Letters From Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  "Yes sir."

  "You didn’t intend to meet Chara in Blue that night?"

  "No sir. I had no idea she’d be there."

  "You haven’t ever met with her socially, I would take it?"

  "No sir…never. Like you say, that isn’t done."

  He nodded. "Of course. It’s just…well…Mr. Butler thought he heard an exchange between you and the Demon, but his head was still largely unformed so he may have been mistaken…"

  "An exchange?"

  "Well, he thought you said something to the effect that Chara should come see you. To which the Demon was said to respond that she knows where you live."

  I tried not to swallow again. I tried not to hesitate, or protest too strenuously, when I said, "Mr. Butler must be mistaken, Mr. Turner. Like you said, his head was still reforming. I’m not associated with this woman…Demon…no matter what I might have done for her. She’s a Demon, sir. I’m nothing but an animal to her, if even that."

  "Perhaps. Then again, from what I’ve heard from witnesses, and particularly from the two victims, it seemed that this Demon was trying to protect you from Mr. Butler."

  "Sir…you know, maybe she was. Maybe she was trying to repay me for what I did for her. But I didn’t ask her to. Like you said, I didn’t participate in the attack myself. And maybe she wasn’t protecting me…maybe they had simply harassed her beyond her breaking point."

  "That could be. Not to exonerate her; there is no excuse for what she did, however insulted she herself might have felt…"

  "But we aren’t friends, sir," I chuckled myself this time, to show that even the notion was absurd. "That would be like me climbing one of the watchtowers to play checkers with an Overseer."

  Turner snorted a half laugh and pushed his chair back, rising to his feet. I did the same. He shook my hand again as he emerged from behind the desk.

  "I appreciate your candor, sir," he told me. "And please…if you ever should spot Chara in Oblivion again, report it to another Demon immediately. They’ve been instructed to capture her, despite their feelings about her being of their own kind. They know they’re expected to demonstrate their loyalty to their jobs, first and foremost."

  "I should think she’d get out of Oblivion altogether, as fast as she could."

  "You may be right. Then again, it is a large city. With many nooks and crannies."

  We exited my alleged supervisor’s office (maybe there wasn’t even a Mr. Gold; another possible sham). I was relieved to see the Celestial’s cadaverous spine as it walked away ahead of me. But Turner turned toward me again, and the Celestial paused as well.

  "Just one more thing, sir," Turner apologized. "When Butler and Franklin reconstituted, they found their assault rifles beside them. But both were missing their pistols. Do you know anything about that?"

  "Missing their pistols? No, sir…I don’t…"

  "Well, a patron might have snuck back and grabbed them. And of course it’s very possible that Chara herself took them. While Demons favor their swords and such, they can use a gun when they have to…as Chara proved with those assault rifles."

  "Yes sir."

  Turner clapped his palms together, as if catching a fly between them. "All right, then. Good enough. I thank you again."

  "Anytime, sir." I forced a smile as I watched the Angel investigator and his bodyguard or escort turn down a dingy corridor. I half-expected the affable detective to look back and give a wave.

  How had Turner found out where I worked? I supposed that the factory owner was required to report my employment to some office or other of the city’s demonic government.

  And might the owner of the hotel/lodging house also report to some office the names of those like myself who rent on an extended basis? Maybe there is a kind of census bureau in Oblivion after all…

  Might Turner, like Chara, know where I live?

  Day 67.

  I took my more recently favored, more circuitous path home from work. The sidewalk along this street was formed from sooty black bricks, like the crowded buildings that faced it. Gray translucent grass and weeds grew at the confluence of sidewalk and wall. I had managed to elude Larry’s attempts at walking home with me.

  I stopped briefly in a small bookshop along the way, as I had done before. There was a printing press in the back room; I’d seen the door left half open, had heard its churning sounds. The offering was small; chapbooks, stapled at the spine, nothing perfect bound. Memoirs, brief autobiographies. Poetry or short story collections, novellas at most. No religious propaganda or anything like that, and it was not any kind of diabolic establishment. It was managed and operated by a small group of citizens, publishing and distributing the writing of other citizens.

  Naturally I found most of the work I’d already bought to be amateurish, sophomoric. The typos few (I credited the publishers for this more so than the authors), but the actual prose seldom above the level of a high school creative writing class. The fiction cliched, often maudlin, the nonfiction of little interest to anyone who had not lived it themselves. And yet I was grateful for even the worst of it, and was only too happy to spend my hard-won coins on it (even though I wished Anne Sexton and Yukio Mishima—writers who interested me greatly, having both ended their own lives as I had—were citizens of Oblivion). Today I bought a slim collection of poems by yet another obscure author.

  Not for the first time, I wondered if this publishing house—Necropolitan Press—might be inclined to publish this journal of mine. I had been entertaining the fantasy of slipping it through some crack in the wall of Hell, sneaking it into the living world through a portal. Might some of the more infernal of the world’s books have found their way into the hands of Satanists in that manner? Might these Satanists heed my warnings, mend their ways so as to avoid my fate?

