by Glenn Cooper
“In your day it would have been called the Hashemite Empire. Babylonia, in ancient times.”
“Indeed, that is what it’s called here: Babylonia. So, in your twenty-first century, you are still fighting the Crusades?”
“I guess the other side calls it that. We don’t.”
“War is a never-ending story. In your world and in ours.”
“I’d like you to tell me more about your world. If I’m going to rescue Emily, I’ve got to know what I’m dealing with.”
“Quite right. I have been doing all the interrogations. Now it’s your turn. Shall I start with myself?”
“Please.”
“How old do you think I am?”
“I don’t know, fifty?”
“Fifty-five, as of 1874, that is. I was a lawyer in London, with a busy commercial practice. Life was good, or so I thought. I had a comely wife, one son and one daughter who both matured admirably and acquitted themselves well in their early adulthood, though I do not know what became of them. It is enough to know that they did not, to the best of my knowledge, become denizens of this domain. How suddenly things changed for me. I discovered through intercepted correspondence that my wife and my legal partner, one Abner Coopersmith, had been engaging in an affair of the heart. I was blinded by rage and determined to have my revenge. I knew a man, an Irishman in London by the name of Caffrey, who was skilled in the art of explosives. I knew all sorts in those days, from lords to scoundrels. Caffrey supplied me with a cask of black powder that I placed in the basement of Coopersmith’s house in Tavistock Square while he was in attendance. I lit a long fuse and made my escape. I brought that house down, John, upon the heads of Coopersmith, his wife and his children. The police came to suspect me and in time, moved to make an arrest, but I eluded them for a spell until, in despair for the life I had lost—not Coopersmith’s life, I assure you—I threw myself off the highest possible point of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and immediately thereafter, I found myself here, in Hell, in a rather sodden field, quite remarkably intact. Caffrey was caught and hanged within weeks. Allow me to introduce him.”
The guard with red hair, who was standing at the wall, nodded his head.
“Our fates are intertwined,” Wisdom said. “Caffrey serves me still.”
John muttered, “Incredible.”
“Isn’t it?” Wisdom said. “After so many years, one tends to forget how incredible all of this is, but we do tend to relive the experience with each new arrival. To return to my tale—I was picked off the streets of our London town by a filthy crew of sweepers and taken to a gentleman named Cosgrove who lived not far away. Cosgrove was a seventeenth-century man, a banker in his day. He was an agreeable enough fellow who took the time to thoroughly explain things to me. You see, a goodly number of arrivals here are not, what you would call, men of refinement. They’re what you would expect, the scum of the Earth, like our friend Dirk here.”
“I take no offense,” Dirk said.
“I am so relieved,” Wisdom replied. “Cosgrove took a liking to me. He and I were birds of a feather and rather than passing me along for his usual fee, he took me under that feathered wing of his and taught me his trade. I learned how to be, well, let me be quite candid with you, a flesh broker. The sweepers pick up new arrivals and bundle them off to men like me who are sprinkled throughout the realm. We make an assessment of any particular skills they might possess and make transfer of that person to the most suitable lord in need of those services. If they have no desirable skills we will usually have them returned to the jurisdiction of a local lord who will invariably need men to work their fields or empty their latrines. My business is to know what my clients are looking for and more importantly, what they are willing to pay.”
John looked at him squarely and said, “I don’t want to insult you, Solomon, but it sounds pretty unsavory. You’re a slave trader.”
“Everything here is unsavory, a game of raw power and naked leverage. I am but a cog in a huge, filthy wheel. I make no apologies. But I am a clever cog. I know who wants a man of science for his employ. I know who needs warriors. I know who wants builders, tradesmen. I know who wants women—well, they all want women, don’t they, as they are in such short supply. And the fetching ones, they are the real prize. I digress. Cosgrove treated me well enough. He saw the merit in expanding his capabilities and the two of us were, I’m told, the busiest brokers in Brittania. When misfortune struck Cosgrove after a time, removing him from his lofty perch, I assumed his duties and I have prospered greatly over the many years.”
