"Why?"
"There is no reason we can comprehend. But I suppose, just so the citizens would not feel too complacent. Too sheltered. A lot of us escaped. The last I saw from a distance, my city was in flames."
"It’s the incomprehensible that scares me the most," I confessed to her. "More than pain, I think." After a few moments I asked, "Did you have friends and family in your city?"
"Friends. Friends from Hell, not friends from my lifetime…and I’ve never encountered family here. My friends were scattered in all the chaos. I hope some of them will find their way to Oblivion."
I nodded. "Have you ever seen a famous person or a celebrity in Hell? Like Ted Bundy…Lee Harvey Oswald?"
The little Indian woman gave me an uncomprehending frown. "I died in 1927," she explained.
"Oh. I’m sorry. People all seem like contemporaries here. Well…anyway…back at Avernus University I thought I saw Danny Kaye one time in a hallway. He was a film actor, a comedian; I loved his movies as a kid. But we were being herded along by an instructor so I didn’t dare ask him. I remember thinking that if Danny Kaye is in Hell, then there’s no hope for humanity. He’s the only celebrity I might have seen. No Jimmy Hoffa, no Hitler…"
"
That
name I’ve heard mentioned," the woman said.
"You’ve been here for a long time—do you think it’s possible to escape?"
"Escape? Hell? Oh, no…no, no…"
"Well, you know, look at the visions of Hell writers like Dante and Swedenborg, prophets and so forth have given us. Hell mentioned in the Bible…places like Hell in all these different religions and cultures. Where did they get their glimpses of it, unless they might have come here briefly and then returned?"
"Part of them may have come, a projection, but it is more likely that a window was merely opened for them to see through. Or perhaps they only sensed Hell instinctively. But in any case, no one who ever died and was damned to Hell could ever escape."
"Orpheus went to Hell and back."
"Only a myth."
"I used to say Hell was only a myth."
Some people weren’t heading toward Oblivion, but coming from it. The traffic grew more congested the closer the city loomed…and now it did indeed loom. It towered above me like the skyline of a great Earthly city, the tallest towers seeming almost to reach the sky of magma, which was now above my head. Looking up at it, and the ebony skyscrapers, was a vertiginous sensation. Orange light reflected on metal and glass, and sent a diffused glow everywhere, so that faces took on the look of people gathered by a fire.
Many of the smaller buildings appeared to be made from bricks that were either cut from black pumice or baked from clay that had been painted black, nestled between the larger structures like tenement slums. On their flat roofs were tents and lean-tos in a kind of elevated shanty town. The most imposing buildings, however, were even more mechanical than they had seemed from afar…covered in external circulatory systems of pipelines, and in clockwork gears that turned and pistons that pumped and grooved belts that flowed along recessed tracks in the rusty hides of the sooty black edifices, all to no apparent purpose.
Not only were there several titanic towers that might rival the Empire State Building, but some buildings that were not so much tall as vast overall, covering many blocks, and one of these didn’t even seem to have a single window in it. Most of the towers had rows of windows like Earthly skyscrapers, but some were lit while others were dark, some with glass intact and others smashed. Many were boarded over.
There was a clamor arising from Oblivion; not of cars and their horns as in the cities I had experienced, but of multitudes of voices, of gnashing and clanging machinery, and the hiss of steam that billowed up out of brick smoke stacks and out of strange vents and grills in the bodies of buildings. Oblivion was like a gargantuan factory busily manufacturing itself.
There was a wall surrounding the entire city, about four stories in height, and made from huge plates of iron impossibly soldered or welded together, these seams like silvery scars against the thick black sheets. Beyond the wall rose a refinery of some kind, and an immense mound of glistening coal. Structures that might be steeples or minarets, their metal surfaces layered and richly detailed. Huge fans turned atop various rooftops, perhaps windmills generating power. Water tanks rested atop others. Catwalks connected many of the tall buildings. Everything looked tremendously congested, lumped together, as if a city like New York had been compressed into half its length and breadth.
The wall around Oblivion was a hexagon, with a slender metal tower soaring at each corner. Like a skeletal iron lighthouse, each turret was surmounted by a glowing orange bulb. And then I noticed that an elevator-like contraption inside one of these needle-like towers was raising an illuminated globe up toward its presently unlit summit. I realized that the globe was that Buddha-faced Jack-O’-Lantern being I had seen in the carriage.
"What is that thing?" I asked the Indian woman, pointing.
"An Overseer."
"So…they monitor the city?"
"Yes. More or less."
"Where did that one go off to?"
"He didn’t go; he’s coming. He’s replacing one that must have perished. Sometimes Overseers sicken…grow dim, then black, and die. Sometimes they’re murdered by the Damned because the oil in their bodies can be used inside lamps."
Ahh. I recalled the mysterious lamp Caroline and I had used back in Caldera.
"Well, where is this one coming from?"
"He was probably born in the city of Tartarus. That is where most of the Demons in this region are spawned."
"Have you ever been there?"
The woman turned eyes of marveling horror upon me. "Go there? No one would go there! Not willingly…"
We were coming up on the massive gates to the city, which were set into grooved tracks and could be slid shut and bolted, closing the city off. I asked my companion what the city might want to shut out.
