The cathedral gave a jerk as it shuddered back into movement. I was thankful for that, after what Uphir had said about the state of things above us.
"Goodbye, Oblivion," I muttered to myself.
I thought about what Chara had said about the Father being half-dead. I also thought about what certain other laborers had suggested regarding the purpose of the factory where I was working. "We keep the Creator running," one man had whispered to me. Were places like that plant and the machine building a kind of life support system that kept the Creator alive? Or at least, which harnessed and focused His force? If such places were to be destroyed, would we kill the Creator? And if He were entirely killed…would we be free, or would we His children perish along with Him, without His breath to keep inflated the illusory balloon of our pseudo existence?
"I’m going to confer with the others," Uphir said.
"I’ll come with you," said Chara.
"I think I’d better go and get some more rest," I said, rotating my arm to test my healing shoulder. I winced at the ache.
Whether the seagull screams or the gunfire came first I can’t recall, but all three of us spun in unison as four of the doors in the central hall burst open and Celestials began surging forth, submachine guns sputtering and bucking in their fists.
It was obvious that they had scrambled up the outer sides of the Black Cathedral during our brief layover, and had shattered windows to gain entrance into four of the torture chambers. It looked like as many as twenty of them had found their way inside…
"Go!" Chara yelled, pushing me away. But I yanked my remaining pistol out of my waistband, determined to stay and fight alongside the Demons. After all, I was the only passenger aboard who couldn’t be killed.
I saw a Demon whack off the gun hand of a Celestial, who without missing a beat drew its own sword, and in a second their blades were clanging against each other. The Celestial even whipped its wounded arm in an arc to fling blood from its stump in the Demon’s face, to distract him. I viewed this as a cheap trick so I shot the being in the ear. The Demon looked down at his crumpled foe, then up at me in blank surprise. I almost felt guilty for cheating him out of an honest fight, but in a blink he was racing off to meet another enemy.
My actions hadn’t gone unnoticed by the Celestials, either; a burst of gunfire whizzed past me, even flicking my hair over my left ear. I dove behind the central desk for cover, but apparently someone else engaged the shooter because they didn’t come around the desk after me. Or maybe, in the confusion, the bullets had even come from a Demon’s weapon.
Wildly looking around me for Chara, I couldn’t make her out in the chaos of bat wings and muzzle flash, shouts and thunder, but I did see Uphir with one wing hacked off and the other hanging half-severed, holding onto both wrists of a Celestial with a bloody sword in one fist. Before I could point my handgun to help him, another Celestial came up from behind and drove its blade deep into the Demon’s lower back. I saw Chara’s friend drop…her third friend whose death I had personally witnessed.
I still meant to shoot at these two, but before I could that shorn-headed female with the MAC-10 had sprayed them both pretty thoroughly.
There was definitely an effort on the Celestials’ part to converge on the door into the control room, obviously to sabotage and disable the cathedral. There were maybe eight of them already at the door, two of them squeezing through the threshold, pressing on despite the wounds in them. I decided to emerge from my half-shelter and add my efforts to stopping them.
Cresil, yelling like a berserker, had scooped up a shotgun from the hands of a dead Celestial and ran straight at the knot before the cockpit door, pumping off blast after blast as he went. I bolted in the same direction, pointing my pistol and squeezing off the last few of its shots. I was still in my forward momentum as the pistol clicked empty. Now I was without arms, only my legs sending me right at those androgynous, nearly ethereal warriors.
But several other Demons charged after us, adding their own bullets to the storm, plus a thrown iron javelin which actually went through one Celestial and into another, bringing them both down in a writhing shish-kabob.
By the time Cresil and I had reached the door, five of the Celestials there were dead and three were in the control room, where it sounded like the navigator/mechanics Thamuz and Allatou had met them squarely. Gunfire ricocheted in there. If it should shatter delicate instruments, that tank of burbling green liquid…
Cresil was the first to clamber over the corpses that choked the threshold, with myself on his heels and another Demon directly behind me. I wanted to call out to him not to fire his shotgun in the room, but he seemed to realize this risk himself, despite his mindless ferocity, and instead swung the gun by its truncated barrel like a club. The force of his blow was so great that he broke the wooden stock off the gun, which itself spun entirely out of his hands as a result, but he had successfully caved in half the head of a Celestial, leaving only two alive in the control room.
I saw that Thamuz was dead, shot several times in the chest, but Allatou had a long curved sword like a katana in the guts of one Celestial and was twisting and wrenching at the handle as if it were one of the levers that controlled the cathedral. Unwilling harakiri was the result. Another Celestial fell.
The last Celestial, swiveling madly, firing a pistol as it did so, snapped its eyes onto me. And a moment later, the muzzle of its revolver snapped its focus on me as well. I could see the tips of several remaining bullets in the front of the cylinder.
