"What crime is it that makes them trap some people in books, when the rest of us can go freely? I’ll recite the alphabet again. Blink twice when we reach the first letter of the first word you want."
The answer that was laboriously decoded was: "Writers who angered Creator."
"I thought it was something like that," I wrote back to the eye. "I wanted to be a writer myself. A novelist. But I had no luck, I’m afraid."
"Just as well," was the reply. "Might be like me."
"Will they ever free you?" I asked.
"Don’t know."
"What would happen if I pried your eye out of this cover? Would you then regenerate? Well, the leather of the cover is part of you, too. If I tore off the covers and burned them, would you then finally regenerate whole?"
"Don’t know," Lyre repeated.
"You might just regenerate as this cover again," I mused aloud, "just a hunk of skin with an eye in it." I changed the subject, and wrote to Lyre, "Are you aware of anyone ever escaping from Hell?"
"No."
"Is it possible, do you think, to at least send a message out to living people? To warn them, prepare them? Something like this book itself. Is it possible to smuggle out an object?"
"Doubt it."
"I’d like to find out," I replied. "I’d like to try to send this book back home. Maybe it would work if I stripped the covers off, because they’re your soul. Maybe somehow I could find a way to deliver just these inanimate pages."
"Don’t know," said my living journal.
Hours have passed. I would have thought the Demon Chara would have already been brought to look at me. I reasoned that she must still be recovering from her ordeal. I wondered, too, if she had caught up with Caroline before Caroline made it to Oblivion. But what would it matter, really? Caroline was destined to be mauled and mutilated by many Demons through eternity; one was as good as another.
Gripping the rough bars of my cell, I pressed my face between two of them to peer out into the dimly-lit corridor beyond. Intermittent bare light bulbs glowed inside little metal cages like miniature cells in themselves. There were other cells like mine, but the one directly opposite was in pitch blackness and I wasn’t sure if it was occupied, though I thought I heard a slight rustle of movement within. A rushing gurgling caused me to lift my eyes to the low ceiling. Along it ran a thick pipeline that was translucent and organic. Dark fluid was flushing through it, and seemed to be bearing along gobs of refuse. But it wasn’t sewage; the fluid was red, and the refuse borne along was offal, viscera, blobs of raw flesh. It was like listening to a train pass in the night, and when the cloacal flow had dwindled away, it looked like a few stray scraps of sundered meat lay inside that vein-like tube, its interior beaded red.
"That’s from the torture plant," chuckled the unseen occupant of the opposite cell, apparently amused by my wary upturned eyes. "That’s where we’re headed. You and I."
"Maybe you," I said. "Not I."
"Ha! I see…your lawyer’s gonna get you out of this, huh? A last minute appeal?" The figure of a raggedly dressed man emerged from the dark to grin at me between his own bars. "Maybe they’ll turn you into a book, too," he said, nodding at the volume I’d left on the floor behind me. "That’s where it’s done." Another chuckle. "Still got your book…that’s funny. What are you doing, postgraduate work? Going for a degree?"
"Hey…aren’t we on the same side, here?"
"Side?"
"Never mind. Look…you said they make these books in the torture plants?"
"Yeah. I seen where they do it. I used to work in a print shop, so it was pretty interesting. Watching the bindery and all." He snorted. "This will be my third time through a torture plant. I don’t take no shit from these fuckers. I don’t care. I’m not about to bow down."
"You aren’t scared?"
"Course I’m scared. You think I’m crazy? But all I got left here is my pride. When I lose that, they win. They can’t break me. I have to show ’em all…I got to show the Big Man…that I’m still my own person. I have my will. They can tear this phony body all apart and flush me down the drain but they can’t tear apart who I am. See? In that way, we can win. If you look at it like that, in the end we can always win."
"I hear what you’re saying. But I want to make things as easy on myself as I can. I’m afraid of the pain."
"That’s what they count on. That’s what they enjoy. You can’t give in to your fear, no matter what. Some people just go crazy from pain and fear. Others go blank like robots, just fall down in one spot like a rock and lie there. Like in a coma. Don’t do that; if they find you, they’ll gather you up and do some really extreme stuff to get your attention again."
"Do you know what my cell mate did?"
"He’s an autistic."
"And for that he’s in Hell?"
"If he didn’t know enough to accept the Son, then that’s what he gets."
"It just isn’t fair," I hissed, glancing back at my cell mate, who continued to murmur an unending stream of numbers. Maybe the days that we would be here, the hours of eternity.
"Fair? Oh man, you’re a virgin in Hell, aren’t you?"
As I was looking back at my cell mate huddled in his corner, those burbling fleshy spheres inserted into the wall caught my attention. There was an eye floating in both of them, unnaturally large, perhaps magnified by the milky liquid within. The eyes blinked. When they recognized that I had seen them, they withdrew…became blurry and disappeared. So, was this then some viewing device for my captors to check on me from a distance?
The eyes had looked familiar to me. Long, lynx-like, with heavy slitted lids. Irises grayish in color.
I swore they were the eyes of the Demon Chara.
Day 41.
T
oday I was awakened by the sound of my cell door creaking open. Startled, I looked up from the floor to see a handsome Demon standing naked in the threshold, his wings folded to his back.
"Get up," he commanded. "You’re free to leave."
"Free? I thought Chara would come to identify me…"
"She identified you. You weren’t one of her attackers. She confirmed that you helped her, as you claimed." He gestured at the hallway behind him. "So you can go."
