Inferno (19 page)

“I would be less flippant, Allen. Look around you.” Before I could answer, Benito had started climbing the ruined bridge.

It was still a ridiculous picture. Christ was supposed to be gentle. Using a whip on the temple money-changers was one thing; behaving like a comic-book hero was something else. I tried to imagine the bleeding, wounded, near-naked figure ripping those tremendous iron gates from their hinges, while the halo flamed angrily about His head—

Then gave it up and climbed up after Benito. I tested each foothold, but some of the slabs slid down anyway. Near the top the rockslide ended, and we climbed by fingerholds and toeholds. There it was that I had to repress a sudden, violent urge to giggle.

Benito wouldn’t have appreciated it. But—no wonder Christ was so upset. Some clerk must have tried to hand Him Form D-345t-839y-4583.

T

he
seventh pit was enormous. I stood at the end of the bridge and marveled at the thin fairy-span arching across. Carbon steel wouldn’t have taken the stress; yet it was made of stone without mortar, like the fallen bridge behind us. Another miracle, and so what?

We started across.

It was dark down there. What I could see had a vaguely reptilian flavor to it: constant slow slitherings, and sudden flurries of violent motion.

Benito pulled at my arm. “Why do you dawdle, Allen?”

“What’s down there?”

“Thieves. Theft is the most profitable of sins, and very popular. Tell me, Allen, do you expect to see anything that pleases you?”

He had me there. I didn’t. But—“I’m a writer. I’ve got ten men’s curiosity. What’s the hurry? Are we in danger here?”

“I remind you that we are fugitives.”

I stared in astonishment. “Geryon could have stopped us. Minos could have stopped us. They didn’t.”

“The demons behind us would have. Oh, very well, Allen. The real danger is at the next pit. We must cross that quickly.”

“Okay.” And I looked down again.

Reptilian, yeah. There were men and women down there . . . and lizards ranging in size from Chihuahua to Great Dane, and snakes whose range was even greater. I watched a tiny scarlet lizard leap from a crack in a rock to bite a man on the neck. The man burned like flash paper, dazzling me. When I looked again he was congealing from a cloud of smoke.

Benito was watching me, not them. Let him wait.

The land was strewn with rocks of all sizes. A stout gray-haired woman came toward us, running a tortuous path, her eyes fixed on her path. It didn’t help. Somehow she stepped between two rocks and fell sprawling, yelling in despair. The python that had been following her caught up as she tried to run on the ruined foot. It climbed her leg and bit her on the navel.

Woman and snake, they lay immobile. They began to change.

“Allen—”

I made a shushing gesture. They were changing, the snake sprouting arms and legs and head hair, the woman melting into a smooth limbless shape. Presently there was nothing left of the woman.

The slender man who had been a snake stood up smiling. “Thanks, Gladys,” he said, and walked away.

“He stole her shape,” I said. “I’ll be buggered. He stole her shape!”

“She will grow it back. In life she was probably a buyer of stolen goods, what do you call it? A fence.”

“Yeah. Wow.”

“Are you ready?”

“Yeah.” I turned and followed him. Wow. He stole her shape. How does a science-fiction writer explain that? A computer-drawn hologram. Could be. It was pretty dark down there. But I didn’t believe it.

The bridge dipped. We climbed down. Benito turned left on the ledge between the seventh and eighth pits. Benito was clearly uneasy. Interesting things were happening in the darkness on my left, but I looked into the darkness on my right for the danger Benito expected.

It looked like a swarm of fireflies, or like a freeway seen from an airplane, or—

THIS AYE NIGHT, THIS AYE NIGHT,
EVERY NIGHT AND ALL,
FIRE AND SLEET AND CANDLELIGHT,
AND CHRIST RECEIVE THY SOUL
.

Sleet I’d found on the Circle of Gluttons, and fire on the desert. Here at last was the candlelight: huge candle flames moving in darkness.

From the next bridge it was no clearer. Benito kept trying to hurry me along. “You will not see anything here. Are you so fond of Hell that you would linger?”

Slender flames moved down there in the yellow-and-black murk . . . and stopped, and clustered beneath us. I said, “Who are they?”

“Dante calls this the Bolgia of the Evil Counselors.”

