Letters From Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The terrain was mostly bleak, flat, dusty, with only scattered patches of tall grayish grass that looked translucent, and the occasional stunted and gnarled tree, either leafless or with dark purple leaves like that ivy growing in the university courtyard I would take my breaks in. At last, though, ahead of me I saw the scrub brush, grasses and trees become increasingly plentiful, until they merged into the outer edge of a forest.

  It was my good fortune, relatively speaking, that I had reached this cover when I did. I heard distant shouts or cries behind me, and looked back across the wasteland I had crossed to see two tiny figures running in my direction…but they were a long way off from the shelter of the forest, or from any of the scattered trees. Then I heard the gunshots. I realized that the second figure was firing a gun of some kind after the first, fleeing figure. Shot after shot cracked, their echoes rumbling across the plain like thunder. From around the misshapen trunk of a tree that looked as though it had been sent to Hell for torture itself, I saw the pursued figure crumple. He or she had been hit.

  The second figure slowed to a casual stroll as it approached its victim. Now that it was somewhat closer, I made out that the figure wore white robes and a peaked white hood. It was the first time that I had seen an Angel.

  The white-garbed figure stood over its writhing victim, and fired down at it point blank several more times. Then it turned and started walking back in the direction of the university.

  I plunged into the woods. There was no point in going to the aid of the Angel’s prey; he or she would resurrect soon enough. We are the undead. Zombies. Vampires.

  I had learned at school that the Angels venture here to Hell—willingly of course—so as to hunt down or torture the Damned for sport. In that regard, they both find entertainment to sustain them through their long immortality, and aid the Father by essentially joining in the work of his Demons. These tourists are not truly Angels, at least not one of the celestial races that have never had a terrestrial form. They are the spirits of earthly men and women who have died and been reborn in Heaven. But in Heaven they become like those entities that have never walked the surface of our sad little ball of rock. In the same way, an Angel might consider me a demon.

  Because I was accustomed to the several castes of devils I had encountered but had not as yet met an Angel up close, I was more frightened at this point of running into an Angel than a Demon out here now that I was free. So I pushed deeper and deeper into the forest, in case the one I’d spied came back, or had friends about.

  The trees had become more like evergreens, now, taller and straighter, but their needles a dark purple color like the ivy, as well. The bed of dead needles under my feet was purple rather than brown. Because the sky was so dark, it was almost like night in that forest. I tried not to crunch too loudly across its floor. The treetops rustled eerily in high, whistling gusts that came from one direction and the next time, another.

  I soon realized that it wasn’t only the wind I was hearing up there, but cries of despair. Looking up, I saw two human feet growing out of a thick trunk just above the level of my head. On the tree facing that one, I saw two more feet…growing out of the bark rather than poking out of holes in it. I craned my head further back, and saw two hands protruding out of the trunk, but too high up to belong to the same person who owned the feet. The same was true of the second tree. And yet I knew there must only be one person buried, somehow, inside both of these trees. And I knew, though they were too high and lost in branches for me to see, that a human head must protrude from both of those trunks as well. The source of the wails.

  These two people had been merged with the trees, back when the trees were young. But as they had grown, over decades, they had stretched out the bodies of their entombed victims, as if on a gigantic rack. One pair of feet looked male, the other more feminine. Were they lovers, then, who had loved each other more than they cherished the Father? And so here they were together for eternity, perhaps…or at least until Demons came some day to cut down the trees, and release the prisoners so that they might be free to encounter fresh new punishments.

  This spectacle made me think of my living book, and both made me terrified. I should not take for granted my freedom to roam, to explore. There were not only those who would hunt me as an animal, but capture me and imprison me in one certain torture for a generation at a time. I must stay alert, be stealthy. And so, in case those who were responsible for the suffering of this couple might be lingering nearby, I resumed my plunge into the deep woods.

  Several hours later, by my reckoning of time, I stopped to rest. My soul was panting and exhausted. In the morning, as I preferred to think of it, I might try to find something edible around me. I had thought I’d heard a bird screech several times…though I couldn’t be certain it had been a bird.

  I crawled on hands and knees into a thorny thicket, shaded by the trunk of an especially large tree, and lay on a bed of needles. I was actually able to sleep for what must have been several hours straight…though I was awakened at one point by the very distant but unmistakable rolling thunder of gunfire.

  Unable to get back to sleep, I have caught myself up in my journal.

  Day 33.

  There is nothing to eat in this forest except insects. At least I assume these plump, segmented black organisms I’ve found inside rotted holes in some of the older trees are insect larvae. They aren’t too bad…especially after not having eaten in a month. But the slow-crawling, six-inch long albino millipedes I uncovered yesterday under a mound of damp, decomposing leaves made me violently ill after I ate just one of them. The leaves and stems around me bleed red blood and stink like rotting meat when I break them, like that ivy back at school. In fact, the waxy purple leaves of one kind of plant which grows close to the ground are so big that you can see their veins pulsing very subtly.