  But it seems unlikely that it’s possible. It’s said that the spirit cannot be translated back into matter. If it were so, I might as well try slipping through some chink myself. I’ve heard only Demons and Celestials can accomplish this feat, as they never had mortal flesh in the first place…though they are generally forbidden to do so, and I’m sure it’s a rare occasion indeed when it is permitted (at which time, it’s rumored, they would be almost invariably invisible to mortal eyes, anyway).

  But being a writer, I yearn for readers. It would be ironic if I fare better in Hell than I did in life, in acquiring them. That would even give Hell a positive aspect for me, and I like that idea—the notion of turning my punishment into something that works favorably for me, if even in some small and humble way. Yes…I must approach the owners of this bookstore/publishing house one of these days soon. Before my journal gets too big for them to print in the format they use. I can always write a volume two, and three, and so on. A continuing series, if readership warrants it. Perhaps in reading about my personal experiences in Hell, others will feel less alone in their suffering, more connected to their fellows. It’s the aspiration of art; to share, to connect. But I won’t limit myself to these memoirs. I will also write of the world we left behind. I’ll write escapism, because art serves that less lofty but just as valuable purpose as well. My own poetry and short story collections. Yes…this gives me something to look forward to (I won’t say something to live for).

  There were narrow alleys between some of these black brick row houses, which had a kind of Colonial look and which I assumed to be among the oldest of Oblivion’s structures. As I began to pass one alley that had a black iron gate blocking its end, a voice emerged from its shadowy throat.

  "In here," it said. "Hurry."

  I stopped, looked, and saw a white apparition near the back of the alley. It took one step forward. It was Chara.

  After a glance over my shoulder to be sure no one was close enough to identify me, I gave the barred door a push. It swung open on its rusty hinges. I slipped into the alley, closing the gate behind me, and went to Chara’s side.

  "I don’t live in my barracks anymore; I have a room. I’ll take you
there, if you want," she whispered. She looked serious, intense; no smile of greeting, though why should there be? Then again, why should she be here at all? She had obviously done reconnaissance on my recent path home from work.

  "Yes," I answered. Then I asked, "Are you being hunted by your own kind?"

  "Some of them. Not others."

  "An investigator came around my work to talk to me. He was an Angel. He…"

  She looked even more grave, but said, "Wait until we get to my place. Then you can tell me all about it."

  I nodded, and followed her out the other end of the alley. It fed into a larger alley, heaped with broken furniture and half-stripped unidentifiable machinery, with sentinel trash cans presiding over the detritus. Then, we plunged into another narrow alley, emerging onto a street unevenly paved in flagstones and almost as narrow as an alley itself.

  This went on for a while, and I soon lost my orientation. We were in an obscure warren of streets I had never explored before. We were seen by various pedestrians, but they lowered their eyes in fear of Chara. Fortunately we encountered no Demons, who were in minority in Oblivion in any case. I could see more clearly now that her hair was not braided as she characteristically wore it, hung freely down her back as it had the first time I’d met her. She wore her sword. I wished I had my guns on me, but they were hidden back in my flat. As I had been doing lately, I had propped this book against my window so Lyre could at least have a view of the street (if not the skyline, blocked as it was by the vast machine building) to pass his intolerable hours. I hoped he wouldn’t be worrying where I was.

  "Act like my prisoner," Chara hissed, as we emerged onto a broader street. She drew her sword and held it in one fist, her other hand gripping my wrist, and she almost literally dragged me stumbling along. People were really afraid to glance at her now that she looked like she meant business, though I imagined that they felt sympathy for me.

  We climbed a stone stairway wedged between two close tenement houses, and emerged on an upper level of street. Ascending behind Chara, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her buttocks as they pumped, her strong legs, the wings folded against her back. I wondered if the wings had sensation, how it would feel for her if I touched them. My furtive lust left me feeling guilty, especially knowing how my fellow humans had suffered at this creature’s hands; it was like lusting after a Nazi. But it seemed impossible for me to not stare at her incandescent white flesh.

  There was a bridge ahead which people were walking across, though mainly it was just another available surface for building, covered in houses and reminding me of photos I’d seen of Florence’s Ponte Vecchio. We would be passing underneath it through one of the shadowed arches of its stone base. Once we were underneath the bridge, however, Chara slipped a key out of a small pouch affixed to her scabbard’s belt. She unlocked a rust-scabbed metal door set into the bridge’s broad leg, and led me into the small apartment she had rented or acquired.

  It was larger than my own flat, actually, but without even my single window. The walls and ceiling were entirely sheeted in copper, stained green with verdigris, especially on the ceiling where the bare pipes that crossed it sweated moisture. There, a mineral encrustation had accumulated to the point that it swallowed the pipes in spots and miniature stalactites had formed here and there. Gas jets hissed on several walls. There were also banks of levers set into one wall, leading me to think this was originally meant as a utility area of some kind. Chara threw a heavy bolt to secure the iron door, then turned to face me.

  "When you first set me free," she husked, "I thought it might be because you were afraid not to. I thought maybe you were just a brown-nose, and a coward."

  "I did it out of compassion!" I protested.

  She held up her hand. "But when you stood up to those fucking swine in Blue, I realized you were stronger than I thought."

