“Mab, please don’t frighten the masses,” I requested.
“As you wish, Ma’am,” came his grunted reply.
Erasmus’s voice floated back from the blackness ahead of us. “Tell me, again, why I am crawling through this dismal tunnel? Because some demon put on a pretty face, called itself an angel, and told Big Sister Miranda the quickest way to damn us all? Aren’t we supposed to be keeping our staffs out of Hell? If so, this hardly seems the wisest course.”
“It was a true vision,” Cornelius’s voice replied. “I do not trust our elder sister, but I trust what I hear. When she spoke of her vision, Miranda’s voice held joy. Demons come in many guises and bring many passions—among them glee, excitement, and false hope—but they never bring joy. What Miranda saw was an angel.”
“But our angel? It makes no sense! Miranda was never initiated into the Orbis Suleimani. Why would our angel come to Miranda? Why would she not appear to those of us who serve her?” asked Erasmus.
“God moves in mysterious ways,” replied Gregor’s husky near-whisper, “and fills what vessels are available to him. Perhaps Miranda made herself available when the rest of us did not.”
“Oooph! Oh, this is ghastly,” Logistilla complained as she bumped into Titus. “Ulysses’s staff has been to Hell before. Why can’t we just teleport there?”
“Because I can only go the one place my staff has been,” Ulysses replied. “Believe me, you would not want to go there!”
“I don’t want to go at all!” whined Logistilla. “What evidence do we have that any other place in Hell will be any better?”
“Light!” cried Mephisto, from up front. From the start, he had abandoned his hands and knees in favor of the hip-stomach-and-elbow wriggle of a soldier’s crawl. “I see light! I think we’re coming to the end. Yippee!”
“Only Mephisto would cheer our successfully crawling into the Inferno.” Logistilla’s voice floated up from behind me. “Oh, do hurry! I have a most horrible cramp in my leg!”
I emerged from the tunnel through a hole in a clay embankment and adjusted my shoulder bag. Outside, the world was a swirl of featureless mist. Mephisto, Erasmus, Cornelius, and Theo were already standing when I reached the mouth of the tunnel. I climbed to my feet and waited for Mab, Logistilla, Titus, Gregor, Ulysses, and Caliban to join us.
Erasmus and Cornelius had objected to bringing Caliban, so Mephisto had sent him away. Then, once we were in the tunnel, Mephisto had tapped his staff, and Caliban had reappeared, making the point moot. Now he crawled along with the rest of us, toting a heavy club. Titus’s children were not with us. They had been deposited back in their home in the Okefenokee, where they were being looked after by their own au pair, along with trusted Aerie Ones, who had been sent by Mustardseed, whom I had managed to speak with briefly.
As I had feared, two of the Priority Contracts had gone awry over the holiday. Mustardseed had handled the first one readily, but the second had resulted in an earthquake in Guatemala I could have prevented had I been in the office. With a heavy heart, I gave Mustardseed orders to carry him through the next few weeks. If I was not back by then, he would have to contact the Orbis Suleimani for instructions.
Now, standing in the mists of Limbo, I examined our surroundings. The ambient light issued from the mist itself, which offered a dim glow hardly bright enough to let us see our own hands in front of our faces, much less each other. This swirling mist was all that I could see in any direction, except straight ahead, where, some distance away, two enormous half-moons shone, the points of their crescents facing each other. I recognized it from the sketches in Father’s journal. This was the Gate of False Dreams.
Faint manlike shapes, long and drawn, moved through the mist about us, seeking and fleeing each other in some eternal chase. One of these phantom inhabitants passed through Ulysses, who shrieked. His face went utterly pale, and his eyes nearly bulged out of his head. A second tried to pass through me but was turned aside by my enchanted tea gown.
As my gown deflected the shade, an emerald glow, reminiscent of sunlight seen through the canopy of a tall forest, flared. In its bright gleam, I could see my brothers and sister staring at me. I gave them a puzzled glance, and Mephisto pointed over my shoulders.
Behind me stretched wings of emerald light that seemed to originate from the shoulders of my enchanted tea gown. They were not like the wings of birds, but rather an impressionistic indication of the top of a wing; as if painted with thick brushstrokes but unfinished. They were beautiful.
