Storming Paradise (7 page)

The music kept playing, on and on, as the earth sealed closed above the sinking street, plunging the whole scene into absolute darkness. With that darkness came a feeling of claustrophobia, of being buried alive.

Iolaus had landed hard on the packed earth that had formed the surface of the street, dropping into a roll to dissipate his momentum as the earth sealed above him like two stable doors, sealing him from the dawn's early rays.

The street was still shuddering, shaking as if caught in the fearsome turmoil of a quake, while the temperature had palpably risen by several degrees.

Iolaus cursed as he lifted himself up from the ground.

Hercules' voice came from beside him then, resounding over the strains of lyre, pipe and drum. “Iolaus? Are you okay?”

“I think so,” Iolaus said, looking around himself into absolute darkness. “Where are you?”

As Iolaus said those words, the shuddering scene around him lightened just a little, painted by a deep red like a distant sunset—only this sunset appeared to be emanating from below rather than above. As the light increased fractionally, Iolaus searched once more for Hercules, found him standing just six feet away, a sturdy silhouette against the gloom.

“Right beside you,” Hercules told Iolaus in answer to his question. He pitched his voice low, wary of being overheard despite the lyrical clamor of the musicians.

Iolaus glanced from Hercules up the street, identifying the musicians and the dancing women, albeit only as shadows against reddish darkness. “Are we still moving?” he ventured. “Feels like.”

Hercules nodded once. “It does.”

The walls at the edges of the street were dark, with deep plant roots giving way to earth. As they sunk deeper, even the evidence of the burrowing creatures and insects disappeared, giving way to rocks and then to darkness, a sense of something there in the faint red-blackness rather than visible confirmation. Iolaus did not like it.

Iolaus was about to ask where Hercules thought they might be going, but he realized it was pointless—his friend had just as much, or as little, knowledge as he did as to their destination. It could be that the street was already headed for its next appearance on another island, in another town, there to abduct more unsuspecting victims who would come to join in the party. But, just as easily, it might be traveling to another destination, a holding place like a stable, or even somewhere darker; there were stories about such things, deals made with the dwellers of the Underworld—Persephone had given fully one third of her life away to the darkness in just such a tale.

One thing was clear, however. As the street shuddered in the grip of its sorcerous movement, Iolaus and Hercules were made all too aware that when they had planned on tracking down the street they had never discussed what they would do once they found it. Saving lives was all well and good, but in Iolaus' opinion no life was worth saving at the cost of his own. He appreciated that Hercules might think differently—his friend would on occasion display a little too much selflessness for Iolaus' liking.

The street continued to shake, the strains of the music echoing strangely through it as if heard in a cave. It was not really a street now, however; it was more like a long, narrow platform along the sides of which lay the stalls of food and drink, their contents spilled across the street as it continued its descent.

Iolaus turned to Hercules in the red twilight. “I wish they'd stop playing that music,” he said. “It's giving me the creeps.”

“I quite agree,” Hercules said. “Why anyone would feel the need to play music during a platform's descent is beyond me. It certainly won't catch on.”

As if they had heard the two companions—and perhaps they had—the quintet of dancing girls stopped their graceful movements and the music softened to a quiet lull.

“How many did we snatch?” one of the women asked, looking around her.

One of her companions laughed joyously. “I don't know. Shall we count them?”

“I need only thirty more for my release,” said the third, brushing a hand through her blond tresses. As she did so, the edges of her hair seemed to drift away, departing like ashes above a fire.

“Thirty?” her laughing companion repeated. “I need but sixteen this trip.”

As the women continued to talk, comparing numbers in this manner, Iolaus turned to Hercules and whispered: “Any idea what they're talking about?”

“The number of people they hoped to capture, presumably,” Hercules suggested uncertainly.

“But why?” Iolaus asked. “And what's that talk of ‘release'? Release from what?”

Before Hercules could respond, an unearthly shriek echoed down the street from where the women were poised. The women were looking all about them and had clearly realized that something was amiss.

“Where are they? Where are the people?”

“They've left!”

“They can't have,” a third woman ventured. As she spoke she shook her head with such vigor that her dark hair cast a streak across the air like a stroke of paint. Then, the dark hair began to drift away from her head in the manner of steam above a simmering pot, creating a cloud behind and above her as she moved.