  "Listen, there’s this detective of some kind, who came to my job…"

  Before I could finish my sentence, Chara came at me. For a moment terror blanked my mind. Had she lured me in here, then, to punish me? Did she think I had betrayed her to Inspector Turner?

  She seized my skull between her hands. Her face swooped at mine, her head tilted forward so that her dark-rimmed eyes looked up at me from beneath her brows, her too-full lips parted so that I only saw her bottom row of teeth. Then her predatory mouth was on my mouth. Her tongue was inside my soul.

  Chara’s mouth squashed desperately against mine, and it seemed like she wanted to suck the very breath from me. My arms had gone around her and my hands across her warm bare flesh, until I awkwardly came up against the unfamiliar jut of her wings. It had been so long since I had embraced Caroline back in the ruins of Caldera, and before that, my wife who rejected me. My whole body ached with a yearning beyond lust, seemingly beyond passion. Chara seemed just as frantic, feverish. I heard my shirt rip as she wrenched it up over my head.

  There was a bed that was little more than a cot, which Chara pushed me down on before sitting astride me. She reached between us to guide me into her, then plunged her weight down in one thrust so that I cried out more in shock than in pleasure. Straddling me, the female devil ground herself with a deep rotating rhythm atop me.

  Her wings opened and spread to their full length, trembling subtly with the overall tension of her body. They overshadowed us like a tent, one gas jet glowing through their translucent membranes from behind, silhouetting dark veins that seemed to visibly throb. I saw thick scars spaced along the wings, now, too…from her crucifixion in the forest. I couldn’t see her hands, wrists, feet or ankles at this angle, where there must be more scarring; as Chara herself had told me, the Demons could heal, but not as thoroughly as we humans could. My eyes dropped to her navel, where she had been skewered with the iron pike, but no wound was evident in that shadowed indentation. Its alluring mystery was intact. A navel is like both an eye and a vagina.

  Moaning, I ran my hands over her smooth thighs, slid them up to hold her waist as she rode me, reached to grip and squeeze her paper-white breasts, their gray nipples straining rubbery and hard against my palms.

  After we had both spent ourselves, she lay on her belly while I lay on my back, one of her arms and one of her open wings lying across me as we cooled, sweat glistening on us, the air humid from our breath and heat. The wing was like a blanket; I ran my fingers lightly across it, tracing the veins, then touching one of the raised white scars. Stigmata. I stole a look at her face. Those thick gray lips were pressed into the subtlest of contented smiles, her heavy eyelids shut. Her beauty nearly made my chest tighten painfully.

  "I wanted you from the second I saw you," I whispered.

  Without opening her eyes, she said, "Did you know Verdelet was more than my partner?" A pause in which I said nothing. "She was my lover as well."

  "I’m sorry," I said. I meant it, though I felt a foolish stab of jealousy and wondered if, with her eyes closed, she was imagining it was her dead lover whose shoulder she pressed her cheek to. I saw that her smile had faded. Her eyes opened, and head lifted to look up at me.

  "You’re different. You’re the first man who I didn’t want to be afraid of me."

  "I don’t want to be afraid of you either." I smiled.

  "I don’t know why I brought you here," she said. "I don’t know what I’m doing."

  "You’re rebelling. Against this whole thing. The Angels, and what they want to do to you now. Your job, which must be as mind-numbing as mine. The lack of freedom you suffer as much as I do…"

  "I am bored," she confessed, her gaze moving to the far wall. "Do you know we Demons try to think up different ways of torturing humans, just to stave off the boredom of it all?"

  I wanted to joke how awful that must be, and how it made my heart bleed for the Demons, but I was in fact still afraid of her. I let her go on.

  "We’re punished like you are, just like you said. We have no freedom. We’re born to a hive like ants. Nothing in the universe is promised justice, but my hea
rt still cries out for this nonexistent justice like yours does. The Father’s sense of justice is as alien to me as it is to you; when you don’t analyze it, you can accept it, but when you make the mistake of scrutinizing it then nothing makes sense any more. At least you had a chance at Heaven. My kind are born as adults, our destinies preordained. There is no Satan, no Lucifer, but I wish there was; my own deity to look after his own kind…"

  "Are you here with me now because you’re bored? Because this is something new and exciting for you? Or is it because you were touched by the mercy I showed you?"

  "Both," she answered without hesitation.

  But I hesitated before I said, "I am truly sorry about Verdelet. If you hadn’t fought to protect me, she might still be alive."

  "I’ve thought of that. But it isn’t your fault. I don’t hold it against you."

  "That’s very Christian of you."

  Scorching eyes flicked up to mine. "Don’t make light of my compassion. It isn’t something to be taken for granted."

  "I don’t," I assured her. "But I trust in it. I know you have integrity. And loyalty. So that’s why I don’t understand how you can hurt human beings."

  "It’s my job. I was born to it, I told you. An ant doesn’t go to school. I was born as I am now. It’s my very nature. The fact that I’m acting against that nature now shows what a freak I’ve become. How years of sameness have warped my thoughts and made me an aberration. I almost wish I could go back to the way I was."