Inferno (12 page)

Suppose he’s crazy? Or an agent for Big Juju?

Then you’re on your own
.

Nuts. Benito might be able to trick the damned bureaucrats into giving us whatever we wanted. I couldn’t kid myself I’d be able to. Fabric I could get—at worst, by peeling it off catatonics—but how to get through the wall? I’d seen demons on the rim. More demons guarded the gate.

I glanced sideways at Benito. Stolid patience, and iron faith in God and the maps of Dante Alighieri. And Carpentier’s given word. If we ever got out of this maze, he’d go down. We could follow or not.

I felt heat ahead. We turned a corner and found a wall of red-hot urns. The floor seemed to slant uphill.

Corbett whooped. “This way! To the wall!” His voice sounded out of place in the mausoleum. I waited for Benito to protest, but he said nothing, and I wondered if he knew something we didn’t.

“We could make quite a safari,” Corbett shouted. He was over-joyful at finding a way out. “Just open these urns and pour out the ashes.”

“I went further than that, once,” Benito told us. “I attempted to establish a local government.”

“Didn’t work?”

“No.”

“Why?”

There was no answer. It became apparent that there wouldn’t be one. Something else to think about.

We hit a T corridor and were back in cool marble. We followed it a short way, anxious lest we find ourselves back in the endless tombs. It turned left again. I rounded the turn ahead of the others and found myself facing red heat. I shaded my eyes—

“Your papers, please?”

I squinted through my fingers.

I faced a towering wall of red-hot iron, with a divided door in it. There was a counter on the lower, closed half of the door, and someone behind it, half-hidden in the dark interior framed by bright red light. He held a stack of papers. The bored face showed no sign of recognition. It might have been the same clerk or a different one.

“Papers? Come on, I haven’t got all eternity.” He pushed the stack of papers toward me. “You’ll have to make these out before you can go uphill. It’s in the rules.”

I backed around the corner. To the questioning looks of the others I said, “Don’t ask. Just turn around.”

We went back the way we’d come, looking for a right turn. Presently we found it, and—

“Your papers, please?”

I walked toward the booth, but I was studying the gate behind the clerk. Iron glowing red, but it was only waist high. We could jump it.

The counter turned white-hot as I approached.

“Papers? You’ll have to fill out the forms. No exceptions.”

I looked at Benito. He shrugged and turned away. After a moment I followed, hating him. He wasn’t going to help.

And he’d known it all along. We had to go downhill.

15

T

he
music went with us wherever we went: nature themes, melodramatic sweetness, singing violins, but never funeral dirges or somber tones. The cheerful music was more depressing than any funeral march.

Gradually I realized we could hear something else as well. I don’t know if it had been with us the whole time, waiting for us to become aware of it, or if it began as we threaded our way deeper into Hell.

The sounds came from the tombs. Groaning. Whimpers. Croaks of rage. Mumbled curses. Once even gay whistling, a tune that jarred against the canned music.

Gradually the clammy air warmed. It was our first sign that we were moving out of the maze.

We followed currents of warming air. Where the air turned steamy hot we found a doorway.

Unnerving sounds reached us through the doorway: screams of agony torn from throats that could contain them no longer, blended with animal war cries and the most vicious curses I’d ever imagined.

Corbett plunged ahead, but Benito caught him. “Carefully,” he warned us.

We looked out and down. The ground fell straight away from the doorsill, first vertically, then angling down to a forty-five-degree slope. The dirt was baked adobe with jagged edges of protruding flint.

The bottom of the cliff was obscured by steam, much like the marsh outside Dis, but this was hot. The steam roiled about, leaving occasional clear patches. Gradually the picture formed.

We were looking at an enormous discolored lake. The shore curved away to either side until steam hid the endpoints. Men and women stood waist deep in steamy red water, and they howled. They were packed like a public pool on a Kansas summer Saturday, and they wanted out.

Some tried it, but they didn’t make it. Armed men patrolled the shore between us and the scarlet water. The guards were dressed for a costume ball, in the military garb of all places and all times, but they walked like sentries whose officers are watching. Their eyes were uniformly on the lake, and they held weapons ready.

