Once Upon a Time in Hell (10 page)

H
ENRY
J
ONES WASN'T
immediately aware that his circumstances had changed. He had spent the last twenty-four hours slipping in and out of consciousness so frequently that his grip on reality was fragile at best.

When his mind was clear enough to make the connection, it made him think of a time when he was seventeen, a young man out on the road and getting in trouble. He had fallen in with a crowd of horse bandits. They'd been fascinated by his blindness (and even more so by his skill with a gun despite what would seem obvious limitations) and they had let him travel with them for a short while. He had never been truly included in the gang's business, they were impressed with him, certainly, but they didn't trust him. He had been more a pet than an equal.

At night they would cheer him on as he shot cactuses in the dark; a performing monkey that would foreshadow his days in the carnival. One night, just for the devilment, one of the gang, a seedy Texan called Bulrode, had spiked him with peyote to see, or so he claimed: “Whether the young buck can shoot ghosts as well as trees.”

Jones had been lost to the world for hours as the psychoactive coursed through his system. He had shouted and screamed so loudly at the visions that had plagued him that the gang had bound his mouth and he had come close to choking by the time dawn came up and he found himself, once more, in a world he recognised. He had shot Bulrode and ridden the man's horse as far away from the gang as he could.

Those hours in the care of Clarke were not so different. He remembered the chill of the snow that had turned to heat and anger as he carried Knee High, the only member of his gang of outlaws he could find in that white, terrifying world outside the town of Barbarossa. He had needed the man's eyes, his own ability to sense the world around him lost in the falling curtains of snow that hid his surroundings. He had fought to find his wife, Harmonium, the woman that had always stood by him, despite his moods. He had failed. Like that drug-fuelled night with the horse thieves, time had jumped. One moment he had been in the snow, the next he was lying on his back in a hospital tent. He had wrestled with the doctor, desperate to find out if Harmonium had also been rescued. Then, as the doctor pumped more drugs into his system, he had let go of the world once more, sure of only one thing: his wife was lost to him except in the dreams that followed.

And those dreams were strange things indeed.

He was chasing her through a never-ending graveyard, wooden crosses wherever you turned, spinning round and round in rows that stretched beyond the horizon. He knew, in that way you do in dreams, that Harmonium was buried in one of the graves. So he ran through the rows, ear to the ground, listening out for her. He had to find her soon, before the precious air within the walls of her casket was gone.

The residents of that impossible graveyard were talkative souls. Some encouraged him, some laughed at him, some had the voices of people he had known in his life.

"Run boy!" one had shouted, with the voice of his uncle. "Run and never stop running because, when you do, I'll find you!"

You alr eady did find me, thought Jones, on a sweaty night in T allahassee when I cut your thr oat with the neck of a smashed whisky bottle. The last time his uncle had spoken to him it had been nothing but hot air and bubbles. The grave had fixed that throat up just fine. "Henry!" Harmonium had called, and her voice had been choked with earth and grit.

"Quickly, god damn you or I'll never see the light!"

He had ran and ran and ran...

Sometimes he had woken, aware of the sounds of people around him, moaning and cry ing. The drugs were strong though and the moments of consciousness were brief, snatches of air grasped by a man being pulled from beneath by a strong tide.

In some of his dreams he could see, the skin of his face fallen away to reveal two perfect eyes. Even they were not good dreams. He had been blind from birth and didn't know what to do with the eyes now he had them, didn't know what the colours and shapes that surrounded him meant. They were hard and sharp and looking at them was like running through a forest where the branches kept hitting you and drawing blood.

Then he was with Harmonium, the pair of them lying in the long grass outside Serpent's Creek, the smell of sex and the memory of her body, seen in the best way possible, through the tips of his fingers as they moved all over her.

And then he was stood in the middle of a street.

This, as he would later appreciate, was the moment he truly woke up. At the time he thought it was just another dream, shuffling along through this empty, unfamiliar town.

