Letters From Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  LETTERS FROM HADES

  Jeffrey Thomas

  Bedlam Press

  2010

  Digital Edition

  This edition February 2010 © Bedlam Press

  Letters From Hades

  ©2003 by Jeffrey Thomas

  cover art © 2003 Erik Wilson

  Also available in a trade paperback

  ISBN: 978-1-889186-51-1

  a Bedlam Press book

  5139 Maxon Terrace

  Sanford, FL 32771

  Bedlam Press is an imprint of Necro Publications.

  www.necropublications.com

  assistant editors

  John Everson

  C. Dennis Moore

  Amanda Baird

  book design & typesetting:

  David G. Barnett

  Fat Cat Graphic Design

  www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  For David G. Barnett,

  who fanned a spark into an Inferno.

  Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

  (So great the evil religion has aroused.)

  —Aldous Huxley in The Devils of Loudun.

  Day 5.

  On my fifth day in Hell, I found a praying mantis.

  It was during a break between classes, though that should not be taken to mean a break for rest. We were merely waiting for the arrival of our next instructor, and along with many of my classmates I had wandered into a courtyard of the university. The university is built entirely of black metal, some sections plated together like the hulls of immense battleships, covered in rivets and outsized nuts threaded onto bolts as thick around as trees…and other sections seemingly molded as a single, titanic piece of iron. All of it is streaked and caked in red rust like drying blood. Some of that might be, in fact, drying blood. On my third day here, it rained blood. In pounding torrents. When the rain was over, the grounds of the university steamed with scarlet pools and there were even squirming, flopping eels and jellyfish in those pools that I realized were actually organs and entrails. One of my classmates speculated that it was all waste ejected by a local torture complex.

  Avernus University is huge beyond all human scale. I know as I continue this record, this journal or diary or whatever I might call it, that I will run out of ways to express the magnitude here. The magnitude of size, and of suffering.

  I wish I had been able to begin this record at Day One, but for one thing, I had no paper or stylus until I began my classes in earnest, on Day Two. And frankly, it’s been just a little bit difficult for me to adjust to my new surroundings, so it didn’t occur to me to write these personal notes until today. Even still, I expect that they will take this book away from me once they find that I’m writing my own thoughts down in it. I’ve flipped the book upside-down so I can start my writing here on its last page. Hopefully they won’t look at the back of the book, should it be examined. At the front of the book, as my class has been assigned, I am writing lines of self-loathing, self-abasement:

  "I am a worm not worthy of my Creator. I have betrayed the love of my Father. I have squandered the gift of life my Father gave me." Every line must be different, and repentant, not that I will be forgiven if I write a trillion of these lines, no two alike.

  I think—I hope—that writing in this book will be a distraction, at the very least. A focus, to remove me even a tiny bit from my intense physical pains. A mortar to hold together the crumbling bricks of my mind. Though maybe that’s a mistake. Maybe I would be better off if I gave myself over to madness. There might be peace there. Well, I suppose I can always do that later, if sanity doesn’t work for me.

  I think the main reason I’m writing this is as a form of rebellion, a gesture of individuality. It reminds me of when I was in high school, which I ended up dropping out of…not because I wasn’t intelligent, or because I was a druggie or what have you, but because I was so shy, so alienated, an outsider. I wanted to stay home and read, and I wanted to write, dreamed of being an author (another reason I feel compelled to put pen to paper, even in this place). In high school, we were given an assignment to read one of two plays in a book. I didn’t read the play I was instructed to. Instead, while I was skipping school one day—waiting behind the garage until my father went to work so I could sneak into our attic and spend the day there—I read the other of the two plays. It wasn’t a planned gesture of defiance, it just happened. It was a personal instinct. It was my spirit of silent mutiny.

  It feels like that now, with this heavy volume reversed in my hands. But where that was a slim and dog-eared paperback, this book is bound in living skin, and on its front cover is a single human eye. I’ve seen it following my motions, and I know it is cognizant of me. At first I thought it was a tool of the Demons, a means of spying on me, but a more experienced classmate told me it was all that remained of some published author, who was probably being punished for cherishing frivolous books over the majesty of his Father…for never having read the Bible, despite his passion for the written word.

  "I’m sorry," I whispered to that one blue eye, which blinked at me mutely, the book resting in my lap. "I’ll take care of you. I won’t let any more harm come to you." I almost had to laugh at that. What more harm could be done to this soul? Even if a cigarette were ground into the flesh binding, it would be nothing. And yet, I think it understood my words or at least the sentiment behind them. I saw the eye grow a moist film, and a tear broke free to wind down that scarred, tanned hide.

  "I wish I knew who you were. I might have read your words," I said to the book. "You might have made me feel less lonely. I might have read you in the attic." I wiped the tear from its solitary eye. I brushed my fingertips lightly, a caress, across those hard scars. A bit later, the eye closed in sleep. I like to think I soothed it to some small degree.

