what little blood was left in his face drained away.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “Remind you of anything?” said Night. She stood there, spear gripped in her hand.

  Millions of cogs, springs, filaments. Yeah, they reminded Pan of something.

  “The Engine,” she said.

  Marlow nodded.

  “Yeah, the Devil’s Engine,” said Night. “I don’t know what they are, but I know this: if you follow them, you find him.”

  And Pan suddenly understood what she was feeling when she touched the metal, that magnetic pull.

  The Devil was calling them.

  “We have to go to him,” said Marlow, reaching the same understanding.

  Pan spat out a dry laugh.

  “No way. No way in hell.”

  “You think we have a choice?” he asked.

  Pan looked at Night and the girl shrugged, digging her spear into the ash.

  “You felt it call you,” Marlow added. “What else can we do?”

  Whatever these pipes were, wherever they led, Pan wanted no part of them.

  “Come on, Night,” said Marlow. “Where else are we going to find answers?”

  “Even if it is the Devil,” said Pan. “What makes you think we’ll get answers?”

  He chewed his shrapneled knuckles for a moment, frowning.

  “Because this place has to mean something,” he said. “It can’t just be … this.”

  Pan stopped walking, flexing her toes in the cloud-soft ash. Her thoughts were boxed away, pushed into storage. Uncovering them felt ridiculously slow. She tried not to think about the fact that she had died, that her brain had literally grown again from the earth, each and every synapse formed from the stuff of the dead. Going down that road would lead her to madness and nothing else.

  But she could still feel that awful pressure, the moment her head had come off. And she’d heard it, that crunch of bone, as Patrick chewed on her skull. She’d still been conscious for that first, awful bite.

  I deserve it, she told herself, thinking of what she’d done to Patrick, to his sister, to everyone she’d ever hurt. Her procession of the dead would stretch a long, long way, starting all those years ago with Christoph. I deserve all of it.

  And maybe she should just lie down, wait for the demons to take her. She could lie there and die and die and die, over and over and over. After a while, surely, she wouldn’t even notice it. She rubbed the scar that ringed her neck, swallowed dust into a stomach as dry as sandpaper.

  “This place doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “All it wants is for us to suffer.”

  “But—”

  Marlow stopped speaking, stopped walking, ducked down. Pan froze, too, her borrowed heart clamoring. Night had taken a couple more steps before she realized she was alone, crouching, all of them listening to a voice ghosting out of the night.

  “Marlow? Marlow? Marlow?” It was thin and reedy, just a whisper over the roar. It grew louder, louder, muffled by the pipe that lay between them. Then it faded.

  For a while, nobody moved, then Night pushed on, leaving tiptoe prints in the ash. Marlow hesitated, and Pan could read his thoughts as they flashed across his face—What if it wasn’t a ghost? What if it was somebody real?—before he gave up and kept walking.

  “Your but,” said Pan.

  “My what?” he asked.

  “You said but.”

  “Oh, yeah, this place. I can’t…” He chomped on a knuckle and she could see the blood there where he’d broken the skin. “Oh, right. But why are we here? I mean, I know about the contract and everything, but why? You ever stop to ask why you’d lose your soul if you couldn’t break your contract? Why the Devil would even want your soul?”

  She had, she’d thought about it so many times, but the answer had always been the same: It doesn’t matter, because it will never happen to you.

  “He eats them,” says Night. “That’s what we always got told. Went to Catholic school back in Mexico, before they kicked me out for drinking the sacramental wine. You should have seen that Eucharist, we replaced it with antifreeze.” She laughed softly, the sound like sunlight. “Anyway, we always got told if we sinned, the Devil would feast on our souls.”

  “Like barbecue?” said Marlow.

  “Sí, like he wanted to drain something from us, our energy or something. Ay dios mío, Sister Margarita would freak knowing that she’d actually been right about me. She always said I would burn.”

  “Sounds like a nice lady,” said Marlow.

  “Don’t even get me started on la chancla.”

  “So you’re saying we’re here because the Devil wants to eat our souls,” said Pan. “Which means I’m right, we shouldn’t go anywhere near him.”

  “But you’re still walking,” Marlow said. And he was right, she was.

  Pan sniffed, staring out into the desert. A wind had blown up, forming ripples in the ash and pulling it up into the air. It was so thick it looked like mist and she was glad of it because it meant they were harder to find.

  “I’m just saying,” Marlow said. “We don’t know anything about this … this whatever you want to call it. We all saw him inside the Engine, yes. He gave us the powers, granted our wishes, yes. He took our souls and dragged them into this craphole, yes.”

  “Yes?” said Pan when he didn’t continue.

  “What if there’s something else he wants?” Marlow said with a half-assed shrug. “What if there’s something we can give him?”

  “In return for what?” Pan asked. “Special treatment? He might serve us for the main course instead of dessert.”

  “I’m just trying to think of ideas,” Marlow snapped back. “I’m just trying to do some—”

  “Whoa!”

  Marlow thumped into the back of Night, Pan almost walking into Marlow. She craned her head over Marlow’s shoulder but all she could see up ahead was the same desert, the same cloud of ash bathed in firelight.

