Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades (2 page)
Read Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades Online
Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
Much evil has been done in the name of religion. Hatred, murder, crusades and inquisitions. But in the USA, we say, "Guns don’t kill people; people kill people." The same can be said of religion. Religion is a fire in one’s hands that can be used to illuminate, or destroy. You’ll meet no God or Satan in LETTERS FROM HADES. Just people. People are scary enough.
Two people inspired LETTERS FROM HADES; one in a bad way, one in a good way. At a printing company I used to work for there was a young employee who had become a Born Again Christian. Around his work station he posted Biblical quotes that he had enlarged on the photocopier, these quotes essentially meant to threaten damnation for any of his co-workers who did not subscribe to his own beliefs. I found this display arrogant and offensive. Would he truly like to see us all burn and bleed every minute for all of eternity, simply because we didn’t feel precisely the same way he felt? This callous boy inspired me to write a short story called COFFEE BREAK. In COFFEE BREAK, for one hour every year the damned are allowed a brief respite, a break, during which they can visit any number of restaurants and cafes and ice cream parlors scattered throughout Hell, before resuming their torments. It’s sort of like Tet Trung Nguyen, when the dead can return to walk the Earth for that single night.
Years later, publisher David G. Barnett of Necro Publications invited me to write a novel for him, and suggested I return to the world of COFFEE BREAK and expand upon it. I accepted this invitation eagerly. While the netherworld of LETTERS FROM HADES turned out differently from the way I portrayed it in COFFEE BREAK, the short story definitely afforded me the initial sketch for my larger painting.
In LETTERS FROM HADES, I’m not issuing a warning to the living about the dangers of being damned in the afterlife. I’m actually reflecting on the world we are alive in now, filled with religious intolerance and human hatred.
In one sense, you will not need to fear for the protagonist of LETTERS FROM HADES too much. He is already dead, after all, so he cannot be killed. But what you will need to be concerned about is whether he can maintain his sanity, and his dignity. Can his afterlife in Hell even become a second chance for him to find the personal fulfillment he lacked when he was physically alive?
I’ve written a loose sequel to LETTERS FROM HADES called BEAUTIFUL HELL, which explores another region of Hades where the demons are Asian in appearance, have the names of Japanese devils and wield samurai swords. Hell has many nations but no borders; we all dwell beneath its imprisoning sky. We can all relate to the same fears of pain and despair, and the same hopes for courage and perseverance. My aim in presenting this novel is that it will speak to you no matter how different from mine your language, your culture, your religious inclinations may be. Besides the widespread notion of a Hades, there is a larger theme contained within LETTERS FROM HADES; something even more universal, something that connects every human being—devout or faithless—through the whole world and the whole of time.
The eternal struggle of the human spirit.
Maria had been told she was lucky to have acquired work in the city of Tartarus, so soon upon her arrival in the netherworld.
It wasn’t much comfort. She could only take the word of her co-workers—her fellow slaves, more precisely—that to be employed here brought a measure of protection from the Demons in place of the punishments inflicted on those beyond the city’s borders. It was as reassuring as being told that she should be thankful for having one leg chainsawed off instead of two.
Seeing the Demon city of Tartarus for the first time had been the third greatest shock of her afterlife. The first shock had been that there
was
an afterlife (she had been one of the only Mexicans she’d ever known not to be devoutly religious) and the second greatest shock had been that the afterlife adjudged for her was as a citizen of Hell.
was
an afterlife (she had been one of the only Mexicans she’d ever known not to be devoutly religious) and the second greatest shock had been that the afterlife adjudged for her was as a citizen of Hell.
Mexico City was dwarfed by Tartarus, though to Maria’s mind the population of her own former city might have been greater. Perhaps that was only an illusion because of the vast scale of this place, which rendered all (mock) life microscopic, and because of its absence of streets, of commerce. Its very expanse and scope made it seem empty, its fullness made it desolate, and most strangely, its hideousness made it terribly beautiful.