Normally he could sense the physicality of things around him, he could picture them as rough shapes. The way that the sound changed between wide open spaces and narrow streets, the point at which roofs could no longer enclose the brush of his feet in the dust and opened out into the sky. He didn't visualise the buildings as others saw them, he didn't have the context with which to do so, but he knew them for what they were and could navigate between them easily. The same went for people. He would hear their breathing, the clothes shifting on their backs, even their hearts pounding away in their chests on the frequent occasion that they saw him and realised their death might well be close at hand. This town held no such people, not so far at least.

Walking was difficult. His legs were weak and threatened to give out, his knee joints wobbling with every step. That and the pain in his hands is what first made him wonder whether this actually was a dream. The visions had been disturbing and surreal but at least he had moved through them as a whole man, not this fragile remnant, this snapped twig left behind after the snow had melted.

Just ahead of him he began to sense something. It wasn't a physical object, in fact it was the absence of one. Just inside a building to his right there was a patch of space that whined, like Cicadas in the trees. It was a patch of space about which he could tell nothing and therefore it stood out a mile. He made his way towards it.

Stepping up onto the boardwalk made his hips ache so hard he had to reach out to steady himself. The moment his broken fingers touched the rail by his side the pain in his hip was subsumed and he fell to the ground, holding his hands protectively out in front of him.

"Not a dream," he whispered. "Pain feels different in dreams."

Slowly, he got to his feet and made his way inside the building.

Once in the same room as that impossible space, that hole in his world, its buzzing was all but deafening. He moved cautiously towards it, trying to map it out, define it by the things he could sense around it. No more than the width of two men, it hung there in the air before him.

But what was it? He took another step towards it and felt the hair on his body rise. Whatever it was had power. It was dangerous. It might destroy him. He should certainly not step any closer to it. And yet he did just that. He couldn't say what it was that drew him. In dreams you know the way forward, you cannot help but follow it, however much you might wish to turn another way, your path is predestined, like a train on its tracks. Even though he was sure now that this was no dream, he still felt that sense of destiny; that there was a line he was following, lead where it may, and attempts to deviate from it would be pointless.

He stepped closer still. The proximity to it making him shake on his unsteady legs. In the end he half stepped, half fell into that impossible, buzzing absence and found himself somewhere else entirely.

He was lying on his front, hands pressed beneath him into the cool dirt. This time they didn't hurt. He rolled over onto his back and held his arms up. His hands were fine, he wiggled his fingers in what was cool night air. Cool night air that bore a familiar smell. This was some where he knew well, but he hadn't been here for a long time and the memory was slow to surface.

A short distance away, a fire crackled and there was conversation and the familiar slap of playing cards. He could smell campfire food and animal cages. Canvas crackled in the breeze and with it came the memory of where he was. He was back in Dr Bliss' Karnival of Delights, lying next to his trailer after a long day of separating rubes from their money. He couldn't, in all honesty, say that he had loved his time here but, by dint of the fact that he had never loved his time anywhere, it was as close as he could get to a welcoming place. Especially if...

"I'm afraid she's not here, Henry," said a voice next to him.

A moment earlier he would have sworn to the fact that he was lying quite alone on the grass. Now he could sense the man that had joined him. He could smell the leather of his boots, the sweat caught up in the fabric of his shirt, the whisky on his breath. He thought back to the man who had first told him about Wormwood; the old drunk who had claimed to once rule the midway with his knife-throwing act (arms bound to his sides, fooling the audience into thinking he had none). The man who had, in short, shaped the last couple of weeks of his life.

"Alonzo?" he asked.

"The same," Alonzo replied, reaching forward and patting Henry on the shoulder. There was the slosh of whisky against glass and Henry sensed a bottle moving towards him. "Care for a drink?"

