Happy Hour in Hell

thirty-eight: chained

I’M SURE I would have had to pay extra on any package tour of Hell for the thrill of sinking to the bottom of the Phlegethon River—“swim with the friendly fang jellies!”—but to be honest, I was more intent on surviving than getting the most out of the experience. Actually, surviving probably was getting the most out of the experience.

I spent the first few seconds pulling the bone cork out of the air sack on my vest, then getting the opening into my mouth so I could breathe. Shallowly, of course: the air inside had to last until I could reach land, which also meant I had to outlast any pursuit from the Widow. I looked up. The eyes of my demon-body were very adaptable to low light and, luckily, the Phlegethon wasn’t as dark as the Styx. Even so I could barely make out the hull of Niloch’s ship far above me, in a circle of sky. I could see all right, but the Phlegethon wasn’t always bursting into flame by accident: its waters made my eyes sting and irritated my nose something fierce. Still, so far so good. The cannonball was heavy enough to keep me on the bottom despite the buoyancy of the oilskin air sack.

Things swam past me in the murk, some of them quite depressingly solid, serpentine forms like huge eels or something fished out of Loch Ness, but others that were scarcely more than dark streaks in the water or cold currents with a definable shape. I didn’t see any of Riprash’s fang jellies close up, but I saw something large in the dark distance that looked like a floating circus tent trying to fold and unfold itself as it floated along. I didn’t waste much time thinking about it or any of the others, because it seemed obvious to me that the bottom of a river in Hell wasn’t likely to be a safe place. The only thing I could do to improve my odds was get to land as soon as possible.

As elsewhere in Hell, the animal life was as distorted and depressing as the more complex creatures. As I reached the bottom and began to trudge slowly across the mud in what I believed was the general direction of shore (and if I was wrong I was going to be in serious trouble) I found myself stepping carefully around spiny things that could have been sea urchins if they hadn’t been in a river and five feet wide. Flat, disklike crabs with disturbingly human faces skittered in and out of the rocks on the bottom, sending up little puffs of silt as they dodged away from predators that were little more than toothy jaws with fins. Once I stopped, despite my limited amount of air, and waited while a vast shadow passed right over me with a slow flick of its tail. I couldn’t see it clearly, but it was covered in bony plates and had a mouth big enough to swallow Bobby Dollar and a few other folk at the same time. I had no illusions that I’d be able to outswim or outfight it—the thing was the size of a school bus—so I just hunkered down. It was a long wait, but at last the living submarine moved on, and I could continue. Later I think I even saw a hogsquid, which truly did look a bit like a my friend Fatback in his pig form, if Fatback was as big as the payload of a tanker truck and had twenty-foot tentacles growing out of his mouth. Fortunately for me, the ugly bastard was too busy rooting up and swallowing doomed creatures from the murky river bottom to notice me.

It was hard to hold myself to small breaths, hard to walk slowly when there were monsters all around, and I could feel the air sack getting smaller and smaller, but I had no idea how long it would take me to reach the shore or whether it would even be safe, at that point, to get out of the water. I was pretty certain Niloch would be watching for me to surface. He might even be waiting when I reached the riverbank, since it didn’t take a whole lot of smarts, even by the standards of infernal nobility, to realize what I was trying to do.

I had just kicked away a few larger specimens of the crabs with faces—the bigger ones looked both less human and more expressive, if you can imagine that—and was really beginning to wonder whether I had enough air to make the shore, when I saw another large, long shape coming out of the murk in my general direction. Certain it was another one of the plated monsters or something even worse, I crouched down in the mud and froze in place, trying not to let the bubble of air in my lungs escape and give me away. But what came toward me out of the clouds of silt, heading out toward the deepest part of the river, was not the prehistoric monster I expected, but . . . a parade. Humanoid shapes walked along the river bottom in a line, kicking up the gray ooze so that they seemed to be moving in a fog, like a vision of fairies in the Irish hills. Then I saw that they were walking along the bottom because they were chained together.

Slaves. Somebody’s slave ship had been chased by a faster ship, or perhaps merely sunk. Whichever it had been, these poor damned souls had wound up at the bottom of the Phlegethon, too heavy because of their chains to reach the surface. I could only guess how long they had been down here, trudging through the mud, but it had been long enough for the river to take its toll. Several of the slaves were all but gone, only bones and a few rags of skin still tangled in their chains, but many of the others looked almost whole except for the places where fish and other river creatures had gnawed at them. The leader, whose grim determination seemed to have drawn the rest along after him, had lost both eyes, one arm, and most of the fingers from his remaining hand, but still he moved forward through the dark water, one bony, tattered foot in front of another, his fellows stumbling or floating behind him, depending on how much of them remained. When I saw all those empty eye sockets I understood why the poor bastards were headed in the opposite direction from the shore.

