There was only one occupant of the room. A female child, on the floor. No, the head was so disproportionate to the body, even for a child. A dwarf, perhaps…
I opened the door all the way, stepped over the threshold, and heard the woman on the floor gasp. I nearly gasped myself.
We knew we were both of the Damned. She didn’t scream, but looked up at me with glassy-eyed anguish. I looked down at her with as much pity as I could squeeze out of my exhausted soul. The woman’s head was of normal size, but her body was as tiny as that of a five-year-old. A five-year-old made emaciated, cadaver-thin, naked and withered. Without strength to hoist herself up onto the room’s dusty bed, she had pulled off its blanket and made a nest for herself. She dragged a fold of it across her, more I think out of shame for her deformity than for her nudity.
"I was harvested," she explained, her voice distorted: squeaky and thin, "but my head was deflected off the blade before it was sucked in. It rolled aside and I was forgotten. When enough of my body grew back, I dragged myself here. It was horrible, worse than being buried. The crabs tried to eat me but I got away." She turned her face to show me where half of it had been nibbled to the bone but was forming new muscle and skin. "I don’t know how I ever made it in here, but I did." She let out a jagged, sorrowful sigh. "My body is coming back…but it hurts so bad…it hurts worse than losing it…"
"I’ll find you some clothes," I whispered, and I began to search the room. In the next room, I found some and returned. I put them into a pillowcase and set that down beside her. "Do you want me to help you into something now?"
"No. I’m all right for now. I’ll grow into them. Soon. But it seems to take forever…"
The room was gloomy, without a window, so I had left the hallway door open to let in the barest dregs of light. Still, I wanted to write in this journal and wanted more light to see by. I set out on another search, and found a glowing lantern in one of the rooms. The gelatinous fluid inside it was not oil, was not even aflame, but it gave off its own cool, orange-hued luminosity even having been buried all this time. I don’t know what the slime is or where it was collected, but I’m grateful for it. When I returned to the woman I was now able to close the door and see well enough to write. Sitting down on the floor beside her, I opened this book across my lap. The woman respectfully did not ask me questions as she watched me write, but against her will let out the occasional moan as her body gradually fleshed itself out like an embryo growing at a remarkable rate.
Day 36.
T
he woman’s name is Caroline, and she used to live in Caldera, though her building is entirely buried she says. She was thirty-nine when she was killed in a shooting spree at an abortion clinic. She’d been accompanying her sister, who was the one having the abortion; she has no idea whether her sister was killed as well. She believes that the killer probably went to Heaven because he had devout faith whereas she did not. I gaped at her when she said this, but she shrugged her lengthening shoulders and said, "Hey, I don’t make the rules."
In the building where we took refuge I have found a bottle of homemade wine that is still good (rather, still preserved; it’s as syrupy and sickly sweet as cough medicine), a few strips of dried meat of some kind, tough and salty, and several stray crabs that had worked their way in here as we did; I killed them and experimented with their taste, finding them edible as well. Again, we don’t need to eat to survive (we’re beyond survival), but our bogus bodies crave it.
In my explorations I also found spare clothes for myself, and folded them into my book bag. And in one of the rooms that had a window, I saw bones stabbing up from the floor of black ash. Ribs, the top of a skull. I knew it wasn’t the skeleton of a human, because a human here would regenerate from even the most atrocious mayhem. And then I realized I was also seeing several long bones segmented like finger bones. They were the struts of a baboon Demon’s wings.
I rushed back to Caroline, bundled in her blanket but able to crawl up onto the bed now, to tell her what I’d seen. She stared at me a moment as though I were thick, then said, "The Demons can die. They can be killed. They aren’t immortal like we are."
"No one told me that!"
"They don’t advertise it in school. But we’re immortal because we’re souls. Demons don’t have souls."
Now it was my turn to stare at her. "Why don’t we all just band together, then? Fight them? We have the advantage!"
"The Creator can make more and more of them to replace those lost!" she hissed in a whisper, as though the Creator Himself would burst into the room in outrage at my suggestion. "And there are the Angels, too, don’t forget…and they
are
immortal."
I just wagged my head in awe. The creatures of myth could die, rot, be picked clean by crabs…but here I was, an undistinguished human, and as eternal as Apollo.
Day 37.
W
hile we slept together on the bed, discreetly back to back, Caroline woke abruptly from a terrible nightmare. (We didn’t need sleep to survive, either, but our bodies craved that also.) I sat up, raised the lantern from the floor, and asked her what was wrong.
"I have two daughters," she sobbed, turning toward me, her face—fully healed—like the theatrical mask of tragedy in the starkly shadowed lantern glow. "My two babies…I don’t know if they’re still alive or not. I don’t know how old they might be now, if they are alive…"
"It isn’t fair," I muttered, almost to myself.
"Fairness is a human invention," she said bitterly.
I rested the lantern on a wobbly bedside table made of that purple wood, and I held her. She held me back, her tears wet against my neck. A few minutes later, her mouth was wet against my neck. I shifted my body closer to hers. She was still naked under her blanket, her body almost entirely reformed. I grew hard, pressed up against her.
We made love. And while we did, we both cried.
Day 38.
T
oday Caroline and I set out together for the city the buried African-American man told me about, which Caroline informed me is named Oblivion.
