Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades (13 page)

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Authors: Jeffrey Thomas

BOOK: Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades
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Suzanne entered the hallway then, and clasped her hands together in front of her with delight. "Oh…
oh
…it’s more beautiful by the hour, honey." She addressed Zaraiah, beaming. "Isn’t she wonderful?"
The Seraph seemed to falter before getting out, "Her gift from the Creator is to be admired."
"Oh, I’m so jealous of her. Can you imagine being able to do this? And to have a face like this, on top of it all." Suzanne stepped closer and cupped Wanda’s cheek, turning to Zaraiah like a proud parent. "Isn’t she lovely? Some people are just so lucky. I think she’s a dead ringer for the actress Scarlett Johansson."
At least Wanda had died recently enough to share the woman’s frame of reference, so she smiled and said, "Thanks. Me and the Overseer here were just talking about luck."
"I have this habit of trying to compare everybody to a celebrity," Suzanne went on obliviously. "I think I look like Jane Fonda. Not
Barbarella
 Jane Fonda, but maybe younger than she is now. Or am I being too kind to myself?"
"No, no, I can see it," Wanda lied.
"And what do you think about our Zaraiah here? I can almost think of someone but I’m not sure."
Wanda looked at the Seraph. A celebrity to match it? Male or female? Without thinking, she said, "I don’t know…they all pretty much look the same to me."
Zaraiah met her eyes a little too quickly. The creature looked like it might become blatantly angry for the first time. In a tighter than usual voice, it said, "If you’ll excuse me, I will go look in on the other workers now."
Watching the faintly glowing figure leave the hallway like a ghost headed to haunt other regions of its castle, Wanda wondered if she hadn’t so much insulted the Seraph as hurt its feelings.
««—»»
Suzanne had handed her a package of pastries, with a wink. Again, Wanda waited for the Seraph to confiscate it from her. Again, it did not.
But when she stepped through the portal on the other side, things were different. The metal carriage awaited, and the yoked Damned, and several of the towering and ancient gray Demons. The sky of molten lava churned and glowed behind the monsters, silhouetting their great horned heads. The apparent oldest of these Demonic officers had cracks in his pumice-like skin that showed the yellow glow of magma within.
Immediately, this very Demon strode toward Wanda, trailing smoke from his empty eye sockets. Could he smell the pastries where the last time he hadn’t detected the fruit, or had she been betrayed by another Damned seeking the Demon’s favor? Whatever the case, he snatched the package out of her hand, tore it to fragments without even glancing at the scattered contents, and then seized Wanda by the hair at the back of her head. He lifted her off her feet until they were face-to-face. She felt the heat that blazed out of his eye holes in rippling waves.
The Demon thundered, "Enjoying our vacation in Paradise, are we? Maybe you forget the true state of affairs. Maybe you need a little perspective restored…pretty little worm."
Wanda’s sob was cut off by the Demon as he clamped his mouth over her own. And even the gurgle that tried to replace the sob was shoved back down her throat, into her chest, as the Demon regurgitated magma into her mouth. He dropped her to writhe, to smoke, before the horrified eyes of the other slaves. In a matter of what might be called hours she would look like the actress Scarlett Johansson again, but for now Wanda’s lower face had burned away and a hole melted open in her chest, like a painted canvas set on fire.
««—»»
Wanda was fashioning long folds in the robe of one of the mural’s figures, having decided to give this one rose pink attire. She had resisted the impulse to make the robe blood red. Somewhere during this process a happy accident, as she called these things, occurred. Two of the folds, forming crescent loops, looked to her like a pair of skull’s eyes.
She glanced over her shoulder. She heard the pounding of carpentry elsewhere in the house. She thought she heard a harpsichord playing; it couldn’t be Suzanne, who professed to be devoid of any talent, so maybe a Celestial played for her, or else it was a recording. And Zaraiah—the Seraph was not to be seen.
Wanda turned back to this wall of the hallway’s double mural and worked another crescent fold, smaller and lower, between the other two. Finally she added a longer drooping crescent, highlighted on its upper edge and deeply shadowed within, below the other three. A ghostly face, as if it pressed against the fabric from the other side. A dark spirit trying to tear through into the realm of Heaven.
"Do you think you could make one of the figures look like me, hon?" Suzanne asked, suddenly there behind her.
Wanda whirled, suppressing a gasp. She smiled tremulously. "Hi. Um, yeah, sure, we could do that." She looked over both walls of the mural nervously, darting her gaze from one potential figure to another.
"Would you want me to pose for that?"
"It would look more like you if you did, instead of me doing it from memory."
"Well if you don’t mind doing that, then you tell me when you’re ready, okay?"
"Sure. I will."
"Are you hungry now? I can bring you a sandwich. And I have some more of that fruit to send home with you tonight."
Wanda’s smile turned apologetic. "I’m sorry, but they don’t want me to bring home any more gifts. Against the rules, I guess."
"Oh, really? What a shame! I’m sorry to hear that."
"But thanks anyway."
"Well, you can still eat while you’re here in my home—I insist. Let me go round up something for you."
"And the others? I’d feel guilty if…"
"Oh sure, sure dear, I’ll see the others get some lunch, too. But you’re my favorite, you know." Suzanne wiggled her fingers, and floated off into her house in the direction of the kitchen, more likely to oversee the making of lunch by her staff of Celestial servants than actually prepare it herself.