“Whatever bumped into me must have woken some defense in my gown,” I said, awed. “Logistilla, you made my dress. Do you know what caused this?”
“No,” she frowned enviously.
My sister deliberately stepped in front of a passing shade, who was repulsed by the enchanted fabric of her deep blue robes, which she had retrieved while dropping off the children, but no wings of light appeared.
“Must be some enchantment Father added later,” she pouted. “Apparently, he didn’t bother to share it with me.”
“He must have had his reasons,” Theo growled, shifting his pack. He had shaved his beard and donned his Toledo steel sword and his shining armor with its Urim breastplate. It clattered awkwardly against his old body as he walked. Frowning down at himself, he added, “Erasmus, come here and help me secure this armor.”
“What, me?” Erasmus looked right and left, as if expecting to see someone else of the same name. His face bore an incredulous expression that reminded me of my familiar, Tybalt, Prince of Cats. Erasmus, too, was wearing the enchanted garments Logistilla had made for him, justacorps and breeches of deep forest green. All those of us who had enchanted garments had retrieved them before gathering at the crate and plunging into Hell. Titus wore his kilt, Gregor his red cardinal robes. Only Ulysses was dressed in perfectly ordinary cloth. Logistilla had never gotten around to making him a set.
“You were my squire, right?”
“When I was six!” Erasmus objected heatedly.
“Nonsense, you were at least ten,” Theo replied good-naturedly as he donned his helmet over his goggles. It was winged and had once belonged to an angel.
Sighing, Erasmus trudged over to aid him, while the rest of us began walking through the mists of Limbo toward the Gate of False Dreams.
we made our way across the spirit-haunted plain. Before us, a great black wall stretched upward and in either direction, as far as the eye could see. Cut into it was a fifty-foot archway, through which we caught a glimpse of more swirling mist beyond. This arching gate was flanked by giant tusks, nine times the size of a man, which shone with an ivory light. While the enormous tusks made us feel insignificant, they themselves were minuscule when compared to the vastness of the wall, which dwarfed everything else. We stood craning our necks and gazing up at this magnificent edifice.
Above the archway, blood-red letters had been carved into the wall. In Latin, it read:
Through me the entrance unto Doom
Through me the gateway to the Lost
Through me the entrance to Everlasting Pain.
Beyond me, Divine power stops, Wisdom fails, and Love ceases.
Justice has weighed: the doom is clear:
ALL HOPE RENOUNCE, YE LOST, WHO ENTER HERE.
“We’re planning to walk through there on purpose?” Mab asked, gaping at the gate. “You’ve got to be kidding!”
“This is the Gate of False Dreams . . . meaning that those sucked in by false dreams end up on the far side,” Mephisto announced cheerfully. He had attached a string to his magic hat and currently wore it pushed back onto his shoulders. “It marks the boundary between the World of Men and the Nether Realms. Beyond this gate only evil reigns, and that’s where we’re going.”
“Not quite Dante’s wording,” Caliban stared up in reverent awe. “Though very close.”
“Dante had gone all the way through the Inferno into Purgatory and then up through Paradise before he got home to write it down
,” Mephisto replied cheerfully. “Can we blame the guy for getting a few words in the wrong place?” Turning to the rest of us, he asked, “How are we planning to find out where Daddy is?”
“What a shame we never recovered John Dee’s crystal ball,” Cornelius said sadly.
Mab hit his forehead with his fist. “Keep forgetting to tell you, Ma’am! That ball can’t be destroyed by throwing it! Sure, it explodes when it hits the ground, but it’s supposed to do that—a defense built in to protect its owner. After it explodes, it reforms again. It’s a famous crystal ball, Ma’am. Merlin used it before John Dee, and Solomon before him. Some people claim it originally belonged to the first magician of all, Seth, son of Adam. It’s unlikely Mephisto actually destroyed it. The Catholics must still have it.”
Throughout Mab’s speech, Mephisto had been shifting uncomfortably. When Mab finished, I calmly held out my hand. “The ball, Mephisto.”
The others stared at me.
“Mephisto doesn’t have . . .” Titus began, then his voice drifted off, as an abashed Mephisto tapped his staff.