  “What’s up?” she said.

  “What’s down,” said Night, standing to the side to make room for her.

  Pan took a couple of steps forward and was about to take another one when Marlow grabbed her arm. She retreated, finally seeing the slope, the ledge just beneath it, and then nothing.

  “Oh,” she said, kicking at the ash and watching it slide into oblivion. Only the conduit carried on, stretching out into the haze like the Brooklyn Bridge in the fog. She looked to the side, seeing the vague line of the cliff, and beyond that what could have been the edge of the world. “You think it’s deep?”

  “Could just be a couple of feet,” said Marlow. “Dibs not checking.”

  “Dibs,” said Night.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure dibs doesn’t work down here,” Pan said. She ducked, rooting her hand in the ash, staring into the swirling abyss. Every now and then the clouds would thin and she was certain she could see something churning far below, an ocean. A fist of vertigo struck her in the gut and she moved back on her hands and knees until she felt steady enough to stand.

  “Well, that answers that, then,” said Pan.

  “Huh?” Marlow and Night said together.

  “Our field trip to see the Devil. We can’t go any farther.”

  Marlow was looking at the pipe, chewing his knuckles, and Pan shook her head.

  “Don’t even think it,” she said.

  “It’s huge. It will be like walking along a footbridge.”

  Yeah, a footbridge that filled your head with shadows, that blinded you.

  He put a hand up to the metal, not quite touching it. His
expression belonged to a man who was about to jam a fork into an electrical outlet.

  “I’m not going,” Pan said.

  “Then wait here,” he replied, wincing as he put his hand to the pipe. She heard a noise—or not quite a noise, more a cross between a generator hum and the buzz of a bluebottle trapped inside the pipes of her sinuses, tickling them so much she had to pinch the bridge of her nose. Marlow had pulled his hand away and was flexing it madly. His face was like parchment, like it had been drawn onto a paper bag.

  “Come on. Whatever is over there, it can’t be worse than what we’ve already seen.”

  She glanced back into the swirling wall of dust. Demons, ghosts, and Patrick the Monster, too, probably. He’d have regenerated by now and she had a funny feeling he wasn’t done with her.

  Could the Devil be worse than that?

  Yeah, she thought. He could.

  But however awful it was, nothing could be more awful than being alone here. And it was that thought—watching Night and Marlow vanish into the dust, leaving her behind—that made her nod her head.

  “Fine,” she grunted. “After you.”

  CROSSING

  It was like standing on a washing machine at full spin—a pulse of discomfort rising through Marlow’s feet.

  But it was more than that, too. He felt like he was standing on the sidewalk back in New York, the subway rumbling beneath him as trains smashed their way through the tunnels. He could feel the force of it, something vast and dark and unstoppable tearing through the mechanism that lay beneath his feet. There was an electric pulse vibrating inside his skull, relentless, hard enough to shatter it, and he pushed his hands against his temples to hold his mind in place. The roar of vertigo was overpowering, it was the sensation of feeling a train hurtle toward you, seeing it loom over you, the awful, inevitable rush of death.

  He gritted his teeth against it, loosed a roar of his own that was lost in the storm. It was hot up here, the burning sky roasting the top of his head, making his hair shrivel. Glowing flakes of plasma dripped from the inferno, like it was snowing fire, and he crouched, resting a hand on the pipe.

  It was as though he’d been pulled inside it, a rush of roller-coaster movement that wrung his aching stomach. He reeled into the sudden quiet, into the unexpected dark, feeling the power that flowed through the machine beneath him—feeling it and following it, seeing the land pass by beneath him, seeing it grow more and more fractured, more and more broken until even gravity seemed to have given up.

  And there, a black hole on the horizon, leaking darkness.

  For an instant he feared his asthma had come back, because he couldn’t get a breath. It was just a phantom in the dust, a mirage, but there was no denying what he was looking at. And even though there was no way it could have seen him, Marlow just wanted the strands of himself to unravel and return to the ground, he wanted to unwind—because he could feel that thing, whatever it was, he could feel it in every single cell of his being.

  He could feel it watching him.

  What is it you desire?

  He grunted.

  “The trick is to keep saying it to yourself,” said Night as she clambered up.

  “Huh?”

  “Your name, your age, your family. This place swallows your mind, it tries to take everything you got. Keep looking back, keep remembering who you are. Say it.”

  “Marlow,” he said. “Marlow…” And his whole body seemed to lurch as he reached for his surname and found nothing, just a void. Then it was back, sliding into his skull. “Green. Uh, I’m fifteen, my mom’s name is Audrey, my dog’s name is Donovan, my brother’s name is…” And there it was again, like stepping off the end of the world. “D-Danny,” he stuttered, finding it.

  “Told you,” said Night. “Try to remember further back. It doesn’t seem to be able to get those memories.”

  He did, the gears of his mind grinding, stalling. He could remember being five, maybe six—walking across his bedroom, his mom running through the door and hugging him tight. Was that when Danny had died, maybe? Was that the moment she told him? He couldn’t be sure. There was nothing before that, just an abyss where his past had once sat.