Every structure was a skyscraper, many of them vanishing into the almost solid layer of slowly churning clouds that forever obscured the sky. These skyscrapers were not so much ranked beside each other as
merged
with each other, so that often the only way one might tell them apart (if indeed they were in any sense apart) was to notice how the color of one was shaded slightly darker or lighter than another, or how a building composed of nothing but uncountable, tiny opaque windows faded into a building that appeared to be entirely constructed (within as well as without?) out of gigantic auto parts blended with a madman’s plumbing system combined with computer circuit boards…some of this machinery glossy smooth, other sections corroded rust red. Though a building might be a ghostly pale hue and another so dark it seemed one existed in day while the other loomed at midnight, there was a bleak sepia tone over the whole of the city that made it weirdly homogenous. Her own former city had been notorious for its smog, but sectors of this city seemed to loom out of a more subtle mist that blurred its edges, while other areas stood out with a sharpness of line and detail that stabbed the eye. White, luminous fog wound like a living entity between the fissures and irregular gaps in the mountains of concrete and metal, and steam plumed out of apertures, some of these like grates or exhaust ports while others were more like organic orifices. Because worked into the weave of Tartarus was an unmistakable organic element, as if the city wasn’t actually built from concrete and metal, plastic and stone, but had been
grown
like one titanic living body. There was thick tubing that looked both flexible but vitreous and that snaked down the faces of buildings, that ran in and out of their very bodies, like arteries. There were huge, glassy bulbs or boils or tumors of some kind which were filled with that glowing mist or else with seething black masses like gigantic worms in rows of immense egg sacs. There were portions of the city that looked formed out of translucent bone, out of some calcified matter like a coral reef, out of tons of oxidized fossil. Buildings that seemed made of polished insect chitin, structures that were not linear and hard-edged but fluid and asymmetrical and a chaos of shape and design. All of these things in unlikely conjunction were Taratarus, unified by its leeched brown color however it might shade, compressed so tightly together it was like one colossal building alone, unified by its strange silence despite the ringing and hammering heard here and there as its mechanical flanks pumped and pistoned, unified by its atmosphere of hopelessness and loneliness…like an abandoned city haunted only by ghosts. Of which Maria was one.
merged
with each other, so that often the only way one might tell them apart (if indeed they were in any sense apart) was to notice how the color of one was shaded slightly darker or lighter than another, or how a building composed of nothing but uncountable, tiny opaque windows faded into a building that appeared to be entirely constructed (within as well as without?) out of gigantic auto parts blended with a madman’s plumbing system combined with computer circuit boards…some of this machinery glossy smooth, other sections corroded rust red. Though a building might be a ghostly pale hue and another so dark it seemed one existed in day while the other loomed at midnight, there was a bleak sepia tone over the whole of the city that made it weirdly homogenous. Her own former city had been notorious for its smog, but sectors of this city seemed to loom out of a more subtle mist that blurred its edges, while other areas stood out with a sharpness of line and detail that stabbed the eye. White, luminous fog wound like a living entity between the fissures and irregular gaps in the mountains of concrete and metal, and steam plumed out of apertures, some of these like grates or exhaust ports while others were more like organic orifices. Because worked into the weave of Tartarus was an unmistakable organic element, as if the city wasn’t actually built from concrete and metal, plastic and stone, but had been
grown
like one titanic living body. There was thick tubing that looked both flexible but vitreous and that snaked down the faces of buildings, that ran in and out of their very bodies, like arteries. There were huge, glassy bulbs or boils or tumors of some kind which were filled with that glowing mist or else with seething black masses like gigantic worms in rows of immense egg sacs. There were portions of the city that looked formed out of translucent bone, out of some calcified matter like a coral reef, out of tons of oxidized fossil. Buildings that seemed made of polished insect chitin, structures that were not linear and hard-edged but fluid and asymmetrical and a chaos of shape and design. All of these things in unlikely conjunction were Taratarus, unified by its leeched brown color however it might shade, compressed so tightly together it was like one colossal building alone, unified by its strange silence despite the ringing and hammering heard here and there as its mechanical flanks pumped and pistoned, unified by its atmosphere of hopelessness and loneliness…like an abandoned city haunted only by ghosts. Of which Maria was one.
