Happy Hour in Hell

thirteen: gob

SO ONE moment I’m lying under somebody’s spare bed like a bargain basement King Tut, the next I’m in deep, deep darkness. And things got even stranger after that, because the darkness was bumpy.

I’m not talking texture here, like undercooked oatmeal, I’m talking about the fact that I could feel myself going bump, bump, bump as I went down, as though I were being lowered by very clumsy hands. I was in some kind of closet or tiny room. No, I realized as the entire enclosure lurched around me, throwing me toward one of the walls. No, I was in an elevator. I was descending to Hell in an elevator, ratcheting down on a squeaky cable toward the ultimate basement floor. I wondered if other new arrivals got different conveyances. Handbaskets, for instance.

I felt different, I realized, and it wasn’t just the sudden absence of Lameh the guardian angel (apparently she herself wasn’t accompanying me) or the presence of the ideas she’d whispered into my memory. My whole body felt different in ways I couldn’t quite understand, and the feeling was so strange that it took me longer than it should have to realize that I must be in a new body as well, that as part of her duties Lameh had housed my soul in something more suited to travel in Hell. A new body and a few new thoughts, too, but the same old hopeless situation.

I found it all very creepy for those first moments, but as the jolting descent continued, my situation just became boring. Then the very boredom, the length and unrelenting sameness of the journey, became creepy again. If it hadn’t been for a few bone-rattling jolts and the very occasional smolder of light through the little window that seemed to be in front of my face, I might have been in some kind of endless video loop, the same meaningless five seconds cycling for eternity. I was fairly certain that Hell’s high rollers didn’t travel in and out this way, since it seemed to be taking hours.

The long descent gave me time to take a little stock. I lifted up my hands to see if I could get some idea what my Hell-body looked like. They seemed darker than usual and the nails were nearly claws, but otherwise not too freaky. There wasn’t enough light to make out any of the rest of me, but I bent what I could bend, felt what I could feel. Mostly it seemed pretty normal, although my skin definitely seemed thicker than before, a bit like the rubbery hide of dolphins and orcas.

At last, the elevator shuddered to a halt with a whine of metal on metal. The door banged open. I half-expected to see Housewares or the Children’s Shoes department or something, but instead I stood on one side of a narrow expanse of yellow dust, everything above me and beside me lost in shadow. But it was a big space—that much I could tell. Impossibly big. On the far side of the dust loomed the Neronian Bridge, my first glimpse of that impossible span of stone. The featureless bridge curved up and across the monstrous abyss until it narrowed into near-invisibility over the pit’s dark center, illuminated only by the fiery red glow licking through cracks in the walls.

I had enough light now to look at myself. My hands were roughly human, but my skin color (or colors, to be more accurate) wasn’t even close; what I could see was ashy gray with stripes of black and orange. At the joints the skin hardened into black plates, and when I twisted my arm or leg I could see bright red flesh appearing or disappearing in the crevices as the plates pulled apart. It was a bit unsettling, to tell the truth, so I stopped doing it. I felt my head, which seemed fairly ordinary except that where I normally would have had hair I was feeling something more like bristles or even quills. No horns, then. My feet were flat black and leathery, with only one division, between my big toe and the rest of my foot, like Japanese tabi socks. If that was standard issue for demons, I could understand where the idea of hooves had come from. No tail, either, which was a bit of a relief. In fact, everything I could see except for my color and my toes felt and looked at least human-ish. Could have been a lot worse.

I felt different on the inside as well, but it was impossible to know whether all the new sensations flooding into me were because I was wearing a new body or because I was in Hell. Still, I reminded myself, this body might be strange and the skin tones might be un peu poison-dart frog, but what was important was that my new demon shape was like an astronaut’s suit; it was going to help keep me safe in this very unhealthy place.

I already told you what happened on the Neronian Bridge. Here’s what happened when I stepped off it and into the hot, thick mist at the edge of Hell.