“That doesn’t tell me a lot. And I still don’t know what you’re afraid of.”

A voice answered from below . . . a voice with little of the human in it. It thrummed like a harp. It was coming from the tip of one of the huge flames. “He is afraid of his own home-coming.”

I looked at Benito. He nodded, not looking at me.

“Come down!” one of the flames called to Benito. It was eerily compelling, that thrumming voice. The tip of the flame wavered, turned to me. “Throw him down, you, if you’re an American! That’s Benito Mussolini! Benito Mussolini!”

Jolted, I turned to Benito. He shrugged.

Mussolini?

Another voice thrummed from the pit. “You
are
American. I know your accent. Do you understand? That’s Mussolini! Throw the bastard down here where he belongs!”

“Who are you?”

“Does it matter? I approved the firebombing of Dresden.”

A British voice spoke from the flames. “And I led the mission. We may belong here, Yank, but so does that Eytie swine.”

Benito was backing away. When I went toward him, he turned and ran. I caught him at the edge of the next pit and tripped him. He fell heavily to the ground, and I sat on him. He was no match for me. “Mussolini!” I shouted.

“I pulled you out of a djinn bottle!” he protested.

“And led me here, deeper into Hell! I knew it all along!” Mussolini. What better choice for the Devil’s agent, to wander through Hell corrupting souls already half corrupted? Hitler was probably loose too. If we’d run across him I’d have guessed earlier. I remembered all my suspicions, and all the unexplained things that had happened on the trip down. No wonder he could give orders.

Well, I knew who he was now, and I knew where he belonged. We were at the edge of the ninth pit, but I took him by the heels and dragged him back to the eighth. He thrashed like a fish. He clutched at rocks and pulled a couple out of the ground, for all the good that did him.

The pit flamed beneath us with the crowd gathered to welcome Benito home.

I rolled him over the edge. He gave a low cry as he dropped. Before he struck bottom he burst into flame. He was very bright, brighter than most around him.

I turned and went on.

22

I

walked until I had to stop, until the ground dropped away at my feet. There I stood like a machine whose program has run out. After all, where would I go?

Now I was utterly alone, with nobody to tell me about the geography of Hell, or warn me of the dangers—

—or make me go deeper into horror after horror when all I wanted to do was stop. Mussolini. Benito Mussolini, II Duce of Italy. He hadn’t even tried to deny it.

What an idiot I’d been. Why hadn’t I recognized him, with that massive square jaw and high forehead? I remembered reading about him in history books. Benito Mussolini had escaped from his castle-prison in a glider flown by Hitler’s commando, Skorzeny, one of the most romantic figures of that war. No wonder Benito could fly a glider!

Mussolini the fascist. He invented fascism! Killer and leader of killers, thug, ally of Adolf Hitler . . . back to the anonymous flame, Mussolini, evil genius behind the Italian king. Down you go, Benito, who poured me from a bottle.

I stood there a long time before I realized what I was seeing.

In the ninth pit the damned staggered and lurched, slipping in bloody mud, leaving more blood to make the path more slippery for those behind. They seemed dazed survivors of some lost battle.

One showed no obvious wounds, except for his erect posture and painfully stiff walk. I stared at his face, where a macabre joke had been played. It was pale and lean, and calm; no one would have guessed that he was in pain; but the eyes burned white with hate. The mustache was in an unfamiliar style, straight, but twice the width of his mouth. And the sharp white canine teeth protruding over his lower lip would have had anyone over the age of six shouting, “Vampire!”

Well ahead of him was a sturdy fat man with a striking bearded face and blood running from a cut throat. The face was familiar. I studied him, trying to remember where I’d seen that face.

He stared back. Then he roared in fury wrapped in a Shakespearean accent. “Varlet! Who might you be, that stare so arrogantly at England?”

“Huh?” I shook myself. “Carp—Carpentier.”

“Come down, woodworker, and I will have your eyes nailed shut!”

I realized I had been staring, rudely, at people who had trouble enough without that. More of Big Juju’s victims. “Sorry. Does it help if I tell you the wounds will heal?”

I could see the shock rippling down the line, and suddenly they were all screaming curses and waving their fists. One man threatened with his severed arm held like a club.

