Hellwalkers

by Alexander Gordon Smith

  He glanced back. Behind them the world was almost dark again, although he didn’t see how there was any way another day could have passed. It wouldn’t be long before the sky started burning, but they didn’t need the light in here. There was a weak glow leaking from the far end of the passage.

  There were noises, too, something too faint to identify.

  “Maybe it’s the band,” he said, walking to Pan’s side. “All parties should have a band, right?”

  “Party?” said Night.

  “Welcome party,” Marlow replied. “Something’s waiting for us.”

  “Hope it’s mariachi,” said Night. She leaned her forehead against Marlow’s back, muttering, “I’m so tired.”

  He was, too, his body running on fumes, running on fear.

  “So tired,” Night said again.

  The passage angled to the right, then to the left, worming its path up into the heart of the mountain and getting steeper with every turn. The noises ahead were growing louder but he still couldn’t identify them. They echoed off the walls, off one another, becoming some twisted chorus of half sounds that grated on his every nerve.

  “Yeah,” said Marlow, his voice just a whisper. “That’s definitely a mariachi.”

  “Shut it,” said Night, thumping Marlow on the arm.

  He yelped, but his mouth snapped shut around it as they turned a corner in the corridor and it suddenly opened up into a bigger space.

  A much bigger space.

  It was like a football stadium, like MetLife or somewhere, the far end almost invisible. One vast circular wall enclosed the space—or not so much a wall as an engine, its mechanisms churning. Struts arced skyward like the ribs of some enormous animal, meeting in the middle where the tornado of darkness still roiled. Beneath it sat what could have been a pyramid, its walls made of machinery and its top lost in the clouds. The ground around it was a wasteland of rock and gleaming metal.

  Hundreds of those fat black arterial pipelines crossed the space, draped over one another like a nest of snakes. They must have been leaking, because there were pools of dark liquid everywhere. The pools seemed as if they were rippling, or at least that’s what he thought until he looked closer and saw that there were things moving on the edge of them, shapes that could almost be human.

  There was noise in here, that thumping pulse reverberating around the space, but it was quieter than it had been outside—quiet enough for him to hear the screams from the people there, screams and songs and laughter and incessant chatter and howls of glee and sorrow. It was the lullaby of a madhouse, of bedlam, and he felt the tattered threads of his own sanity pull loose a little more.

  “What now?” he said, chewing his knuckles to pieces.

  He turned to the center of the giant room, where the mechanical pyramid rose toward the clouds above, its tip invisible in the maelstrom. Everything led to it—the pipes, the finger-like stretches of Engine, the black pools. Everything led right here.

  Including us, he thought. Because what was the point in coming all this way just to turn back now?

  He hopped down from the end of the passage, slipping on the damp stone. He could feel the moisture seeping into the wounds in his feet—not painful, just weird, like it was probing them. There was a puddle of it ahead and he ducked down, trying to make sense of what he saw, and why it looked so familiar. Dozens of silver flecks swirled in the darkness like miniature shoals of fish, and when he leaned over to get a better look there was no sign of his reflection there.

  “Like the Black Pool,” he said aloud, thinking of their Engine and the pool that sat by it—that grotesque body of water you had to throw yourself in to make a deal. He looked up to see Pan pulling a face. She looked gaunt, half dead. He guessed he probably looked worse.

  “Always hated that thing,” she said.

  He helped her up and they kept moving, their footsteps falling into time with that bone-shaking pulse from the Engine. The piles of rock made it difficult to see where they were going, but so long as they kept that pyramid in sight he knew they wouldn’t stray too far. The sound of the other people in here was alternately muted and amplified by the metal walls, making it so that when he rounded one cairn the sudden rush of noise and movement took his breath away.

  There was a black lake ahead, almost as big as an Olympic swimming pool. Positioned around the rough edges were cages—the bars formed from pieces of Engine, all brass and obsidian. They were all empty save for the last one, which held a creature that he could make no sense of. It was almost human—two arms, two legs partially submerged in the pool—but it looked like it had been skinned, and there was something wrong with its head. There was no face there anymore, just a sucking hole right in the middle of it.

  Marlow splashed across the uneven ground. He didn’t exactly want to get a better look but he couldn’t turn away, seeing the tubes fastened into this creature’s limbs, seeing the veins that bulged black beneath its muscle, seeing the baby teeth that were pushing through the circumference of its mouth, small and sharp. The demon—because there was no doubt in his mind that that’s what he was looking at—must have sensed them, because it angled its head their way, sniffing. Its mouth drooped open, great gobs of black gunk dripping from it, and it started to laugh—uhuhuhuhuhuh—the sound unbearably real, and unbearably human.

  It smashed two clublike hands against the bars, rattling the cage, and Marlow quick-marched past it, walking up a small rise and past another mound of fractured stone. The lake he saw here had no cages, just four figures crouched at the edge of it, people who were completely naked and wire thin, apart from their distended stomachs. They were scooping up the black liquid and drinking it, over and over, barely even stopping for breath. It sprayed back out of their lips and dripped from their noses, their eyes, their ears, but still they drank, their dark eyes wide with mindless joy.

