Letters From Hades (12 page)

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Authors: Jeffrey Thomas

BOOK: Letters From Hades
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"We can bring you a bowl of broth, a hunk of bread and a cup of water for one coin."
"All right, then. I’ll want that, too. Thank you."
The proprietor summoned a dirty-haired teenage girl from a back room, and she showed me up to my room on the third floor. Its one window’s view was obscured by the bulk of the machine building, which also caused the panes of glass to audibly tremble. Still, the sight of a bed made up for that, however meager the mattress.
Under the circumstances, I couldn’t tip the girl; not that I had bags. But she lingered in the doorway. After a hesitance, she said, "For another coin, I can come visit you tonight."
I was appalled, especially considering the girl’s age. But I pitied her. I didn’t know if the proprietor expected this of her, or whether she did such things just to feed herself. Not wanting to offend her, I smiled gently and told her, "No thank you. I’m…very tired…I need to rest now."
She smiled, appearing embarrassed, and exited without another word…leaving me here to record these events and impressions of my first day as one of the citizens of the city of Oblivion.
Day 50.
T
oday is my day off from work, so I thought I’d return to my neglected journal. I think Lyre was glad to see me after having been hidden away in his bag for over a week.
My second day as a citizen I spent scouring the neighborhood of the hotel for work, knowing that I only had one coin left to my name. Finally, toward the end of the day, I found a job in a factory several blocks away. The building is only two stories high but covers a lot of ground, and it has a tremendous solitary smoke stack. Its tarred roof is covered in little shacks and tents like a dog’s hide covered in fleas, but a lot of the inhabitants of this miniature rooftop shanty town work for the company.
All I really do is stand at something like a conveyor belt that has white marks on it like the increments of a ruler. Spaced here and there along the belt, though, are red marks. And they’re not evenly spaced, oddly enough. Several red marks will be fairly close together, then I might not see another one for ten minutes. I’m not sure how long this belt is, how far it extends through the mechanical guts of the place. In any case, every time one of these red marks comes along and lines up with a red mark etched on the border of its track, I have to throw a lever. And that’s it. But it’s an important task, my group leader has impressed upon me; if I daydream and miss just one red mark, one lever throw, I’m sacked.
Not only do I not know what I’m achieving by throwing my lever, I don’t even know what this plant produces. I’ve asked several of my coworkers, but they seem recalcitrant about it. One simply answered, "Shh." Another, "Who cares?" Someone said, "I think we make dolls; there are eyes on my belt, little eyes…they might be glass, or maybe they’re not." Still another laborer whispered to me, "We keep the Creator running." But someone told me this laborer has lost his mind.
At least I’ve found out what the dust in the street is, which is so frequently swept up from between the cobbles and flagstones. I’m watching it rain outside my window even now: a brightly glowing downpour of lava from the sea of magma over the city. It’s pattering against the outer sill of my window, even forming little rivulets and small pools, but they quickly go cool and fade to a gray ash. Orange fluid trickles between the cobblestones like a glowing web, runs in the gutters, pours into sewer grates. I’m so glad I’ve found a place to stay, lucked out and got a job. I pity the people who sleep in the choked little alleys, or camp out in tents and other inadequate shelters. In fact, I can hear someone outside screaming horribly even now.
On Day 47, I think it was, I was walking home from work when I saw two Demons burst out of a tenement dragging a man by the arms. Both Demons were female; one with a short banged Louise Brooks cut which I thought was both weirdly becoming and sort of absurd, and the other with her hair pulled back in a single thick braid. Both glanced at me, but the one with the braid held my gaze longer.
I recognized her as Chara. And I knew she recognized me.
But they dragged the weeping, babbling man away, and I approached a cluster of timid neighbors who were watching the incident. "What did he do?" I asked them.
"Nothing, probably," someone replied. "Sometimes they just pick people at random for the torture plants."
"Why?"
This person looked at me in awe. "Because it’s Hell, that’s why!"
A wailing made me turn my attention back to the man’s house, and I saw a woman clinging to the doorframe, sobbing violently.
"That’s his wife," another person said to me.
"Did they die together?"
"No…they met here in Hell."
This has set me wondering again why I haven’t met anyone I know here…not just family, like my father who died several years ago, but grandparents, uncles and aunts, my wife’s deceased grandparents, and so on. When my wife ultimately dies, and assuming she doesn’t go to Heaven (which I doubt, because she was an agnostic like me, though maybe her new boyfriend is a church-goer who can save her soul), will I ever run into her? Hell is vast. I think it might even be infinite. And even if I did meet her eventually, she might be an elderly woman who died of a stroke. An Alzheimer’s victim who would not even remember me.
I miss her. I hate her. I realize I still love her.
I have shelter. I have food.
But I’m lonely.
I pity that woman who watched her husband dragged away to endure horrors, and I hope he is returned to her soon, though I’ve heard rumors that one might spend anywhere from days to years in a torture plant.
Chara helped take him away. She is evil. She has no soul. She is the enemy. I mustn’t forget that, however beautiful she is. Why I was hoping to see her again I have no idea.
The rain is stopping now…
Day 55.
I
’m so tired from work, I have no energy to write in this. It’s not that it’s strenuous work, just so numbing. I’m little more than a robot…
On my conveyor belt there is one green mark. Just one, I think, though there may be several I’m seeing, very distantly spaced out. Does some other worker stand there all day, punching his lever just on this apparently single mark? I see the green mark once every hour, I’d say. And I’m tempted to throw my lever when it comes level with the red indicator etched on my track, just to see what would happen. If someone told me that in doing so, I would cause all of Hell to go up in a nuclear blast, vaporized out of any level of existence, I would do it. I would throw that switch. I would pull that trigger.
