Authors: Eliza Crewe
Fury. Blind fury. “
My heels won’t touch the ground
,” I shout and Jo erupts into laughter. I twist to Armand. He’s looking down the front of his pants. “Ken and Barbie, indeed.”
Chi latches back on to my arm just as I lunge again. “Let go, Chi! I’m gonna kill her!” I elbow him in the gut and wrest free. I leap at her but I’m not used to this wildly disproportioned body, and Jo slips easily out of reach, still laughing.
“Meda, stop!” Chi says, grabbing my arm again as I wobble on my toes, trying to gain my balance.
“Oh relax, Chi,” I say, scowling at a cackling Jo. “She’ll just come back.”
“Jo!” Chi says. “Cut it out!”
“You don’t care for that look?” Jo can barely speak she’s grinning so broadly. “Oh, fine then.” She waves her arm and my skin is again covered with the burning flush. I blink, my perspective is off, and I realize I’m taller. I look at my hands, my skin is a golden-tan, and smoother. With a sudden thought my hands jerk to my hair. It’s short—almost shoulder length, and sticks out behind me in a jagged bob. I pull a handful, just long enough for me to see.
Punk-rock white blond. I know a peace offering when I see one.
I look over at Armand whose skin has darkened to a light brown. His eyes are slightly deeper set, giving him an intense look, and his jaw is covered with a bad-boy stubble. All this is topped with the big-league hair of a Bollywood actor.
“Nice.”
Jo ignores me and snaps her fingers over her head. Her hair flattens, glossy-smooth. Her olive skin darkens to a light brown. Her eyes widen and her nose gets smaller, as does her outfit. Short shorts replace her jeans, revealing two perfectly-formed legs.
“I can’t do anything for you,” Jo’s saying to Chi. “Yet another reason why you shouldn’t come.”
“Guess you’ll just have to protect me then.” He says it lightly, but something about his words, maybe the reminder of the imminent danger, make us all look across the arched bridge and the waiting doors. By silent consensus we start towards them.
“Remember,” Armand says, just loud enough to be heard over the slapping of our feet on the stone bridge. “A demon can pull the truth if they touch you, so
don’t let them touch you
. That means don’t fight anyone, don’t bait anyone, don’t accidentally brush up against anyone.” We’d been over this a hundred times, so it’s more chant than instruction. “Get in, free the souls, get out.”
Obviously I don’t need the reminder, but the way he said it makes it sound so simple, so easy. “Get in, free the souls, get out,” I repeat.
We reach the other side of the bridge and step on to the narrow ledge. There’s a moment as we all catch our breath, all take a moment to think about what we’re about to do. A surreal moment, when I stare up at the hellhound’s open mouth.
Then with a sudden rush, Jo pushes open the blood-red door and we’re swallowed into hell.
“Bosch has been here,” are the first words out of my mouth. We’re on a dry, almost desert-like hill. Twisted trees and dry, rustling grasses sprout from the sandy soil in scattered clumps, and below us sprawls a dark city huddled under a toxic yellow sky. Hot dry air howls across the landscape, flinging dust into our faces.
“Who?” Jo asks, blinking at the sudden light after the dark of the tunnel.
“Hieronymus Bosch. The painter,” I answer, too amazed at the vista to rub it in that I know something she doesn’t. There are elements of modernity that weren’t here in the time of Bosch—the cavities of burnt-out cars, nests of electrical wires (one live one, flailing like a fish on the ground, shooting brilliant—and no doubt painful—sparks), buildings towering and teetering drunkenly like nineteenth-century tenements, the misery of compacted humanity no less now that they’re all dead. But the feel of the place, the bleak black and browns, the perverse statuary, the enormous face melting into a hillside, all of it appears in the work of the early sixteenth-century painter.
But, of course, in his paintings you couldn’t hear the melted face scream.
“There.” Armand points at an enormous, shadowy protrusion dominating the skyline. “That’s where we’re going.” It towers over the surrounding buildings—to the point that until now, I’d thought it was a mountain. But as I squint I can see that the edges are too square, the face too flat. “In the center.”
“Naturally.”
“At least he didn’t say it’s on the opposite side.” Chi, always with the glass half-full.
“Good point.”
“It won’t be too hard. Not with her.” He nods at Jo.
“Can she get us a car?” I ask, studying the urban sprawl.
Armand shakes his head. “Wouldn’t do us any good. Too much traffic.”
“There’s traffic in hell?” I ask, then wave my hand. “Never mind, just heard it in my head. So how will we get through?”
“Demons use magic passageways, like the door. Jo can get us through—we just need to find one.” On that ominous note, Armand starts walking with a determined stride that sends the scree skittering before him. There’s some violent thrashing in a spiny bush to my right, then a squeal that turns into a death-scream. Armand ignores it, but I move warily to the left, then jog to catch up with him. We crunch along for hours, the city growing slowly larger on the horizon—so slowly that the true scale of the place starts to dawn on me.