  Except for one who had no eyes at all.

  “Oh no,” Marlow said, the sudden recognition like a gunshot going off between his ears.

  “No,” echoed Pan.

  It couldn’t be, could it? It couldn’t be who Marlow thought it was. The worst guy imaginable, yes, the guy who made his time in the Fist unbearable. But not even he had deserved this.

  “Hanson?” said Night. “It’s him, Pan.”

  “Hanson!” Pan called out, taking a step toward him.

  He flinched, turned his head her way to reveal those gaping sockets where his eyes had never been. His body was covered in scars, riddled with them, and Marlow understood that he’d fought it, he’d fought hell. He must have died here a hundred times to have scars like those, a thousand. But then how long had it been since he died, since Mammon had killed him? And how long was that on this side of the void?

  Hanson licked his lips with a tongue that was too long, too black. Then he ducked down and scooped another handful of water into his mouth, swallowing, gagging, bursting with it.

  Pan was crying, sobs punching their way up from somewhere deep inside her. She covered her mouth, as if it were possible to be embarrassed in this place, hurrying past the drinkers and following the path ever deeper.

  It was the same at the next pool, where a young woman stood neck-deep in the black fluid and sang what could have been a keening song, her eyes as dark as pitch and drenched in sadness. They were all Engineers, Marlow knew, people who had died under contract, whose minds had been corrupted into rot by the black fluid, by the presence of the Devil. By the time they’d passed by, all three of them were crying their way toward the rotten heart of this cathedral.

  Only a distant voice held them back.

  “Hang on,” said Marlow, reaching out and stopping Pan. He stared back the way they’d come, back past the pools, past those ruins of flesh.

  “Wh—”

  “Just hang on,” he said again.

  He cocked his head, listened as a voice rose up, shrill and wicked. It spoke only one word, over and over, but it was a word that speared its way right through him.<
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  “Pan.”

  “It’s Patrick!” Pan proclaimed. But it didn’t matter. They were here. A spiral staircase wound its way up the outside of the central pyramid, leading into the vortex. Marlow could make out a shape in the storm, a coiling mass of shadow and madness whose nightmare pulse seemed to have become something else, something full of humor.

  The bastard was laughing at them.

  Something shuddered inside his head, a tectonic shift of emotion—fear, confusion, sorrow, guilt, and anger. It was a rage he’d never felt before, a fury that burned up from the deepest part of him, that threatened to split his throat in two, that escaped from his lips as a roar.

  No more, he thought, unable to shape the words. No more.

  And he was running, running without even knowing how, or why. The stairs were tall, surely carved for a giant, but he pulled himself up them, one at a time, one after the other, the world turning around him in slow, relentless circles. His legs burned, but the pain wasn’t real. He wasn’t real. How could he be? He’d been woven from the dead, he was a little piece of hell, as big a freak as anything here.

  “Marlow, wait,” Pan called out from below. But he didn’t listen to her, because she wasn’t real either. There was nothing real in this place, nothing but him. Whatever lay above them, in that tornado of movement and noise, it was the only real thing here.

  He climbed, the cavern vanishing into smoke and thunder, the maelstrom all around him. But the top of the pyramid couldn’t be far, he could almost see it, a ledge, and beyond it only darkness. He was on his knees now, his legs too weak to carry him. But still he moved forward, turning the final corner, scaling the last dozen steps, and finally seeing what lay there, at the very summit of hell.

  HOME

  He should have known that hell would save the very worst till last.

  He should have been ready for it.

  But nothing could have prepared him for this, not the demons, not the ghosts, not the horrors they’d been through since materializing here.

  The summit of this engineered mountain was the size of a basketball court, almost perfectly flat. Right in the middle of it was another pool of black water, the same size as the one back in the Fist’s original Engine. There was only one building here, and the sight of it was enough to make him want to throw himself off the ledge and end it all—not that jumping would have ended anything, of course.

  It was a house. A wooden house, the slats of the siding so old that there was only a haze of blue paint left. A set of steps led up to a front door that was shut tight, the filthy windows all closed, too. The curtains were drawn, the porch coming loose. Dozens of those black tubes fed into the house, along with sections of Engine that ticked and whirred like clockworks. The roof was missing, replaced by a bulging mass of black flesh that looked tumorous, diseased, one that stretched up into the seething gyre of the sky.

  It was a house, the kind you’d see on any street, the kind that a young family might live in, an old couple maybe. Only he knew this wasn’t home to either. He knew exactly who lived in this house: a woman, a teenage boy, and the ghost of a dead brother.

  It was a house.

  It was his house.

  “It’s…” he tried, but he couldn’t find the words. It was like the storm had plucked them right out of him. It’s a trick, he told himself. It had to be, another of hell’s games—the same thing that had forced them to see their mothers, fathers, brothers.

  “You are seeing that, right?” Marlow asked, the words fluttering like sails in the wind.

  “A house,” said Pan.

  “You’d think the Devil would upgrade,” said Night, her laugh hollow. “Pick somewhere with a good color scheme, maybe fewer rats. Must be a recession down here.”