  I carried my book under one arm as I strolled the courtyard, though I had a sack slung over my shoulder to carry it in. The sack seemed to be the dried-out organ of some large animal, covered in brands and dyed black. All of us had one, and all of us were wearing a school uniform of black shirt, black trousers, black boots. We even had one pair of white socks and one pair of white underwear. On my first night (what I judged to be night, at any rate), I fingered the elastic band of my underwear and laughed soundlessly while sobbing soundlessly. This can’t be my real flesh. My real flesh is embalmed in a coffin. This is some sort of fabrication, my soul fossilized into matter, a clone, a golem molded of ectoplasm, an illusion. Our professors haven’t told us. But what is my underwear? Is it an illusion, too? Is it an extension of my soul? Or is it hundred percent cotton? In the sweat shops of Hell, do Asian child laborers sit at sewing machines all day and all night churning out underwear for Hell’s Wal-Mart chain?

  Engraved in one wall of the courtyard, in rust-filled letters as tall as a man, is the inscription:

  THE DESCENT TO AVERNUS IS EASY—Virgil

  I walked in circles around the courtyard like a prisoner during an exercise period, but not to exercise. It gave me the sad fantasy that I was walking away somewhere. There was still a pool of blood from that recent storm, gathered in a marshy pond at the center of the courtyard. I suppose those thorny shrubs and twisted miniature trees there are meant to be a garden. From the center of the garden looms a black metal sculpture of some Demon of note; I didn’t want to do him the honor of reading his plaque. From the top of the hideous being’s iron skull, emerald flames were lapping. Gazing up past the towering statue, I saw that the sky was a billowing mass of black smoke like thunderclouds rolling in. A very light dusting of pale flakes drifted down and turned to spots of powdery volcanic ash on my black clothing. It swept off easily.

  I hadn’t cried all day. It was the first day in Hell that I hadn’t. Was I numb? Or w
as I already getting used to it?

  But others around me were crying. And there was a high, ululating howl blended into the wind that sounded like human voices by the thousands, the millions. It was too alive to be the wind alone.

  I put my hand on the shoulder of a woman who sat on a bench near the foot of the statue, our shoes getting wet in that swampy blood. She was sobbing hysterically. I meant to comfort her, but she looked up at me and shrieked, swatted my hand away, and I resumed my circling of the courtyard.

  Some of my classmates, however, did seek solace in the company of their fellows. I paused from my circling to listen to a few of them. One was babbling, "If they’re putting us through schooling, they must mean to better us…you know, so we can go to Heaven, later. First Purgatory, then Heaven…right? We’re here to be punished, like prison…but rehabilitated, so we can…can…"

  "Become productive citizens?" I said.

  He wheeled at me, his eyes frenzied. Like me, this man had an ugly raised scar on his forehead in the shape of an "A". It was a brand, and stood for Agnostic. I didn’t want to know what an Atheist’s designation might look like, though I was sure I’d find out. This man replied, "So we can become saved!"

  "We blew it," I told him. "We didn’t believe in any of this. We should have, obviously."

  "Well it can’t be that we have to suffer forever because of it…it wouldn’t be fair! Maybe I didn’t have a religious upbringing, huh? Maybe some people don’t have effective preachers to instill religion in them! Blame the scientists for telling us this didn’t exist—don’t make us suffer for their sins! There aren’t enough signs around us to make us believe!"

  "That’s why they call it ‘faith’," one of the others said. "They make the signs hard to read on purpose. To see if we’re paying attention."

  "Okay, well, I’m learning!" the frantic man cried, spinning to face this other speaker. "I want to learn! I want to!" He broke into ragged sobs. "I want to be saved! I want to go to Heaven!"

  "So why are they schooling us?" another muttered thoughtfully.

  "As punishment in itself," someone said. "School sucks."

  "It’s just to torture us with anticipation, before the rest of the tortures," I murmured. But I had to agree with him; I had always hated school myself, as I’ve mentioned. I felt so alone among all my other classmates. I think it was Sartre who said that Hell is other people. But conversely, T. S. Eliot said that Hell is oneself. They were both right.

  "Why take the time? Why make the effort, if not to salvage us?" the sobbing man whimpered.

  "They just want us to understand a few things," I told him. "So we can appreciate how deserving we are of what will happen to us. It’s just part of their plan. And we can’t hope to understand the ways Gods and Demons think…"

  "Shh!" a woman in the same black uniform as the rest of us hissed, drawing close to me. She had been shaved entirely bald like the rest of us, as well. But she had three X’s branded in a row on her forehead. A prostitute? "You can’t say that word down here! I saw a man who called out to—Him—by name like that…and these Demons grabbed him…" She couldn’t describe what had followed.

  "He’s the Father. The Creator," someone instructed me.

  "I know that," I said, losing my patience, beginning to walk away. "I forgot for a minute." It had been one of the earliest lessons; not to take His name in vain.

