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Authors: Jeffrey Thomas

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"Oh God," Petty groaned, letting go of the rail as if blown back by the cry and the stare. He thumped backwards against Eridan, who did not budge.
"Daaaahhh!"
Petty had been disappointed in Heaven, but now he knew that Hades was much worse, even for the casual visitor. Because the remade face of the central girl, this Nike of Samothrace with its head restored, was that of Petty’s teenage daughter, Christina.
"Daaaad!" the cry came in full at last, like lava exploding from a volcano.
Petty whirled away and squeezed his eyes shut tightly. He clamped his hands over his ears, like Ulysses’ sailors, blocking their ears with wax to keep out the call of the sirens. But then he opened his eyes and glared up at Eridan, who was watching him with a little smile, as if he possessed some secret, satisfying knowledge.
"You did this on purpose, you bastard!" Petty sobbed. "You knew she was out here!"
"I’m not the Creator," the Demon told him mildly. "Only He weaves, Mr. Petty."
"You let her go! I order you!"
"I can’t, sir. She’s been Damned. She should have followed her wise and pious parents to church. She should have embraced her Father."
"I’m an Angel! I’m an Angel!" Petty blubbered. "You fucks can’t do this to me!"
"This is Hades," Captain Eridan said simply. "Do you wish to leave it?"
"Yes," Petty cried. He fell to his knees, palms still clamped to his ears. "Yes!"
"Daaaad! Help me!"
 he heard, regardless of his efforts to blot out the sounds.
Thank God that Eridan started up the motor then. The sound of it helped drown out the screams. The lines were cast off, all the crew clambered aboard, and the boat turned its nose away from the island of congealing blood.
"Your daughter is very beautiful, sir," Eridan told him casually, as he piloted them away and the voices dwindled in their wake. He looked down at Petty, still humped forward as if bowing on the deck in supplication. "Very beautiful."
M
ost breeds of Demons didn’t require food as sustenance—but the Buddhas, as the Damned workers had dubbed them, were ravenous beings. They had been designed that way, in the factory city of Tartarus where most of the Demons in this region of Hades were mass produced.
The Buddhas were vast, dinosaur-like travesties of humanity, nine feet tall and wider around. Patrick thought that they made sumo wrestlers look as if they might be the Buddhas’ infant offspring. Their flagrantly naked bulks were an awful canary yellow in color. These elephantine entities had heads as small as a mortal baby’s, however, with eyes crushed shut and sulky pouts. Their heads reminded Patrick of human fetuses who are born with acrania—absence of that section of the skull which contains the brain.
To be born without a brain, Patrick mused. Such blissful oblivion. He had never thought he would envy such a tragic fate, until he had awoken from death to find himself sentenced to eternal damnation.
He had been twenty-two when he died. He estimated he would have been forty-four by now. He had stopped berating himself, long ago, for not having been religious in life, not bowing before the Creator. Though he had never met any of his friends or loved ones in the infinity of Hades, he doubted that any of them would pass the Creator’s harsh criteria to make it through the pearly gates, the golden arches, or whatever the gateway to paradise looked like.
Patrick, Eleanor, and Wally worked close together, wading through the knee-deep (occasionally, waist-deep) bog in which they seeded, grew and harvested the food for the Buddhas. Eleanor had been in Hades the longest; she had died in 1870, when she was twenty-eight. She and Patrick had taken Wally under their wings. Although he had been much older than they, physically, when he died—sixty-seven—he had only been in Hades for a single month. He huffed and panted as he slogged through the marshy plants, cutting free the fleshy globes the Buddhas craved with his curved knife and storing them in the waterproofed leather bag he wore slung onto his back. He paused often to wheeze, to hold his chest with one blistered hand, to squint up at the blazing sky—a ceiling of churning lava. The three of them wore straw hats like Vietnamese farmers laboring in a rice paddy, to protect their flesh from being burned by that intense glow. Of course, they were immortal; their skin would have regenerated even if it had been immersed in lava. This was why Patrick often teased Wally when he saw him clutching at his heart.
"You’re not going to die, Wally, don’t worry."
"I should be so lucky," Wally grumbled, wiping his knife’s blade clean of sap against his pants leg. "I should be so lucky to
really
 die."
"Then we wouldn’t have your charming company," Eleanor teased him in her good-natured British accent, flicking some water at his face. "Would we, my love?"
"
He’s
 your love," Wally jerked his knife toward Patrick, "not me."
"You
are
 too young for me, Wally," Eleanor admitted.
All three of them turned their heads abruptly, and fearfully, when they heard the bellowing roar of one of the Buddhas roll across the swampy farmland. All three were relieved to see that one titanic yellow guard was lumbering slowly, terribly in another direction, perhaps to berate some other knot of workers, instead of coming their way. Wally wagged his head. "They invented this fruit just to give us something to do. Something hard and awful to do. And they invented
them
 just to eat the fruit." By "they," he meant the Creator.
Patrick lifted another of the bright red, rubbery globes out of the water and slipped it into his own heavy sack. "Come on, Wally." He shooed a blood-drinking insect (or miniature Demon, depending on how you looked at it) that had jabbed him in the back of the neck…then patted the older man on the shoulder. "It will drive you mad to dwell on the whys and wherefores."