Scrambling to my feet, I gathered up my book bag and threw a last look at my pathetic companion, still counting off numbers in the corner, and then followed the Demon out into the corridor.
I looked into the cell opposite mine. It was dark, but I sensed it was empty. While I had slept, its occupant had been taken away to the torture plant.
As I walked along beside the statuesque guard, I knew that it had indeed been Chara who had spied on me through that organic device in the wall. But in an odd way, I was disappointed that she had identified me in that manner. From afar. I realized I had actually been anticipating her arrival at my cell with more than just the desire to be freed. I had wanted to see her again in person…
Insane, I told myself. You’re going insane.
"Do you know where I might go to have this arrow taken out of my shoulder?" I asked the Demon as we walked. "It’s…"
The guard looked over at me, stopped in his tracks, took hold of the crossbow quarrel in one fist and jerked it out of my body.
I dropped to my knees, my vision going black for several moments, the ripped wound streaming fresh blood down my back. With his free hand, still holding the arrow in the other, the Demon took me by the elbow and hoisted me to my feet…helped me along as we resumed walking. Though his medical assistance and his grip were rough in nature, I still sensed that there was some consideration in his actions. What I had done for Chara had not gone fully unappreciated.
We passed through Moorish archways into new corridors, some lined with more cells and others lined only in damp grimy stone. As we neared the outer reaches of the prison, passing what I took to be offices with closed black metal doors, the hallways became cleaner—formed of glossy obsidian blocks mortared like bricks. At last we stopped outside one of the closed iron doors and the guard opened it to usher me inside. Behind a desk, also bolted together from slabs of black metal, sat one of the those skeletal demons with glowing eyes and the top of its head immensely swollen like a balloon fit to burst, like the ones new arrivals filed past when first being admitted into Hell. Without a word, the cadaverous entity looked up at me, seemed to stare into my very brain, then nodded at the guard. And that was that, whatever that was. We left the room, the guard shut the heavy door, and a minute later I was ushered out the front entrance and into the open air of Oblivion.
As I’d immediately been arrested upon entering the city, this was really my first exposure to life on the inside of its surrounding walls.
Stumbling down a broad flight of black marble stairs, I looked back at the looming prison. It was wide and tall, but there were wider and taller structures; I imagined that most of it existed below street level. A number of huge translucent veins of varying thickness—like those that coursed along the ceilings in some of the prison’s corridors—ran out of one face of the prison, connecting with a taller building that rose up next door. I watched as a wash of blood and pulped matter flushed through one of these connecting pipelines. The neighboring building must be a torture plant. From its flat roof, two vast brick smoke stacks soared against the lurid reds, yellows and oranges of the lava sky, billowing black smoke that filled the air with a noxious scent of burning flesh.
This street was very wide, paved with cobblestones, and through its center ran two far-spaced rail tracks such as a streetcar might ride on, but there were no motorized vehicles passing along the road. Did Oblivion have a public transport system?
I turned the corner of the block, and found myself on a much narrower street lined primarily with smallish tenements of black brick. On street level, I was surprised to see shop fronts glowing yellow against the dark faces of the buildings. The inviting smells of a bakery nearly masked the air’s pollution. There were several clothing stores. As I trudged along, my own clothes still wet with blood though my wound was already sealing, no one gave me so much as a second glance.
Two teenage boys came pedaling up the street on crude bicycles, wobbling and squeaking maniacally. An old woman ahead of me on the sidewalk pulled a rickety wagon loaded with groceries. As he passed her, one of the boys on the bikes reached down and swept up a sack from her wagon. She cried out, and I yelled, "Hey!", but the boys turned the corner whooping triumphantly.
Every fifth building or so, a wire was strung across this street, and hanging from these wires like drying laundry were rows of headless skeletons, each blackened as if charred, their joints wired together as if they were classroom displays. They swayed in the breeze, and clattered softly against each other like bamboo wind chimes. As in the case of Caroline, if a person were beheaded, the head would grow a new body…but the headless body would simply rot. Yet this was the first time I had seen human bones in Hell. I didn’t doubt that the torture plant one street over had contributed these macabre decorative displays to the city, perhaps to mark its outer borders.
The next cramped street I found myself in didn’t have the rows of strung skeletons dangling above it, and was something of a modest marketplace. Clothing folded on tables, pots and pans hanging on hooks, pottery glazed in glum colors, soaps and candles. There weren’t many foodstuffs to be had; a few vendors had nothing to offer but baskets of those white pumpkin-like gourds, and several others displayed tubs of ice in which were presented crabs like those that had swarmed across the volcanic plain outside Caldera. There were some salt-cured, eel-like creatures, as hideous as deep-sea fish, hanging by their tails from one makeshift booth. They had no eyes, but fangs overflowed their protruding jaws. I pointed them out to a Muslim woman swaddled in black, who waited in line to make a purchase.
"Is there an ocean or a large body of water near here?"
"There is the Red Sea, near here. But these fish do not come from the sea."
"Where do they come from?"
Her dark eyes, all that showed of her, narrowed intensely and her voice was gravely confidential. "They are mostly found in the Valley of Steam. They swim through the air…and a sufficient number of them can devour a man so quickly that they will eat him again and again before he can fully renew his body. One attacked by them could spend months trying to crawl far enough away from the valley to entirely regrow his form."