John saw a smirk cross Wisdom’s face when he spoke of Cosgrove’s misfortune. He suspected that Wisdom might well have been its architect but let it pass.
Wisdom continued, “I earned enough gold and silver to build this very house, a replica of my boyhood home in Greenwich. It wasn’t on this spot. The Royal Observatory was here, of course. But this hill has a good aspect, don’t you think?”
John signaled for Caffrey to refill his wine cup and said, “I think I need to understand the way things work around here.”
“Let me start from the beginning,” Wisdom said. “You arrive in Hell at the precise place you died. If you died in Greenwich, you appear in our Greenwich at the exact same latitude and longitude. Our terrain is the same as mother Earth although the influence of man has not been felt to the extent it has in your world. I’ve been told that in your time and place, hills and mountains have been flattened, rivers have been diverted, forests have been cut down. Our world is similar, but far more primitive, in that regard.”
Dirk was nodding. “Tell ’im what ’appens if you die in water. That always gives me a laugh.”
“Yes, well, I’m not sure how amusing John will find it but let’s say you were to die at sea in a shipwreck, or in a river. You’d find yourself in the same pickle barrel here. If you are able to swim to safety, then fine. But if you can’t then you’ll drown again, scarcely aware of what has befallen you.”
“But I already told ’im, Mister Wisdom, you can’t die ’ere.”
“No indeed. Eternity is a very long time but it seems likely we are here for eternity. We cannot and do not die. We suffer our fates for all time. We may succumb to illness, or sustain injury or starvation but our existences are simply not to be snuffed out.”
John leaned forward. “I wounded five men in Dartford, seriously enough to cause their deaths but they kept moving.”
“There, you’ve seen it for yourself. Take an extreme example. One’s head may be severed from one’s body and still there is life. The lips may move, though no words can be spoken without the benefit of chest and lungs. The eyes blink and may be trained to blink once for a yes and twice for a no. Even when the flesh is fully degraded, decayed to pulp, the bones, falling to splinter and dust, we believe there is still consciousness, still suffering. Eternal suffering. That is our sorry fate.”
“How can you know that for sure?”
“It is difficult to prove but all the evidence points to such a conclusion. One only needs to visit a rotting room to know.”
“I’ve smelled them.”
Wisdom stood and nodded towards Caffrey.
“Then you must see one too. All my words border on abstractions without seeing them. I’ll assemble a troop of my men to keep us safe in the darkness. It’s but a short walk down the hill into Greenwich to the nearest chamber.”
John rose, tipsy from the wine, but he still had the faculties to automatically do an inventory of his weapons, an old army trait. His sword was on his belt but he remembered he’d left the flintlock with the horse.
“I had a saddle bag,” he said.
“Your pistol and shot are safe,” Wisdom said. “I had Caffrey bring the bag to your room. It is your legitimate trophy and a valuable object. I wouldn’t wish it to disappear into the night.”
The evening air was still. A party of Wisdom’s men brandishing swords and lanterns led the way down the hill toward the town of Greenwich. Dirk
seemed to take delight in their company and he chatted amiably with them, regaling the lot with John’s battle with the sweepers and with the tattooed Reggie. The town below them was dark, melting into the gloam of the evening save for a few open fires dotted here and there. John strode alongside Wisdom who bore his own candle lantern, a bony arm extending from his cloak.
John asked the question that was burning a hole in his tongue. “What buys you a ticket here?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“What do you have to do to wind up in Hell?”
“Ah, I see. It is surely the most despicable of things. Murder, mayhem, violent acts, abject cruelty to one’s fellow man. I was a God-fearing Christian in my lifetime and I did then believe that the roster of offenses to condemn a man to Hell was very much longer. Blasphemy. Idolatry. Failure to accept Jesus Christ as lord and savior. Fornication. Adultery. The list does goes on. Yet it seems that none of that is true. It is simply a matter of the worst offenses a man might render unto others.”