"Sometimes armies of Angels come here to lay siege to this city or that. War games, for their entertainment. They expect us and even the Demons to put up a good fight."
The exodus into the city was log-jamming at the gates, trickling through it at a slower rate. There were several Demons posted there, prodding people in the crowd with longer versions of the metal pike I carried, herding them in or out through the entrance. And I saw that these Demons were like the one I had rescued—very human, very white, with jagged dragon-like wings. These were the only devils I had seen in Hell that resembled Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s
Divine Comedy
—the beautiful muscular bodies (but without the horns and tails). And I had thought the Demon I rescued had been stripped naked by her tormentors, but I could see these four males were nude, as well.
One of the Demons stabbed a man in the buttock with the sharp end of his lance. "Move, hog! You’re blocking traffic!" And he barked a laugh.
His companion laughed, too, until he abruptly turned to face…
me
. He had an alert look as if he recognized me from somewhere, and didn’t like what he saw. He shoved into the crowd to get to me.
"What?" asked his friend.
"Don’t you smell it, Vetis?" he growled. "Demon blood…from this one!"
The pike in my hand, I realized with terror. I wanted to fling it away from me but it was too late. I saw the Indian woman squeeze ahead between two people to get away from me. I didn’t blame her.
"Wait," I said, frozen in my tracks while other souls uncomfortably flowed around me, eyes averted. "Listen…"
The first Demon to reach me snatched the iron bar from my hand, and raised it to his nose. The one named Vetis soon joined him, seizing me by the hair of my head and pushing the bloody tip of his pike under my jaw. I groaned as it scratched my skin.
"It’s female blood," the first one snarled. "It’s Chara’s blood!"
"He must be one of those who attacked her…wounded her," snarled Vetis. I felt the lance’s tip break my skin, and blood flow in a thin stream down my throat.
"Chara," I babbled desperately. "Is she the one who was nailed to a tree?"
"Ah, so you admit it!"
"No—I’m the one who set her free! I pulled that rod out of her stomach!"
"Chara didn’t say anything about any worm setting her free."
"She didn’t? Well, didn’t she say how she got free? I did it…I helped her! Ask her!"
"We’ll take you to her, worm. And if she identifies you as one of her rapists, you will suffer like no soul has ever suffered in the history of Hell."
"Then take me to her…please!"
And so I had a personal escort through the gates of Oblivion.
Day 40.
I
spent the night in this cell, with its low ceiling and walls of mortared stone, and even slept on its cement floor for what I judge to be a few hours. After searching me for weapons, my captors allowed me to keep my organ pouch containing this book and my spare clothing from Caldera. It’s at least given me the opportunity to jot down my approach and introduction to Oblivion.
My one cell mate must either be mentally ill or driven mad. And he has been severely wounded…yet, and this is something I haven’t witnessed previously, he has regenerated oddly, mutating, his head an impossible tormented flower of flesh, a row of puckered anus-like holes ringing its misshapen skull and his brains dangling from these orifices in ringlets of dry gray tissue. Perhaps his insanity has distorted his healing process. He sits in one corner hugging his knees to his bony chest, pounding his head back against the stones and whispering a series of numbers that might be mathematical equations or purely random.
It’s surprisingly cool in here, which is refreshing, though I’ve been given no food, water or blanket, unsurprisingly. Beyond the corroded bars of my cell I see a murky corridor and hear echoey shrieks, reverberating wails, and somewhere a baby crying. Behind these, muffled, is the ratcheting grind of great rotating cogs.
On the wall above me, inserted into it like the mortared stones themselves, are two globes that contain a milky-white gurgling fluid. I’ve touched the globes and they have a fleshy, resilient feel. The fluid does not emit light, so their function was not at first clear to me. They remind me of an organic aspect to Oblivion that wasn’t readily apparent until I was inside the wall, really. Mixed in with the external plumbing and the gears and such detail on the intricate exoskeletons of Oblivion’s buildings were grayish orbs like immense blind eyes or diseased organs…snaking, branching pipelines like gigantic black veins…and some of their composition seemed to be more of charred black bone than of metal, though the bones of no known creature…perhaps grown expressly for these purposes.
I wondered if the buildings were, at least in a very primitive way, alive. Each, perhaps, a vast half-sentient Demon, with the Damned dwelling inside them like parasites.
This book in my lap, I stroked its leather cover until the drowsing eyeball centered on the front awakened. As I had done before, I spoke to it soothingly. The single blue eye seemed to focus on my mouth, and it was then that I finally realized it might be able to read my lips somewhat if I spoke slowly and exaggerated my words.
"Can you understand what I’m saying?" I asked it. "If you can, blink two times."
The eye didn’t blink. Changing my tactic, I tore a page out of this book, and wrote a message which I held up in front of the book’s cover:
"If you can read this, blink twice."
The eye blinked twice. I had known the book was conscious of me, but I’d never been able to judge how much of a mind lay behind it. All along, I had been carrying about a mute companion. I felt less alone, and eagerly wrote:
"Tell me your name. I’ll recite the alphabet. Blink twice when I reach the first letter of your first name. Then the second letter of your first name. And so on."
It was a time-consuming process, but at last I had spelled out the name of the soul who had been trapped as the cover of this book, and thus prevented from regenerating. The prisoner told me his name was Frank Lyre.