Seeing this in the half-light of the Underworld, Iolaus frowned. “What in the name of Hades are they?”

“Your dead companion,” Hercules ventured, recalling the first time that they had found this mysterious street. “The one you danced with. Remember?”

“Oh yes, that's a date I won't forget in a hurry,” Iolaus assured him.

The gaggle of dancing women had been joined by the few servers who had been dedicated to topping up drinks and clearing plates. “There was a man,” one of the women recalled, “using a cart to transport people.”

“I thought it was a game,” one of the serving women said. She was dressed in longer robes than the dancers, with a colored ribbon tied around her waist. “They were all quite drunk.”

“No,” the blond woman said, her hair now a fracturing blur about her shoulders. “He was clearing the street deliberately. He threw a man onto a roof, too.”

“I thought that was a fight,” ventured her darker haired companion. “It seemed—”

The whole group appeared to spot Hercules and Iolaus at the same instant, turning almost as one, like birds sighting a predator.

“There!” one of the men who had helped serving drinks shouted, pointing to Hercules and his companion.

Hercules held his open hands outwards in a non-threatening gesture as the posse of figures approached in the red-tinted gloom. Behind them, it seemed as if the platform that was the street was changing proportions, becoming shorter and as it continued its journey down into the bowels of the Earth.

“You!” one of the dancing girls spat as the group closed in on Hercules and Iolaus. “You did this!”

“What is it that you want?” the dancing girl beside her asked, an accusatory edge to her voice.

“I was about to ask you the same question,” Hercules responded jovially.

As Hercules spoke, he saw the faces of the women for the first time, and his eyes widened in shock. Their figures were human, but their heads were something else. The long hair was fluttering away from each head as if made from gas, and the faces had no flesh on them—and yet, nor were they bone skulls. Instead, they were kind of formless, the features drawn there as if kneaded into dough. As Hercules and Iolaus watched, the faces seemed to become even less rigid, like features carved into a candle that is left to melt, eye sockets and noses and mouths drooping downwards as they lost definition. It was inhuman.

“You!” the centermost figure shrieked. “You stole my freedom!”

“Mine, too,” the decaying figure beside her howled. “All of ours!”

Before Hercules could say a word in protest, the decaying figures of five dancing girls and a half dozen others rounded on him and Iolaus, closing them in on three sides. “Now, wait a minute,” Hercules said, trying to keep his tone light. “When you say ‘freedom,' what do—?”

The question was cut short as the nearest of the dancing girls lunged at Hercules, swiping at his face with the talon-like claws of her hand.

Hercules sidestepped, raising his left arm to bat his attacker's arm away.

Behind Hercules, Iolaus suddenly found three of the monstrous figures reaching for him—two of them male waiting staff. “Hercules?” he called, stumbling backwards on the quaking platform.

Hercules was too busy to respond. The dancing girl's attempted assault had opened the flood gates. Now, all five dancing girls were assailing him in a rush of kicking legs and swiping hands, a wild, coordinated dance of death. Hercules knocked one attack aside only to be struck by another, blow after blow slamming against his chest, face and legs. Hercules was strong, but even he could not be everywhere at once—five attackers made for more of a scrum than a fight. In an instant he was knocked down, losing his balance as the shuddering street continued its impossible descent. Three of the inhuman dancing girls leapt on top of him to hold him down. Before Hercules could struggle free, another dancing girl, her facial features melting to an amorphous mass like so much mashed potato, dropped on him, elbow first. The sharp corner of the woman's bent elbow bashed into Hercules' face, backed by the full weight of its plummeting owner.

All around, the walls of the earth were cast in a fiery red-orange, the glow more brilliant now as it spread upwards from below.

Iolaus stepped back, almost dropping as the street shuddered beneath his feet. Three of the waiting staff—two men and a tall, leggy woman—were almost upon him, fury on what remained of their decomposing features. There was a plume of auburn mist around the woman's head where her hair was disintegrating, while the men's shorter hair was already almost entirely disappeared, just a few wisps rising from their heads like licks of flame.

“Stay back!” Iolaus warned them. “I don't want any trouble.”

“Trouble?” hissed the man-thing on his left. “You and your friend there have caused more trouble than you realize. You've cost us our freedom!”

“One hundred souls for freedom!” the other man elaborated. “I had ninety-three already!”

