The Fall of Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  FALL OF HADES

  by Jeffrey Thomas

  ISBN: 978-1-937128-90-6

  This eBook edition published 2010 by Dark Regions Press as part of Dark Regions Digital.

  http://www.darkregions.com

  Dark Regions Press

  300 E. Hersey St. STE 10A

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.darkregions.com

  © Jeffrey Thomas 2010

  Cover Design by Frank Walls

  Ebook Creation by Book Looks Design

  http://www.booklooksdesign.com

  Premium signed and limited print editions available at: http://www.darkregions.com/books/the-fall-of-hades-by-jeffrey-thomas

  Author s Note

  While it is not necessary to have read any of the other books set in my milieu of Hades in order to enjoy “The Fall of Hades,” it will of course enhance the experience if one has.

  As always, I’d like to thank David G. Barnett for inspiring me to write “Letters From Hades,” and Dark Regions’ own Joe Morey for inspiring me to write this one. And thanks to Frank Walls, whom I chose to provide the cover, for his artistic inspiration, as well. You all have my infernal gratitude.

  1: THE REBORN

  She believed she saw the drop of water that shattered her prison—the very drop. As the bead of water formed at the fracture in the ceiling, bulged with readiness, extended teasingly and finally let go, she seemed to have an inner certainty that this drop was unlike the ones gone before; more significant, more potent. The decisive drop of water, heavy with power, as filled with import as an atom bomb dropped on a city, or the microscopic splitting of the very first cell. She had the presentiment that this drop was the demolishing bullet, the key that would unlock her prison. Or was it actually that she was exerting pressure against the stone unconsciously, that it was her own force that imbued the magic drop, which would have been just another of an endless string of drips had she not extended the influence of her will?

  She had long ago stopped noticing when she was pushing against the stone that encased her body like a fossil. Though of course there were long stretches of time when she lay absolutely inert, as if sleeping, or in a coma, or dead; stretches during which she just lay within her womb without applying any force against the stone at all—stretches of maybe years, decades, centuries.

  She had once tried counting the drops of water to keep track of time, each drop approximately thirty seconds apart. She had steadily, consciously counted the drops for what her inner arithmetic told her was two months (approximately 172,800 drips of water, falling too far from her parched lips to do anything but taunt her or provide her this exercise, this distraction) before she taught herself to count the drops unconsciously instead, so as to free up other parts of her mind to wander, to dream, or to simply shut off. She had managed this for what she figured was three years (approximately 3,075,840 drops, and was that enough to feed a rain forest, to fill a lake, to drown a world?) before she ultimately lost the cadence somehow, through some mental hiccup, and staggered, faltered, the trick of subconsciously counting off the drips eluding her.

  Maybe the hiccup was the increased splitting of the rock around her.

  She had occasionally heard gentle, whispering crackles, almost subliminal. At times, she had heard this in answer to pressure she exerted.

  Sometimes she had even heard the distant clatter of a fallen pebble—and more distant, as much a vibration as a sound, the occasional muffled thud of a large piece of stone as it dropped heavily somewhere beyond.

  Only her head was free of the encasing cement. She recalled that her captors had wanted her to see what they were doing to someone else in the room beyond, but there was a metal door on tracks that shut up the little chamber in which her block-like sarcophagus rested, and it was now closed, after all these years caked in rust that had streaked down the cement wall. A cage of scabrous metal bars surrounded her head where it protruded from the stone coffin that had been poured, shaped and squared off around her body. She vaguely remembered, untold ages ago, figures standing around the coffin poking her face through the bars of the cage, with either heated or sharp implements or both. There was a socket in the ceiling with wires hanging out of it now where this apparatus with long, jointed arms tipped with glowing heat or glittering razors had once been suspended, but it had been removed for repair or salvage at some time she could no longer recall, just as she could no longer remember much about the shadowy figures who had operated the apparatus. She supposed that had as much to do with her not wanting to remember as with the long passage of time.

  But with her head being free to this extent, she was able to watch the water that dripped down from a crack in the low ceiling like a fissure in a skull, a seam from which this leak pattered every thirty seconds on the flat top of her coffin. Through the years, she had watched the cement discolor, darken, erode into a shallow concavity. Eventually cracks had appeared and spread with the slowness of mountains eroding to deserts. But the process continued, the cracks widening and deepening. Sometimes she watched avidly, sometimes with eyes open but sleeping, glazed like those of a dead person. But wait—she was a dead person, wasn’t she? She seemed to recall that much, at least.

  Today—if one could still speak of days, as if speaking of this molecule of water in the river of infinity—the final drop fell. It was not the final drop, of course; there would be more. But none that she would remain to watch. Water did not collect in the concavity, but because it was lopsided trickled off down the left side of the sarcophagus. It was on the unseen left flank that she heard a sudden loud crack, a crack like lightning splitting the sky (a surprising image belonging to some previous life). This initial dramatic noise was followed by a slow crumbling sound and the increasing patter of pebbles across the floor—then a great shuddering crash as a whole corner of stone dropped away to the floor of her tomb.

