The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  Two winged, toad faced, demons with talons for hands and hands for feet, Gesnil and Trinkthil, saw to the orderliness of the line of passengers that ran from the shore back a hundred yards into the writhing human continent of dead. Every day there were more travellers, and no matter how many trips Charon made, there was no hope of ever emptying the endless beach.

  Brandishing cat-o-nine-tails with barbed tips fashioned from incisors, the demons lashed the “tourists,” as they called them, subduing those unwilling to go.

  “Another load of the falsely accused, Charon,” said Gesnil, puffing on a lit human finger jutting from the corner of his mouth.

  “Watch this woman, third back, in the blue dress,” said Trinkthil, “her blithering lamentations will bore you to sleep. You know, she never really meant to add Belladonna to the recipe for her husband’s gruel.”

  Charon shook his head.

  “We’ve gotten word that there will be no voyages for a time,” said Gesnil.

  “Yes,” said Charon, “I’ve been granted a respite by the Master. A holiday.”

  “A century’s passed already?” said Gesnil. “My, my, it seemed no more than three. Time flies…

  “Travelling?” asked Trinkthil. “Or staying home?”

  Charon ignored the question and said “Send them along.”

  The demons knew to obey, and they directed the first in line to move forward. A bald, overweight man in a cassock, some member of the clergy, stepped up. He was trembling so that his jowls shook. He’d waited on the shore in dire fear and anguish for centuries, milling about, fretting as to the ultimate nature of his fate.

  “Payment,” said Charon.

  The man tipped his head back and opened his mouth. A round shiny object lay beneath his tongue. The boatman reached out and took the gold coin, putting it in the pocket of his cloak. “Next,” called Charon as the man moved past him and took a seat on the bench of skulls.

  Hell’s orange sun screamed in its death throes every evening, a pandemonium sweeping down from above that made even the demons sweat and set the master’s three headed dog to cowering. That horrendous din worked its way into the rocks, the river, the petrified trees, and everything brimmed with misery. Slowly, it diminished as the starless, moonless dark came on, devouring every last shred of light. With that infernal night came a cool breeze whose initial tantalizing relief never failed to deceive the damned, though they be residents for a thousand years, with a false promise of Hope. That growing wind carried in it a catalyst for memory, and set all who it caressed to recalling in vivid detail their lost lives – a torture individually tailored, more effective than fire.

  Charon sat in his home, the skull of a fallen god, on the crest of a high flint hill, overlooking the river. Through the left eye socket glazed with transparent lies, he could be seen sitting at a table, a glutton’s-fat tallow burning, its flame guttering in the night breeze let in through the gap of a missing tooth. Laid out before him was a curling width of tattooed flesh skinned from the back of an ancient explorer who’d no doubt sold his soul for a sip from the Fountain of Youth. In the boat man’s right hand was a compass and in his left a writing quill. His gaze traced along the strange parchment the course of his own river, Acheron, the River of Pain, to where it crossed paths with Pyriphlegethon, the River of Fire. That burning course was eventually quelled in cataracts of steam where it emptied into and became the Lethe, River of Forgetting.

  He traced his next day’s journey with the quill tip, gliding it an inch above the meandering line of vein blue. There, in the meager width of that last river’s depiction, almost directly half way between its origin and end in the mournful Cocytus, was a freckle. Anyone else would have thought it no more than a bodily blemish inked over by chance in the production of the map, but Charon was certain after centuries of overhearing whispered snatches of conversation from his unlucky passengers that it represented the legendary island of Oondeshai.

  He put down his quill and compass and sat back in the chair, closing his eyes. Hanging from the center of the cathedral cranium above, the wind chime made of dangling bat bones clacked as the mischievous breeze that invaded his home lifted one corner of the map. He sighed at the touch of cool wind as its insidious effect reeled his memory into the past.