Iolaus shook his head. “I wish I knew what in the name of all the gods it is that you're talking about,” he said.

Then a shudder gripped the street, and he found himself toppling forward and into the arms of the woman with the frizzing plume of auburn.

“Idiot!” she hissed. Then she struck Iolaus hard across the face in a slap that set Iolaus' head reeling.

Iolaus stumbled away with a yelp, almost falling over himself as he tried to stay upright, the shudder of the street throwing off his sense of balance.

The street shook again, and Iolaus stumbled in a little three-step dance as he tried to keep from falling. Three steps:
Solid ground.

Solid ground.

Nothingness.

Suddenly, Iolaus was keeling backwards over the side of the street where his foot had missed its mark; below him: a sheer drop.

Hercules meanwhile had been struggling under the array of dancing girls who had set upon him. He found himself pushed to the ground as they kicked and struck him, one of them sitting on his chest to hold him down while the others stamped on his arms and legs and chest.

The blows were irritating and relentless. But they were not very powerful.

“You're never going back!” the woman on Hercules' chest insisted, pounding her fists against him. Her face was a withered caricature of humanity, like a face drawn into the folds of a prune, and her hair was a blurred mist around her head, no longer touching her but rather just hanging there as evidence of where she had once been.

Hercules gathered his strength even as one of those vicious blows struck the side of his face. Then he shrugged, twisting his torso and throwing the girl who sat atop him from his body. She went toppling backwards, bumping into two of her colleagues before all three crashed to the ground in a heap.

Hercules was on his feet in an instant, knocking another of the quintet aside as she threw a rabbit punch at his gut. Before he could tackle his remaining adversary, Hercules heard a pained yelp from behind him. He spun, motion and thought coming as one. He knew that yelp—it was Iolaus.

Even as Hercules turned, he saw his colleague stumbling away from another of the ghastly attackers in a blind stagger. Hercules identified the danger as he ran for his friend, knocking one of the male serving assistants aside as he drove himself onwards. Iolaus was teetering at the very edge of the street, beyond which lay that red-lit nothingness.

An instant later and Iolaus was plunging into darkness, his stomach flip-flopping as the ground disappeared from under his feet.

Iolaus was falling. Beyond the edge of the street was a drop so deep that it was beyond comprehension. The darkness was cast in red where something glowed just a little way down from where the street platform was—and that glow was getting closer every second as the street continued to sink.

Iolaus fell, everything spinning around him as his foot left the street and cut through empty air, the rush of the wind suddenly powerful all around him as he left the safety of the descending platform.

An instant later something grabbed Iolaus by the wrist, hoisting him up in a strong grip.

“You okay, buddy?” Hercules asked as he yanked Iolaus up by one hand, drawing him back to solid ground.

Iolaus nodded, eyes wide, unable to speak.

Behind Hercules, the decaying figures of the street were massing, preparing to renew their attack. Iolaus saw them and tried to warn his partner, but his voice had momentarily left him and all he could was make a kind of “mmmm” sound as he nodded urgently to the area behind Hercules.

Hercules let Iolaus go, his feet securely on the street once more. Then he turned, even as the first four attackers charged him, dropping down to one knee as they approached. The first attacker, a man of not inconsiderable size, tripped as Hercules dropped, and he went sailing over the side of the street in a heartbeat. The next followed an instant later, trying to slow her charge as she was clipped by the falling figure of her colleague. She, too, went over the side and disappeared.

Iolaus peered curiously over the edge of the street as the two figures dropped, watched as they went careering down towards the source of the red glow. Both of them were screaming.

The third attacker had the presence of mind to halt before he tripped, so Hercules kicked out with a leg sweep that knocked the man flat on his back. The final attacker—one of the dancing girls—just stopped, her hands raised before her, switching from fists to open palms as she realized that she might be taking on more than she could handle.

“I don't want to hurt you,” Hercules warned as the woman stood before him, her hands up, her face a smear of ruined features.

“You've already ruined everything,” the woman hissed back. “We'll never be . . . free . . . n—”

Abruptly, her words ceased. Her head had lost its features, the mouth swallowed into the doughy lump of flesh that had once been a pretty face. She slumped to the ground, keeling over as her knees bent beneath her.

A few feet away, the other attacker was also deteriorating, his face now a smudge, fingers becoming short and pudgy as they retreated into his hands.

“What's going on?” Iolaus asked, looking around him.