  She felt air on her naked left side, from her arm down along her leg.

  The air was not fresh, was humid and warm, for she had been recycling her own moist breath through the countless years, but it was open air nevertheless. She tried to reach out her left arm, no longer encased, into this air but her muscles had all but petrified, the joints crackling with the effort. She sucked in an anguished sound. There had been many years with constant discomfort but it had been consistent and ultimately something she’d been able to distance herself from. This pain was new, fresh, immediate. She waited, panted until she could get her breathing under control again. She tried shifting her leg, but more carefully, minutely this time.

  Then, back to a tiny shift of her arm. The leg again, and back and forth, in a process that might have taken hours or days of terrestrial time. Finally she was able to lower her leg out of the space that had become a mold around it, a mold reproducing the creases of her body, the smoothness of her skin, a reversed image of herself; a ghost shell. It was now like a chrysalis that she freed herself from gradually, as a butterfly will patiently wait for its delicate wings to dry and unfold.

  More rock fell away with solid thunks. At last she managed to rest her bare foot against the floor, and bracing herself this way—with teeth gritted against the torment—gripped the rough edge of the wound in the coffin with her free hand and angled her body out sideways, further and further. She had to wriggle and squirm out of the molded contours of her own form, like a newborn worked through a birth canal. She groaned as she drew in her head and squeezed it through the narrow channel her neck had made, scraping and gouging her cheeks and forehead and nearly wedging her skull stuck, but luckily more cement cracked away to permit its passage. At last her upper body dropped out to the floor and she let loose a wail as the fragments of stone there dug into her side and upper arm. Her right leg was sti
ll wedged into its mold, but she crawled away from the sarcophagus a little until she could drag it out after her. It fell heavily to the floor as if dead and useless, and she moaned with a fresh stab of pain. She rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling until she began to feel the life returning to her right leg as well. Life, in a manner of speaking. Life, with the consideration that—despite the agony that stole the air from her lungs—she was not alive. And she was not really feeding air into her lungs because she didn’t truly need air to live.

  But this phantasmal flesh believed its own lies, its mock sensations and imitation needs, still experienced excruciating pain, however illusory. So she lay, and lay, testing her limbs only gingerly and in movements as slow as the spreading of the cracks over the long years she had begun to count too late and stopped counting too soon. But then what should time matter to the immortal?

  Yes, she remembered she was dead. Yes, she remembered how to walk, reborn creature though she may be, once she was recovered enough to attempt it. (And she could afford to be patient; she knew patience if she knew nothing else.)

  But if only she could remember her name.

  2: THE CAPTIVE

  She found the sliding door rusted into its track, planted her bare feet in a wider stance and put so much force into pulling on it that the scaly corrosion of the handle sliced into her palms. She winced, but already the lacerations and scrapes on her head and body from squeezing out of her mold were fading. She recalled that her flesh reconstituted itself swiftly, even after serious wounding. How else had she regrown flesh plucked from her face by the arms of the torture apparatus in the ceiling, regenerated lips sliced away, teeth wrenched out, both eyes teased slowly from their sockets? She tried not to recollect those things, but whereas her body would always grow smooth again, she felt as though her mind was so thick with scar tissue that she would never again think clearly.

  Her name. Again, had she simply forgotten it because of the passing of too many years in which no one had used it, years in which she was so much a prisoner that her identity was eradicated along with her freedom—decades (centuries? millennia? ) of obliterating insanity born of ceaseless pain? Or, had she through her own effort of will stopped knowing herself at some long ago point in order to detach herself from the tortures? Had she protected her true self by hiding it away just as she was hidden in this vault, replacing it with this suffering clay, this sacrificial doppelganger for the torturers to play with? If so, then where was that other self now, and again…again…could she ever call it back, ever know its name?

  She strained, grunted, ignoring the hurt in her hands as best she could by bearing in mind their later regeneration. Sweat ran down her ribs; oh this clever ectoplasm! With a grating squeal, at last the door slid open a few inches. She tugged, tugged, pushed the door shut again and then hauled on it afresh in violent jerks. It gave another few inches. She persisted, as always for an unknown amount of time, until there was enough of a gap for her to squeeze though without too much abrading of her unclad skin.

  The chamber beyond was more sizable than her humble little sepulcher. What struck her first about it, after so long a time staring up at her own low ceiling, was that this chamber’s ceiling was so high up it was lost in darkness, as if this were the inside of a tower or, given its industrial feel, some old shaft or chimney. Also, the air circulated more freely here, was still humid but at least new air was being drawn in. When she stepped further into the chamber and could look more squarely up the shaft, she saw a silhouetted fan at the top of it, spinning lazily and then stopping, twirling a few times again; its motor shot, or at least turned off, though errant gusts of air still stirred it.

  Motes were being blown down the shaft, swam in the air around her.

