Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades (15 page)

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Authors: Jeffrey Thomas

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The Demon paused with apparent discomfort. "That isn’t for me to say, sir."
"The gun is for my protection," Michael explained tersely.
"We will see that no Damned assault you during your stay. And of course, you are not capable of being killed, or injured for very long, so…"
"I’m well aware of that."
"Of course you are, sir. In any case…allow me to take you to your quarters, now. We have insured your comfort, for the duration of your stay."
"Thank you, but I’d really rather get to where my son is, as quickly as I can."
"Yes, as I understand, sir…but you see, first we must ascertain his whereabouts, and we will assist you in every way we can, in that endeavor."
"His whereabouts?" Now Michael felt too great a heat rising in him to be cowed by the cadaverous titan. "What do you mean? Do you mean to tell me that you don’t know where my son
is
?"
"We know the general vicinity, sir…we feel confident he is still in this territory that I govern, and that is why you were directed to this portal. But we have not yet been able to narrow down his exact location."
"I don’t believe this!" Michael snapped. "This is unacceptable! My son is suffering here, do you understand? He’s in Hell and he could be tied to a stake in the middle of a bonfire right this moment!"
"You see, sir, there is a breakdown in our former lines of communication. Gaps, and irregularities. Our methods of intelligence gathering, and monitoring of the Damned, have become eroded. I’m sure you have been informed of the conflict we are facing here—the rebellion of certain breeds of the more human-like Demons. These species are to be phased out, but they are resisting violently. There is an atmosphere of chaos, I am sorry to report, that has…"
"Look," the Angel snarled, retaking that step he had lost when the monster had entered the portal chamber with him, "I want my son located immediately, do you understand? I don’t care if it takes every Demon in your jurisdiction…I want him found! I want my boy brought to me!"
"We will do that, sir. But you understand, of course…even when we find him, you may not bring him out of Hades with you. You cannot take him to Heaven. He will still be one of the Damned."
"I am only too aware of that, believe me. I am only too fucking aware that my son is damned for all eternity because he didn’t have a little holy water dribbled on his head by some fucking child-molesting priest…doomed the same as murderers and rapists because a few words weren’t said to placate the Creator that I’d put my trust in for my entire fucking life!"
"It is a pity," the Demon stated in its emotionless, sepulchral hiss. "But as a religious man, sir—if I may presume to ask you this question—why did you not have your child baptized, since you and your wife obviously were yourselves?"
"My wife is my second wife; my son’s stepmother. She was a Catholic in life, as I was. But my first wife—my son’s mother—was always an atheist. She was very adamant about my son not becoming baptized or even attending church until he was old enough to make that decision for himself, as an adult."
"And you gave in to her desires."
"I gave in. Yes, I gave in." Michael was still seething. His voice trembled with his stoppered fury.
"It must have been a great source of enmity between your wife and yourself—you being devout, and she denying the Creator."
"That’s why she’s my
ex
-wife…isn’t it?"
"And she is still in the world of the living?"
"She’s alive, yes. She’s there, still breathing…still not believing. Maybe even disbelieving more than ever, in her grief. But she’ll learn one day, won’t she? Learn how wrong she was. When she joins her son in Hades. And then she can apologize to him. She’d fucking damn well better apologize to him!"
"Come, sir," Iblis Al-Qadim said, sweeping his arm, in a tone that almost sounded sympathetic. "Let me take you to your quarters. And I assure you—the search is already underway."
"Why did I listen to her? Why was I so
weak
?" the Angel lamented.
"Sir?" The Demon had his hand on the metal door’s wheel.
Michael grunted, and in starting forward met the eyes of the mollusk-thing poised like a parrot on one of the Demon’s shoulders. An uncanny intelligence glowed in them. He remembered what Iblis Al-Qadim had said—the human-like Demons being gradually phased out, because of the revolts incited by several demonic races. Was he looking at Iblis Al-Qadim’s replacement-in-training?
He saw that one of its glistening tentacles had reached out and curled with insidious slowness around the handle of that great iron staff.
2: The Damned
Before they became lovers, both of them had lain with Demons.
In one region of Hades, Roger had been captured in his wanderings by a group of Apsaras, as their breed had been named by the Damned (since the Demons themselves tended not to give appellations to their many races). The blue-skinned Apsaras were beautiful and terrifying, with voluptuous perfumed bodies and long black hair that swam in the air above their heads endlessly as if they were drowned women under the sea, their dark eyes blazing and tusk-like fangs curving up from their lips. During his confinement, which may have lasted a year or more (how could he judge?), the Apsaras would seize him and arouse him against his will…rape him. Somewhere in the course of this—like a female mantis consuming the head of her mate as he copulates with her—the Demon would rip his throat open with her fangs, or dismount him as he climaxed and tear off his manhood with her powerful hands (it seemed to be a sport, with the Apsaras, to pluck the organ just as it squirted), or bite off his member as she fellated him, or slash his scrotum open with her long nails to eat the savory oysters of his testes. But there were male Demons in this territory as well, incubi known as the Asuras, and they had performed their own brand of sex acts on him, or forced him to perform acts upon them, followed by the usual mutilations. These torments became almost mundane (if no less excruciating) with time, and of course he always fully recovered later on, regenerating whole once more so that he could be rent afresh the next time around.