Day 57.
B
ecause I am bored, and in a sardonic frame of mind, I have decided every day here is October thirty-first, so I have purchased white gourds from the market, hollowed them out, carved evil faces in them, and put scented candles inside. I have one on my bedside table and one in my window, facing out. I’ve viewed it from the street with satisfaction. I like to lie back on my bed with my Jack-O’-Lanterns as the only light, watery mellow orange membranes of light quivering across my ceiling and walls.
The girl who works here cleans my room, and she’s asked me once again if I wanted her to come to see me at night. Again I told her no, but it was harder this time. Hell will do that to you. Hell will pare down your sense of outrage, which doesn’t grow back like your flesh does.
If I could kill myself again, I would.
Day 60.
I
saw Angels up close for the first time today. My shift had let out and I was entering onto my street when there came a low, resonant rumbling sound from the distance. It was too mechanical to be thunder, and I was accustomed to the various sounds of the skyscraper machine in whose shadow my hotel/boarding house squatted—it wasn’t that, either. Though some of the skyscraper’s sounds could be quite disconcerting, often waking me from my sleep, this was unsettling for its steadily mounting sense of
approach
. And…its familiarity.
It had been a while since I’d heard the sound of motorcycles. Numerous motorcycles.
The realization put me instantly in mind of my hometown of Eastborough, Massachusetts. Some years back, a child riding on the back of her father’s motorcycle had been killed when a drunk driver forced the bike off the road. Every year on the anniversary of her death, local bikers had gathered in a grim, noisy parade through the center of town and on into Pine Grove Cemetery, where the child had been buried. Yes…this sound was exactly like that.
When the first motorcyclist came growling loudly onto my street, I was too struck by the rider’s appearance to take much note of his bike, whether it was of an Earthly model or something more unique, exotic, celestial in some tangible way. Never having been the type to salivate over cars, trucks and other phallic extensions, I suppose the bikes looked just like big black chrome-trimmed insects to me.
But if the bikes were uniformly black, the opposite was true of those mounted upon them. I knew what they were as soon as I viewed the foremost of them.
Some of them wore monk-like robes, with hoods or cowls either up over their heads or fallen off to hang down their backs. Others, like the first rider, wore tall cone-like hoods, either with the face entirely open or else covered so that only the eyes showed through holes in the fabric. Some of these robes shimmered like satin, while others were of plain cloth…but all of the riders were dressed entirely in white.
When the last of them had rumbled past, bouncing over the roughly cobbled street, I realized I had unconsciously backed up across the sidewalk until my shoulder blades touched the brick face of one of the street’s dismal, dusty structures. A few of the Angels had turned their heads to hoot at me, but luckily none of them had pulled over to accost me. Perhaps they had some specific destination in mind. Anyway, it seemed that they had already had a bit of fun: I noticed blood stains vivid against the white cloth of more than one of them. Several wore swords like the Demon warriors of Oblivion did, but all of them had holstered pistols hanging from their black leather belts. Most had shotguns or what looked like various submachine guns slung over their backs, or rifles sheathed in long bags of stiff black leather like a cowboy might have by his saddle.
I could swear one of them had a crossbow.
The rumbling receded, thankfully, but I was still unnerved just knowing they were still within the city’s borders, however expansive. I pitied whoever might encounter them more intimately than I had. At first I thought that they might be headed toward the Aviary.
The Aviary was a long street I had discovered recently while exploring the city during my free hours. The brick buildings ranked along its length were much like the shops in other blocks, but instead of glass windows they had cage fronts of chicken mesh or net-like rope mesh or iron bars, as crude as those of a prison cell or filigreed and flowery like the railings of romantic terraces. The wares displayed within these diverse birdcages were prostitutes even more variegated. White, black, Asian. Naked or clothed. Anorexic or obese. Gray haired or adolescent. Female or, in lesser numbers, male.
The majority of this menagerie’s inhabitants struck me as being willing prisoners, winking or cooing or calling to passersby like myself, baring their breasts or spreading their legs, bending over to present their bottoms. But there were those who looked sullen, in despair, even in terror, whom I took to be the victims of other Damned souls exploiting them as my landlord apparently exploited his young helper. At the very least, they were victims of their own desperate need. Despite the guilty visual pleasures, it was ultimately as debased a display as would have been a street lined with bodies writhing on stakes. I haven’t been back since.
No, I decided…the Angels hadn’t gone there. Where would be the fun? Better to ravage those who chose not to sell their bodies. To chase women down in the street, or boldly drag them out of their houses to rape in front of their husbands.
I have learned that a good number of people marry in Hell, the ceremonies carried out in secret by former justices of the peace or the occasional minister who suffered a rude awakening upon rebirth. And while procreation in Hell is impossible, there are children here in abundance, and it isn’t at all uncommon for married couples to adopt them as their own. It is this kind of behavior that reassures me even as a place like the Aviary disillusions me. And it is just these sort of people, I presumed, that the Angels would feel most drawn to in the course of their sport.
But all I could be certain of, at this point, was that I was glad the parade hadn’t stopped to have sport with me.

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