The mist shifted, and I could have sworn a kangaroo jumped upon the plains of Limbo. Then, there really was a kangaroo! The startled creature hopped twice, twitching its long ears nervously. Mephisto gave the beast a playful punch, reached into its pouch, and pulled out a round ball of perfect crystal. The kangaroo nuzzled Mephisto, who tapped his staff again, and it vanished away as quickly as it had come.
“I say!” exclaimed Ulysses, leaning in for a better look at the shiny gleaming crystal ball. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I, too, would like to hear the answer to that question, Mephistopheles,” mused Cornelius, leaning on his staff. The light from my wings dyed the bandages wrapped across his eyes an emerald green.
“Heck if I know.” Mephisto shrugged. “Don’t remember.”
“How convenient,” murmured Erasmus.
Mab regarded Mephisto coolly. “And all this time you’ve been using that ball to learn secrets and spy on people? Humph! Explains a lot.”
The rest of us might have had more to say on the matter, but Logistilla began looking fervently about behind us. “Oh, my god! The tunnel! Did anyone think to mark the tunnel? How are we going to find our way home?”
“Mark it how?” asked Erasmus, raising a finger. “Make a note of the nearby currents in the mist? Oh, wait . . . mist moves.”
“Don’t worry, old thing.” Ulysses patted our sister’s arm. “We don’t need to find our way back to that wretched hidey-hole. The moment we find Father, banf! I can teleport us home.”
“I knew there was a reason why we agreed to let these two come,” muttered Erasmus. “Well, my loving clan, shall we go through together?”
“Any chance Harebrain here could put his over-sized marble to work and find Mr. Prospero, so we know where to go once we’re on the other side?” asked Mab.
“I’m getting there, I’m getting there.” Mephisto leaned over the crystal sphere and rubbed it once. The white mist within it began to swirl. “I’ve found . . . Arghhhhhhh!”
Mephisto screamed, clutched his eyes, and dropped the crystal ball. Because Mab had just informed us that it would explode if it broke, we all leapt for it. Ulysses tried the hardest. He threw himself headlong between the orb and the ground, clutching it to his chest as he slammed into the hard-packed earth.
“Some kind of rugby move?” asked Erasmus, standing over him.
“Just so,” gasped Ulysses. “Right. Help me up.”
“Oh yeah, everyone run to help the guy who deliberately jumped on his head,” Mephisto muttered, still holding his eyes. “Never mind the guy who just looked at the Thorns of Pain.”
A frisson of terror shot through me. Surely, Father was not in the Tower, that horrible, painful place of wrongness where Astreus had been held! But was that not what the Ouija board had told me, back on The Happy Gambit, that Father was the prisoner of the Torturers of the Tower of Pain?
“The Thorns of Pain!” Logistilla was exclaiming. “That sounds unpleasant . . . are you all right, Mephisto?”
“Why does it always have to be the Thorns of Pain?” Ulysses murmured more to himself than to us. “Why is it never the Feathers of Happiness or the Teaspoons of Tranquility?”
Mephisto took his hands away from his eyes and blinked a few times. He patted his cheeks experimentally. “Any blood? No? Then, I guess I’m okay. I found Daddy. He’s in a cage in the thickets outside the Tower of Pain. That’s . . . that’s pretty deep in, guys. It’s a long way.”
“How do you know all this, Mephisto?” asked Cornelius. “I have never heard of the Tower of Pain.”
“I’ve heard of it,” I whispered shakily, memories of crippling pain and horror haunting me. “It is a place of torture, and it is very old. Older than our Sun.”
Theo reached up and clicked the side of his goggles, cycling through its lenses: green, blue, gold, silver, red.
“Try these!” He pulled them off without removing his helmet, slipping the band over the top of his head, and handed them to Mephisto. “The red lenses don’t let the pain through! ”
Mephisto took them and looked cautiously at the ball. When no pain ensued, he studied it carefully.
“He’s alive.” Mephisto reported finally, handing the goggles back to Theo, who stepped away to remove his helmet to replace them properly. “But it looks bad. We should hurry!”
The lighthearted mood among us died. My siblings and I stood numbly in the cold mist, listening to the slithering whispers of ghostly voices, a constant chatter that always seemed to be on the verge of resolving into understandable syllables, but never did.
