Authors: Steven R. Boyett
“On yuh way to a gig maybe? They be trowin a righteous party all the time down along dat way I hear. Righteous party fuh true.”
“That’s right,” says Niko, his own voice flat and thin and airless. “I’m on my way to a gig.” He’s stopped walking now.
“Sneakers an a coat mon.” Gombe laughs. “Yuh from California fuh certain.”
Niko’s face heats. You have got to be fucking kidding me.
“Yuh long way from home ma friend.” Gombe is getting closer. Niko hears the man’s footsteps crunching on the unseen ground.
“Maybe Gombe jus take yuh shoes an send yuh on yuh way. Yuh play yuh gig barefoot like de bluesman hah?” Gombe laughs.
Once more orange light smears the distance like a comet’s ghost and now Niko sees Gombe there before him. The man’s skin glistens with crawling shapes. He is covered head to foot with enormous roaches. Their crawling traffic on his naked body is unceasing, even about his face, but Gombe pays no mind. Now Niko hears the aggregate rustle of millions of jointed cockroach legs picking their filthy way, millions of fat and glossy cockroach bodies brushing, millions of brown thin wings beating. Gombe steps forward and the ground crunches underneath his naked feet. Niko’s mouth tightens with nausea as he realizes that for some time now he has been walking on a living carpet of the filthy creatures.
Gombe sees his face and laughs. An enormous cockroach crawls across one eye. “What the matter mon? Yuh don like how Gombe dress? Maybe soon yuh and him have the same tailor huh. Or maybe yuh give old Gombe yuh shoes an he let yuh go with the res.”
“I’m sorry,” Niko says and hears his voice’s tension, “but I think I’m gonna need them more than you.”
Gombe grins. “Now what yuh be needin fuh to wear runnin shoes here mon?”
“Watch,” says Niko. And runs. The rhythmic crush beneath him is sickening, the rapid crunch behind him spurs him on. Within a hundred yards the yelling pursuit begins to fall away, which is good because although Niko is in great shape he is no track star and certainly no spring chicken. The crushing beneath him lessens as well, gives way to hard pounding on flat stone. Niko slows to a stop, breathing heavily. Why aren’t they pursuing? Could they who do not breathe grow winded?
He feels a tickling on his ankles as he bends panting with hands on knees, a tickling climbing his shoes and calves. Suddenly he drops the hardcase and scrunches up his pantlegs and compulsively slaps at his ankles and shins and calves, goes on to his thighs, his rear, his stomach. Takes off his coat and snaps it before him like a rug. Hears soft bodies patter onto stone. Another shudder convulses him, and he hurries on his harried way.
NIKO WALKS DISCONSOLATE along the midnight plain. Soon the flat ground becomes cracked and broken like the parched skin of the Bonneville salt flats. Earthquake fissures run dark and jagged like frozen lightning shadows. Niko has encountered not another soul although he hears their lamentations in the distance. It’s a lot less crowded here than one would think. Then again it’s goddamn huge and he is only on the outskirts. How big, how long his traveling to come? This geography is not physical or mappable. Cartographers of this sullen abyss might light black candle and cast bone and carve rune and paint in chicken blood on parchment skin and still not fix it for the eye to read because it is not fixed. There ought to be a word for such a notion, for the cartography of Hell.
Hadeography.
From far off comes a freight train rumble. Niko peers across the dolorous distance and faintly sees a giant living thing glide stately on the cracked and broken ground. No, not living. And not gliding either. Sinuously twisting, bottomlit and lifting itself up at points like a woman in a hoopskirt stepping high across a puddle, touching down again capriciously, a tornado heaves across the tortured landscape toward him. The gloom alive with static sparkings like a plague of fireflies. The churning funnel owns the landscape like an Old Testament god, vengeful and malign and bent on wrath and thunder. The locomotive roar of its approach grows deafening as it stoops and gathers writhing clots of feckless damned to bear them up and dance them doll-like in the air around its undulating body in a hundred mile an hour waltz. Their naked skin sandblasted. Fleshy layers flense to raw and glistening muscle and white tendon band, gouting arteries spray particolored tendrils that whipstain the massive shaft before dispersing. Screaming faces filed down to glossy bone. The twister touches down again to amble toward another clump of running damned, leaving in its quiet wake a stripped debris of gleaming bone and conscious jelly.