I had been expecting something like the old border crossing into East Berlin or maybe even the Black Gate into Mordor, but instead entering the Bad Place was as easy as stepping out of a taxicab—at least at first.

From what the guardian Lameh had planted in my memory, I knew I must be in the Abaddon levels, somewhere in the upper middle of Hell. But if this was upper middle, I knew for sure I didn’t want to visit anything lower, because even before I could see any of it, I could smell it. Abaddon stank. I don’t mean simple, ordinary foul odors like shit or rotting meat. I mean a combination of every foul smell that biology and geology could create, blended into a heady bouquet that combined not only all that a nose would normally detest, but wafts of things so odd and unexpected—like copper and burning hay, just to throw out a couple of examples—that I simply could not get used to it. I never really did, either. The architects of the underworld were, excuse the pun, fiendishly clever: They knew that a single stench, or even a million unchanging stenches, can become familiar after a while. But small changes can keep anything new, no matter how horrible. As long as I was there, I never learned to ignore the stink.

As I left the bridge behind and walked through the swirl of stinging, acid mist, voices filled the hot, damp near-darkness, some human, some animal, some horribly in-between—shrieks, moans, arguments, even tatters of laughter that sounded as though they had been jerked painfully out of whatever spawned them. The noise of the damned. Pretty much what you’d expect. The air was horribly hot and slimy, muggy as the worst August day in the New York subway times a thousand. Already I could feel the gears grinding at the interface between what my mind expected my body to do—pump gallons of sweat as quickly as possible—and what the demon body actually did, which was nothing. This was normal, you see, and the body I wore treated it that way. One hundred and forty degrees and drippy as a Florida swamp? No problem.

Lovely day, sir and madam. Expect it might rain diarrhea later so I brought my brolly, eh what? Cheerio!

As I emerged from the mists near the bridge I could see for the first time where I actually was.

According to Lameh’s briefing, facts now stuck in my brain like some kind of half-forgotten college survey course, Hell is a monstrous cylinder, wide as a small country and almost infinitely high and low, its countless habitations piled in layers like some impossibly huge core sample, the pith of an entire world. Abaddon, like much of Hell, was a sort of self-contained country made up of several levels, and its cities were built almost entirely from the wreckage of other cities.

“Wreckage” sure seemed to describe what lay before me. Stones and mud had been dragged into new arrangements, the rubble of old towers and walls rebuilt into a thousand new shapes to make an immense insect hive with scarcely two shoulders’ width of passageway between the stacked structures, and every bit I could see teemed with hellish life. The variety of body shapes was astonishing. Some of them could hardly be called bodies in a normal sense, being little more than moving piles of goo (often disconcertingly full of eyes); others wore the shapes of beasts or half-beasts, or upsetting reworkings of the basic human form. One of them a short distance away from me, crawling up a muddy facade of linked and interconnected holes over flimsy ladders of wood and mud and twisted rawhide, looked like one of those giant Japanese crabs with incredibly long legs, except each of this creature’s legs had a row of human hands growing down its length. The head perched on top of the crab shell was human, too, and looked as if it was whistling a tune.

But now I noticed something even stranger than that. Just a few yards behind me in the mist lay the near end of the Neronian Bridge, a path that led both in and out of Hell, but nobody on the Hell side seemed to realize the bridge was there. I watched people walk into the mist and go right past the end of the bridge as if it were invisible. Maybe it was, for them. All those people stumbling around in misery only yards from a way out that they couldn’t see. Suddenly, I felt sick. If I had not yet truly realized where I was and how bad it was going to be, I began to grasp it then.

There was no sky, of course. The makers of Hell hadn’t needed to bow to physical reality any more than the folk who built Heaven, and the very shape of the place was meant to be a constant reminder of confinement and punishment. Parts of Abaddon, however, did stretch very high above me, especially along the walls where crude materials were scaffolded upward many times the height of a man; but above it all was a great roof of jagged, pitted rock. We looked up at the bottom of the level above us, not at sky.

