The Gargoyle (60 page)

Almost immediately, a dark figure emerged and started climbing towards us.

This creature was three united bodies working together from a single torso. It had six gangly arms, whose six hairy hands reached into the waterfall to secure handholds, and it moved like a spider climbing a web. At first I thought there must have been some rock behind the waterfall but as it came closer, I could see its hands were wrapping around the liquid itself, twisting the streams of water into something like ropes. The beast had a sharp tail that cut into the waterfall, and though it was still some distance away, its smell already reminded me of piles of decaying mayflies on a beach.

“Geryon,” Francesco said, “who was once a king in Spain but is now the monster of fraud. It’s the guardian of this waterfall, and is the one who must deliver us into the pit.”

When Geryon reached ground level, its six legs pushed against the stream and it catapulted towards us, making a perfect six-point landing.

It was a large thing (as most things in Hell seemed to be), its torso littered with shiny scales. Its three heads were about six feet above my single one. Each face had similar features: all were lumpy with great welts, large lips that held rotting teeth, and eyes like black pearls housed in half-opened shells. Still, despite their ugliness, the faces seemed to be without deceit. All three heads began to speak at once.

“WHAT DO YOU…”

“WHY ARE YOU…”

“HOW DARE YOU…”

“…WANT?”

“…HERE?”

“…DISTURB ME?”

“We wish to enter the next circle,” Francesco answered.

“NO, IT CANNOT…”

“WE WILL NOT…”

“THIS ONE…”

“…BE DONE!”

“…HELP YOU!”

“…IS NOT DEAD!”

“It is true that we ask a great deal, and it is true that this one is not dead,” Francesco admitted. “But he is a friend of Marianna Engel.”

The name seemed to mean something to Geryon and the three heads muttered amongst themselves. Eventually, they took a vote—“YES. NO. YES”—before deciding to take us. (Who would have guessed that the monster of fraud was a democracy?) It turned so that we might climb onto its broad back. Francesco ushered me up first, whispering, “I’ll ride between you and the tail. It’s poisonous.”

When we were settled, the beast took a robust leap from land’s edge towards the waterfall. When we hit the water, I saw Geryon’s hands plunge into the liquid and grasp the fluid that flowed through its fists like translucent snakes. While it was difficult to keep my grip, I noticed that my arms were stronger than they had been since my accident. At one point Geryon’s three heads said, “NOT…SO…TIGHT.”

As we neared the bottom, Francesco called out over the water’s roar, warning me to prepare for the next level. It would be, he said with a tone that forced me to take note, particularly unpleasant.

We dismounted and Geryon disappeared back into the waterfall. I took stock of exactly how far my healing had progressed. Most of my skin was smooth, and the pancreatitis scar that had adorned my stomach was gone. Nearly all of my hair had regrown. My lips were once again full. I bounced on my shattered knee and found it strong. My lost fingers were more than half recovered and I used them to rub, at the juncture of my legs, the small nub of my emerging cock.

“We are now in Maleboge, home of the Seducers. In this Circle,” Francesco advised, “I am useless to protect you.”

I could hear what sounded like gunshots and crying voices, coming ever closer. Soon they were upon us: men and women in an endless line being driven by horned demons. What I’d thought were shots were actually the cracks of the demons’ flaming whips, brought down repeatedly with merciless precision. The seducers were hunchbacked in fear, curling their bodies to stave off the thrashing for an extra half-second. Their arms hung limply, only jerking upwards in their sockets each time the whip connected. Perhaps the seducers had once been of great beauty, but they were no longer; now, they were little more than lumps of well-beaten flesh.

The woman closest to me was struck and blood jumped out of her mouth. When I gasped, she was alerted to our presence. She looked up and I saw that much of her face had been eaten away by maggots. Her right eye looked like a bulging egg and her left one dangled an inch out of the socket on the optical nerve. With her egg-eye, she winked at me lasciviously, and she licked her lips. For this she was whipped to the ground by a legion of demons that didn’t let up even as she lay writhing in agony. Her skin opened in crisscrossing patterns until she was practically spilling out of herself. Dozens of snakes emerged from holes in the ground, twisting up her like chains upon an escape artist.

After she was tightly serpentbound, more snakes—different snakes, with oversized fangs dripping with venom—appeared from the holes and began to roll merrily over her. Eventually a cobra took a position above the seductress’s face, pausing only a moment before it dove down to attack the mongoose of her neck. Spurts of blood cascaded into the air before showering down upon her body, each drop erupting into a tiny bead of fire. Flames quickly engulfed her, and her bulbous eye swelled until it burst like an overfilled balloon. She screamed until her vocal cords were incinerated; all the while, the serpents remained lashed around her body. Her flesh fell away, like tender meat, to expose the skeleton within. Her bones glowed yellow, then red, then black, before finally crumbling into the earth. She disappeared this way, into nothingness—except for what should have been her spine.