Caroline, I could see more clearly in the diffused open light, is very short and somewhat overweight, her face pinched and pained, though I could tell under kinder circumstances she would have been attractive. This morning (morning being a subjective term, as there is no day or night here) it bothered her that her tangled red hair was unwashed, and that seemed to be what she most looked forward to upon reaching Oblivion; there would be water there. "But it doesn’t grow longer than the length it was when I died," she explained. "I can shave it all off and it will grow back in a few weeks, but never any longer than it was. Same with my nails. You must have noticed you don’t need to shave."
"Yeah."
"And I still have my tattoo." I’d found last night that she has a bumble bee on the back of her right shoulder, which she got when she was twenty-six and drunk. "Astral ink, I guess."
We’d entered into another forest, but not as thickly wooded as the one I’d come through to reach the volcano, and there was even a broad dirt path through it which we followed, though keeping alert in regard to Demons and Angels. Also, the trees had leaves shaped like oak leaves, some with massive trunks as thick and wrinkled as the legs of dinosaurs, whereas the other forest had been of evergreens. Everpurples, anyway. These trees all had purple leaves. The grass and bushes that bordered the path were also in dark shades of purple, though some shrubs edged toward deep blue and others were almost fully black.
As we walked, Caroline asked me, "So how did you die?"
Without looking at her I said, "Self-inflicted shotgun wound."
Peripherally I saw her look over at me. "How old were you?"
"Thirty-three."
"Why’d you do it?"
"I thought I had nothing to live for."
"And why did you think that?"
I hesitated. Then told her, "I wanted to be a writer. Great American novelist. And it wasn’t going so well…"
"And
that’s
why you…"
"And," I cut her off, "I was working a job I hated, for money that couldn’t cover my bills. And my wife fell in love with a co-worker. Had an affair with him. Left me for him…"
"Oh. Wow. I’m sorry." She digested this, then meekly asked, "Did you have children?"
"We had a miscarriage. Year before she left me."
"Do you still love her?"
"I’m…not sure." This was the truth. "I guess I’m too busy being in Hell to know how I feel about her anymore."
"I’m sorry," Caroline said, reaching over to put a hand on my shoulder as we walked.
Her gentleness touched me; I actually felt choked up. The only real freedom we have here is that we can be kind to each other. Like that African-American man; he couldn’t free his body, but he could free his emotions, and try to help me. It keeps us human, even more so than these sham replica bodies. It’s something that the Demons can’t hack away from us, something they can’t truly understand, because they don’t have it.
"Nothing to live for," she repeated to herself. "If only we’d known how bad it would be. How death wouldn’t be the ultimate escape. I was afraid that there was no afterlife…terrified of it…but I just couldn’t bring myself to believe in it. And here I am. And it turned out to be real. If only I had been able to believe, I wouldn’t be here right now."
There was a terrible sound then, that nailed us in our tracks. It was like the howl of a wolf, mixed with the scream of a woman, or the shriek of a banshee.
"What’s that?" I whispered, looking wildly around me.
"I think it’s a Demon."
"Doesn’t sound like the baboons."
"There are a lot more than them," she hissed. "The Creator gets off on His artistry. There are more than one kind of flower, back home…"
"Do you want to cut through the forest instead?"
"Maybe we’d better."
We went off the path, but snapped twigs and rustled leaves and I wondered if it were such a good idea after all. There were no more cries. It had seemed to be ahead of us, but I couldn’t be sure. But shortly, I found out. We pushed through the low-slung, twisted, leaf-laden branches between two ancient trees to see a figure etched white against a vast dark trunk, a stark silhouette in negative.
"Christ!" I blurted.
"Shh!" Caroline warned me, terror ballooning her eyes more at my exclamation than because of the being we saw before us.
It was a woman, naked—and beautiful—crucified to a titanic oak.
She snarled at us, her upper lip curling to expose her teeth. There were no fangs other than her human-like incisors, but still the effect was terrifying. We were both afraid to approach any nearer, as much because of her feral grimace as because of the woman’s broad wings, which had been opened and spiked into the tree’s grooved bark.
We were stunned, speechless, just stood there gawking at the creature. It was plainly a Demon…albeit the most human-looking species I had yet encountered. So what was it doing staked to this tree? Was it being punished by its own kind?
There were probably ten to twelve spikes pinning each wing, spaced between the four umbrella-like support struts, which were jointed like finger bones, and along the slender upper arm of each wing. I was reminded of the remains of the dead devil I had found in my hiding place back in Caldera. I noticed that veins squiggled across these pallid membranes, thick and dark beneath their translucent surface, like a mysterious calligraphy.
There had been controversy as to whether the Messiah was pierced through the palms or through the wrists. For good measure, this woman had been nailed through both palms and wrists with more of those thick, crude spikes with their broad heads. I suspected that these spikes were made by the Demons themselves, with purposes like this in mind more so than for use in construction, though the Damned had probably adapted them to such uses. I was reminded of my own crucifixion upon graduation from Avernus University. I began to suspect that this was a revenge meted out not by her fellow Demons, but by lost souls like myself, who also couldn’t forget their crucifixions.
The female devil was also spiked through both feet, but they were not placed demurely one atop the other as in the case of the Son. Her legs had been lasciviously spread out along the broad curve of the trunk, as if she sat astride the back of some huge animal, and they’d been further anchored in placed by spikes through her ankles. Still, I was surprised that even this many nails could hold her; every species of Demon was reported to be uncannily strong. Of course, she was no doubt weakened from the pain and blood loss from the black iron pike that had been shoved into her guts like a spear. Directly into her navel, in fact, pinning her there like a butterfly. Perhaps it was some perverse reaction to the fact that a Demon, spawned in no mother’s womb, would have an umbilicus at all.