We finally reach a pitted asphalt road, and see the first other living (well, living-ish) creatures. Streaming along the road are hunched, flesh-colored humanoids. They are mostly bald, dressed in rags with a metal collar around the neck, and devoid of any gender-determining features—thin, hipless, flat-chested, slender-shouldered . Most disturbing is that they don’t have mouths—just smooth flesh where a mouth would be. They avoid us, keeping their eyes downcast and bobbing in terrified servility if they accidentally catch our eye.
“What . . .?” I don’t have to ask the whole question.
“Souls.” Armand explains with a word. “Humans who are damned to hell or demons who have had their false-life stripped from them.”
“But I thought they were tortured in the Pit?”
“These are servants. Or hobbies.”
I don’t really want to think what that entails.
As we near the demon city, the concentration of souls becomes thicker, not just on the road, but alongside it. Dozens of souls line the sides of the road as if held back by an invisible barrier. Many stand still, appearing catatonic, while others beat against the barrier and make animalistic noises in their throats.
“Exiles.” Armand, again with the one-word explanation.
I have no idea how long we’ve been walking for. Hell has no night and no day, just the endless poisoned twilight. There is no need for darkness when evil walks during the day and the horrors of your imagination can’t hold a candle to those of hell’s reality. When we do reach the city, it feels abrupt, buildings suddenly rising out of the desert. The outer walls of the buildings fit so closely together they form a wall, any gaps blocked by the clear barrier that keeps out the unwanted souls. Hundreds pound on the walls encasing the city, the mouthless screams combining until it becomes an eerie, wordless roar.
In contrast, inside the city it’s unnaturally quiet. The sidewalks teem with souls, but they rush along silently with their heads down. The only sounds are from the cars packed tightly, as Armand promised, in a never-ending traffic jam. The drivers of the cars lean forward, gripping the steering wheel with a panicked urgency of an expectant father driving his laboring wife to the hospital. The air is thick with exhaust, and acrid.
Up close, the combination of buildings are even more bizarrely mismatched. Some look like caveman-style hovels, others modernistic skyscrapers, and everywhere along the spectrum in between. They’re squeezed together, some even merged as if they’ve grown together, like a tree swallowing a barbed wire fence, in a senseless mess that defies expectation, and, in some cases, gravity and all logic.
“Hell is a joint construct of the demons’ imaginations, and their lives span centuries,” Armand explains in response to my look of wonder. “They’re most comfortable with what they know.” We stand at an intersection with roads sprouting off in all directions like a splayed hand. Armand looks up and down the roads as if trying to get his bearings, then leads us to an out-of-the-way spot, in an alley between two tottering brick building of indeterminate use. He doesn’t join us in the alley, but stands on the sidewalk, the souls passing around him as if he were a rock in a stream, as he looks up and down the street trying to identify landmarks. “It changes constantly. This place is a constant battle of wills, the stronger demons destroying those of weaker and recreating it. I haven’t been back in a . . .” he trails off, squinting into the distance.
“Problem, O Fearless Leader?” asks Jo.
“It’s been years,” he murmurs, his accent thick in his distraction, as he looks up and down the street. Then he rubs the back of his head and turns to us. “Look, it’ll be faster if we split up.” He holds up a hand to forestall arguments. “Not for long. Everyone take a road and go just a half mile or so. Look for landmarks, anything big and memorable, especially in older styles—they’re usually built by demons who have been here longer. Don’t go far.” He fixes his gaze on Jo. “And stay out of trouble.”
Jo bats a pert
who me?
with her eyelashes before jogging down a road to our right. Armand looks at me and I shrug before taking the road next to hers.
Armand said to look for notable buildings, and the problem isn’t that I can’t find one—the problem is that they’re
all
notable. I mean, if you could dream any building into existence, the rules of physics applying only through the power of nostalgia, you’re unlikely to come up with a municipal building from the 1970s. Spires stab the sky, steel and glass structures arch and bend in improbable configurations. I take mental notes of the biggest, most grotesque, and oldest of the buildings. One, a wide gothic-style building that hunches in the distance, its buttresses splayed wide, like a crouching spider, particularly catches my eye.
I’m the first one back and, patience not being one of my many, many virtues, I decide to check up on Jo. It’s always suspicious when she does what Armand says without an argument. I trot down her road and, when I round a bend and still can’t find her, pick up speed. The never-ending traffic blocks my view of the other side of the road, so I cross, but still can’t find her. I’m starting to get genuinely nervous when I finally see a movement in an alley to the right. It’s notable because instead of the purposeful efficiency of the souls, this person moves furtively. I slow, peering between harried souls. Jo.
I reach her just as she notices my presence. She starts, a too-sweet smile sliding into place. My sigh of relief at finding her quickly turns into something else.