They had sloshed their way to an outcropping of rock like an island jutting out of the flat landscape. They could climb up on it and rest for a few minutes, on its far side where they wouldn’t be spotted, but not for too long or they’d be missed. It would give them a chance to dry off a little in the heat of the molten sky, and to pluck leeches off each other. They’d throw the leeches back into the mire instead of killing them, just in case those creatures could be considered Demons, too.
It was Patrick who climbed onto the outcropping first, gratefully slinging his sack off his shoulder as he did so. It was Patrick, then, who first spotted the cat.
The cat clearly had heard them coming; it was wary but not surprised. It was tensed, ready to hiss, ready to claw, ready to leap away. But leap away where? Into the water? Most cats hated water. How had it ever gotten to this isolated rock in the first place?
"Oh my!" Eleanor exclaimed. "Oh!"
"It’s a cat," Wally observed, dragging his old, dripping bones onto the barren oasis. "An ugly one," he added. "So what?"
The cat had indeed seen better days. It looked like it might have become tangled in a tattered, filthy curtain. Or could that have been a burial shroud? Scraps of it were twined around its limbs and tail, a loop of it even obscuring one eye. And in one battered ear it wore three earrings. It had been someone’s pet, obviously, at one time. Or something more important. But it looked a long way from having been anything to anyone, in its present condition.
"It’s impossible," Patrick said to Wally, as tensed and unmoving as the cat.
"Why?"
Eleanor answered for him. "There are no cats in Hades. No animals can come here."
"What do you mean? These bloodsuckers…and mosquitoes…"
"There are
infernal
 animals. But no animals from the mortal world can come here upon death, Wally. According to the Creator, animals don’t have souls. They don’t go to Heaven or Hell. They simply cease to be."
"Sweet oblivion," Patrick muttered.
"Then this is an infernal animal, then," said Wally. "Like the leeches. Look at it. Looks infernal to me."
The cat hissed at last. Patrick smiled. "It doesn’t like you, whatever it is, Wally."
"There are no cats in Hades," Eleanor insisted. "I’ve been here well over a century. I’ve covered a lot of ground in that time. I’ve never seen a cat, a dog, any earthly beast."
"There." Patrick pointed. "Look."
Behind the cat, and lower on the opposite face of the rock, there was a deep crack or fissure. Its edges looked black, as though charred. Wally climbed over next to Patrick carefully, trying not to startle the cat. Even in the short time he had been in Hades, he knew this rock well enough to recognize that this fissure had not been there previously.
"He came from the crack," Eleanor said. "He had to have. From some other part of Hell, do you think? Maybe animals do go to another realm, after all…"
"I had another thought," said Patrick.
"What’s that?"
Wally said it before Patrick could. "Maybe it came from our world. The mortal world. You know?" He picked his way nearer to the cat, the fissure below it, less concerned about upsetting the animal now. "Maybe if he could find his way here, we could find our way out…"
The cat gave a warning yowl and hissed again, backing off just a little bit, its broken tail giving an angry flick. Seeing this, Patrick caught Wally by the arm to halt him.
"Shh, puss," Eleanor cooed, extending a delicate white hand to the creature. "Shh. Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you."
"It’s probably hungry." From his sack, Patrick withdrew one of the buoy-like, bobbing red orbs they cut free of the stalks in the swampy water. He sliced into it with his tool, which always reminded him of a linoleum knife. A thick, crimson sap began to well out.
"Don’t feed it blood," Eleanor admonished him.
"What else do I have to feed it? Maybe you could nurse him, eh?"
She swatted his arm.
"It’s seen a lot. It’s been to Hell and back," Wally murmured, staring intensely at the animal as it stared back at him. "I’m telling you, it’s come from someplace far away. If it can come here, we can go there."
"Think, Wally," Patrick said, while he proffered the bleeding fruit to the cat. It didn’t come near it. "If where it comes from is better, then why’d it want to come here?"
"Anyway," Eleanor added, "look at the crack. It isn’t wide enough even for me."
"But we could widen it!" Wally blurted, beginning to sound desperate.
In the distance, the terrible foghorn bleat of one of the Buddhas sounded. The noise rumbled across the watery fields like thunder. The three prisoners of Hell exchanged quick glances. Patrick said, "They’ll notice us gone, soon."
"We have to smuggle the cat back to our barracks with us," Eleanor stated. "We can’t leave it here."
"Smuggle it how?"
"In one of our sacks, of course."
"If we get caught with it, now or later…"
"Never mind the
cat!
" Wally moaned, as if trying to reason with children. "We have to start widening that hole. Every day, a little more. We have to at least explore what’s beyond! Can it be any worse?"
Eleanor turned toward the old man gravely. "There are sections of Hades that make this bog look like a resort beach, Wally. Yes. It can always get worse."
"I don’t care what you say!" he persisted, and began scrambling over the rock again. "I’m going to see what this hole is about…"
"Wally!" Eleanor cried, trying to snatch hold of his tunic. "Don’t scare the cat!"
"To Hell with the cat!"
Patrick thought for sure the cat would start slicing at the old man’s advancing hands, then. Instead, without even another hiss or yowl, the creature—oddly both bedraggled and regal—turned nimbly and scampered down the rock face toward that split in its surface. It darted into the fissure…disappeared inside.

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