  But I find this purple forest quite beautiful, in fact…especially the tall, gently stirring fir trees. Is the beauty an intentional effect of the Creator, or an oversight? One would think He wouldn’t want a scrap of beauty to exist here, that every tree should be dead or black and misshapen. Maybe He doesn’t realize that there are those like myself who can find beauty in so alien an environment.

  Yesterday, I saw a group of a half dozen primitive hominids passing through these deep woods. Hunched, naked, raggedly hairy and with heavy anthropoid faces. When they saw me they scampered off out of sight in fear, but they must know enough not to cry out and call attention to themselves. They looked unscathed, and didn’t even seem to have brands on their prominent brows, though I didn’t get a close look. Frankly, at first they terrified me as much as I did them; I thought they were lower caste Demons like those winged baboons, until they were gone and the truth occurred to me.

  They were cursed to Hell because they had not accepted the Son into their hearts, the Son being the only door to salvation. It didn’t matter, apparently, that they had lived and died many thousands of years before the Son came to earth. Just like unbaptized infants, who don’t live long enough to accept the Son, banished here even if they would have been very much inclined to worship Him had they only had the chance. (I remember Swedenborg writing that unbaptized babies go immediately to Heaven. I’m sorry, but that’s just wishful thinking.) Though I hadn’t stopped to think that prehistoric people might dwell in the netherworld, in school I had been told that aborigines and pygmies and other primitive peoples who had never been exposed to belief in the Father and the Son were still damned…not so much by predestination, but simply due to bad timing, the luck of the draw. However, the Father was not without some dregs of mercy, as in the case of Muslims and Jews; we were told that those who had lived before the arrival of the Son would not suffer nearly so much as those who had come after the Son but had turned their faces from Him. These souls would not be hunted by Angels, captured and tortured by the various tribes of Demons. But they would spend eternity in this nightmare realm, sentenced to immortality…denied the presence of their Creator
, in His Heaven.

  Still, the hominids frightened me as much as the Demons had when I first saw them. Seeing so primitive an ancestor of your species, so very animal-like but unmistakably human-like, is like having a glimpse of yourself as you will look one day, old and waxen in your coffin. It seems a violation of time. Yet another perversity, another blasphemy against Nature. But Nature is the Father’s raped and debased lover in this place, like a respectable wife who behind closed doors is forced to endure her husband’s sadomasochistic fetishes.

  Day 35.

  I am reluctant to leave the forest. If I am to discover any part of Hell in which I might be relatively safe from the Demons and the Angels, it seems it would be here. But despite my solitary ways at the university, I am beginning to at last feel a lonely desolation. I have seen a few other humans like myself openly wandering or creeping stealthily through these woods, but have no more than exchanged a nod with them. Not even a smile. Earlier today a Native American came running out of the underbrush and nearly collided with me. In fact, he raised a crude hatchet as if to cleave my skull down the middle. But when he saw I was a man more or less like himself, he darted past me and vanished into the forest. I changed my aimless direction sharply after that, in case I came face-to-face, next, with whatever it was that pursued him…

  Later.

  I spoke too soon about the comfort and shelter of these woods. There has been a fire, sweeping through the forest, and I imagine it was this that the Native American fled from. I didn’t know at first if it were purposely set by Demons or Angels flushing out game like myself, or if it were a natural occurrence (can such a thing be innocently called an act of You-Know-Who, now?). I suspected it might be natural, because I’d noticed a change in the high ceiling of clouds that forever smother the sky. They were blacker, heavier, more heaped-looking, and yet there was a reddish glow on their swollen bellies. It might have been the reflected glow of the forest fire, and the ash that fell like light snow could have been from the fire as well…but there was also a rumbling in the earth beneath my feet, occasionally a startling, deep boom like a thunderstorm raging in a subterranean world. I came to suspect that there was a volcano beyond the thick, obscuring trees.

  I tried to keep ahead of the smoke that increasingly hazed the woods, but found it difficult; the forest all around me grew ghostly, misted, and I ran faster, faster, branches lashing my face, smoke beginning to sting my lungs. Once I even heard crackling ahead of me, and ran into a wall of heat, so that I had to veer madly in another direction. I heard people crying out in fear, here and there, distantly. I heard that bird-like screeching again, and at one point a dark hulking thing like a boar or a bear but apparently with a head like a denuded cattle skull went crashing ahead of me through the foliage.

  At last, and purely through luck (although I may have unconsciously been following the lead of that horned beast), I emerged from the forest onto a vast, open plain. There was actually a ragged drop of about ten feet, as if the wasteland before me were a depression, a crater. In fact, I nearly pitched over this small cliff before I caught myself. The skull-headed shaggy beast had just leapt down onto the plain and splayed in a scrambling heap; I heard a distinct crack as one of its ankle bones snapped. Somehow, though, it desperately righted itself and loped away at a rapid speed. It has occurred to me now—though at the time I was too stunned by this vista—that the animal was of a species (perhaps even a very primitive form of Demon) specifically provided for those lesser-damned peoples such as the hominids, aborigines and the like, to be used for their hides and meat. Handily, their heads are already fleshless and ready for decorative purposes. Thank G** for small favors.