  One night, he couldn’t recall how many centuries before, he was lying in bed on the verge of sleep, when there came a pounding at the hinged door carved in the left side of the skull. “Who’s there?” he called in the fearsome voice he used to silence passengers. There was no verbal answer, but another barrage of banging ensued. He rolled out of bed, put on his cloak and lit a tallow. Taking the candle with him, he went to the door and flung it open. A startled figure stepped back into the darkness. Charon thrust the light forward and beheld a cowed, trembling man, his naked flesh covered in oozing sores and wounds.

  “Who are you?” asked the boat man.

  The man stared up at him, holding out a hand.

  “You’ve escaped from the pit, haven’t you?”

  The back side of the flint hill atop which his home sat overlooked the enormous pit, its circumference at the top, a hundred miles across. Spiraling along its inner wall was a path that led down and down in ever decreasing arcs through the various levels of Hell to end at a pin point in the very mind of the Master. Even at night, if Charon were to go behind the skull and peer out over the rim, he could see a faint reddish glow and hear the distant echo of plaintive wails.

  The man finally nodded.

  “Come in,” said Charon, and held the door as the stranger shuffled past him.

  Later, after he’d been offered a chair, a spare cloak, and a cup of nettle tea, the broken visitor began to come around.

  “You know,” said Charon, “there’s no escape from Hell.”

  “This I know,” mumbled the man, making a great effort to speak as if he’d forgotten the skill. “But there is an escape in Hell.”

  “What are you talking about? The dog will be here within the hour to fetch you back. He’s less than gentle.”

  “I need to make the river,” said the man.

  “What’s your name?” asked Charon.

  “Wieroot,” said the man with a grimace.

  The boatman nodded. “This escape in Hell, where is it, what is it?”

  “Oondeshai,” said Wieroot, “an island in the River Lethe.”

  “Where did you hear of it?”

  “I created it,” he said, holding his head with both hands as if to remember. “Centuries ago, I wrote it into the fabric of the mythology of Hell.”

  “Mythology?” asked Charon. “I suppose those wounds on your body are merely a myth?”

  “The suffering’s real here, don’t I know it, but the entire construction of Hell is, of course, man’s own invention. The Pit, the three headed dog, the rivers, you, if I may say so, all sprung from the mind of humanity, confabulated to punish itself.”

  “Hell has been here from the beginning,” said Charon.

  “Yes,” said Wieroot, “in one form or another. But when, in the living world, something is added to the legend, some detail to better convince believers or convert new ones, here it leaps into existence with a ready made history that instantly spreads back to the start and a guaranteed future that creeps inexorably forward.” The escapee fell into a fit of coughing, smoke from the fires of the pit issuing in small clouds from his lungs.

  “The heat’s made you mad,” said Charon. “You’ve had too much time to think.”

  “Both may be true,” croaked Wieroot, wincing in pain, “but listen for a moment more. You appear to be a man, yet I’ll wager you don’t remember your youth. Where were you born? How did you become the boatman?”

  Charon strained his memory, searching for an image of his past in the world of the living. All he saw was rows and rows of heads, tilting back, proffering the coin beneath the tongue. An image of him setting out across the river, passing between the giant oaks, repeated behind his eyes three doz
en times in rapid succession.

  “Nothing there, am I correct?”

  Charon stared hard at his guest.

  “I was a cleric,” said Wieroot, “and in copying a sacred text describing the environs of Hell, I deviated from the disintegrating original and added the existence of Oondeshai. Over the course of years, decades, centuries, other scholars found my creation and added it to their own works and so, now, Oondeshai, though not as well known as yourself or your river, is an actuality in this desperate land.”

  From down along the river bank came the approaching sound of Cerberus baying. Wieroot stood, sloughing off the cloak to let it drop into his chair. “I’ve got to get to the river,” he said. “But consider this. You live in the skull of a fallen god. This space was once filled with a substance that directed the universe, no, was the universe. How does a god die?”

  “You’ll never get across,” said Charon.

  “I don’t want to. I want to be caught in its flow.”

  “You’ll drown.”