Without a weapon, all I could do was raise my spread hands as an ineffectual shield and hope that the pain of regeneration wouldn’t be too drawn out. That was when Cresil slammed his arm down on the Celestial’s, so that the gun discharged at the floor. The rebounding bullet ended up whining off the metal wall behind me before its flight was spent. And before a second shot could be fired, Cresil swung his other hand in a fist into the front of the Celestial’s throat, knocking it back against the wall behind it. It hovered there stunned, only a moment, before the Demon who had barged into the control room behind me jammed a short sword into its skull, then tugged savagely down on the grip so that the creature’s brains slithered out from between its levered-apart eyes. It slid down the wall bonelessly, leaving me to turn and see that the Demon who had followed me closely into the cockpit was Chara, awash in blood, her eyes seeming to glow in a speckled mask of arterial spray.
"I think that’s the last of them," she panted. There was no gunfire to be heard in the huge central room, outside.
Cresil and Allatou knelt over Thamuz. Wearily, with multiple wounds streaming inky blood, Cresil rose and I caught his eyes. "Thanks," I told him.
He just grunted and slipped past me out the door.
"Let’s throw these immaculate misconceptions off the train," I said, lightly kicking a dead Celestial in the side. I helped drag them out of the room.
The front doors of the Black Cathedral were opened, so that we could toss body after body out onto the dark tracks that receded behind us. It was unfortunate, but we ended up deciding to leave behind the bodies of our comrades as well. But for this, we stopped the cathedral, and carried them out to lay by the side of the tracks, unburied, but at least not splayed across the tracks themselves like refuse. Then, quickly, lest even more Celestials swarm on board, we were in motion again.
After several hours, three of the wounded died…leaving twenty-six Demons of the original combined sum of forty still alive. And myself, of course. The convert.
Day 78.
Today we stopped briefly beneath the smallish city of Pergamos, to pick up another band of rebels fleeing that town. Fortunately, no Celestials boarded this time (the Pergamos Demons hadn’t seen any in their town at all), and we resumed our journey without fuss. This brought our number up to thirty-eight. One of the new men nodded at me respectfully. One of the new women sneered at me as if she’d discovered me on the ball of her heel.
Chara sleeps in the bunk abo
ve me, not in the same one with me. For the sake of appearances, mostly, though the bunks are awfully narrow. Though of course, twice now we’ve managed to both crowd into my bunk to make love, unobserved.
Day 82.
Maybe because I’m still adjusting to sleeping in a new, strange, moving place, I had an odd dream last night. I don’t think it’s of any actual significance, but it felt very real to me at the time and even when I first woke up, so I feel sort of obliged to write it down. It unsettled me.
In my dream I was again a prisoner in Oblivion, as when I first arrived. And again, I shared my cell with that poor blighted creature who was apparently mentally ill or, as another prisoner claimed, autistic. His improperly regenerated head was ringed in anus-like openings through which dangled twisted dry gnarls of brain matter, and he was hugging his bony knees, thumping his head back into the wall in a ceaseless rhythm while he muttered something repeatedly, mantra-like. I was in the cell with him, but despite this, in the dream I felt free. Not a prisoner like him. I stood across from him, watching him…and out of curiosity and compassion, I drew nearer to the tormented prisoner and bent over him a bit to listen to what he was saying.
But when I grew near to him, and saw his eyes, which were fixed in space and wouldn’t look into my own, a vast realization entered into me. For a moment it made me straighten up sharply, but I resisted the urge to back away from him.
My realization was that this creature was the Creator Himself. And no one had recognized the truth before but me. Not even the Demons who had stuck Him in that cell. The Demons who had tortured Him. Our Father, who had created us and all around us but had been drained and gone mad from the effort.
Despite this awesome awareness, I still felt gently concerned for this being, who suffered like the most miserable soul in all of Hades. I took a step nearer to Him, and bent down again to listen to what He was murmuring.
"I’m sorry," the prisoner was saying to Himself, or to me, over and over and over. "I’m sorry…I’m sorry…"
Day 83.
As a favor to me—or more correctly, Chara—a Demon with surgical skill as a torturer has freed the writer named Frank Lyre from my journal.
Chara has been reading my journal from the beginning, which has flattered me but also made me nervous, in regard to how she might feel about the entries concerning herself. So far she has been complimentary, and I’ve even caught her chuckling over a few passages, which I guess is a good thing.
Today she came to the entry for Day 40. Coincidentally (or not), that was when I was imprisoned with that being I dreamed about yesterday. In the course of that entry I also described how I had learned to communicate with Lyre, and how I had asked him what would happen if I tried to pry his eye out, or if I removed his skin which binds this book. Would he finally regenerate fully as a man? At the time, he had told me he wasn’t sure what would happen.
That was when Chara had broken off from her reading, and suggested to me that Lyre could in fact be freed. And this rather disturbingly gifted Demon amongst our group could probably handle the job.
I watched him use a simple filleting knife, produced from his ominously pouched and tinkling tool belt, to skin the binding of human leather from the covers of my journal, and I ached to think that the process might be harming Lyre. But even before attempting this operation, I had asked him if he wanted us to go through with it, and with his blinking code he had told me that he did.