  So shocking was the contrast between the crowded forest and this yawning space that I stood frozen like a deer. It was an almost electric shock, like leaping off a high quarry cliff into icy water. I gaped, my body tensed as if I might turn and flee back into the fire head-long, struggling to assimilate the vision that stretched before me.

  The plain seemed to extend forever. But it did not. For at its far side loomed an immense volcano, from the broken top of which rose an atomic mushroom cloud of boiling black smoke and poisonous gases. I wondered if I had discovered the source of the sky’s constant obfuscation. No lava ran down the sides of the titanic cone, but strewn across the plain I saw glowing hot embers and small fires. The embers were the white-hot fragments of lava bombs, cast like meteors from the eruption which had set the forest alight. A deafening howling as if from a hurricane issued from the volcano’s pit. It was like having pencils jammed into my ears (and I knew from experience, after having nodded off in one of my university classes in which the instructor was insistent on driving his point home to me). But there was another howling blended into the volcanic exhaust. I realized this was the source of the wailing that even as far away as the university could be heard sometimes mixed in with the wind, depending on its direction. It came from the plain, which from its apparently circular shape might actually be a huge volcanic caldera itself.

  Hundreds…thousands…of human heads covered the plain before me, which itself had the cracked scaly look of a dried lake bed, with only the occasional scrubby bush sprouting from it. Heads like row upon row of lettuce grown in a bone-dry field. I would have thought they were ranked trophies from a mass beheading, had they not been screaming and sobbing.

  It was obvious that these people had been buried to their necks. And from the proximity of the volcano, I assumed it was in lava—now cooled—that they had been buried. Perhaps years ago. Perhaps generations ago. Imagine the people entombed at Pompeii, only still alive.

  The heat rose behind me, roared against my back in a feral wind. I heard heavy branches cracking as they fell. The inferno wanted to push me off the ledge. Though I had seen the animal land on solid ground, only too solid, I was irrationally afraid that I would be swallowed up like these others if I leaped. But when I glanced over my shoulder, saw the flames, I knew I must. Yes, I could survive those flames, regenerate. Still, I did not want them touching my ectoplasmic flesh. Sometimes I thought that regeneration hurt even more than the injury itself.

  I turned and lowered myself down the rocky cliff until I was able to drop to the floor of the caldera without breaking any bones myself.

  Looking down at the heads that were nearest to me, I saw that those which faced in my direction had fixed their eyes on me. Down here amongst them, their lamentations seemed even more stunningly loud. But I could still hear the individual cries from these heads at my feet.

  "Help me!" one screamed.

  "Dig me out! Please!"

  And one of them, a black man with his branded forehead glistening with sweat and pasted with ash, said, "Watch out for the Harvesters."

  I took a step closer to him, and crouched down a bit, but kept back a little as if I feared he might be luring me in to drag me down with him. I saw a tiny orange crab crawl up from the back of his head to perch atop it. It had kinky hairs stuck in its pincers that it had obviously plucked from his head. I reached out and flicked the thing off him.

  "Watch out for the what?" I said.

  "Listen," the man went on, rolling his bulging eyes frantically, "you have to get out of here. The ones who put us here have been gone a long time…I don’t know how long…but now the Harvesters are beginning to collect us. More of them will be coming…"

  "Please, mister, please!" a woman shrieked at me. I looked at her. Half of her skull was crushed, horribly indented like a deflated basketball. But despite the thick, drying blood I could see she was already mending. I realized that she, like many, had been struck with rocks hurled like missiles from the eruptions.

  "There’s nothing he can do for us!" another man bellowed at her. "He’s just like us! He’ll get his another way!"

  "Listen," the black man hissed, and I returned my attention to him. "There’s a town in the foothills, to the right of the volcano. Can you see them?" He tried to jerk his head over his shoulder. I glanced in that
direction. I could see the foothills he spoke of, entirely black. "There’s a town there—Caldera. We all lived there…we built it. For years it wasn’t too bad. Demons would come into town, and Angels, but it was bearable. The volcano never made a peep. And then one day the volcano woke up and took Caldera. And the Demons gathered up the survivors and planted us here."

  "But the town is buried?"

  "Mostly. But go there. It’s as safe as you’re going to get. And beyond it, if you can make it, beyond it is a city. If you can get there, you’ll be a little better off. Towns and cities are less open, there are more places to hide. They’re usually safer—when you can find them. But for all I know, that city might be gone now, too. Just be sure you don’t go into a Demon city. Make damn sure of that…"

  In the distance, through the screams and the wind and the mounting sounds of the fire, which cast a glow on the cracked ground around me, I heard a new sound. Like a truck rumbling slowly across unpaved ground. And mechanical whines and rasps and gratings.

  "The Harvesters!" shrieked the woman with the crushed head. In glancing at her again, I saw another orange crab plucking at her healing wound. I swatted it off her. She didn’t seem to notice, so terrified was she of this Harvester we were hearing.

  "We’ll be freed, at least," the black man told her. "Finally freed from this lava…"

  "I don’t want to go through it!" she sobbed.

  "You’d better go, mister," warned the black man. "You’d better go."