I moved toward them as quickly as I could through the slippery ooze, trying to get their attention by waving my arms, but my cannonball sinker made me no faster than them, and even though I got closer I couldn’t attract the attention of any of them, least of all the blind leader. He marched past me, and the rest of the chained, doomed group followed him. I got close enough to grab at one of them, but the arm came away in my hand and the one who had lost it didn’t even seem to notice.

Too far gone, I realized. However long they had been down here, there was not enough left of them, either in body or in thought, to survive on the surface. The kindest thing I could do was leave them marching on as they were, to be pulled apart by fish or to rot gently into pieces and become one with the river.

One of the most profound lessons of Hell was how little an angel could actually accomplish. I had learned that lesson again and again since I’d been here, but never as clearly as this.

The chained slaves hobbled slowly away, vanishing within moments into the floating murk of the river bottom, invisible to my stinging eyes.

If I was a different kind of guy, I could probably spend an entire career studying the life (well, you know what I mean) to be found in the rivers of Hell. But I’m not. All I really wanted to do was just find my way out of the river, off this level of Hell, and down to the Neronian Bridge. Still, it was hard not to notice when I saw something thrashing in the mud and, instead of the fishy monster I expected, discovered two animated corpses, little more than bones, trying to murder each other.

Let me reiterate: I had to step over a pair of skeletons, which were struggling in the silt a couple of dozen feet beneath the surface of the Phlegethon. Both of them were missing most of their lower halves, and their bony hands were wrapped around each other’s throats. The throats in question were little more than vertebrae and a few rags of rotting flesh, and they were, I repeat, at the bottom of a river, so it wasn’t like one of them was going to suffocate the other. But there they were. I guess that’s why it’s called Hell.

Anyway, like I said, I could tell you lots more, because there’s lots to tell—carnivorous river worms, lobsterlike beasts that vomited out their own sticky stomachs and reeled them back in like fishing nets, things with the bodies of sharks and the heads of insane horses, all teeth and rolling eyes and, of course, more bodies of the humanoid damned in various states of decomposition, not all of whom seemed to be in the river against their will. In fact, more than a few seemed to have chosen lying in the acid mud at the bottom of the Phlegethon, slowly turning to living mush, over whatever they had experienced on land. Hell’s version of committing suicide, I guess.

I reached the shallows just as my air ran out. I shed the vest and its weight, saving Riprash’s flask, then let myself float to the top. I lay there for long moments, trying to look as much like another suicide as possible until I could take a discreet look around. I spotted the Headless Widow, but saw to my relief that it was still some way out in the river, still waiting near the spot I’d gone down, and there was no sign of Riprash’s ship at all. So far, so good.

I paddled gently forward until I could touch the bottom, then climbed the bank in the darkest and least visible place I could find, in case somebody on Niloch’s boat had a telescope. When I found a comparatively safe spot, I stole a moment’s rest and deep breathing, but was roused by the sound of distant voices.

The Widow appeared to have given up on its vigil over the spot where I’d sunk and was pulling to shore, fires stoked and oars sweeping like centipede legs. I knew that even in this darkest part of the day there would be eyes on board that could see better than mine, so I unwrapped the pistols Riprash had given me from their protective oilskin bag, slid them and the dagger-sword into my belt, and began to make my way up a low bluff, away from the river. But the bluff quickly proved to be only the base of a larger hill, and I was even more exposed on the slope than I would have been on the riverbank, so I had to keep climbing. As I did so, I could look down on Niloch’s ship anchored in the bay, and the landing boats coming ashore. Unlike the Bitch’s little dinghy, these were good-sized craft with several oarsmen in each and room for soldiers and mounts and even Niloch’s hellhounds. It was easy to tell where the hellhounds were, because everyone else was crowded at the other end.

To my dismay, instead of making camp on the shore, the commissar’s troops immediately began to follow in roughly the same direction I’d just come, as though they’d already picked up my scent. I did my best to hurry my pace, although it was dangerous climbing in the dark. As I got nearer the top, I could see my pursuers beginning to flag: the horses, or whatever the hell they were riding, were having trouble with the steep, rocky slope. At last they reached a relatively flat spot several hundred feet below me and began scouting for an easier way up.