  “You see a house?” he asked Pan, ignoring Night. “Blue, kinda, brown door, steps? A Staten Island kind of house?”

  “Yeah,” said Pan. Then she frowned. “Wait, you know it?”

  Marlow nodded. Something big had crawled out from his stomach, was clawing its way up his throat.

  “I live there.”

  “What?”

  His mind was reeling, like a bird thrashing inside a cage—it was only a matter of time before it broke free, before it got caught in the storm. He put his hands to his face, grabbed hold of it like he meant to pull it loose. His nails dug into the skin, the pain unbearable but still more bearable than this. He closed his eyes and wished it all away—pleasepleaseplease—but when he looked through his fingers again there was the black pool, the raging storm, and that house, that awful, impossible house.

  And as he stared at it, tears streaming down his face, the door clicked open.

  Pan took hold of his hands, pulled them away from his face. Then she threw herself at him, her arms locked tight around his shoulders, her head buried in his neck. She was speaking, the words hot against his skin.

  “We’ll do it together. Whatever is in there, you won’t be on your own.”

  He pressed his face into her hair, wondering how despite the fact she had been born again here, despite the fact she’d waded through the countless dead, despite the fact that none of them had washed for days, she still smelled just like Pan. He gripped her, held her like she was a part of him, like she was keeping him alive.

  Which was true, wasn’t it? It had been true since that day back in the parking garage, a million years ago.

  He held her, and breathed her, until she pulled away—awkwardly, because he couldn’t remember how to relax his arms.

  “You really live there?”

  “Yeah,” Marlow said. “Like, forever.”

  He thought back as far as he could, which had never been far. He had spent his childhood here, but his memory of the place began from when he was about five. He couldn’t remember a thing before that, except the death of his brother—more nightmare than memory, dulled by age but sharpened by imagination. He’d always just assumed that when Danny had died his brain had done some emergency surgery on itself, packed everything away in Styrofoam and bubble wrap. It wasn’t like there had been anything much of his childhood worth keeping.

  “But why?” Night said. “I don’t get it.”

  “You think it’s a trap?” asked Pan.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “What else could it be?”

  And for some reason, his head answered him: the truth.

  “There’s one way to find out,” he said, forcing his reluctant legs to start moving. He reached out and felt Pan take his hand, Night grabbing hold of the other one. He had the sudden, insane desire to start skipping, like a kid between his parents, and before he could stop it a giggle escaped his lips.

  The house replied. Or something in the house. A voice seemed to spill out of it, just a whisper, the words somehow wrong like they were being played backward. Then another sound, a cry of grief, like somebody in there had just discovered the cold body of a loved one.

  A blade of pain pushed its way inside Marlow’s head, just above his left ear, and he had to let go of Night to rub at his scalp. His skin was crawling as if there were maggots feasting beneath it. The house was twenty yards away now and the door had opened further, revealing a shadowed hallway that looked just as he remembered it.

  “You think the Devil’s in there?” Night asked.

  “Yeah,” said Marlow. Then, for a reason he wasn’t quite sure of, he said, “Or something worse.”

  Fifteen yards, and Marlow had to look behind him because he thought he heard that voice, rising up over the storm. There it was again, faint but close enough to make out Pan’s name, called over and over.

  Ten yards, he could see the windows shaking in their frames, could hear the squeal of glass about to break. The whole building looked like it was about to collapse, only those pipes and mechanisms holding it together.

  Five yards, and through the open door Marlow saw the wooden floorboards, scuffed by Donovan’s claws when the dog went crazy at the sound of somebody knocking. He saw the m
irror on the floor, resting against the wall because it had fallen off months ago and Marlow had always told his mom he’d put it back up one day. He saw the fan of letters stuffed behind the radiator, bills he knew his mom would never read. But the darkness was too heavy, too thick, to see beyond those first few feet. It looked like a throat, and Marlow couldn’t help but think of anglerfish, those glowing lures. The house looked like it could swallow him whole.

  “We go in together,” said Pan.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Just give me a—”

  “Pan?” That voice again, behind them, louder now. “Pan? Pan?”

  She looked back, her face creased with anxiety.

  Marlow.

  Another voice. He snapped his head back because this voice had come from inside the house—thin and reedy, a thousand years old. There was a desperate gasp for air, then it called his name again—not a sound but something else, something that seemed to come from inside him.

  “Your nose is bleeding again,” said Pan, smudging it away with her thumb.

  His head pounded in time with that relentless pulse, the force of it surely enough to liquefy his brain. It was impossible to think straight and he wondered how long it would be before he, too, was wandering the cavern, drinking from those black pools, tearing off his own face.

  “You sure you want to—”

  “Yeah,” he said, trying to stare inside the house, trying to make sense of the darkness there. Whatever it was, it was moving, swaying, beckoning. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  Because he had to know why his house was here. He had to know who was inside.

  He stepped up to the threshold, opened his mouth to speak.

  Hello? Who’s in there? Whoever it is, I’m gonna crush your ass.

  Nothing came out, though.

  “Whatever it is,” Pan said. “We deal with it together. All of us.” And he could hear her whisper together again and again beneath her breath as she stood behind him, as she waited for him to take that step.