  “Yes, I’ll drown, be bitten by the spiny eels, burned in the River of Fire, but I won’t die, for I’m already dead. Some time ages hence, my body will wash up on the shore of Oondeshai, and I will have arrived home. The way I crafted the island, the moment you reach its shores and pull yourself from the River of Forgetting, you instantly remember everything.”

  “It sounds like a child’s tale,” Charon murmured.

  “Thank you,” said the stranger.

  “What gave you cause to create this island?” asked the boatman.

  Wieroot staggered towards the door. As he opened it and stepped out into the pitch black, he called back, “I knew I would eventually commit murder.”

  Charon followed out into the night and heard the man’s feet pacing away down the flint hill towards the river. Seconds later, he heard the wheezing breath of the three headed dog. Growling, barking, sounded in triplicate. There was silence for a time, and then finally…a splash, and in that moment, for the merest instant, an image of a beautiful island flashed behind the boatman’s eyes.

  He’d nearly been able to forget the incident with Wieroot as the centuries flowed on, their own River of Pain, until one day he heard one of his passengers whisper the word “Oondeshai” to another. Three or four times this happened, and then, only a half century past, a young woman, still radiant though dead, with shiny black hair and a curious red dot of a birthmark just below her left eye, was ushered onto his boat. He requested payment. When she tilted her head back, opened her mouth and lifted her tongue, there was no coin but instead a small, tightly folded package of flesh. Charon nearly lost his temper as he retrieved it from her mouth, but she whispered quickly, “A map to Oondeshai.”

  These words were like a slap to his face. He froze for the merest instant, but then thought quickly, and, nodding, stepped aside for her to take a seat. “Next,” he yelled and the demons were none the wiser. Later that night, he unfolded the crudely cut rectangle of skin, and after a close inspection of the tattoo cursed himself for having been duped. He swept the map onto the floor and the night breeze blew it into a corner. Weeks later, after finding it had been blown back out from under the table into the middle of the floor, he lifted it and searched it again. This time he noticed the freckle in the length of Lethe’s blue line and wondered.

  He kept his boat in a small lagoon hidden by a thicket of black poplars. It was just after sunrise, and he’d already stowed his provisions in the hold below deck. After lashing them fast with lengths of hangman’s rope, he turned around to face the chaotically beating heart of the craft. The large blood organ, having once resided in the chest of the Queen of Sirens, was suspended in the center of the hold by thick branch-like veins and arteries that grew into the sides of the boat. Its vasculature expanded and contracted, and the heart itself beat erratically, undulating and shivering, sweating red droplets.

  Charon waited until after it died, lay still, and then was startled back to life by whatever immortal force pervaded its chambers. Once it was moving again, he gave a high pitched whistle, a note that began at the bottom of the register and quickly rose to the top. At the sound of this signal, the wet red meat of the thing parted in a slit to reveal an eye.

  The orb swiveled to and fro, and the boatman stepped up close with a burning tallow in one hand and the map, opened, in the other. He back lit the scrap of skin to let the eye read its tattoo. He’d circled the freckle that represented Oondeshai with his quill, so the destination was clearly marked. All he’d have to do is steer around the dangers, keep the keel in deep water and stay awake. Otherwise, the craft now knew the way to go.

  Up on deck, he cast off the ropes, and instead of uttering the word “There,” he spoke a command used less than once a century – “Away.” The boat moved out of the lagoon and onto the river. Charon felt something close to joy at not having to steer between the giant white oaks. He glanced up to his left at the top of the flint hill and saw the huge skull, staring down at him. The day was hot and orange and all of Hell was busy at the work of suffering, but he, the boatman, was off on a holiday.

  On the voyage out, he travelled with the flow of the river, so its current combined with the inherent, enchanted propulsion of the boat made for swift passage. There were the usual whirlpools, outcroppings of sulfur and brimstone to avoid, but these occasional obstacles were a welcome diversion. He’d never taken this route before when on holiday. Usually, he’d just stay home, resting, making minor repairs to the boat, playing knuckle bones with some of the bat winged demons from the pit on a brief break from the grueling work of torture.