Weird and new as all this was, I had very little time to drink it in, because as soon as I stepped out of the mist, I was surrounded closely by noise and stink, bumped and jostled by some of the ugliest fuckers you’ve ever seen.

“Worms!” A froggy-looking guy with no back legs waved a sheaf of blackened, muddy sticks in the air. “Crispy like you like ’em!”

“Gin! Swaller of gin, just a spit.” This from a guy who looked as though he’d been sawed apart by a very bad magician and put back together by the magician’s amateur-surgeon brother. His off-kilter eyes caught me staring. “You, there. You look like you need one. Guarantee you’ll not have a clear thought again ’til last lamp. Only a spit!”

Last lamp. Lameh’s inserted memories stirred. There was no daylight or moonlight here, so first lamp was lit to signify morning, a second at midday, then one of those was put out and they went back to a single lamp until day’s end. (The fiery cracks in the walls, which provided the only brightness after day’s end, were called “afterlights.”) And a “spit” was an iron coin. The gin was almost certainly made from something horrible and did not tempt me in the least. Hell is remarkably realistic compared to Heaven, which I guess makes sense—real nakedness, real food, real shit, real money, you name it. The fairy lights and muted, pastels of the Celestial City were looking better and better by comparison, and I’d only been in Hell for a few heartbeats.

The gin peddler shuffled nearer to me, offering me a cup that dangled on a piece of rawhide so long that the cup had been dragging in the dirt. I was feeling pretty thirsty, but even if that filthy thing had been the Holy Grail I wouldn’t have lifted it to my mouth—I could smell the ghastly odor of the “gin” past the thousands of other stinks of the place, and no oblivion was worth that. (I really thought that then. I changed my mind later. In fact, by the time I’d been in Hell awhile, I was slurping down whatever I could get, just like back in the real world. If there’s ever a place where a person needs a stiff drink occasionally, it’s Hell. Hell and parts of Oklahoma.)

But the guy with the booze was interrupted before he could finish his spiel, shoved rudely out of the way by something very large that loomed above me like an arriving bus. The newcomer was female, in an Alice’s-Duchess sort of way. In short, she looked like a bitter manatee in a wig.

“Git,” she rumbled at the gin peddler. “This fine gennulman don’t want your swill. He wants a little of the good times, eh? Eh? Am I right?” She leered as she bounced her breasts in her ragged bodice. They looked like plastic bags of pale gravy and blue spaghetti. “Nothing like what I’ll give you for a spit, lordship. I’ll clean your gulleys and gutters, I will. Blow the ashes right out your chimney!” She hiked up her skirt to show me what was under the dress. If a hairless horse had as many legs as a spider, with a cruel parody of female genitalia at the juncture of each sagging, scarred pair of thighs, then . . . no, you don’t really need to know. It was all I could do not to vomit. “Oooh, lovely,” she said, reaching for my prick.

I suddenly realized I was naked. I mean, really realized. I turned and dove into the crowd, for the moment not caring what other horrors I was rubbing against.

“Asswipe! You won’t find any prettier between here and the Uppers,” she bawled after me, cantering awkwardly in place as the bodies of her fellow Hell-citizens pressed back around her. “What you think, that you’re one of the high boys? Go on and find out what they’d do to you, you stuck up little turdball!”

I had to keep moving, I now understood, because when you stopped, things started to crawl on you. So I pushed on through the crowds, through the filth and the howls and the unending horror-zoo, past things that cringed from me and things that snapped at me, past beggars by the dozens with raised hands like mutant starfish, begging, pleading, weeping tears of blood and other unpleasant liquids. Everybody was scarred. Everybody was crippled, and not in accidental ways—these were punishments. It should have become easier to take after a while, the constant flow of maimed creatures, the hopeless and the inhuman, but it didn’t, and wouldn’t for a long time. I picked up a large rock and carried it in my hand, just to have some kind of a weapon.

