Red Spikes (13 page)

‘You always have to go
through
stuff,’ said Barto.
‘Why couldn’t somebody have made a road?’

Leah grunted. Yes, it was always a trudge here. But what was the hurry, when it came to eternity? Might as well trudge as run. Might as well be hampered as not. Barto was new here; he didn’t realise. He’d just arrived, and by car accident, so he was still in a kind of shock. He was trying to catch hold of the last threads of his curiosity as it disappeared.

Right now they were walking through reedy, rushy stuff, sometimes ankle-deep in black water. It was quite dim, too. They were deep in the Lower Reaches; Hell’s crusted, warty underside hung low above them, close enough to feel the warmth. There were four of them: Leah, Barto, Tabatha and King. They were all youngish, so far as that meant anything, and they spoke the same language, so they made a good team. Plus there was the Miscreant Soul they were escorting, on his string. At least he’d stopped moaning. Hard as it was to feel strongly about anything here, the Miscreant’s carryings-on had managed to irritate Leah.

Well, it was entirely up to you,
she’d said to him.
You can
get away with a certain amount, but you can’t expect to be
forgiven everything.

Why not?
he’d retorted miserably.
What skin would it
have been off anyone’s nose?

It’s just not the way the system works,
King had said
. The
line has to be drawn somewhere.

I don’t see why.

You don’t have to,
said Leah.
It’s not your business to see.
Just count yourself lucky to get any glory at all. Some people
never even catch a glimpse.
And she’d made sure to walk on the far side of the group after that, so his complaints were mostly lost on the warm, wet breeze.

He was naked, the Miscreant. He didn’t get to keep the white garb and the little round golden crown. He was just a plump white man, rather the shape of a healthy baby, on a leash of greenish-yellow string and with his hands tied behind his back. He had died of a knifing outside his office building; the big wound that had opened him up from left shoulder to right hip was sealed up shiny pink.

The rest of them wore the grey-green uniform. It was neither shapeless nor quite fitted, neither long nor short, neither ugly nor attractive in worldly terms; it was not remarkable in any way unless – Leah had seen it on the Miscreant’s face, on the face of the woman at the desk at Heaven Gate – you were used to that other uniform, the white one, and the beaming face above.

The woman had cleared her throat and some of the light had gone out of her face; when they were so close to the Gate, people didn’t like to look away from it.
You have some
business with us?

Tabatha had handed over the satchel, and they’d all stood around as the woman went slowly through the leather pages. The occasional seal shone light up into her face, but she looked less and less happy the more she read.

This is never good.
She’d slapped the satchel closed.
This is never a pleasant task. Do you have the appropriate device?

Tabatha had held up the two lengths of string – Leah had seen King’s fingers rub together, and her own tingled at the memory of rolling the grass-fibres into string on her thigh. The woman on the desk had sighed and stood and crossed the little bit of marble paving in front of the Gate.

‘Someone up ahead,’ said King. ‘It looks like a staffer. With a crook?’

Leah looked up from the reeds and the water. Yes, there was the curl of a crozier against the grey sky ahead.

‘He’s coming right for us,’ said Barto. ‘Of course, I don’t mind if it’s not
specifically
for me.’

The man was tall, as a Shepherd should be. ‘All hail!’ he cried as soon as he saw them. No one spoke as he toiled forward through the swishing reeds.

He patted the satchel on his white-robed hip. ‘I have papers here for an infant, Jesus Maria Valdez.’

There was a slight sag among the four of them at the word
infant
. The Miscreant narrowed his eyes at the staffer. So he had been hopeful, too.

‘There are a lot of infants back there,’ said Leah. ‘Get through this boggy stretch; look out for a copse of dark trees on your right. They’re in there, on the ground and up among the branches, heaps of them.’

He was on his way. ‘I’ll try there,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘Praise be.’

‘Whatever,’ said Barto softly. Oh, he minded a great deal.

Leah shook herself and walked on. Out here, you got to know too well all the different shades of disappointment.

‘What was that all about?’ said the Miscreant, watching the glittering crozier recede. ‘Someone
else’s
paperwork got mixed up?’

‘Probably a posthumous baptism,’ said King. ‘Or an intercession, you never know. They don’t have friends, babies, but sometimes there’s a very devout grandmother. Come on.’ He tugged the string gently.

The Miscreant resumed his trudging. ‘So that baby gets to Ascend?’

Leah didn’t hear any answer – she was watching reeds and water again – but the Miscreant asked no more, so someone must have nodded.

Actually, Hell would be so much worse for the Miscreant, now that he’d been inside Heaven Gate and experienced that eternity. It would be worse than it would have been for Leah herself, who had only seen the Light, only felt it, from here in the Outer, and only for a few seconds at a time. And it was hard enough for her, this ache that never left her bones, this endless dull knowledge that things weren’t as they should be.

They came to the edge of the marsh, up onto a rise covered with brown grass. There were quite a few people there. Two groups prayed to a Wrong God, the women wearing head cloths woven laboriously from grass fibres – where did they get the energy, for the praying, for the weaving? Babies floated here and there in their greenish swaddling, some sleeping, some awake and waving their arms, kicking their legs; another one screamed inconsolably in the distance. Other people wandered alone, meeting no one’s eye, or lay on the grass looking up at the carbuncular ceiling, which was just like the surface of Heaven, except that it rumbled occasionally, and leaked dirty-yellow puffs of sulphur.