Her spine was not a spine; her spine was a snake that looked directly at me from its nest of ash. It flashed a dastardly, reptilian smile, and hissed:
AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.

The snake continued joyfully leering at me even as it began to tremble and new ribs burst forth from its sides like fingers breaking through tightly stretched plastic. Next, arm and leg bones emerged. The ashes of the incinerated sinner began to reconstruct into human tissue, first sifting into intestines, and then weaving into a new circulatory system. Red liquid flowed up out of the ground to enter the new vessels. Muscles twisted around the bones like ivy growing over a fence, and skin pulled up out of the soil like a blanket which tensed itself over the sinewy form. Hair sprouted and new eyeballs gelled in the sockets. The seductress was rebuilt, not into the beaten form I’d first seen, but as she must have looked upon the Earth. She was as physically beautiful as any woman I had ever seen.

She rose from the ground and took a step towards me, her arms held out for an embrace. How alluring she was, with her soft skin and pleasing hips. The demons, who had been tending the other seducers and only now noticed that her rebirth was complete, set upon her again with their whips before she could reach me. She was shepherded back into the procession of sinners and the cycle was made clear to me: she would once again be beaten into pulp, she would once again be bound by the snakes, and she would once again be disintegrated by the fire. It would be repeated over and over, for eternity, just as it would for all the others in this pageant of seducers.

I understood now why Francesco had warned me against this Circle, because it was during the rebirth of the seductress that the healing of my body finalized. The lava flow that was my skin had fully receded and there was no longer any indication that I’d ever been burned. My body was as perfect as it had been on my best day before the accident; the only mark that remained was the scar that I had been born with on my chest. I, like the seductress, had been restored as fully, beautifully human.

Though I didn’t want to, I fell to my knees and started to cry. Once I started I could not stop.

To this day, I remain unsure of the true nature of my tears. Did I cry because the fate of the seductress so closely mirrored my own? Was it the cumulative effect of the horrors in the three Hells that I had experienced? Was it because I’d regained a human form that I had never dreamed would be mine again? Or was it because back in the real world, my body was deep within morphine withdrawal?

I don’t know the answer. But eventually I continued to cry simply from joy that my tear ducts worked again.

Francesco clasped a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Styx lies ahead.”

As disoriented as I was, I knew that something was amiss. After all, I’d heard the story of
Inferno
in two different lifetimes; I knew we were supposed to have encountered Styx earlier than this. Wiping dry my eyes, I told Francesco as much.

“But this is your journey,” Francesco said, “not Dante’s.”

We moved towards the river’s edge, where a boat was rapidly approaching, as if it knew we were coming. “The boatman is Phlegyas, son of Ares. When his daughter Coronis was raped by Apollo, Phlegyas set fire to the temple of the god. Apollo killed him with arrows and condemned him to this punishment.”

The most striking thing about Phlegyas was the large, angular stone that floated above his fragile skull, looking as if it might drop at any moment. As a result, he constantly lifted his tormented eyes to appraise the situation. With every push of the pole in the water, the ship carried the boatman closer to us and the stone followed, never leaving its tenuous position. Phlegyas had become sallow from so long without sun; the veins of his face stood out like purple spiderwebs and his hair was falling out in stringy bunches. Spindly arms stuck out of his robes, which had long since been stained the color of sweat.

“Who is this, that dares bring an arrow to my shore?”
Phlegyas’ attempts to menace were nullified by his preoccupation with the stone above his head. Even as he attempted to glower, his eyes twitched upward with the rock’s every little movement.

“You will have to forgive our foolish friend,” Francesco said, “for he is young and still alive.”

“That does explain much.”
Phlegyas nervously bobbed his head to the left, before allowing it to settle back to the center of his shoulders.

“Will you carry us across the water, so that he may finish his journey?”

“Why would I do that? This one is not dead.”

Francesco began to speak. “He is a friend of—”

“Marianne Engel,”
Phlegyas cut him off.
“This matters not to me.”

The boatman pushed upon his pole to turn the boat around, but Francesco called out, “Much depends on your help, Phlegyas.”

Intrigued, perhaps, Phlegyas turned his face back to us. “
And why is that
?”

“If you know Marianna, then you know this is a journey of love.”

“What care I for love?”

“Was it not love for your daughter that brought you here? Would you doom another to likewise be trapped forever in Hell, where he does not belong?”

For the first time, Phlegyas seemed to pay more attention to me than to the rock.
“Tell me about your love for this woman.”

I answered as sincerely as I could. “I cannot.”

Phlegyas furrowed his brow. “
Then why should I honor your request
?”

“Any man who believes he can describe love,” I answered, “understands nothing about it.”