Niko doesn’t even think of running from the whirlwind twisting there before him. He only watches in mortal dread as the vortex lifts to hopscotch over his windswept head and pass mercurial above him. The voice of the whirlwind a leviathan moan. It augers down again behind him to gyre like a mindless deadly battling top. The wind of its periphery whips him and he covers his eyes as sand stings his exposed skin like nettles. Then the wind abates to scour elsewhere on the naked dark.
Niko realizes he has fallen to his knees as if in supplication to some oblivious god. He rises, lucky or blessed or perhaps just insignificant, and walks on. He passes piles of glossy polished bones that clack like windchimes in the remnant breeze. The sockets of sandblasted skulls contain a residue of pureed eye and muscle pulp. The bones appear to writhe with pink maggots until Niko sees that ligaments and tendons and muscle tissues are slowly regrowing, stretching over tortured frames while polished skullteeth chatter as if cold. Purple filigrees of veins spread thickening webs. The twister’s murdered are not dead but are to slowly reassemble to endure new torments that await them when again they are made whole.
The mashed grape eyes of one such skull inflate to fill sandblasted sockets once again. Eyes that track him in their polished frames as Niko navigates the endless gloom. And though these dead are flayed to glossy skeletons he feels certain they are conscious all the while. That their reconstitution is a deep and undiluted pain in every lazarus nerve and cell.
Again pale orange smears the abyss. He decides to head toward the source of the intermittent light.
Enfleshing skeletons rise quaking against the light that glowers through the gaps between their picket ribs and glistens on wet marrow and raw meat. They twitch and shudder and convulse and jerk, uncertain as yearlings in their newmade frames. As they stand they slowly turn to stare at him like vivitropic flowers.
IX.
LIFE BY THE DROP
HALF AN HOUR later Niko encounters his first demon.
The ground shudders beneath his feet, followed by a loud deep boom of something massive smashing on the broken plain. In the distance large square silhouettes are scattered about. Some kind of structures. Temples? Houses? Hard to determine size and distance because there is so little light and because the plain he walks is vast and featureless and without horizon.
A low shape undulates toward him. Niko turns to avoid it and it swerves to meet him, traveling close to the ground in jerky flopping motions like some enormous writhing maggot. Fifty yards away and Niko sees it is in fact a human being, prone and dragging itself toward him with its pale arms. Twenty yards and the shape is a woman, naked and fat and oozing a doubled sluglike trail of her own blood from stumps of amputated legs.
Niko stops walking and she raises on her arms. “Por favor.” She shifts her weight to one arm to beckon with the other. “Por favor.”
Niko steps toward her, the question How can I help? already breath in his mouth. But she is dead and damned and consigned to torment. Relief from what has been willed is beyond action or even consideration. How many damned down here, what private universes of suffering? Millions certainly. Billions probably. Even to alleviate their torment would consume the balance of his mortal years and derail him from his mission. Harden your heart, Niko. You cannot save them. They are already lost. Harden your heart.
That shouldn’t be too difficult for you, buddy pal, whispers another facet of himself, the demon voice in the Greek chorus of his self-deprecating soul.
The legless woman regards him now with her head atop her upcurved back. The shocking termination of her thighs. Some carved sphinx half buried in the hardpan of the plain, artifact of a civilization lost and alien and cruel. Her pleading face. Her pain-dulled eyes. Her outstretched hand. Already sprouting from her ragged stumps are tiny buds of legs to be.
Orange light throbs again to gleam her doubled trail of blood, which leads toward one of the distant blockish shapes.
I’m sorry, Niko says. I’m sorry. And hurries past ashamed and afraid. Behind him come her spanish imprecations. Niko feels her gaze between his shoulderblades. Don’t look back. Don’t look back.
SCATTERED ON THE lambent plain are granite blocks. Ten feet square and smoothwalled, their shadows moving in the intermittent airborne orange light that waxes, lengthens, flickers, dies. The spanish woman’s driedblood trail abruptly stops beneath the bottom edge of one such block.