Still, as I fought my way through the crowd in search of a way out of this level, or at least a place where the shoving crowds weren’t so terrible, I saw that there were things happening here in the labyrinth of Abaddon that had nothing to do with me, or even with punishing people: makeshift shops with actual workers, taverns, houses, and other signs of civilization, however grotesque. I confess I was surprised. People actually lived here in Hell. They sold things, they struggled to be able to eat and sleep safely. But where were the punishments? Not the punishment of simply existing in all this hateful, overwhelming squalor, but the actual punishments?

Then it struck me, and of all the ugly things I had experienced since stepping off the Neronian Bridge, none hit me harder. This horror around me wasn’t what Hell was really like. Not by a long shot. Lameh had said something about the levels of Abaddon being in the upper parts of Hell, not up where the lords of Hell like Eligor and Prince Sitri made their homes, but not the deeps either. In levels far below us in the great darkness, in the worst of the boiling heat of which this was the merest balmy outskirt, where the souls I had heard on the bridge were made to scream those mind-freezing screams, that was where the real Hell lay. Horrible as this place was, an insult to every sense, a horror to every thought—still, by infernal standards I was in the pleasant suburbs. And if I were captured, I would never see anything this charming again.

At that moment I came very, very close to simply giving up.

Lameh’s mind-whisperings had helped me with some of the geography of Hell but hadn’t given me anything like a detailed idea of how it all fit together, let alone an actual map. In fact, I doubted there could be such a thing, outside of a few broad strokes, because just during the short time I’d been in Abaddon I’d seen a half-dozen passageways made and destroyed. The place grew and changed constantly, like a living organism, a coral reef or something, although the work was done by demons and damned. Between one lamp and the next, a road became two or was filled in; houses were built on top of other houses until they all collapsed, then more were built atop the rubble. Entire neighborhoods caught fire or were shaken down by the intermittent tremors, only to be rebuilt in different form for new inhabitants, often right on the still-screaming bodies of the injured. And they might keep shrieking that way forever, because death can’t release you if you’re already dead.

I had a couple of places I needed to go, but no idea of how to get to them, except that they were both somewhere above me in the great stack of infernal levels. And if you think it’s hard to get directions in a strange city, try Hell. Actually, no, don’t bother.

No map, no directions. How was I going to do what I had to do?

As it turned out, Abaddon had an answer for me.

I was standing in a sewage culvert at the outskirts of one of Abaddon’s maze of settlements, staring up at a depressingly familiar piece of outer wall when it happened. I was exhausted and frustrated, because I had just realized I’d checked out this area the previous day. In other words, I’d got lost again. It seemed I’d have to hike the whole circumference of the place to find a way out, which might take years just on this level.

Something brushed against me and lingered longer than it should have. I didn’t hesitate—I didn’t want to be attacked or solicited—so I swung my arm hard at whatever was touching me. I heard a grunt and something tumbled to the ground at my feet, felled far more easily than I would have expected.

I looked down and saw a very small shape huddled below me in the churned, excremental mud of the street, a naked creature not much larger than an organ grinder’s monkey, hard to separate from the muck underneath. Passersby were stepping on it as often as over it, some of them huge, some of them with hard hooves. I could hear the little thing squeaking, not like something crying but like something desperately trying to catch a breath, so I steeled myself, reached down, and yanked the little bundle up onto its feet. It was only as I turned away again, this small humane act completed, that I saw that the little whatever-it-was held my weapon-stone in his long-fingered hands. The little fucker had picked my pocket, and I didn’t even have a pocket.