Davina, on the other hand, had served as one of the living spawning machines in the city of Tartarus, where many species of Demon were manufactured, so to speak, by Damned laborers. Usually the processes employed were more mechanical in nature; Demons were baked from various ingredients like cakes or injection-molded like plastic, grown in dark cellars like mushrooms or developed in bubbling solution like fetal clones—but certain types of these homunculi, these infernal golems, gestated inside human hosts. The sort of Demon that had been grown inside Davina’s body were dubbed Kilcrops—ghastly cadaverous things, always laughing, that never seemed to mature beyond adolescence. She had been captured by a roving Demon squad, taken to Tartarus and put to this use. On a regular basis, she had been raped by the incubus breed called the Asuras. She had lost count of the pregnancies (maybe two hundred?), each lasting what she thought of as thirty days. There was no actual day or night, but the Damned counted days in terms of work periods. Then again, the work periods were so very long.
The farm girls, as they thought of themselves, were treated fairly well, aside from the rapes that planted the devil seed, but even those were intended more as business than punishment. Not that it made much of a difference to Davina. To her knowledge, no laborer had ever escaped a city so full of Demons as Tartarus, but after a while the farm girls and other workers were released and replaced with new souls. Her understanding of this was: rather than being a mercy, or a thanks for their service, it was to insure that they did not get too comfortable in Hades. Again, even a torture could seem commonplace and predictable with repetition. A man, say, locked in a hanging cage and pecked at by an infernal breed of crow would be liberated after a time (maybe a week, a month, a decade by human measurement), so as to wander free for a while and encounter fresh manifestations of anguish.
««—»»
Hades was full of settlements, either constructed and populated entirely by the Damned, or else by the Damned and the Demons in combination. There was everything from thatch-roofed hamlets to metropolises of soaring high-rises, these skyscrapers either familiar or uncanny in their varied outlines. Many times the look of the town or city had to do with the period of human history its Damned citizens came from, though mostly these characteristics became blurred and blended with the coming of new generations.
Certain colonies of Hades alternated between freezing cold and scorching hot, as if each day contained the seasons of a year. Some were built in the shadow of glaciers, where it was eternally frigid, sleet ever stinging the skin, the rooms of the buildings heated with whatever meager measures the Damned themselves could devise.
Other cities were ever burning. Maybe not with blistering, charring earthly fire—how then could the citizenry move about freely, so as to roam to the next place of suffering?—but with a lesser blue flame that nonetheless consumed a city like Apollyon entirely, the flames lapping high into the air so that every street, every room was filled with this hot blue light, so that it filled your mouth when you spoke or slept. It needed no fuel, it never ran out, it was silent and did not crackle. After a while, you could almost forget the pain it caused in every nerve of your body. Almost.
Roger and Davina had drifted to the city of Apollyon at about the same time; it was where they met. He had been an atheist in life, a British soldier killed by a German machine gun in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, when he was twenty-eight years old. In September of 1993, at the age of twenty-three, Davina had been killed along with eleven-thousand other Indian people in an earthquake. She assumed all eleven-thousand victims, being Hindus rather than devout Christians, must be here in Hades with her. He assumed a fair number of the million-plus casualties of the Somme offensive were here for one reason or another, as well. But Hades was infinite. Hades had room enough for all.
The first time Roger and Davina had made love, the sea of flame they were submerged in caused so much pain to their uncovered bodies that it left little room for pleasure. But they stared at each other’s faces as he lay atop her. And they smiled.
Later, they had met the boy. Mark had died only recently, and Apollyon was the first city he’d encountered. He told them he had burned to death at the age of eight, and it was his opinion that he was in Hades not only because he wasn’t baptized, but because he had caused the fire that had killed him…and his parents.
Roger and Davina had pitied the child. They had taken him in as a kind of son, and it was this act as much as their love that made them kind of a husband and wife. Kind of a family.
««—»»
At least paper did not burn in the blue flame, and the Demons of Apollyon apparently did not deem it worth their time to otherwise destroy the books that Roger and his fellow workers produced, nor the presses they printed them on. Roger was adept with machines, and had helped improve these presses and the binding equipment—all designed and built by the Damned over many years—since settling in Apollyon. Currently, he was inking up one of the presses to resume work on a slim volume called
Beautiful Hell
, a memoir written by a Damned author who had stumbled upon this city and left the manuscript in their care until he should return.
"Mark," he called, looking up but not seeing his boy. "Bring me a fresh can of black, will you?"
A clatter, a clunk (
please don’t have spilled another can of ink!
 thought Roger), and the child appeared from another room, bearing a metal can, looking eager to be of help. His adoptive father even paid him several coins of the netherworld’s currency, every "week," for the scraps of work he performed about the shop.
Roger noticed a smear of red on the boy’s beaming face, and grew concerned, straightened up. "Did you cut yourself?"
Setting the can down, Mark touched his cheek, examined his stained fingertips. He laughed. "No, Rog…it’s red ink. I was putting some cans away!"
His own hands slicked with black pigment, fashioned from native minerals and flora, Roger reached out and dabbed some ink on the boy’s other cheek. "There. You can at least be stained in the same color as me."
"Hey!" The boy flashed out his own hand, and ran his reddened fingertips down Roger’s forearm, leaving smudges. "Now
you’re
stained the same as
me
!"

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