John stopped in his tracks, suddenly sober. “Then you must have a heck of a lot of soldiers here.”
Wisdom paused to answer. “A question of profundity coming from a former one yourself. In my many years of observation and query, I am assured that there is dispensation for brutal acts committed in legitimate war on the field of battle. If it were not so, Hell would be far more populous, methinks.”
“Jus ad bellum,” John said.
“Yes, your Latin and your scholarship are very good, indeed,” Wisdom replied. “The law of war, as fashioned by men, does appear to have a high moral meaning after all.”
John started down the hill again and stewed in silence.
“What about children?” John finally asked.
“There are none. True, children may commit heinous acts but they do not come here.”
“Who makes the judgment about all of this? Who decides who comes and who doesn’t?”
Wisdom shrugged. “Mysteries abound. It stands to reason that there must be some high power, a God perhaps, who sorts souls like apples—good ones there, bad ones here, but I did not have a day of judgment, nor did anyone to my knowledge. We simply appeared here. I do not know the answer to your question. My name may be Wisdom, but I do not possess this wisdom.”
“So I take it you haven’t met Satan.”
“Ha! When I first arrived I rather expected to meet the horned gentleman whenever I rounded a corner. Yet this malevolent king has not made his presence felt to anyone I know. Some believe in him, of course. Perhaps he exists but I think not.”
“Let me come back to children. You’ve got men, you’ve got women, how come you don’t have children?”
Wisdom seemed to allow himself a chuckle. “The carnal act is very popular here, inhibited only by the scarcity of women, though buggery abounds. But female relations do not result in offspring. There is no reproduction of the species. The animal kingdom renews itself as it did on Earth. If it did not I suspect we would all be eating each other’s flesh for supper, but we augment our population only with new arrivals.”
“What’s the population here?”
“There is no way to know, no facility or need to count. It does seem considerably fewer than when I, alive, roamed the streets of London. Think on it. What number of men who have walked the Earth have done enough evil to cause them to be sent here? One in one hundred? One in one thousand? One in ten thousand? And whatever number that may be, how many women? The gentler species is far less inclined toward barbarism. This is a fact for which there is no dispute. Now, weigh that against the proposition that once here, one may be fortunate to remain in a state of good function for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. We do not age. Absent calamity we stay as we were when we did first arrive. Why some time back I made the acquaintance of a strapping young man who died in Brittania before the birth of Christ! He was a soldier in the invading Roman army of Julius Caesar and yet, unless an ill wind has since befallen him, he still ekes out an existence on the streets of London.”
John fell silent, lost in thought. It all seemed like an elaborate and tortured dream. He hoped that any moment he’d wake up and find himself back in his bed, feeling Emily’s warm skin beside him. But near the base of the hill, the putrid smell of their destination began its assault and convinced him that all of this was dreadfully real.
“Almost there,” Wisdom said. “Take this.”
He drew a woolen scarf from the pocket of his cloak and handed it to John.
“What for?”
“You will wish to cover your nose. And drink some of this.”
He took a flask from his other pocket and gave it to John. He unstoppered it and sniffed. Rum.
“I wished I’d been given strong drink the first time I entered a rotting room,” Wisdom said.
The town began where the hill ended. Cooking smoke drifted from the shuttered houses and John could hear low voices coming from some of them.
The stench grew and grew and soon the party stood before a large barn located behind a row of measly cottages. John took another swig of syrupy rum and wrapped his face tightly with the scarf. On Wisdom’s command his men lifted the heavy, wooden latch and pulled the double doors open on their creaking hinges. Dirk retched at the smell but the other men seemed immune and held their lanterns high.
John stepped forward into the light.
This was Hell.
There were masses of rotting, fetid remains almost ceiling-high along the interior walls of the building. And it would not have been so horrific if it were simply like the inert, decaying refuse of some abattoir. The putrefying flesh was in motion, an undulating, roiling mass of disgust, and to make matters much, much worse, there were sounds coming from within, a ghastly cacophony of low moans, sobs and the occasional formed word, a name, a call for a mother, a plea for help.