“I don't know,” Hercules admitted, looking from figure to figure. He realized that the band had stopped playing. “They just . . . ceased to be.”

“You know,” Iolaus said, “I think we may have just stumbled upon something that's way bigger than either of us can handle.”

Hercules nodded solemnly in agreement.

While the band had stopped playing, another noise had begun to echo across the street besides the rumbling of the street's descent. It was the distant sound of screaming.

Hercules frowned, consciously noticing the sound for the first time. “What is that?” he muttered, wiping sweat from where it had stuck his dampened bangs to his forehead.

“You're sweating,” Iolaus remarked, perplexed.

“It's hot,” Hercules told him.

“But you never sweat!” Iolaus said.

The red glow became noticeably brighter at that moment. Suddenly, the street passed by what looked like a gap in the solid wall surrounding them on all sides. The gap was like a cave, and it stretched away from the walls and into darkness. It was from this space that the red glow was emanating, and as Iolaus and Hercules peered into it, they saw figures moving. The figures were trudging at impossible tasks, hefting great chains connected to gigantic spherical rocks at least a hundred times their own weight, stoking fires not with pokers but with their own burning limbs, the sounds of sobbing and screaming almost unbearably loud. The ground was strewn with bones and skulls.

Among the tortured figures were the two people who had fallen from the edge of the street when Hercules had tripped them. Snared in a net, they were being welcomed by a robed figure in the distance, where the darkness seemed to be amassing.

“Is that . . . ?” Iolaus muttered uncertainly.

“Aye,” Hercules confirmed. “Hades' realm. At least, one part of it.”

Iolaus swallowed, finding his throat suddenly dry. “You think we're going there?” he asked, his voice trembling.

“Stand firm, my friend,” Hercules told him, clenching his fists as the street descended and the view of the Underworld grew more expansive.

Beside Hercules, Iolaus clenched his eyes tight. “This is bad,” he muttered. “This is so, so bad. I'm going to the Underworld and I haven't even died.”

The street rumbled on, descending further, past the gates to Hades' realm, onwards towards the Earth's core.

“What's happening?” Iolaus asked, tentatively opening one eye as he felt the shudder continuing beneath his feet. “Are we there yet?”

“It seems we're destined for somewhere other than the deathly realm of Hades,” Hercules told him.

Iolaus opened both eyes. “We are?” He saw the fearsome red glow of the Underworld disappearing into the distance above them, the tortured screams fading to nothing. “Then where?”

The street had changed shape as it sunk. Where it had been the perfect length and width for the space between the houses of the fishing town with the Poseidon statue, now it was shorter and wider, a platform carved from ever-changing rock. The band had sunk down on the ground, lifeless as marionettes with their strings cut, and the remaining dancing girls and serving staff—whom Hercules had trounced in their brief altercation—lay sprawled in similar states of lifelessness, all animation gone.

And still the street continued to drop, falling, falling, falling.

They had been falling for almost ten minutes, with nowhere to jump off and no way to return to the surface. Neither Hercules nor Iolaus could say how far they had fallen in that time, only that the street—or at least the thing that had been the street, for its dimensions had radically altered as they fell—kept on dropping. The people who had dropped with them, all attached in some capacity to the mysterious party, had all devolved into lifeless husks, strewn across the rocky platform that had once appeared to be a street on an island far above. The tables, chairs, foods and drinks had also withered like dried up fruit. Hercules tried eating one of the chicken drumsticks once they had dropped past the realm of Hades, only to find it crumble to dust in his hand. Whatever was happening here, there could be no question that sorcery was involved.

Eventually, Hercules detected a slowing in their passage. “Do you feel that?” he asked Iolaus.

Iolaus looked around, eyeing the moving walls that they continued to drop past. The walls were illuminated with a subtle green now, just bright enough to highlight the crags in their surfaces but leaving the detail lost to the blackness. “Yeah, I feel something,” Iolaus agreed. “Are we slowing down?”

Hercules nodded. “I suspect that means we're closing in on our destination,” he opined.

Iolaus took a wary glance over the side, peering below the descending platform. He could see a faint hint of orange down there, like lava in a volcano. “So, what's the plan, big guy? You've always got a plan, right?”

Hercules thought for a moment. “We should hide,” he decided. “Find out what we're walking into before we show ourselves.”