Wanda returned her attention to the morose, skull-like face she had half-concealed within the figure’s robe. Subliminal advertising, she thought. She was familiar with that insidious practice and often spotted it at work in magazines. FUCK or SEX spelled out in the reflections of an ice cube in a whiskey ad. Skulls in ice cubes and cigarette smoke. Such grim images might seem opposed to the selling of a product but they still captured the subconscious eye—as did applying these techniques to ads featuring children, for instance, where a little girl might be blowing at a phallic toy saxophone while a little boy aimed the neck of a toy guitar at her from the level of his groin, wrinkles digitally airbrushed into his shorts to make it look like he had an erection in there. Yes, insidious, but it seized people’s attention without their knowing why their eyes had been hooked and reeled in. The technique hijacked the mind, stole inside it, and sold products.
What did Wanda have to sell?
She tried not to hate Suzanne for her grating sweet voice, her beaming eyes like those of a drugged or insane person, her neatly cut club sandwiches and her tinkling harpsichord music. It wasn’t her fault, all this, was it? Wanda felt she shouldn’t begrudge Suzanne’s good fortune. Instead of being petty and envious, she should be happy that this human being, at least, didn’t have to suffer, too. Suzanne was kind. Human. Not one of those Angels who traveled to Hades on tours to rape women and children and hunt the Damned with bows or high-powered rifles. But for Suzanne to say she envied Wanda. To say Wanda was
lucky
. Oh, she just didn’t know how it was on the other side of the portals. She just didn’t have a clue. If she and others like her really cared, really empathized, wouldn’t they be trying to do more than just hand out the occasional box of cream-filled pastries, like scraps of meat to a dog whose beatings they turned a blind eye to?
Wanda switched brushes. She focused her attention on the background, which she had thought was finished on this wall. She squeezed several shades of green and pink onto her smeary palette, eyeing a large rose bush that she had placed in one corner.
Camouflaged within the leaves, the flowers, she began to work the visage of the Demon who had lifted her so close to his face moments before his kiss and the molten lava he vomited down her throat. She rendered his face like that of a pagan "green man" design made of foliage, leaves for flesh, his eyes and jagged piranha mouth formed of dark shadows. No nose, as was the case, and a suggestion of his curling ram horns trailing off into the roses’ twisted vines.
As she painted in deft quick strokes, not quick because she was being furtive but quick because she felt true inspiration, Wanda thought of two things. One was a line from Frida Kahlo, one of her very favorite artists: "I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality."
This is
my
reality, Suzanne.
The other thought, as she glanced up at the hallway’s arched ceiling, which she hadn’t got to yet, was how easy it would be to hide things within the billowing white substance of clouds.
««—»»
Wanda was on a stepladder, her forearm speckled with blue and white pigment as she pushed around the wet paint of a cloud with churning strokes, when Suzanne entered from outside with two friends in order to show off the work in progress. Suzanne introduced Wanda by name but the women only grunted, barely acknowledging her. After surveying the more completed of the two walls, one of the friends said dubiously, "Mm, it’s nice. I don’t know." Her gaze darted from figure to figure, from rose bush to flower bed. She was frowning vaguely.
"Hm," said the other woman, more vaguely. Without looking down at this woman, Wanda wondered if she might have spotted the word HATE in the long hair of one figure and the word PAIN in the blossomed branches of a cherry tree. She hoped she hadn’t made them too obvious.
"Well, she isn’t finished yet," said Suzanne, "but it’s going to be marvelous, don’t you think? In life Wanda worked for an electronics company, but now she’s followed her true calling, haven’t you, dear? You see—it’s never too late to realize your dreams."
"My dreams," Wanda whispered to herself. "More like I’ve realized my nightmares." She thought again of the Kahlo quote.
Suzanne had ushered her friends into her home for tea, leaving Wanda smiling thinly as she continued with the challenge of hiding the fanged jaws of a lizard Demon in the ethereal softness of cloud vapor.
The work shift had nearly come to its end. When she came down from the ladder, Zaraiah drifted into the hallway, rich with its scents of paint and thinner (as reproduced by the spiritual matter of which the afterlife was composed). The being’s eyes went straight to the mural in appraisal. "You go back and work again on faces and flowers and such that I thought you’d completed already."
"As the whole thing takes form, I change my mind about things."
"That, there, is our mistress Suzanne."
"Yes. She asked me to put her in the picture herself." Wanda and Zaraiah both took in the portrait. "Art’s always been thought of as a kind of immortality, for both the subject and the painter. Leaving our mark on the world."
"Now you know there is a greater immortality, and that the marks you make are made on the soul."
Wanda felt emboldened by their familiarity, as such, to say, "What I’ve found is that immortality sucks. But at least I don’t have to grow old, huh? It’s ironic that I’ll always be this age, young, and Suzanne is the Angel but she has to be older than me for eternity. At least I never have to worry about these things sagging." She cupped her own generous breasts through the fabric of her top. Zaraiah quickly averted its eyes. She found this amusing. Was the Seraph so modest? Or was it something more interesting than that? For the first time, Wanda wondered if it wasn’t just her artwork that the Celestial being admired.
"When this piece is done, there will be another project lined up for you," Zaraiah said, staring at the painting again, this time in what Wanda felt was a conscious effort to avoid looking at her.
"And another after that? I mean, will this go on indefinitely?"
"No, it will not. It would not be allowed. You are more comfortable than most of the Damned; much more privileged, in being permitted into Heaven even in this way. You know from experience that comfort for the Damned cannot be tolerated for long. It is against the purpose of Hades, isn’t it?"

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