Once Upon a Time in Hell (23 page)

"He's not scary," I said. And I felt it, despite what I'd seen over the last half an hour. The old man had done nothing but watch my back ever since I'd met him. Ultimate evil my ass, he was alright by me.

"What do you know?" Biter said. "You're just a mortal."

"What about you?" I asked Meridiana. "You coming?"

"Biter has a point," she said. "Besides, I've stuck with the pair of you this far, I may as well see things through to the bitter end." She took my arm. "You've got to remember, not much happens to immortals like us, so even if it seems crazy it beats just another day in Hell."

"I've got everything I can loaded up," announced Abernathy, waddling out of the burned out stables. "Of course you managed to set fire to most of my stock but I'll let it slide in the inter ests of good customer relations."

"What about the people?" I asked. Of course, if I hadn't been such a squeamish coward I'd have gone in there and looked for myself.

"The what?" he asked. "They're all gone," Lucifer said. "As quickly and as painlessly as I could make it."

That was some relief to my ailing conscience at least.

"And now," he said, "we're going to find out who he was working with."

He walked over to where Greaser was trussed up, tied to one of the statues by his pool.

My conscience began to wonder if it really was in the clear or not.

"You ready to talk?" Lucifer asked him.

"Fuck you," was the considered response.

"Now," Lucifer leaned casually on the statue, a splayed woman with a giant bladder given the quantity of water she appeared to be producing. "You know who I am, yes? You've seen what I do. I'm not some rival entity. I'm the original. The enforcer. The Light Bearer. The One Who Burns. It's no lack of honour on your part to just tell me what I want to know."

Greaser smiled, a wet and bloody smile. "Let me put it another way then: Fuck you old man. "

Lucifer shrugged. "Up to you. I reckon you'll be feeling a mite more communicative once we've been riding a while, though." He cut Greaser lose from the statue and dragged him over to where the rakh were waiting. I think he even whistled as he tied the man to a long length of rope dangling from the back of his saddle.

"Let's get going," he said, climbing onto the animal's back and galloping out of the gate, Greaser dragged along behind in a cloud of dust and shouting.

Maybe he was a bit scary after all.

By the time we had descended the mountain and were once more outside Abernathy's store, Greaser was half the man he used to be. He'd lost a leg and an arm and had come to resemble an old potato that had been rolled in grit. For the last few minutes he'd been screaming one word: "Alonzo."

"I'd thought as much," Lucifer replied, untying him. "But it's best to be sure before you start flinging accusations around."

He dragged what was left of the man over to edge of the marina and tossed him in. There was a scream and a loud splash then he returned, clapping his hands together to knock off the dust.

Branches of Regret was still stood outside the store, arms wide, taking in the air.

"You were successful?" he asked as I walked over to him.

"Guess so," I replied. "We were able to lift a curse off my friend and that was the main reason we went."

"Lucifer?"

"Yeah," I wasn't surprised he recognised him, clearly everyone did. "He's been with me all the time but you wouldn't have been able to see him."

"I saw him."

"What? You could see him before? But nobody was supposed to be able to."

"I can't help that."

"Why didn't you say something?"

"I didn't think it was important. Are we going to the Dominion of Clouds to fight Alonzo now?"

"I don't know why you even bother to ask."

"Politeness."

"Yes, we are."

He nodded slowly. "It would be better were I to travel my own way, I think." He slowly began to shrink into the earth at my feet, tendrils splitting off from his arms and legs as he pulled himself under. After a moment he was gone.

"Branches of Regret's going to meet us there," I said and went over to my rakh to sit in silence and be confused for a bit.

"Just give me a minute to lock up," said Abernathy. "I don't bother for short trips, the rats police things pretty well, but if we might be gone a while..."

Lucifer shook his head in despair. "Even the shopkeeper's coming?"

"I heard that your munificent piece of shit!" Abernathy called, the sound of chains being dragged around inside the store. "Obviously I wouldn't give you any back chat, being so all powerful as you are. I'll do whatever you ask, even let you kiss my fat ass if that's what you're after.