I snatched back the stone, then pulled the thief into an eddy of the crowd where I could look him over. He had big, round eyes but hardly any nose, his limbs were shrunken and bent with what in the normal world I would have taken for the aftereffects of scurvy, and he was matted all over with pale hair. He was surprisingly strong, though—I had to keep a tight grip on him to keep him from squirming away. The wide-mouthed, primate face betrayed an intelligence that was enough like my own to make my borrowed heart sink inside my borrowed breast.

“You stole my rock,” I said.

He tried to look innocent, but succeeded only in looking more than ever like something that was going to pee on your rug as soon as you turned away. “Nuh,” he said. “Didn’t. Lemme go. Bilgebark’s calling.” His voice was high-pitched, like a child’s.

“Who’s that? Who’s Bilgebark?”

His dark eyes went even wider. He was astonished by my ignorance. “The minder, he is, the big hand, big man. Around Squitters Row, anywise. He’ll come after, I’m not back to the works by afters.” Something about the way he spoke made me even more certain he was a child. His eyes kept darting to either side, and although he’d quit fighting, his muscles were still tense in my grip. If he couldn’t convince me to let go of him, this kid was going to do something to get free, probably something violent, but he was going to try to talk his way out first. I liked that. “What’s your name?” I asked.

He slitted his eyes as if I’d blazed a flashlight in his face. “Don’t got one.”

“What do you do? Where do you live? Do you have a family?”

The eyes crept wider still at this, as though he was having trouble keeping command of himself in the face of such bizarre questions. “Don’t got one. Live at the works.” He licked his lips, then asked nervously, “You Murder?” He saw I didn’t understand. “Murder Seck?”

It finally dawned on me that he was talking about the Murderers Sect, armed demon guards who functioned like mercenary soldiers. In the more built-up areas they were pretty much Hell’s police.

“No. Not me,” I said. “Not Murder Sect, just . . . ordinary.”

He tried something new. “Let me loose. Gotcher rock back, yeah? And I bite.” He showed me his grin, which was indeed made up of surprisingly clean, even, pointy little teeth, like you might see in a fish or a frog.

But I wasn’t letting him off that easily. “I need someone to help me find my way out of here.” It was a risk to trust anyone, even a child, but I’d run out of other ideas. “I’m lost.”

The little monkey-boy considered. Although I could see he was genuinely thinking about it, I could tell he wasn’t ready to give up on just running for it, either.

If you learn to hide your tells better, I decided, you’re going to be good, kid. But then I thought Here? and Compared to what? and the whole idea suddenly just made me really sad.

“Three spits,” he said at last.

Once he started to bargain I knew I had him. We settled on a deal where I’d feed him while he was with me and give him an iron spit at the end, when I found my way out of this level of Abaddon. I didn’t have a spit, of course, but I’d find a way to change that somehow.

“This way,” he said, and headed off without looking to see whether I was following.

I stayed alert as the kid began to lead me out of Abaddon, in case he was actually leading me to his big friend Bilgebark, who would then beat me to death and relieve me of my prized rock. That was if you could get beaten to death in Hell, which didn’t fit in with what I knew about the place. Of course, children in Hell didn’t really make sense, either. I was depressingly sure I had all kinds of disturbing new experiences in front of me.

The kid and I didn’t talk any more. He seemed to like it that way. But Monkey-boy kept sneaking glances in my direction as we walked, as if still trying to make up his mind about me. Dogs don’t like direct eye contact, and lots of other mammals (including some humans) don’t like it either, so I just kept looking forward at where we were going, at the endless passing parade of distorted bodies and unbearably various faces.

“Got one,” my companion said at last. He was no longer looking at me, but staring resolutely ahead just like I was.

“One? One what?”

“Name.”

I considered this for a moment. “And what is it?”

“Gob.”

I nodded. I almost said, “Nice to meet you,” out of sheer habit, but realized that probably didn’t get said a lot around here. Although the street around us was as disgustingly, stenchfully crowded as before, and just as noisy, there was a different quality now to the silence between the kid and me. Something was settled, at least for the time being.

I had made my first friend in Hell. Sort of.