Like a chef deftly flipping an egg without breaking the yolk, the torturer was able to remove the skin with the eye intact and still blinking. He lay the patch of flesh down on my bed, and then we tore the remaining covers off my journal and burned them, because there were still remnants of Lyre there, rooted like grass into them, and this way his remaining soul was concentrated into the one most viable hunk of flesh. The Demon advised that this would better insure that the flayed flesh binding would regenerate as a man…rather than decompose, with Lyre regenerating on the covers again instead.
Because there is so little of him, I’m told it will be a long painful process for him. I hope he finds it worth it.
I’ve turned over my narrow bed to him. That’s all right; I’ll squeeze into Chara’s after all. To Hell with what the others think.
Day 85.
Despite Allatou’s laid in coordinates, we became lost for a few days, as it turns out. She thinks maybe it’s because of the battle that took place in the control center; a struck valve, a nudged lever, a jarred gear. But everything seems to be corrected now and we’re back on course…having reversed our direction along the tracks for most of today, and switching into another tunnel that branched off to one side.
But we must be nearing the general vicinity of the colder region, because you can feel the outside air coming in through our shattered windows. I hope they aren’t so accustomed/adapted to the cold in Gehenna and Pluto that they don’t use heat from steam and fires!
Lyre looks like a man now. A man dissected by first-time—and blind—medical students, but a kind of man…though he’s too incomplete and in too much pain to talk. Still, I sit on the edge of his bunk and talk to him, for company. I tried to hold his hand but it hurt his exposed nerves and broke small blood vessels so that my palm came away wet. Poor guy. We writers suffer for our art.
I told him the plot of the great novel I had always planned to write. "Now don’t steal my ideas," I warned him. But I won’t summarize it here. I don’t want to cash in its magic prematurely, if you can get what I mean. Sometimes you can talk and think a novel out of your system before you even type the first word.
Whether this novel, set in the mortal world, with mortal concerns and absolutely no sense of an afterlife, will emerge as I had planned it…or whether it becomes informed by what I know now…I can’t yet say. We’ll see when I get there. I think I’ll write that next, instead of a second volume of this journal. I can always catch up on my memoirs later on. After all, they’ll be an on-going, endless series. Whether my readership here in Hades would be better entertained by—better relate to—my experiences in the afterlife or by fictions of the world they once knew, I can’t say, either. But I’m so anxious to begin. Talking about it to Lyre has rekindled my old enthusiasm for it, minus my former debilitating, fatalistic despair that had me take up a shotgun instead of a pen. Or, keyboard, that is.
I want to ask Lyre what he plans to write when he is whole again. Maybe we can even collaborate on something…
Day 87.
Final Entry.
We have arrived in Gehenna, where nearly half of our crew has decided to remain. The rest of us will continue on to Pluto on foot and in wagons we’ll purchase here, pulled by blocky hair-covered animals that apparently don’t have heads under all that foul-smelling shag.
The sky here is as white and featureless as the ground, and in fact I’m told it is a solid ceiling of ice, and that sometimes chunks of it break off and come crashing down onto the town. Gehenna is much smaller than Oblivion, the tallest structures being only about six or seven stories in height. Most structures are black, but their sides frosted over with a lace of wind-blown crystalized snow, and snow packed in a solid layer on their roofs. Pluto, with the majority of its structures built from bricks of ice, is even colder than this? I’m almost tempted to remain here myself, but I’ll get used to it. Chara has taken to wearing clothing for the first time since I’ve known her. Oddly, seeing her in clothing stirs my lust anew. Seeing her thighs tightly gripped by coarse tan pants, teases of her breasts peeking out from the shawls she’s wrapped around her middle and between the obstacles of her wing roots. Her nakedness now will be all the more alluring, as will her hair unveiled from the kerchief she has made over her head.
There are very intimidating, very primitive Demons here like bears, or huge shaggy hyenas, that lope around on four legs as often as they shamble along on two. But my comrades have satisfied them with this story and that. I’m supposedly a servant, and they’ve been told not to mistreat me. My
heart goes out to the hard-faced, empty-eyed Damned of this town, though, for the mistreatment they suffer. Too many of them have no shawls, kerchiefs or pants against the whistling, white-misted winds that weave between the long, low buildings.
The Demons of Chara’s ilk who live in Gehenna have been trusted with the knowledge of the genocide in Oblivion, and our flight from it. Though we suspect there will be resentment about the possibility of Celestials tracking the fugitives to this place, the overwhelming sentiment appears to be one of sympathy and solidarity.
By now Lyre could stand in the doorway of the Black Cathedral and gaze outside, wrapped in blankets, but he wasn’t quite up to venturing forth. The animal-like Demons had been instructed not to harass him, either. He was very gaunt, I found, and nearly bald…though maybe he’ll fill out and his hair grow back some more, before he’s done.
Already Allatou had reprogrammed the Black Cathedral, and was about to send it away unmanned, backwards, off in another direction to throw any pursuers off our trail. But a request from Lyre made me ask that she hold off for a little while longer…
"I think my father is back in Oblivion," he told me. "Not to make you feel guilty…but I was hoping not to leave there. I thought maybe somehow, sometime I’d find him. If I ever got out of that book…as unlikely as that ever seemed…"
"You didn’t tell me," I said, feeling guilty nonetheless.
Letters From Hades Page 18
