Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades (23 page)
Read Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades Online
Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
"Hm." She pressed her smile into his neck. "I’m so very proud of you…my husband."
"And I, you…my love."
— For Minh Nguyen
1: The Underworld Wide Web
Out of the sea of fog rose black metal towers like stove pipes or chimneys, a forest of them. Recesses gaped in the towers at various heights, and suspended in each black socket was a glass globe containing a luminous orange fluid. Floating in the fluid of every globe was a human brain. And attached to each and every brain by threads of nerve/muscle/blood vessel were two eyes that could not blink, that could do nothing but stare. Watch. Observe. Witness, like the unblinking lens of a television camera.
From underneath each brain sprouted a long structure like an immense spinal column. It emerged through a watertight rubber collar at the base of the sphere and extended into the distance like a tightrope, like a telephone line.
And so this was all that remained of Leon Brown besides his brain and eyes. All that was left had been stretched and extruded, broken and torn and then woven together again into one long rope. All his muscle tissue. All his veins and arteries. His bones, pulled apart into thin white fibers. And his nervous system, of course—most importantly. All of his body drawn out like taffy, like a bundle of cables, reaching far across the misty void until the other end was secured to a metal ring in another tower. Just as the cord of a person confined in that tower was secured to a ring somewhere above his globe. He could not lift his eyes to see it. But he could see the great web spread directly in front of him, of which his body was just one of countless crisscrossing strands.
He watched with dread, wanting to weep tears but lacking the mechanism, as a spider-like form picked its way across the neighboring strands. Slowly crept toward his own.
The orange fluid in which his consciousness floated did not preserve his brain tissues, per se. Instead, it prevented them from regenerating, as they normally would. In Hades, no matter what injury was inflicted upon the human body, it would always reconstitute itself. Burned flesh would go smooth again. Bullet and sword wounds would close up. Severed limbs would grow back like the arms of a starfish. It was a miraculous form of healing…but only so that more tortures could be inflicted afresh. All this was possible—the miraculous healing of flesh, the spinning of flesh into a far-reaching cord of yarn—because it was not real flesh, of course. It was flesh as hallucinated in the mind of the Creator.
The spider-like thing was drawing nearer, so that Leon could see it more clearly. Not that it was the only creature of its kind. They were all over the web, diligently setting new globes into the hollows in the metal totems, or taking old globes away to release the brains at last, so that they could finally regenerate after having been part of the web for months, perhaps, or even years of terrestrial time. But mostly, these creatures seemed to be nibbling at the strands. Plucking and sawing at them, as if to set off a vibration only they could hear. A kind of music; an orchestra of suffering.
Yes, Leon could imagine those multiple pincers and claws and scalpels of the insect-thing when it finally climbed onto his cord. His cord with its raw, exposed nerves, which it would scrape and abrade, slice and gnaw.
The approaching Demon—for such it was—lifted its head to look his way, and orange light from the many glowing spheres flashed back at Leon’s naked eyes, flashed back from the mirror that was the Demon’s face.
2: Hell on Earth
In a way, Leon Brown was probably better prepared than most of the people who found themselves committed to Hades. In life, he had been a television news journalist.
In Sierra Leone in 1995, he had seen numerous people who had had their hands cut off with machetes by rebels. One woman whom he interviewed said that after a rebel had lopped off her left hand she had begun sobbing prayers to God. The rebel had told her if she pointed to heaven with her remaining hand, God might spare her—then he proceeded to hack at her right hand. But after three failed attempts he had to leave it dangling partially attached. This woman told Leon that she felt her appeal to God had prevented the machete from cutting all the way through her wrist. Leon did not have the heart to tell her that if God had felt like dispensing miracles that day, He should have had the rebel trip and fall on his own machete. Or struck his machete with lightning when he uplifted it. Or prevented men from looking for hands to chop off at all.
Twenty-thousand people—children included—had lost limbs in this way. And as if that hadn’t been enough of a demonstration of inhumanity, instead of inspiring compassion the amputees were shunned by their neighbors as "half people." Because they frightened their neighbors. They were a reminder of the dangers that could come so easily amongst them. They were a reminder that all was not right in the world.
Who were really the "half people"? Leon wondered.
He had been to Somalia, where tens of thousands of people had died of starvation. Americans had been sent to capture Mohammed Farah Aideed, who was considered to be the obstacle in the way of aid distribution. Ultimately, some of these Marines had their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, beefy American carcasses flaunted by jubilant thin-limbed Somalians.
Brown had wondered what their parents felt. When they saw those pictures, did they remember the milky smell of their babies’ heads when they kissed them, their first Halloween costumes, crying a sweeter brand of tears as they sent them off for their first day of school?
He had been to Rwanda, seen heaps of machete-hacked bodies (always, always, the machetes). Hundreds of thousands had been exterminated by the
interahamwe
—"those who attack together." Even tall Hutus, mistaken for Tutsis, were slaughtered. When the murderers became too exhausted in their work, they would slash the Achilles tendons of their victims to prevent them from fleeing until they could be "processed" the next day. In addition, thousands of women had been raped, and even those who survived the machetes or sexual mutilation often found themselves HIV-positive later on.
interahamwe
—"those who attack together." Even tall Hutus, mistaken for Tutsis, were slaughtered. When the murderers became too exhausted in their work, they would slash the Achilles tendons of their victims to prevent them from fleeing until they could be "processed" the next day. In addition, thousands of women had been raped, and even those who survived the machetes or sexual mutilation often found themselves HIV-positive later on.
He had covered the issue of violence against women in Senegal, where two out of five women suffered physical abuse, often from husbands who believed the Koran gave them the authority to beat their wives.