Because it sure sounds like that's what you're after..."

"I blame you," Lucifer said to me. "You attract them like flies."

"More the merrier! With Branches of Regret there's seven of us!"

"Magnificent," he replied, with limited sincerity.

Eventually we were ready to leave, heading back out onto the road the way we'd come.

After a short while we veered away from the lake and towards the large cattle sheds I'd noticed earlier.

"I'm not sure I want to see inside there," I admitted as Lucifer drew to a halt a short distance away.

"You don't need to," he said. "We've seen all of Greaser's business we need to. This is just to send a quick message."

He climbed down and began to slowly walk towards the sheds. "You all stay back here." The sheds stretched right across the field, row after row. The whole set up was more than twice the size of most of the towns I'd ridden through on my journey across America.

"I'm here to tell you something," Lucifer shouted. I was reminded of the time on our journey to Wormwood when he had spoken and I had heard the words clearly, regardless of distance, as if he had been speaking directly into my head rather than my ears. "Greaser is gone.

Buzz is gone. This trade is gone."

I noticed a few people appearing at the entrances of the cattle sheds, some were armed and ready for trouble, most were just confused.

"The Dominion of Circles is under my control again," Lucifer continued, "and I say you're done."

He raised his arms, tilted back his head and, with a roar, a ball of fire rose up from his throat and sailed into the air like a cannonball. Then another, and another...

The people that had appeared outside the cattle sheds weren't slow to run, still most of them didn't make it. When the fireballs hit the roofs of the sheds, they erupted with a light and heat the like of which I'd never seen before. The entire place was ablaze. Huge columns of fire exploding like the heads of cabbages. The sky filled with flame and debris. Even back where we were, maybe quarter of a mile away, the heat was enough to have us holding our arms up in front of our faces, the rakh shifting nervously beneath us.

"I love him," said Biter in awe. "I ain't never loved a man before but I love this one. I want to roll over and be his goddamned bitch."

"Stop talking," said Agrat. "Please... before I'm forced to vomit on you."

Lucifer turned back to us, slowly climbed onto his rakh and nodded. "That'll do," he said, and we cut away from the burning crater and on towards the Dominion of Clouds. 

H
AD
I
EVER READ
the Bible? He asked me.

Well, dear reader, I cannot claim to have done so, at least not in its entirety. I know it's terribly scurrilous to say so but I always got rather bogged down in the endless lineages of David and the rules about what you could or could not do with goats.

I jest of course, but really, what a question! Well, no, not the question... the clear infer ence that lay behind it.

I really didn't know what to say.

I was being asked to write a sequel to The Good Book. Not something that had occurred to me as an option within my career of rollicking adventures and questionable facts (and no, be fore you ask, I am not attempting sarcasm, I'm not what you would call a religious man but I am not so bold—or stupid, given I was staring the sacred in the face—to mock such things).

He left me, confused and unable to comment, saying that we would discuss it more later.

The replica of my childhood home had begun to seem less charming as I became more disorientated and confused. As I had predicted earlier, with Billy and the good lady Forset, the sense of being a puppet dangling on a string was becoming more pronounced by the moment.

I stepped out of the library and found myself in a cloister of such gargantuan proportions that I felt unsteady on my feet for a few moments.

"Feel free to have a look around," Alonzo called, as he strode away, "dinner will be served in an hour or so."

Dinner, yes... but served where? I would have to cross that bridge when I came to it. I stood at the edge of the covered arcade, leaning back on a pillar fashioned— like every thing else I could see—from white marble. It was so clean and perfect it didn't feel real. I touched it, the stone was cool and unblemished, it felt more like glass.

The quad was filled with a garden, neat and immaculate but still somehow possible to lose oneself in. I was reminded of pictures I had seen of Japanese gardens (despite the evidence of my story Krahjira—King of Monsters I have never been there). A network of streams cut through the manicured grass, small wooden bridges crossing back and forth. Several pagodas stood between the trees and, at its centre, there was what I took to be a bandstand, a raised pearlescent structure surrounded by statues.