I took advantage of this pause to find suitable rock where I could rest and also keep an eye on them. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but I could tell Niloch was furious. I could hear his shrill tones echo out over the river valley. While he scolded his minions, I watched the hellhounds pace nervously on their chains, each one held by two or three keepers, but I soon wished I had chosen something else to watch.

The hounds were huge, about the length of lions or tigers, with low-slung bodies like medieval pictures of wolves, and pelts that appeared almost flat black. I found out later that they looked that way because they didn’t have pelts at all but leathery, scaled hides, something like what you’d find on a Komodo dragon. Then one of them turned toward the place where I was hiding, and its entire pink snout, invisible until that moment, pushed forward out of the rough black sleeve of its face, like a dog’s penis emerging from its foreskin. Even in torchlight the pink protrusion glistened, damp and sticky-looking, featureless but for two huge holes that I guessed were its nostrils. Then the end of the snout opened, revealing a mouth full of inward curving teeth like a Conger eel’s, and I turned and threw up bile, the only thing in my stomach.

I’ve seen a lot of nasty things, but I haven’t seen too many worse than that, because unlike the horrors in the river, these creatures were expressly after me and me alone. When my stomach had finished spasming, I got up and hurriedly made my way across the hillcrest, looking for a place to climb down on the other side. I was still exhausted, but getting an up-close view of the things that were after me was enough to pump a shitload of adrenaline, let me tell you.

To my relief, I could see lights in the valley on the far side of the hill; an array of orange glows that suggested a decent-sized city, twinkling in the mist off the Phlegethon. Closer to me lay a network of roads around the outermost lights, and a winding, torchlit strip along the exterior that looked wide enough to be a highway. I made that my goal and began picking my way down the hill as fast as I could without falling and breaking something important.

It took me what seemed a couple of hours to reach the flats. Once or twice I heard bone-chilling howls from my pursuers in the hills above as they got close. I took more than a few dangerous risks, but I was determined to stay well ahead of them, knowing I had a better chance of losing them in the city than in the wilderness. Also, I needed to find a lifter station, because that was the only way I was going to be able to get down to Abaddon ahead of Niloch and his howling penis-monsters.

The whole time I descended the hill, I saw only four vehicles on the highway: a couple of fancy horse drawn coaches, a simple peddler’s wagon, and a big black car which looked like it belonged to one of the infernal nobility. I didn’t want to get recaptured, but I didn’t want to walk all the way into the city, either, which was miles away, so when I reached the side of the wide road and began following the highway toward the lights, I kept my ears open for possible rides.

I tried to flag down the first one to pass, a coach drawn by a team of horselike creatures (if having human legs can still be considered “horselike”) but the driver lashed at me with his whip and sped on. Perhaps half an hour passed without another vehicle as I trudged on, then I heard the chuffing of a steam engine and saw a grotesque thing that looked half-tank, half-bicycle jolting toward me. I waved and, to my relief, it actually slowed as the driver examined me. Then it hissed to a halt and a door opened on the passenger compartment, which was shaped a bit like Cinderella’s pumpkin coach. I took this as an invitation and clambered up, only to be greeted with the trumpet bell of a blunderbuss in my face.

I was braced to be robbed or shot (or more likely both), but the gun’s owner only surveyed me, then suggested I put my own guns down on the floor of the passenger side. I did as he asked, moving slowly so as not to startle him. Satisfied, the driver engaged his engine again, and we rolled forward.

My rescuer was a wizened, manlike creature with a pockmarked face that sagged on one side and a huge, healing hole in his chest—a hole I could have put my fist through. He saw me staring at his wound and laughed. “Can see why I’m a bit careful, can’t you? Last one I gave a ride left me with that. Tried to take this old darling here,” he patted the dashboard of his vehicle, “but I blew his head off and left him feeling around for it by the side of the road. Never going to find it, though!” He cackled. “Nothing left!”

I smiled (a bit weakly, perhaps) trying to show how much I approved of decapitating wicked would-be hijackers, because I was of course not that kind of hitchhiker at all. “But you still give rides to people?”

“Gets boring on the run from Poor Meat to Tendon Junction,” he said. “Good to have a little company. Keeps a fellow from losing his mind!” He smiled and nodded vigorously.