  But the conversation had power, it had cleared the fog from his head. Gradually the world swam into focus—the pipe beneath him, ridged with metal plates and wires and cogs and springs, all moving frantically, veined with tubes that might have been fat, black arteries. The only good news was that it was easily five feet across, wide enough to walk.

  “Dude, this is horrible,” he said, wiping the saliva from his chin and offering Pan the same hand as she neared the top. She waved it away, crouching while she rode out that nightmare vision.

  Night took the lead, skipping across the uneven surface of the giant conduit. Marlow followed, the metal digging into the bruised flesh of his feet. Beneath him the pipeline hummed and thundered as though there were a million working pieces inside, all pumping an icy darkness into his thoughts.

  It took only twelve steps before the edge of the cliff passed beneath them and the void took its place. Fingers of dust whirled around his feet, trying to flick him off, and past them he could see movement, something far, far below. It might have been water, the churning of some great ocean. The thought of it seemed to infinitely multiply his thirst. He felt as if he were made of ash, every drop of moisture evaporated and burned away. Was this going to be his first death? Gasping like a landed fish, every organ failing?

  He was tempted to hurl himself off the pipe and into the water. Drowning seemed like a better way to go.

  The pipe pierced the ash, a straight black line that seemed to go on forever. Every time Marlow put his foot down he’d sense the metallic parts of him drawn earthward. He felt like an iron filing next to a magnet, wondered if he’d be able to stop himself moving this way even if he wanted to. Each step brought with it a flower bloom of night, a concussive strobing, and twice he had to stop to find his equilibrium. The second time Pan was there, grimacing against her own pain as she took hold of his hand. He squeezed, and for a while they walked like lovers. And still the pipe stretched on, erased in both directions by the dust, now, so that it seemed like it was floating in the air.

  “Getting dark,” said Pan. She was right, the inferno above them was losing some of its strength. There were no plumes of fire here, nothing to feed the conflagration, and with every step they took the darkness gathered around them a little more confidently. “Watch your step.”

  Marlow did, the ridges of the conduit growing harder to make out. He looked down again, and with less firelight diffusing through the ash he got a clearer picture of what lay under them.

  And he was so, so glad that he hadn’t jumped.

  There was an ocean down there, but it was an ocean of people. He could see thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, every single scrap of the ground covered by crawling, fighting, biting, chewing figures. They were far enough below that he couldn’t make out their individual cries but the collective noise of them was like a booming tide. He was aware of the smell now, too, a rolling wave of rot that swelled up and settled in his nose.

  The sight was overwhelming, and he had to crouch before the dizziness pulled him into the festering pit. He forced himself to count to three, taking as deep a breath of putrid air as he was able each time. Then he walked, trying not to look down, failing, watching the hordes as they teemed over one another, a crushing mass of misery and pain. It was almost too dark to see, and when he glanced back he could make out the line of fire in the sky above the land. They’d come farther than he’d thought.

  When he turned the other way he thought he saw something in the darkness, as welcome as the shore of a desert island to a shipwrecked sailor.

  The end of the line.

  He moved as fast as he dared. Night was quick and graceful, already rendered half invisible by the churning ash. Behind him was Pan, navigating the uneven surface with care, her arms held out to her sides like a tightrope wa
lker. It felt like they were on a conveyor belt, a treadmill. Maybe they’d walk this thing forever.

  “We’ve got company,” Night said.

  Marlow twisted his head around, saw something walking toward them from the end of the conduit. Night planted her feet, aiming the blade of her spear at whoever was coming. It was hard to tell but it looked like a person rather than a demon. “Another ghost, I bet,” she said. “They just don’t know when to quit.”

  The figure took on substance as it approached, like it was forming from the clouds. A guy, dark hair, kind of handsome. A smile carved his face in two as he walked, and he held out his hand to them.

  “Amelia,” he said in a voice made out of a hundred whispers.

  “No,” whispered Pan.

  “I’ve missed you.”

  “No.”

  “Pan, who is that?” asked Marlow.

  “You killed me, Amelia,” the man said. “Now’s your chance to make it right.”

  “No,” Pan repeated.

  “Make it right,” he said. “It can all end here. Just one step, and it’s over.”

  Pan’s face fell, like something had been pulled right out of her. Marlow saw her look down, over the edge of the conduit. The thought was right there, etched in every line of her frown—she’s going to jump. And Marlow had reached for her before her expression hardened. This time, her reply wasn’t a whisper, it was a roar.

  “No!”

  The man shrugged, using a finger to scratch at his nose. His smile widened further, too big to be human. Marlow could almost see the mechanisms beneath.

  “That’s what he said you’d say,” came another voice, this one behind them. Marlow looked to see another man stepping out of the swirling dust, and this one crushed his lungs in a fist of grief.

  Danny, he tried to say. His brother was wearing his desert combat fatigues, a helmet angled on his head. He strode confidently, wearing a smile that Marlow had never seen before—not that he remembered anything of his brother other than the photos that his mom kept.