Jones did. Taking the bottle cautiously at first, thinking of his hands then remembering that his wounds were gone, at least for now. This had to be a dream then, didn't it? Either that or a miracle, and Jones was of a mind that miracles didn't happen to godless sons of bitches like himself.

"We'll find Harmonium," said Alonzo, "I promise you that. I know you want to see her, I know there's little else on your mind but that, but I need you to hear me out first, can you do that?"

Jones let a mouthful of whisky run down his throat. It burned all the way through him and he rode the sensation like a man floating on the waves of a river. "I guess I can," he said finally.

"You remember the night I first told you about this place?" Alonzo said. "We were sat out here just like this, sharing a bottle and some stories."

"And you were talking about an old gunslinger friend of yours, and how you wondered where he'd fished up."

"That's right, and I talked about Wormwood and how, if a man was strong enough to find his way there, he could walk right into Heaven itself."

"You told me that if I ever found it I should pass on a message from you to God." "I did."

"Seems to me that you might just have beaten me to it."

"Honestly? I've always been here. I came to you then, Henry, found you in that carnival because I needed you here."

"I don't follow, you telling me it was all a trick?"

"No, not that. At least, not precisely that. I hunted you out. I had heard of you and I knew that there was a place here for you. I wanted you to find that place, to be the man you could be."

"Alonzo, I gave up a lot to get here, everything that means a damn to me."

"No, my friend, that's what I mean. Harmonium can be with you again. You needn't have lost anything. This is Heaven after all. This is the place where everyone turns up sooner or later.

I will make sure the two of you are together again. I can do anything, Henry, if I set my mind to it. Like those hands of yours. They don't hurt now do they?"

"No," Jones admitted, wriggling the fingers again.

"The wounds of the mortal world are flimsy things, easily swept away. Nothing breaks forever, neither a finger nor a heart."

"And what would you want in return?" Jones was no fool, he'd heard enough promises in his life to know that the good ones came with a big price tag.

"Nothing you wouldn't be happy to give," Alonzo replied. "I'm trying to build something here. Trying to make it a better place. And there's a part for you to play in that, a good part, a powerful part. I have a role for you in mind that would suit your talents right down to the ground."

"You want someone killed? That's usually what people want me to do for them." "No! Nothing as trivial as that. Though I'm not promising there won't be blood. I want you to rule somewhere for me."

Jones sat up. He was usually good at being able to test the seriousness of someone's words. When all you had was a man's voice, you got skilled at judging the sincerity of it. Alonzo didn't seem to be lying. Nor did what he say make any sense. "Rule somewhere?"

"This place is a world of two halves, Henry. There is Heaven and there is Hell. The latter has become a chaos, a place of chancers, power struggles and division. What it needs is a strong hand, someone to take control of it, to beat it back into shape."

"You want me to run Hell?" Alonzo laughed. "Yes, my friend, that's exactly what I want."

I
RAN OUTSIDE
, thinking, I guess, that I could get some fresh air. Of course, the idea of fresh air in a place like that was madness. The atmosphere was heavy and thick, like leaning over a corpse in the desert.

The deck was virtually empty, most people drawn to the pleasures that could be found in side. I walked towards the rear of the boat, where the paddles cut their destructive way through the horror we sailed on. Over the sound of those heavy blades I heard a low moaning and, in the faint red light of the sky, spotted the dancer I'd found myself obsessing on earlier. She was arched back against the rail, legs apart while a balding head burrowed beneath the frilly coral of her skirts.

"Oh," I said, both embarrassed and, quite stupidly, angry to see the object of a passing affection busy at such work.

The balding man looked up. He was cross-eyed, his salt and pepper beard glistening.

"You want to keep walking, pal?" he said, his voice dreamy but with a clear edge of threat to it.

"We're taking care of business here." I was about to back away when I saw glistening fronds emerge from between the girl's legs’ gelatinous appendages that looked like something you'd find on a sea creature. They wrapped themselves around his head and pulled him back to where his mouth could get on with its work.