Warily Niko touches the rough hewn granite. A fissure jags the surface. The hard ground around it fissured too. Niko lowers his hand and steps back. A block like this would have to weigh what? Fifty, sixty tons? Niko leans away from the block and cranes up at the cavernous expanse of black that is not night. He frowns and quells a welling urge to blindly run. Instead he walks among the widely scattered cubes toward the source of the orange light. No nightchirps of crickets here, no hiss of wind in leaves. No freeway surf boom, no distant music or conversation. What he will hear down here is screams and moans and cracking whips. What human laughter he will hear is maniacal and leached of pleasure. The sounds that come across the plain are oddly flattened. The space is vast and the horizon unattainable, but Niko cannot shake his sense of being inside something, the certainty of living rock above his head. The panic-tinctured claustrophobia of being underground.
Now a man’s voice weakly calls out to him. Hey. Hey. Hey. Dull repetition as if uttered by rote. Hard to fix direction. Hey. Hey. Coming from his...left? Yes, from the block of granite nearest him. From its base.
Niko has decided to ignore the voice when it begins to call his name, Niko Niko Niko, with an urgency quite different from its leaden repetition. Gooseflesh sweeps his back and arms and his scalp grows tight. Your name is something you don’t want to hear called out down here. Unaccountable shudders in the mortal world are caused when someone says your name in Hell.
Niko turns toward the granite block. Emerging impossible from beneath the bottom and flush with the flat hard ground is a man’s head and neck and right arm. The man lies facedown where he’s been smashed flat. It’s too dark to discern more detail.
Niko stops before the man. “How do you know my name?”
The chanting stops. Then once more, Niko, in a whisper all relief. A thin weak voice with little air behind it. No surprise when tons of granite sit on top of lungs pressed flat as burst balloons. “You don’t. Recognize me? I’m crushed.”
“I can barely see you.” Niko glances around, half expecting some trick, some ambush or cruel joke.
“It’s Sam.”
“Sam?”
“Sam Gamundi. Samwise.”
“Samwise?” Niko can’t believe what he’s just heard. “Sam?” And hears himself ask a question that must, in this place, be the most hackneyed of clichés. “What are you doing down here?”
“Trying to. Dig my way out. I’ve made a start. Already.” But then Sam senses Niko’s larger question. “I don’t know. No one tells us. Anything and. There’s no way to. Find out.”
Pale orange flares and Niko sees that Sam indeed has made a start. Beneath the free right arm a small depression near his free shoulder has been scraped out with his fingernails and presumably leads beneath his flattened chest.
Niko frowns. The ground here is like rock. How long would it take to—
He gasps at sight of Sam’s face. Hydrostatic pressure from the impacting granite block burst cells and arteries and veins toward the free end of Sam’s body like stepping on half a waterfilled balloon. One of Sam’s eyes has popped partway from the socket. The other is beet red. Blood has burst from his ears and nostrils and mouth, from beneath fingernails scraped down to nubs.
Mercifully the orange light fades. “I’m luckier. Than most. I have something. To dig with.” Sam waves his free arm feebly. “Most others have to. Wait until. The rock wears away. Before they can. Get out.”
“Until it wears away?”
“Yeah. We’re gonna be. Down here forever. You learn to. Think longterm. You must not. Have been here. Very long.”
“I only just—”
“Well that’s the thing. It takes a while. To adjust. Hey are those. Shoes?” The head turns slightly. “And clothes. They let you in. With clothes? And. Shit is that. Your guitar? Son of a bitch. You mean you get. VIP treatment. Even here?”
“It’s not like that, Sam. I’m on a kind of mission. I’ll do whatever I can to help you but—”
“Son of a bitch. You’re not dead.”
Niko slowly shakes his head.
“Son of a bitch. You always were. The luckiest guy. I ever met. In my life. I followed your career. Since we were. In school. Had all your albums. Used to tell people. I knew you. Way back when. Told em even then. I knew you were. Going to be famous. Always carrying that. Little guitar around like. Linus’ blanket. Son of a bitch. How in the world. Did you get down here. And you not dead?”
“Um. I took a cab.”
Oddly enough Sam accepts this with a slight nod. But then Sam has probably learned to accept an awful lot.
“What can I do, Sam?”
“For starters you can. Get me out. From under this. Damn thing.”
Niko appraises the block. “I don’t see how. There’s no way in hell—uh, there’s no way to move this block.”
“Don’t move it. Dig me out. From under it. I’m pretty much. Healed under here. But I can only. Do so much. With one arm.”
Niko squats, sighs, lets go of the guitar case. “Sam. I don’t—that would take a long time, and I don’t—”