“What did you do?” I demand.
“Nothing.”
I look behind her into the alley, and what I see narrows my eyes. “Oh, then I suppose the demon back there just decapitated itself?”
“Weird, right?”
“Jo,” I growl, and she looks repentant for a whole ten seconds before a grin ruins it.
“Oh, come on, Meda,” she wheedles. “Admit it, that was kind of funny.”
“It was obviously hilarious. That’s not the point! What if someone saw you?”
She waves a careless hand. “No one saw.”
“We’re here to free your soul—’
“For what it’s worth.”
“—not kill demons. What do you mean ‘for what it’s worth’?” My words come out as a hiss as I try to keep my voice down. I grab her arm, pulling her away from the scene of the crime with a couple of furtive glances of my own. Only souls surround us, and they’ve been trained too well to pay attention to any passing violence. I leave Jo standing on the sidewalk and dodge back into the alley and suck the false life out of the demon. The last thing we want is for it to be reborn. I slip back out to join Jo, grabbing her arm to haul her along like a naughty toddler.
“Maybe I don’t want it back?” she asks archly without looking at me. “What if I like playing for the bad guys?” Now she does turn, and the creepy lyrical tone of the Hunger crawls into her voice. “What if I like luring my enemies into lonely alleys and ripping off their unsuspecting heads? What if I want revenge more than I want my soul?”
She stops, forcing me to stop with her. “Meda, they are completely unsuspecting.” Her words fly, whiplash fast in her excitement. “Think of what we could do. Think how many we could get. This, this,” she squeezes her fists, looking for the word, “
hate
I’ve been swallowing for years, and finally, finally I can have my revenge.” She looks up. “No holds barred, anything I want. I thought you, of all people, would understand.” She searches my eyes, then an impish little smile that is all Jo, despite the unfamiliar features, stretches across her face. “Plus think how much fun we could have.”
The Hunger flaps and purrs, rising to the suggestion in a way I can’t allow myself to. She sees it anyway and her smile stretches further. I shake my head and force my eyes forward, dragging her along with me. “No, Jo. This isn’t you—’
“It
is
.”
“It’s
not
.” I stop this time, and take a breath. “Look, I get it. Believe me, I get it. But the Pit scares
Armand
.”
Jo snorts, but I ignore it.
“You don’t want your soul back today, fine, but eternity is a long time. You have to agree that you might change your mind one day.” Even Bad Jo is rational.
She makes a disgusted noise but lets me pull her along when I start walking again. I suspect this is merely a won-the-battle-not-the-war type situation. To my relief Chi is standing with Armand when we make it back. Armand gives us a cursory look as if to assure himself we’re alive, then continues talking to Chi.
“. . . and it had a giant skull on top, the back part blasted out. You’re sure?” Despite the grisly description he’s giving, Armand doesn’t sound concerned, just thoughtful, so I figure it’s actually some landmark he’s describing and not a corpse. As if to answer my question, he leaves the alley and peers down Chi’s road, squinting and muttering. I leave him to figure out where we’re going and take a granola bar from Chi before leaning against the building to eat.
Something seems to have caught Chi’s attention and he leans forward. A child crouches in the shadows, probably four or five, but it’s impossible to tell given his condition. He’s emaciated, wasted to the point where the knobby bones of his bent knees are the thickest part of his legs. His scrawny form swims in a ragged sweater that hangs past his bottom, the back end of it crusted with filth. He doesn’t wear any pants or, I suspect, underwear—which makes a kind of sense, really. The inhabitants of hell haven’t struck me as the types willing to change a diaper. His eyes are abnormally large and his ears are pointed like those of a bat. He shifts back and forth in his squat, bouncing a little, his wild little eyes fixated on the granola bar in Chi’s hand.
“There are children here?” Jo asks.
“Hmmm?” Armand asks, still looking up the road. “No. Just halflings.” As if suddenly hearing his own words, he twists with a sharp jerk. He leaps forward, knocking back Chi, who stands with his arm extended offering the little creature his granola bar. At the same time Armand shoves Chi, the child lunges, his pointed teeth snap on the air where Chi’s hand was moments before. Chi drops the granola bar, and the creature dives on it.
“Holy crap!” Chi says, watching the child fall on the granola bar, ripping it apart with his teeth, package and all.
“Careful,” Armand says laconically. “They bite.”
“Holy crap,” Chi repeats again. “He would have ripped my hand off.” He rubs the endangered body part on his pant leg, as if wiping away the close call.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” Jo murmurs, tonelessly. Then her hard eyes move to Chi. “I told you, you shouldn’t have come.”
My attention is still caught by the child. “Halflings?” I murmur, examining the filthy, emaciated wildling. “Where’s its mother?” I’m not being sexist. Demons are forbidden from impregnating humans, so most halflings are the product of demon mothers and human fathers—present company being the obvious exception.