  Once, as a guest of the master during a holiday, he’d been invited into the bottommost reaches of the pit, transported in a winged chariot that glided down through the center of the great spiral. There, where the Czar of the Underworld kept a private palace made of frozen sighs, in a land of snow so cold one’s breath fractured upon touching the air, he was led by an army of living marble statues, shaped like men but devoid of faces, down a tunnel that led to an enormous circle of clear ice. Through this transparent barrier he could look out on the realm of the living. Six days he spent transfixed between astonishment and fear at the sight of the world the way it was. That vacation left a splinter of ice in his heart that took three centuries to melt.

  None of his previous getaways ever resulted in a tenth the sense of relief he already felt having gone but a few miles along the nautical route to Oondeshai. He repeated the name of the island again and again under his breath as he worked the tiller or manned the shallows pole, hoping to catch another glimpse of its image as he had the night Wieroot dove into the Acheron. As always, that mental picture refused to coalesce, but he’d learned to suffice with its absence, which had become a kind of solace in itself.

  To avoid dangerous eddies and rocks in the middle flow of the river, Charon was occasionally forced to steer the boat in close to shore on the port side. There, he glimpsed the marvels of that remote, forgotten landscape – a distant string of smoldering volcanoes; a thundering herd of bloodless behemoths, sweeping like a white wave across the immensity of a fissured salt flat; a glittering forest of crystal trees alive with long tailed monkeys made of pitch. The distractions were many, but he struggled to put away his curiosity and concentrate for fear of running aground and ripping a hole in the hull.

  He hoped to make the River of Fire before nightfall, so as to have light with which to navigate. To travel the Acheron blind would be sheer suicide, and unlike Wieroot, Charon was uncertain as to whether he was already dead or alive or merely a figment of Hell’s imagination. There was the possibility of finding a natural harbour and dropping the anchor, but the land through which the river ran had shown him fierce and mysterious creatures stalking him along the banks and that made steering through the dark seem the fairer alternative.

  As the day waned, and the sun began to whine with the pain of its gradual death, Charon peered ahead with a hand shading his sight in anticipation of a
glimpse at the flames of Pyriphlegethon. During his visit to the palace of frozen sighs, the master had let slip that the liquid fire of those waters burned only sinners. Because the boat was a tool of Hell, made of Hell, he was fairly certain it could withstand the flames, but he wasn’t sure if at some point in his distant past he had not sinned. If he were to blunder into suffering, though, he thought that he at least would learn some truth about himself.

  In the last moments of light, he lit three candles and positioned them at the prow of the boat. They proved ineffectual against the night, casting their glow only a shallows pole length ahead of the craft. Their glare wearied Charon’s eyes. To distract himself from fatigue, he went below and brought back a dried, salted, Harpy leg to chew on.

  In recent centuries the winged creatures had grown scrawny, almost thin enough to slip his snares. The meat was known to improve eyesight and exacerbate the mind. Its effect had nothing to do with clarity, merely a kind of agitation of thought that was, at this juncture, preferable to slumber. Sleep was the special benefit of the working class of Hell, and the boatman usually relished it. Dreams especially were an exotic escape from the routine of work. The sinners never slept, nor did the master.

  Precisely at the center of the night Charon felt some urge, some pull of intuition to push the tiller hard to the left. As soon as he’d made the reckless maneuver, he heard from up ahead the loud gulping sound that meant a whirlpool laid in his path. The sound grew quickly to a deafening strength, and only when he was upon the swirling monster, riding its very lip around the right arc, was he able to see its immensity.

  The boat struggled to free itself from the draw, and instead of being propelled by its magic it seemed to be clawing its way forward, dragging its weight free of the hopeless descent. There was nothing he could do but hold the tiller firm and stare with widened eyes down the long, treacherous tunnel. Not a moment passed after he was finally free of it than the boat entered the turbulent waters where Acheron crossed the River of Fire.