“Hide,” Iolaus said, scanning the debris that remained strewn across the street. “Riiiight, that's a plan I can get behind. Any idea where?”

Hercules led the way to the cluster of dilapidated tables that had once hosted the many plates of food that were offered at the party. “Come on,” he said.

Iolaus watched as Hercules dropped down behind a table, pulling the tired table cloth before him like a pair of drapes. The cloth looked moth-eaten now, its once clean fabric frayed and discolored with age.

“That's never going to work,” Iolaus said.

Without warning, the street's descent came to a sudden halt, shuddering with a great, loud thump. Iolaus fell to the ground, his legs giving way. In the aftermath of what could only be described as a landing, the echo of the shuddering street reverberated around a chamber with walls made of rock.

“Come on, Iolaus,” Hercules whispered. “Quickly.”

On hands and knees, Iolaus scrambled to join Hercules behind the deteriorating fabric of the tablecloth. Once there, he shot Hercules a challenging look. “Do you have any idea where we are?” he hissed.

“Below the Underworld,” Hercules replied in a whisper, peering through the holes in the tablecloth at their surroundings.

“Yeah, that much I could figure out, smart guy,” Iolaus said, an edge to his whisper. “But where is that?”

Hercules' eyes flicked to glance at his faithful companion for just a moment before turning back to scan the area through the curtain of ruined tablecloth. “Iolaus, sometimes you display the patience of a gnat.”

“Hey,” Iolaus growled, offended, “we were falling for a really long time. You want patience, ask me an hour ago when we were only just setting foot on that island.”

It was hot down here, so hot that it felt as if Hercules and Iolaus were basking in the midday sun. Through the peepholes in the tablecloth, Hercules saw that they were in a vast cavern, with circular walls carved directly from rock. The walls were lit by a lichen-like substance that glowed a luminous green, threads of it stretching across the stones and the floor beneath. Several sections of the wall glowed more brilliantly, recesses where something like burning coals appeared to be located.

There was a secondary glow too, coming from somewhere beyond the open mouth of the cavern, this one the fierce orange of magma. It was the only open mouth to the cavern and, hence, the only way in or out other than the hole above them. Iolaus pointed to it. “Should we investigate?” he asked.

Hercules nodded, peeking out from beneath the ragged tablecloth. There was no one about, but he could hear the distant cries of people in torment. They must lie beyond the cave, he realized.

Once he was certain that were not being observed, Hercules pushed the tablecloth back and led the way to the edge of the rock platform, peering over the side. They were high up, roughly twelve feet above the floor of the cavern, with no obvious way down.

“Come on,” Hercules said, leaping down from the platform. He landed with a clap of boots on the cavern floor, turned and waited for Iolaus.

Iolaus looked warily down. “I don't like the looks of that first step,” he said.

“I'm here,” Hercules said, spreading his arms out to catch his companion.

“I'm going to regret this,” Iolaus muttered as he lay down on the floor of the platform and gingerly eased his legs over the side. Then, using the rock's rough surface as makeshift handholds, he clambered slowly down while Hercules explored the cave.

They were in a roughly circular cavern that was just a little larger than the platform upon which they had descended. The high ceiling was open, leading to the tunnel through which they had dropped, and the walls were craggy with no obvious means of ascent other than the sorcery of the platform. Two recessed areas were located on the side opposite to the cavern's lone, ground-level exit—one high, with a flight of ladder-like ridges cut into the stone to lead to it, the other lower than the rest of the cavern and accessed by a flight of steps. Hercules glanced over these areas, which glowed with some fire bright energy source, before concluding that neither harbored a doorway or other way out. He hurried back to the platform just as Iolaus reached the bottom of his climb.

“I thought you were going to wait for me,” Iolaus accused as Hercules joined him.

“I'm here aren't I?” Hercules responded.

“I could have fallen!”

“But you didn't.”

“Not the point,” Iolaus said sourly.

Hercules crept towards the cavern mouth, pressing his back to the wall there and peering outside. A short walkway hewn from rock protruded from the cave mouth to a towering rocky edifice that looked like a mountain, everything painted in a fiery red-orange light.

“I know this place,” Hercules said with sudden realization. “I've been here before. We're in the Tartarus Pits—realm of eternal suffering and the final resting place of the damned.”

“With no way out,” Iolaus observed dourly.