Weapons: there was every hand weapon known to history. Pistols, bows, crossbows, throwing-sticks, slings, pikes and lances, AR-15 rifles, all held at the ready. When someone attempted to leave the lake, the sentries fired.

I saw a woman in black military uniform cut nearly in half by a burst from an automatic rifle. She shrieked in agony and waded deeper into the lake, where she stood, healing.

Healing
. The implications of our inability to die began to get through to me then.

One man in a long beard wore a golden crown on his head and clustered crossbow bolts through his chest. He was stubborn. He’d move toward the shore. The crossbowmen would fire, and he’d stagger back, the scream hissing through clenched teeth. He’d pluck the bolts from his chest and throw them contemptuously into the water—and wade toward shore again.

And again. And again. He was a fool, but a brave one.

“I take it the guards won’t be on our side,” I whispered.

Benito shuddered. “No. On the contrary, if they catch us, we—” He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to.

The guards looked silly in those costumes. I knew some of them. Nazi swastikas and American GI’s. Coldstream Guards and Cameron Highlanders. Blue and gray of the Civil War. World War I helmets. Redcoats and the blue-and-buff of Washington’s Continentals. Fuzzy-wuzzies and Chinese Gordon’s Tommies, and more: Roman legion, Greek hoplite, vaguely Asiatic uniforms, long gowns and wicker shields, spears with golden apples on the hilts; and more still, yellow men in animal fur, red and black men in little besides war paint, blue men stark naked. Blue? Britons in their woad, marching beside legionnaires, followed by men and women in coveralls carrying tiny machine guns of a variety I’d never seen.

And they watched the lake, constantly, vigilantly. “They won’t see us up here,” I said. “Now what?”

“We must cross the lake,” said Benito. “There is a place, far around, where it is only ankle deep. Elsewhere it rises to above our heads in the deepest parts. The damned stand at a depth appropriate to the violence they did on Earth.”

“That water looks hot. It steams.”

“It is boiling blood.” Benito laughed without humor. “What would you expect for the violent?”

A frozen moment stretched endlessly. Then Corbett shouted, “We can’t walk into that! No!”

“Jerry—”

“I’ve been burned before, remember? We’ll never make it! When our ankles are cooked we’ll go to our knees. When the legs are cooked we’ll be lying in it!”

“Yet you see that every man and woman in the lake is standing.”

The calm voice halted Corbett’s panicky monologue. He looked. I’d already seen that Benito was right. If they could stand, their cooked legs must still be operating. They also wouldn’t stop hurting . . .

“The guards will not allow us to wander freely in Hell,” Benito cautioned us. “Without instructions regarding our sentence, they may well force us to the deepest spot and keep us there. You have noted that their weapons do not kill, but they can disable.”

Let’s stay here, Carpentier. I’m starting to like the music
.

“They must not notice us. We must do as little screaming as possible.” Benito spoke seriously, without a trace of humor. Benito had been in Hell so long that suffering was not remarkable to him, or even unusual.

“There may be a better way,” Corbett said slowly. He pointed. “Allen, what do you see?”

“An island.” Half-obscured by steam, it stood very low in the lake, a good mile to our right. It was more crowded than the water around it, the water that Benito said was boiling blood.

Poetic justice. Infinitely exaggerated, as everything was here. No doubt the people boiling down there were murderers in life, or torturers, or kidnappers, arsonists perhaps. The violent. Well, at least we knew how to get across. “Benito, can we cross on the island?”

He stared pop-eyed, his big square jaw thrust forward. “I had no idea there was an island in Acheron. Dante did not describe it.”

“I suppose he mentioned boiling blood?”

“Of course. He also described the ford I used before. The ford is heavily guarded, and perhaps the island would be better.” He considered. “Dante did not mention the ship in Acheron either.”

“Ship?”

“Yes, Allen, a wooden sailing ship sunken on the other side of Acheron. The decks are just awash with blood. I have been aboard it. There are grills in the deck and souls beneath the grills.”

“Slave traders,” Corbett speculated.

“Probably,” said Benito.