  She brushed a few of the little white flakes from her shoulder. Not snow.

  Ash, she supposed.

  Through these swirling motes, she gazed at the chamber’s sole occupant.

  There was a net suspended just above her head, spanning the entire room, anchored to iron rings in its walls. At first she had taken it for something meant to catch debris falling from above (indeed, a few sections of plaster had come away from the walls of the shaft and lay in the net) but at last the truth had dawned on her. The strands of the net were a glistening, vivid red. They were formed of human tissue, gristle and sinew, tendons and nerves. The stuff of the human anatomy unwoven and then woven anew into these taut cables, crisscrossing the room in an immense web.

  Where she could see it, the floor was stained black from countless little drips of blood, but much of the floor was obscured by a layer of pale orange husks like an accumulation of autumn leaves. She stooped and picked up one of these husks delicately. It was the dried, dead body of a tiny crab.

  She looked up at the net and discerned movement along the strands here and there. Living versions of the dead crabs her bare feet had shuffled through, their shells more brightly orange in life, crawled along or were poised in the web. They appeared to be nibbling at the red vines, picking at them with their pincers. She saw a few drops of fresh blood fall from gnawed veins that partially made up the fabric of the living ropes.

  From the very center of the net hung a ball-like pendulum, swaying very slightly in the occasional gusts of humid air that blew down the shaft.

  The woman moved toward the hanging ball, sliding her feet through the shells rather than walking upon them. That strange white ash or whatever it was drifted around her like pollen.

  She stopped a few paces from the ball, level with her face and hanging on a braid of raw muscle and exposed nerves. Now it was obvious that it was an inverted human head, though initially she had been confused by the fact that some molten metal, like bronze, had been poured over it, or else the head had been dipped into a vat of the stuff. In any case, the metal had hardened into a helmet long turned green with verdigris. Somehow, only the area around the mouth was open, the eyes, nostrils and ears being sealed over. She raised a tentative arm, slowly reached out toward the encased head, meaning to feel for breath emitted through its slack, slick mouth.

  A shell crunched under her foot, and the head’s teeth snapped wildly at her fingers. She withdrew her hand and backed off a few steps, now unmindful of the sharp-edged shells. The head’s tongue lashed madly, and spittle sprayed toward her. Then, the head began to talk. How it could draw air with no apparent lungs, the woman did not question, since again, the process of breathing was spurious in this realm anyway.

  “Who’s there? Who is that?” the head rasped. The voice was only remotely human, more eerie than even the head’s appearance. It then began to jabber, as if speaking in tongues: “The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want He maketh me to lie down in green pastures He leadeth me beside the still waters He restoreth my soul He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me thy rod and thy staff they comfort me…”

  “Listen,” she said, trying to calm the head.

  It babbled on: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies thou anointest my head with oil my cup runneth over surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever amen amen amen amen amen fuck fuck nooo don’t hurt me again you fucks you fucking Demons where have you been huh? Where did you go? You made me think you were gone!”

  The head began to sob wretchedly. “You made me think you were gooone.” As if such a teasing absence were the worst torture of all.

  Demons. The word resonated in the woman’s mind, and she shuddered. It was a word she’d made herself forget, and associated images she’d worked so hard to efface came flickering into her mind’s eye. The shadowy figures who had operated the torture apparatus in the ceiling took on a degree of lost detail. Black form-fitting suits of tight leather or rubber. Faces so white they might have been painted that way, as dispassionate as they were beautiful.
And she remembered wings…

  “I’m not a Demon,” she told the head. Suddenly she squinted as if to make out some shape on the horizon as more memories flitted just out of reach. No, she was not a Demon, and neither was this man. They had both been victims of the Demons; hostages, or prisoners. And this man was…

  “Father?” she said, still squinting, but this time at the dangling, upside-down head—in its bronze shell looking like the clapper of some giant church bell. Church bell…church…

  “Demon!” the head whispered. “Trickster… trickster! You can’t deceive me! You can’t break me! Do you hear? We’re not all as weak as you think. My faith is stronger than my flesh, and this flesh is not real!

  You can’t touch my soul, you fucks, you fucking fucks! ” The teeth snapped blindly at the air again with a horrible clacking sound, and somehow there was enough strength in the braid of muscle for the head to sway more widely.

  “Are you my father?” the naked woman asked more firmly, ignoring the tirade.

  “Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name,” the head ranted, “thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…”

  Well, she didn’t need him to confirm it; it was a certainty now. But whatever emotion that name might once have inspired in her had long been burnt away or locked behind protective barriers. She had only the mistiest impressions of sobbing, howling helplessly, as she witnessed his suffering through the open metal door between their respective torture chambers. Could recall nothing of whatever encouragement they might have called to each other or conversations they might have attempted when their tormenters had withdrawn.

  The head chanted, “…give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil from evil from evil from evil…”

  She wanted to cry, if only to feel that she was alive again; but she wasn’t, never could be, correct? How much had she loved this man in life?