  I paced the courtyard, and looked again at those thorny plants that grew in its center, the ivy-like vines with purplish leaves which smothered one of the metal walls that enclosed us. Was any of it edible? I hadn’t eaten in five days. This cloned or illusory body of mine hungered desperately, though I was sure I didn’t require sustenance or fuel. My body had been given the same needs and drives only so that I could suffer hunger, pain…as I had in life. Five long days. I must say now that I can’t really be certain it has been five days, because of course there is no sun down here. Assuming this place is indeed "down", though I’m sure it isn’t simply beneath the Earth’s crust. Another dimension or plane, an elsewhere beyond my sense of space and time. But I’m trying to make it conform to my limited sense of time by relying on my bogus body’s internal clock, which seems to tell me that five days have passed. Also, each "day" here has one extra-long period in between our classes that I consider to be night. Maybe that is when the Demons themselves rest. As I’ve said, these breaks between classes cannot be considered rest for us, since giving one a period of rest is an act of concern, and mercy.

  I came close to the wall blanketed in those purple tendrils, and I rubbed one of the waxy leaves between my fingers. A glance over my shoulder, then I plucked one, nibbled it. It tasted like something rotten and I spat it out. Even the smell from the snapped stem reeked, almost more like an animal flattened in the street than rotting vegetable matter. A single drop of blood welled from the broken stem. I didn’t want to know what these plants really were, or once were.

  But that was when I spotted the mantis, picking its way carefully across the glossy leaves. I wouldn’t have noticed it at all if it hadn’t moved, because it was camouflaged the same dark purple color. Also, its limbs had these exaggerated flanges so that they looked like leaves of some kind, themselves.

  Though I had been branded on the forehead and badly beaten over the past five pseudo-days, I was afraid to touch this bug in case it bit me. But I forced myself to get past that, and put out my hand in front of the large insect. At first it tried to go around, but at last I got it to crawl over my hand and onto my sleeve, where it seemed to go still out of disoriented wariness. I moved it closer to my face for inspection.

  So did Hell have its own indigenous animal forms, I wondered? Surely animals didn’t go to Hell, simply because they are weren’t sophisticated enough to acknowledge their Creator? Was there a separate but approximate ecology down here? Had this mantis, then, evolved to its current state? Adapted its camouflaged color and shape? Didn’t evolution contradict the very existence of Hell?

  The simple, terrestrial-looking creature mystified me, suddenly, more than these walls of iron that reared about me. That flaming Demon statue in the courtyard’s center. The sky of smoke that I’d never seen clear. It was an enigma. Was it some human sufferer, transformed? Or did the Creator simply mold such things "down here" as He did "up there"…out of sheer artistic gratification? How could any Being so in love with blowing life into protoplasm the way a glassblower shapes vessels with his life’s breath be so cruel as to sentence his complex masterpieces to a world of eternal agony?

  Then again, why do some people have children, only to end up molesting or even killing their own offspring? Did the Father simply enjoy the act of creation as we enjoy the act of procreation?

  Was our Father, then, merely an abusive parent? A psychotic parent?

  The mantis’s jagged forelimbs were bent up close to its armored chest in mock prayer. As though He had contorted its form out of His narcissistic need to make things bow to His own glory. All creation was a mirror for His vanity, but when He didn’t like the flawed reflection there, He shattered the glass. Blaming the mirror for its ugliness.

  A distant rumble of thunder was followed by the nearer thunder of a door opening in one of the metal walls. Huge exposed gears and cogs turned gratingly as that panel screeched open. A hiss of released steam, and I turned to see three figures emerge from the steam into the courtyard. It was one of our instructors, accompanied by two lesser Demons who might have been assistants, bodyguards, instructors in training, or satellite-like extensions of his own body, for all I knew. They, like him, wore flowing ebony robes over chitinous black bodies armored and segmented like those of insects masquerading as skeletons. The central Demon was eight feet tall but skinny as my eight-year-old niece. His robe’s shoulders were padded and tented via some hidden framework, however, to give him a more impressive bulk. He carried a black iron staff with a bizarre crest or symbol at its head, like a splatter of calligraphy translated into metal. His face was that of a m
ummified skull, withered lips drawn back from a grimace of black teeth, but tiny eyes without an iris or pupil glowed a brilliant white in those gaping sockets. Atop his head he wore a tall miter made of metal, and its sides were full of holes in ornate designs. Through these grate-like holes in this headdress, one could see the green fire raging from the top of the Demon’s skull.

  This volcanic orifice was more apparent in the two lesser Demons. They were merely six feet tall, and their robes did not have the bulky shoulders, nor did they carry a staff of office or whatever that was. They were also like charred, reanimated skeletons though the bright pinpricks of their eyes were not as piercing as their leader’s. They didn’t wear a miter or any other head covering, so I could see the opening in the top of their skulls as if the bone had been sawed away. Smoke wisped out of their holes; not that gaseous flame that jetted from the professor’s head, though this smoke glowed greenish as though their brains were made from some luminous, primordial ooze.

  The Demon trio stopped on the flagstones, and the instructor tapped his staff’s end loudly three times, gathering us to him. I was one of the nearest, and I approached them holding out the mantis that clung to my sleeve.

  "Master," I addressed him in what I hoped was an appropriately meek and respectful tone. (Not that I had to fake the meekness.) Sucking up like a new employee. "I found this insect. I wanted to ask you what it is…why it’s here…"

  Perhaps the professor would appreciate my curiosity. A pupil eager for knowledge.