“Dolt! Ass who mocks us!”

“What did I say?”

“You cannot be such a fool!” “England” cried. “We are nearly healed now! We reach the point in the circle where—” He stopped, looking ahead, forgetting me entirely. “I see him now,” he said in a voice without life or hope.

I looked. The bridge was ahead of them, and under it was a king-sized version of all the other demons we’d passed, twenty feet tall, carrying a slender sword. He grinned, showing teeth nearly a foot long.

I had to cross the bridge anyway. I walked toward the demon.

He was killing them. They marched toward him, hanging back when they could until others pushed ahead, and he killed them. He picked a man up and sliced him from crotch to throat, set him down, and let him walk on. Empathic pain lashed through me, and a line from a joke ran crazily through my head. About a cowboy who’d been thrown onto a barbed wire fence. Cut from crotch to throat. He’d shown Texas courage; he’d remounted the horse and gone on.
Of course he had to let the stirrups out a little . . .

The fat man looked sick and scared. His face clicked suddenly into place: a painting, very famous. Henry the Eighth.

I kept walking.

I was crossing the bridge when Henry reached the demon. The sword was not a sword, I saw now. It was an overdeveloped fingernail on an overdeveloped middle finger as thick as a strong man’s thigh. It flicked like a rapier and severed Henry’s head, and the demon handed Henry his head, and Henry walked on. The sharp horn tip of the “sword” flicked suddenly up before my face.

I stopped.

“Who may you be, O privileged one, who runs so free through Hell?”

I got my throat working, “Allen Carpentier.”

“Where away, Carpentier?”

“I don’t know. Inward.” With all the feelings that had been burnt out of me, one was left. Curiosity. Whatever Benito had planned for me, it lay downward, inward.

The dead had stopped to wait, with understandable patience, for the demon to finish his conversation. I waved downward. “Who are they?”

The demon seemed in no hurry. “Sowers of Discord. People who advocated hatred, started wars, refused to end wars—you know, the opposite of the peacemakers. This is a special collection. Religious Schismatics. Generally founded their own churches for their own purposes. You want political types, or lawyers who talked people into divorces they didn’t want and lawsuits they didn’t need, you’ve got to go to another part of the pit.”

“Oh.”

The demon looked fondly at “England” ’s receding back. “Henry there wanted a divorce. The Church wouldn’t give him one. So he made himself a church that would. Clever?”

“On the evidence, not very.”

The demon stooped to pick up the man with the Fu Manchu mustache and the vampire teeth. “Dracula here didn’t found any churches. He—”

“
Dracula!
I thought he was—Dammit, he
was
just a legend.”

“There
are
legends about him. In his homeland, Transylvania, mothers still frighten their children with his name. Dracula was just a title. Means dragon. His real name was Vlad; they called him Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler. He spent his whole life torturing and killing Turks in the name of Christ. Otherwise he’d be uphill, eyelash deep in boiling blood. About half the people he killed were his own subjects, by the way.”

Small wonder Vlad the Impaler walked funny. A wooden stake was sticking two feet out of his anus. The demon didn’t need his sword. He just pushed the stake up until it didn’t show, set the man down, and let him walk on. Walking funny.

The demon picked up another. “Johann here was the only man God would reveal the exact time of Doomsday to. He could save a small party of the Chosen, chosen by him, that is. All you had to do was turn your property over to him.” The demon grinned enormously. “And you, Carpentier? Did you ever create a church of your very own?”

“I—” Oh, boy.

The sword’s bloody tip swung away and back, rapier-quick. I ducked and ran. I fell flat on the bridge as the sword flashed again. The demon couldn’t quite get at me at that angle. But the arch of the bridge dipped low, there at the end.

I rose to sprint position, poised, took off. At the base of the arch the sword flicked toward me at knee height. I jumped it and kept running, right across and into the space above the next pit.

The side was steep. I hit once, and bounced, and hit the bottom very hard.

T

here
was no unconsciousness in Hell. There was only pain and the awful strain of trying to draw a breath. Deep down behind the pain a tiny voice was saying,
You don’t need to breathe, Carpentier. You’re dead
. But I wanted to breathe, I needed to breathe, and not a sip of air could I draw.