“You realize chances are some of us won’t be coming back?” Ulysses asked matter-of-factly.
“No point in loitering here.” Erasmus gave one of his oily smiles and took a step forward. Glancing to the right, he exclaimed, “Oh my!”
I followed his gaze. Behind us, far away in the midst of the luminescent swirling spirits, two black thrones stood upon a raised dais. They appeared empty, except when I glanced at the throne on the left, a cold, eerie sensation traveled up my spine. The wings stretching from my tea gown flared, showering us in verdant sparks. Curious, I would have approached, but Erasmus put a restraining hand on my shoulder.
“Not our battle,” he said simply, and he plunged through the ivory gate.
The rest of us stood as if petrified as we watched Erasmus, of his own will, walk through the gate into Hell. As if the mists had devoured him, he vanished from our sight. We grabbed each other and stared after him. For all that I hated him, I felt an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach when he disappeared.
A figure became visible in the middle of the gate, and Erasmus walked back toward us . . . or at least something that looked like Erasmus. His face was radiant.
“It’s beautiful!” he exclaimed, in astonishment. “I’ve never seen such a lovely landscape! Flowering trees, floating stars, rivulets running across picturesque rocks, knights in armor, ladies dressed in fine gowns, fringed like Spanish shawls. It’s . . . why is it beautiful?”
“That’s just the way it is,” said Mephisto with a shrug. “Come on.”
“What if the demons try to take over our staffs, as Baelor did during the party?” Logistilla balked.
Titus gave a grim smile and held the Staff of Silence aloft. “Silence is golden. Demons can’t command our staves if the staves cannot hear them. Shall we go?”
Logistilla, Titus, Caliban, and Ulysses followed Erasmus and Mephisto through the gate, disappearing into the mist.
“This bodes ill,” Gregor said huskily, “to find in Hell a garden of Earthly delights. It is a testament to my great love for our Pater that I walk through this gate. God in Heaven, forgive me.” And he passed into the mist as well.
“I don’t like it, Ma’am, not one bit,” said Mab.
Beside him, Cornelius stretched out his hand. “Spiritling, guide me. I have no eyes to lead my way.�
��
Mab took his arm. “Sure thing, Mr. Cornelius. Just follow me.”
Theo and I were now alone in the swirling mist, his face shaded by the glorious Urim of his helmet. He looked up at the words on the gate and sighed.
“How ironic,” he said. Despite his regret, his voice sounded younger and hardier than it had in years. “Over the last fifty years, I have suffered such agony, solely to avoid entering this very gate. And now, I choose to walk in with my own two feet. Are we doing the wrong thing, Miranda? Are there some paths one should not take, even for one’s family?”
I thought about this, remembering, for once, not to turn to my Lady for wisdom. The angel had counseled me to rescue Father. Surely, she would not ask me to damn my immortal soul?
Finally, I said slowly, “I think this gate is a trick, Theo, a deception. True Hell is not a place we can walk into, it is something in our hearts. Why should we fear any words written on something called the ‘Gate of False Dreams’?”
Theo chuckled and offered me his arm. Together, we walked through the gate into the land of Living Nightmares.
I cannot say what I had been expecting. Perhaps, after hearing Erasmus’s praise, I thought to see a garden or a pleasant forested way. Upon stepping through the gate, however, I was immediately assailed by the most putrid and rotten of stenches, as rank as any battlefield. Corpses, swollen and half disjointed, floated all around me upon the surface of a dismal swamp. Only these bodies were not dead. Their eyes swiveled to focus on me, and they babbled and moaned, unable to make themselves understood with their broken mouths.
Farther away, on what seemed to be an island, a great black demon stood over five emaciated men who bowed and cowered before him, licking his legs and nether parts with their withered purple tongues. I threw my hand before my face, shying away from this lurid scene, only to have my sight fall upon seven naked women tied into a circle. Throbbing, black sinews violated their bodies, passing in and out of each orifice, even their nostrils and ears. The women, bloated and deathly pale, shivered and trembled as if in the grip of ecstatic pleasure or perhaps suffering some terrible torture.
Prospero in Hell Page 37