John removed himself after several seconds and gulped down the remainder of the flask outside the barn.
“Jesus.”
One of the guards heard him and answered gleefully, “Jesus ain’t here,” before Wisdom shut him up and told them to secure the doors.
“I am sorry, John,” Wisdom said, standing beside him. “It was necessary for you to gain an understanding.”
“Why do you have these?”
“They serve a number of functions. In a world where one cannot deprive a man of his life, banishment to a rotting room is the ultimate punishment. And it serves a practicality. The maimed can be aggregated in discreet places so as not to generally befoul the populated areas or the countryside, though that happens too.”
“How long have they been there?”
“I could not possibly answer that. Some as long as centuries, I should imagine.”
“That’s impossible. A body decays to bones within weeks in the heat.”
“Not in Hell. Human decay is exceedingly slow here. More the cruelty. Come, let us return to my house where we may have more food and drink before we retire for the night.”
“I don’t think I’m ever going to eat again.”
“Of course you will.”
Halfway up the hill John recovered enough to ask the most important question.
“I came here for one reason and one reason only, to find my friend. You seem to be a very well-connected man. Do you know where I can find her?”
“I have heard tell that your woman has been spirited off to Francia on board a ship, in the company of agents of the Duke of Guise.”
“Then take me there. Help me get her back.”
“It is beyond my capacity to do so.”
“I’ll find a way to pay you.”
“It is not a matter of payment. In the morning I will take you to a man who has the capacity to assist you.”
“Who is he?”
“He is the king of this realm, King Henry.”
“Is this a Henry I’d recognize from history?”
“Perhaps so. You would know him as King Henry the Eighth.”
Though she was standing on dry land, Emily still felt the rolling sea pulsing through her legs. The three-masted ship was at anchor off the rocky shore and the small rowing boat that had carried her to the beach was returning to the ship, battling the waves.
It was gray and damp and she felt grubby and in need of a wash. Her clothes, the same skirt, blouse and sensible shoes she had worn on the day of the Hercules experiment were smudged with dirt, her hair was matted and her skin was sooty from the oily lamps below the decks.
“My lady,” the soldier said, “we must go.”
He had been her constant companion during the crossing. As the storm lashed the ship, he reassured her, brought her broth and cushions, and offered apologies for her discomfort. With fair seas and a favorable wind, the passage from Brittania to Francia might take only half a day, he had told her. Unfortunately, the journey from Hastings had taken two gut-wrenching days and nights.
His name was Phillipe Marot. His English was passable, on a similar par to Emily’s French, and between the two of them they’d been able to cobble together an extended conversation. She had learned some basic information during her brief time in Britannia, but Captain Marot had given her a richer knowledge of the surreal world in which she found herself.
Her initial disorientation had been far greater than John’s for she had none of his preparation. In one moment she had been standing in the MAAC control room and in the next, she was in soupy mud in the middle of a rank village, urgently beckoned to come inside a rough cottage by two brothers, one calling himself Dirk, the other Duck. She thought she surely must be dead, until the sniffing lads assured her that she was very much and very strangely alive.
Soon she was in the hands of a foul character named Withers who, after she kicked and punched at his soldiers, had bound her hands and trussed her onto his horse to take her to a large house on a hill to be interrogated by an unctuous man called Solomon Wisdom. Before the light of the next day, confused and angry, an unsavory character named D’Aret who brought her to Hastings, picked her up. There, D’Aret, who repeatedly referred to himself as an ambassador and an agent of someone named the Duke of Guise, delivered her to a coastal house where a party of furtive Frenchmen held her in ropes until the next night when their torches summoned a small boat offshore. Under a moonless sky she had been rowed to a ladder dangling from a large sailing ship whereupon Captain Marot took charge of her.