But how had Benito been aboard? Was that where he had escaped from? Or from deeper down? I didn’t dare ask, yet how could we trust him until we knew his crime?

How could we not?

“Slave traders aren’t our problem,” Corbett said. “I suppose the best plan would be to circle up here until we’re just opposite the island, then make a run for it.”

We looked at each other and nodded agreement.

We turned back inside to parallel the shore, passing walls of shelves packed with crematory urns. I savored the cool, damp air. I was going to miss it. The cliff edge was just beyond that wall.

Why bother, Carpentier? Why not stay here?

No. We’ve got to get out of here. Minos would track us down eventually, and then what? We have to escape.

Hey, Carpentier, what makes you think there’s a way out?

I don’t want to think about that. There has to be a way out. Benito says there is. Dante described it—

A way out for him, yes! A living man whose guide called on angels!

There is a way out of Hell and we’re going to find it, because we can’t die trying, because there’s nothing else to do but sit for eternity. Eternity.

I’m scared, Carpentier
.

Me too. Let’s talk to the others. They’re scared like you. Talking helps.

“The guards,” I said. “They bother me two ways.”

Corbett said, “It’s
boiling
that bothers me.”

“I don’t think I’ll like being shot full of arrows and bullets,” I said. “But worse than that, what the blazes are they
doing
here?”

Corbett just laughed. They were guarding, his look said.

“They did violence they believed justified,” said Benito. “They fought for what they thought was a higher cause.”

“And there aren’t any soldiers in Heaven?”

“I’m sure there are. But these enjoyed their work.” His voice took on a note of sadness. “They enjoy it still. They do not seek to escape.”

“It’s weird. They’re serving the Builders, or Big Juju, or God, whatever we call the master of this place. If they’re serving God they ought to be in Heaven!”

Benito shrugged. “Or Purgatory. Perhaps. Theology is not my specialty. The next doorway is just ahead, be careful.”

He wouldn’t say more, but I remembered the uniformed servitors in Disneyland and wondered if the guards worked in shifts. Did they have homes to go to when they got off work? Did they go home and tell their wives about their day?

We waited, peeking around the doorjamb to watch the shore. The island was obscured by clouds of steam and no easier to see than it had been from a mile away.

A band marched past, robed and unarmed. “Inquisition priests,” Benito murmured. “They would call the temporal authorities. The soldiers.”

They receded. A handful of barbarian women passed, arms and shoulders the color of bronze armor. They carried bows and shortswords. Behind them was another group, also women, wearing olive-drab fatigues and carrying submachine guns. They passed out of sight, and the shore was clear.

“Run,” Benito ordered.

We ran. There was a ten-foot drop to the steep slope. I landed on my feet and kept running in a half-controlled fall. Jagged flint edges tore at my feet. When I hit the beach I kept running, because I knew I’d never be able to
walk
into the boiling lake. The wandering clouds of steam wrapped me round, hid me from the guardians, and I ran toward the chorus of screams. The smell was overpowering, fresh blood and clotted blood, copper bright and polluted foul.

Corbett was ahead of me. He splashed into bubbling red fluid and screamed. He stood, covered to his knees, screaming in pain. Benito plunged in, waded through the stuff like a damned robot, and gripped Corbett’s arm to keep him from turning back. Then I was in it myself. I fell into a trench and was instantly waist deep.

The pain hit me weirdly, as if I’d stuck my finger into a light socket. Stunning. Unreal. All my senses were scrambled. I knew the smell of pain, its sight and sound, and there was nothing to see or hear but pain. I couldn’t control my limbs. They thrashed and twitched, almost spilling me full length into the stuff.

Half a squad of Green Berets stood there studying us. They had friends: small men in black pajamas.

I turned back. We were committed now. Through a gap in the steamy mist I had seen their eyes: dull, expressionless, intent on their task, and their task was to let no one leave the blood.

“The island,” I screamed. “To the island!” But I didn’t move and neither did the others. We stood where we were and screamed.

“The island!” Corbett laughed hysterically, laughter and pain and horror. “We can’t use the island—”

I screamed. “What?”

“Stupid! Look!”