Brown had been in Liberia, where thousands upon thousands of people had been killed in their civil war. Practitioners of juju had committed ritual murder and rites of cannibalism. Children had been forced to rape their mothers. He had personally witnessed the killing of a man by a group of Krahn militiamen. One of the killers had been a nine-year-old boy, who had stabbed the fallen man in the back with a kitchen knife. Later, he had seen this boy and others playing soccer with a human skull still dressed in rags of skin and hair.
Leon knew why he had been sent to these places in particular. He had been told on a few occasions that it was good to have the perspective of an African-American at these African locations, but he knew it was not that so much. It was because he was a "good" black man. While reporting these horrors, his civilized demeanor and articulate delivery on camera would reassure American TV viewers that they need not fear or hate their black countrymen. He was like the "good Mexican," perhaps a cook or sidekick or pretty senorita, included in a western movie to offset the "bad Mexican" villains.
Whatever had caused him to be in these places, Leon had always come back horrified, disgusted, sickened in his very soul. If he were indeed to consider these "his" people, it was frustrating to him that they should be killing their own kind. But he was sure the Hutus had not thought of the Tutsis as "their" people, any more than the Crips of Los Angeles County thought of the Bloods as "their" people.
Leon would wonder if the hard lives human beings endured excused them somewhat for their evil acts. Was empathetic behavior a luxury that only affluent and civilized societies could afford? Did achieving a better way of life result in compassion and mercy, or did compassion and mercy lead to that better way of life?
Leon had sometimes forgotten in which country he had seen this or that specific murder scene or howling orphaned child. He and his crew had repeatedly been stopped in their van and threatened by militia with AK-47s and mobs with machetes. But somehow he had lived through it all himself. Somehow he had come back without a scar.
No—it was in the United States, in his apartment in New York City, that Leon Brown had died, at the age of forty-eight. Of a heart attack, of all things. He had been murdered by one of "his" people: himself. As if all of the suffering he had ingested—the smell of blood that stung his nostrils, the taste of rot that got into his very mouth, but mostly it was his eyes, his eyes taking it all in—had accumulated in that one small organ in his chest. A malicious genie’s bottle too small and frail to contain it. But he knew of course that his heart had not been the true repository.
It had been his brain, of course, entrusted with that solemn responsibility. His brain was the videotape. The glossy news magazine. The archive, the history book. It was his complex and miraculous brain that proved he was the masterwork of all creation. But it was also his brain and all it had soaked up that told him "his" people—that is, the human race—never should have come into existence at all.
As he lay on his kitchen floor dying, wishing he could phone his married son…his remarried ex-wife…he had felt a physical panic, of course. That much was a primitive instinct. But he had also felt a kind of desperate yearning. A yearning for his physical pain to end…a yearning for all the pains of his life to end. Because his one life seemed to contain the lives of all the people he had seen killed, crowded into one skin. He yearned to escape from those countless ghosts into his own private nothingness. The videotape wiped clean. The history book burned. In dying, he wanted to forget it all. Forget even himself.
3: The Ritual
"Hey, it’s Leroy Brown," said Dan, turning just his head because the rest of him was bolted into the wall. "Baddest man in the whole Damned town."
Men, women and even children were affixed to the metal walls of this fluidly twisting and turning labyrinth of corridors, crucified like frogs for dissection. Leon and other Damned souls, dressed in their ragged black uniforms, marched through the high-walled corridors slowly, each carrying a burning stick of incense. The incense filled the maze like steam.
He knew he would be released from this sector of Hades soon; set free to explore its infinite reaches again. Of course, only to be captured by new Demons, with new methods of torture. But maybe the next sector wouldn’t be as harsh as this one. There were even communities of the Damned. Cities. He would try to reach one, maybe find work there for a while. He had started out here as a mere set of brain and eyes, forced to watch the taut thread of his essence as it was worried at by the Demons. Then, he had been one of the crucified ones, like Dan. And now, after an unknown passage of time, he was one of the harvesters—those forced to look after the Demons’ needs. But once every "day" (if eternity could be broken into such units), he and the other harvesters were required to march with their incense through the maze of the crucified. And torture their own kind.
In neighboring passages, Leon heard people cry out and curse. A child screamed from around the bend of a nearby branch. Leon had hoped never again to have to hear such a sound.
He had come to a stop in front of Dan. He smiled painfully. "I’m sorry, Dan," he said. "That time again."
"Hey," said the man, spread-eagled naked against the black metal, "better you than someone else. And better me than you have to do this to a kid, huh? Aren’t we the lucky ones?"
Dan was the soul that Leon, in the mysterious logic of Hades, had been assigned to torture daily. But for the moment, he stood motionless with wisps unfurling from the orange glow at the incense stick’s wavering tip. "You’ll be free like me soon," Leon assured him.
"Free? Is that what you are, man?" Dan licked cracked lips and grinned again. A movement above them drew his glance upward. The top of the maze was covered over with only a metal mesh, and they saw one of the Demons crawling up there, its claws making a clinking sound. It paused to swivel its flat, circular mirror face down at them. Leon saw himself and Dan reflected in it, like images on a TV screen. Dan hissed, "Hurry up and do me, man, before they get after you."
But the strange being continued along toward some infernal errand or duty. The Demons were black, looked like insects, looked like skeletons, but Leon was of the opinion that they were actually machines. Automatons.
Rumors found their way even among the Damned, and rumor had it that a rebellion had started up in Hades. It had two faces. On the one hand, it was the Damned who were arming themselves with the weapons of Demons and those people who, having gone to Heaven and become Angels, liked to venture into Hades on occasion to hunt the Damned for sport. These Damned rebels were emboldened by the fact that they could not be killed a second time. Recaptured and tortured in yet more horrific ways, with no period of respite, yes, but these brave souls were willing to risk it.
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