I couldn’t help wondering if a man who kept picking up hitchhikers after one of them tried to blow him to pieces hadn’t lost his mind already. In fact, as I learned during the ride, he’d had quite a few near escapes over the years. The hitchhikers had come out of it worse, though.

“And now we are companions,” he said. “My name is Joseph. What is yours?”

I made up a name—I didn’t want to leave any more of a trail than I had to. “What city is that?” I asked as the lights spread before us.

“That’s Blindworm,” he said. “Hope you aren’t planning on going there to make friends.”

“Why’s that?” I asked, even though the last thing I wanted to do in any of the cities of Hell was make friends.

“Not from around here? Strange people in Blindworm. City of the Selfish, I call it.” He didn’t elaborate, but he had lots of other things to talk about. He told me he was in the lock business, like the kind you opened with keys. “Blindworm is my best place for sales. Most of what I make on a trip, I make here. They keep me in business!”

As we approached the outskirts of the city I began to see houses, each one with a neat little yard, like some picture-postcard suburb. But although I could see shapes in some of the windows, nobody was outside. I supposed it was the hour—by my reckoning it was somewhere after midnight in Hell-time—and figured things would be different as we got farther in, but although I spotted a pedestrian or two, they all hurried off the street ahead of us, disappearing into doorways or down alleys as if they feared us.

When I asked Joseph, he shook his head. “You really don’t know? I thought you were joking. How could you not know? The folks in Blindworm hate everyone. They keep to themselves.”

If they kept to themselves, why had they built a huge city of tall buildings? Judging by the size, it seemed there must be quarter of a million inhabitants or more. But as we approached the city’s heart I began to see what Joseph meant. In every dwelling or business we passed, there was never more than one person inside. Even places meant to be used by many people at once, like carriage stops or banks, seemed to be divided into individual stalls, so no matter how many customers there were, they never had to see each other. Half a dozen sat at a bus stop we passed, each cramped in his or her own space like farm animals in a barn. They all looked up at the sound of our motor and watched our passing car with scowling dislike.

Normally I would have examined such a weird thing more closely. I mean, how does a city like that work, full of inhabitants who don’t want to see each other? But Joseph was starting to worry me. The closer we got to the center of the city and the towering lifter shaft that dominated the skyline, the more distracted he became, talking to himself and peering at me from the corner of his eye as though I were the one acting strange. I tried to make harmless conversation with him, but that only seemed to make things worse, and by the time we were within a few blocks of the vast square tower of the lifter station, I had fallen completely silent. That didn’t help, either. Joseph was murmuring continuously under his breath, and kept reaching out to touch the barrel of his shotgun, which was leaning against the padded dashboard between us. When he saw that I’d noticed, that only seemed to make things worse.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Think you could? But I’d have it first, and then boom! The worse for you!” He chortled, his sagging face as empty as a jack-o-lantern. He was beginning to scare the crap out of me.

“Just let me out here,” I said. “This is where I wanted to go. Thanks for the ride.”

“Thanks?” Now he looked directly at me, and the wide-eyed expression on one half of his face looked even more severe next to the slack features on the other side. Saliva was dripping from the side of his mouth. “You have the audacity to give me thanks? When you want to murder me?” He slowed the vehicle, fumbling for his gun, which lucky for me was clumsily long for the crowded passenger cab. My pistols were still on the floor, and I knew I’d never reach them before he could shoot me, so I yanked open the door, kicked my guns into the road, then threw myself out after them.

A moment later there was an explosion like thunder. Hot gases leaped over my head as a chunk of the building ahead of me flew into powder and chips. As I went scrambling through the dark in search of my pistols, I heard Joseph get out of the car and cock his gun again. “Try to kill me, eh? Come back to try again, eh? Put another hole in Joseph, eh?” he shouted, but before he fired again the nighttime street was ripped by one of the most fearsome noises I’d ever heard: a howl that made my skin want to crawl right off my body and run away without me. The hellhounds. The hellhounds were inside the city. But I’d left them back in the hills, miles away. How had they caught up so fast?

Joseph may have been crazy, but he wasn’t stupid enough to mess with hellhounds. As I recovered my guns, I heard his door slam closed. Then he drove away.

As the noise of his engine dwindled, one of the beasts howled again, an echoing, whooping cry that could stop a healthy heart. Another answered, and it sounded even closer. They were spread out and hunting me, and I was at least half a mile away from the lifter tower in the center of the city. And now I was on foot.

There are times to fight, but this wasn’t one of them. This was a time to run.