Leah’s party passed on into the grasslands. The going was drier, but pricklier underfoot, and the grasses had sharp edges that made long, light cuts on their bare legs.

‘You never know, do you,’ said Barto quietly at her shoulder. ‘You see a bloke with a cut throat, like back there, and you don’t know whether he did it himself, or whether he got murdered.’

Leah nodded. ‘About the only suicides you can be sure of just by looking is slit wrists. Not that you can’t just go up and ask. It’s not like people are embarrassed about it, or won’t tell you.’

‘Hmm,’ said Barto. ‘I’ve never been much of a going-up-and-asking type of person.’

‘It’s different here,’ said Leah. A sigh escaped her – it seemed so wearying, to explain. The thing was, nothing would
change
, whether it was explained or not explained. ‘No one takes offence; no one thinks any the less of you. Just like no one plots against you, or gossips or anything. It’s restful. It’s pointless; everything is pointless, but nothing is a bother, either.’

‘Come
on
,’ said King behind her. The string was at full stretch, and so was King’s arm. The Miscreant was dragging his feet, his eyes cast fearfully upward.

Leah turned impatiently from the sight.
She
had lived a virtuous life, if a short one. Her only sin was one of omission, and not even
her
omission, but her parents’: she was one of the billions of unbaptised who walked the Outer.

The breeze was very warm now, and Leah could smell the sulphur. The smell, the rumbling and the occasional sprinkle of pumice on her head and into the surrounding grass, were the only indications of the sufferings going on overhead. At least she didn’t have to worry about finding herself in Hell; her only question was when, if ever, she would be granted admission to that better place.

Mostly Leah didn’t get to see much inside Heaven; clerical errors usually went the other way from this one, and Souls delivered to Heaven slipped in quickly, as soon as the Gate opened the merest crack. This time, because the Miscreant had made such a fuss, some force had been needed to remove him, and the Gate had had to be opened comparatively wide. The four members of the escort had been tortured long and hard by the sight of the Eternal Benediction, of that constant rain of powdery shimmer – was it food? was it love? – that fell through the rays of Light, that clung to the clouds, that brushed past the beings. The snatches of music, the humming of crystal, the tang of harp strings, the celestial harmonies sung by voices so human, so joyous – Leah, accustomed only to the whistling breezes in the Outer, to the weeping and mumbling of the Souls Pending, had listened fiercely. She resolved to memorise a single phrase, to take with her, to give her heart during the grey times. And she had; she’d caught a little flourish of notes and hammered them into her memory.

But then the Gate had closed and silenced the music, and the Miscreant Soul had stood naked and dismayed before them, subdued by the string but still panting from the fight. Leah had run the caught phrase through her mind several times and it had fallen dead, all its brilliance and mystery and beauty gone, a series of notes as bland and grey-green as the clothes she wore. The four of them, whose pure yearning towards Heaven had fused them elbow to elbow into a single being, had fallen apart, four blockish, clumsy entities excluded into a quieter, greyer eternity. One needed nothing here, not food or drink or love – but a glimpse of Heaven woke a hunger, a hunger
to hunger
, to long for something, anything, and have that longing satisfied, to feel any feeling but this bland resignation, this hopeless doggedness, this pointless processing of oneself forward through unmarked, unmemorable time. Oh, and then the hunger went, and left you frowning, trying to fathom how you could have felt as strongly as that about anything.

Walking through the grasslands was tedious now; Leah’s shins stung with grass cuts. There were few Souls here, either floating or walking, and they kept their distance – if you weren’t a Shepherd, no one was interested in you. A few children stood and stared, head and shoulders above the grasses, but anyone in their teens or older hunched and turned and swayed slowly away as the escort came through on its business.

The rumbling overhead became louder; the shell of the sphere was thinner the closer they approached Hell’s Gate.

‘I can hear people screaming, I think,’ whimpered the Miscreant.

‘Not yet,’ said King. ‘You’re imagining it.’

‘Put another loop around his neck if he’s feeling resistant,’ said Tabatha. ‘That’ll keep him moving.’

They paused while King arranged this, Tabatha instructing him. ‘You want it firm, but not tight, and you don’t want it to get any tighter when you pull on it, just like the first one.’

The grass clumps grew farther apart now, and the ground between was bare and red, uneven and littered with sharp stones. It was quite hard to keep an even pace, and the whole team slowed, picking places to put their feet. The stones grew bigger and bigger, broader and more treacherously balanced.

‘This is like gibber plain,’ said Barto. ‘I remember when we went on our round-Australia trip. Except there’d be no creatures here. We looked through these binoculars that could see infrared light and there were all sorts of things – little mice jumping around, lizards, spiders . . .’

No one answered. Leah had barely understood him. Australia? Binoculars? Infrared? And she wasn’t going to reiterate,
No, there are no animals here. Animals are old-world
stuff; they just circulate in that system.
And then he’d ask,
So
why are there plants here – aren’t they old-world too? I don’t know,
she’d have to say.
Did I create this? If you ever get to Heaven,
I’m sure it’ll all be made clear.
It was all too boring and took too much energy.