Idyllic but empty.

This was the same everywhere I went. I looked in through large windows into ornate halls, galleries and living spaces, everywhere offered a genteel, beatific decadence but no residents. As far as I could tell, Heaven was empty.

Once I had found the stairs, I descended to ground level and made my way into the garden.

I squatted down by the stream and dipped my fingers into the water, it was the same temperature as the air and I could barely tell it was there. No fish swam in it, the stream was as devoid of inhabitants as everywhere else.

I sat down on a bench and tried to decide what to do with myself. As a writer I felt it was important to try and explore the place but it all felt somehow hollow, like the ceramic dainties that ladies like to buy for their mantels. A thing of crystalline beauty but surprisingly little soul. I began to suspect that everything was as false, as dreamed up for my benefit, as the library I had first found myself in. Could I even be sure I was in Heaven at all? Or Hell? I would later come to understand they were movable concepts. Both had their physical geography and yet both were also states of mind experienced by dead mortals who passed into them. At that point, however, I was just a man lost by the side of a stream, wondering what ridiculous situation he had got himself into.

Perhaps more would be revealed at dinner.

As the time passed, I found myself becoming absurdly sleepy, lulled I believe by the soporific sound of the water and the general air of calm. I am not entirely sure if I slept or not.

Possibly, the brief vision I experienced was a dream. I suspect such distinctions don't even matter.

A young girl walked across the grass towards me. She was dressed in the sort of white raiments that classical painters do so love to drape their celestial visions in. A jumble of Roman and Greek, shimmering togas and skin pale as milk. She pulled a toy train behind her on a piece of string.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Waiting," I replied. It seemed the only truthful answer.

She sat next to me on the bench. "Waiting's boring isn't it?"

"Yes," I agreed, "though that depends on what you're waiting for. If you're waiting for something horrible the time passes quickly enough, if you're waiting for something nice..."

"I don't like it. I just like things to happen."

"But then we wouldn't be able to enjoy them. If something was happening all the time, when do you get to relax and think about them? Appreciate them for what they are?"

She shrugged. "I suppose. I just get impatient."

"So do I sometimes. Even more so when I was young like you." She smiled. "Being young is nice. Nobody expects things from you."

"Oh, I don't know. You have to tidy your room, do your schoolwork. Do you play an instrument?" Most little girls I knew were forced by their parents to do so. Trudging their bored way along the keys of a piano or the strings of a violin.

"No, do you think I should?"

"Up to you. I suppose it's nice to be able to make music. It takes a long time to get good at it though, you need to be patient."

"Oh, I haven't got a lot of that."

"Patience?"

"Time. Never mind. I'm sure it wasn't important." She held up her little train and scruti nised it. "I like trains. They drag people around."

"And then you drag it around."

She smiled and nodded then stood up and skipped away.

"Bye then," I called after her, but she had vanished into the trees.

Later, either woken up from my sleep or shaken from my thoughts, a bobbing light, like a willow-the-wisp from a child's story book, appeared before me.

"And what are you?" I wondered.

It bobbed as if in reply and then slowly began to move away. I decided, in the absence of anything else to do, to follow it.

T
HE SIEGE ON
the Land Carriage was brief and seemingly unproductive. Inside, keeping away from the windows, it was hard to decide whether the crowd had given up or been struck into guilty silence by a realisation of their own actions. Lord Forset was quick to expound such a theory but then, with Billy's assistance, he had just carried the body of Brother Clement inside his cabin and the horror of that old, lifeless face hung heavy on him. The Order of Ruth, with the exception of Brother William, had retired to their cabins in order to pray.

Billy suspected they would be hiding more than talking to God, but that was fine, he didn't blame them. The rest of the party was now crammed into the front compartment, having decided it was better to stick together.