««—»»
Maria had been raped again. It was bad enough when a Demon raped her, but much worse when one of her co-workers did. She expected better from them, since they shared her plight. She supposed these men needed to vent their terrible, frustrated rage. Or else they simply felt that this world was a place where evil was expected, being the very substance of the walls, their masters, of their own mock flesh. Still, they expressed their humiliation by humiliating her. Spent their bottled anger by filling her up with it instead.
A Demon had come along the narrow corridor in which they lay, and had kicked the man hard in the ass. The man had scampered to his feet, his slick cock bobbing ridiculously, and scampered off down the passageway to wherever his work station was. The Demon had then strolled on, not bothering to help Maria up from the floor. As she rearranged her wrenched and ripped clothing, she watched the Demon recede. He hadn’t been concerned for her, but only for the work that waited to be done.
The first man who had raped her, on her second day in Tartarus, she had afterwards struck across the back of the head with a huge two-handed wrench swung from over her shoulder. He had dropped to her feet with blood already pouring heavily out of his nose and ears. An hour later, the damage almost entirely regenerated, the rapist had sought her out with a lead pipe in his hand for his own club…but a Demon had pushed him away and told him to leave her alone. "Thanks," Maria had told the creature.
"Go back to work," it had rasped at her. And several days later, she thought it was this very same Demon who raped her against the wall of a hiss-filled boiler room…though it was hard to tell some of them apart, especially the ones like this who were less human in form.
Brushing off her bottom with both hands, Maria resumed her interrupted journey to her current work station for the beginning of her shift. She picked up her pace, afraid of being late, and thus punished. She had been allowed a period of sleep so as to recuperate from yesterday’s seemingly endless shift, and the workers were even given food to eat. These sham bodies they possessed did not really require sleep or sustenance, just as it wasn’t true blood that ran in their veins or live sperm that spurted from rapists’ pricks. (And nerves did not really scream at the touch of a torturer’s brand or blade, however it might seem they did.)
The bodies of the Damned thought they were still alive, and so they had the urges and instincts of the living.
««—»»
Tartarus was one of those far-spaced cities of Hell in which its Demonic population was not only trained for their duties…but made.
This was Maria’s line of work. She was, for all intents and purposes, a manufacturer of the very creatures that had rustled her up for this employment.
Shifts were long. One often burned or froze their hands, depending on what sort of Demon—or what stage of that Demon’s progression—they were working on. Toward the end of today’s shift, a gust of hot steam had scalded Maria’s left hand…but already, on her way to this floor’s showers, the pain and angry redness were fading.
Whenever she was badly burned, by steam or splashed corrosive chemical or by bumping into a red-hot metal surface, Maria was reminded of her father. His right arm had been terribly scarred as a toddler, when he had tipped a pot full of boiling water off the stove top. He had told Maria that his mother was passed out on the sofa at the time. He had told Maria that his mother was a worthless bitch and whore, and a neglectful mother who ultimately left her husband for a man who was younger but just as drunken as herself.
Maria’s own mother had met her father while she was living for a time in San Antonio. He was white, she a Mexican. When she was eight years old, after an escalating series of terrifying fights, her father left her mother. She had never seen him again, and her mother had moved them back to Mexico to be with family.
Maria had thought that her father loved her; that he would never leave her as his mother had ended up leaving him. Now, she couldn’t even remember his face clearly. But she remembered the scars on his arm. They had never faded away, like the burn on her own hand today.
Maria nodded in mute greeting to the three men who stood watch outside the women’s shower area. The Demons had not assigned them to this duty; they had volunteered, to protect the women from other men who might enter the showers to attack them. On the rare occasion, though, a Demon or even a pack might enter into the showers, and for them the men lowered their eyes and stepped aside.
Maria stripped and angled her wide pretty face toward the pelting hot streams, turned slowly around, her long hair plastering to her back. Opening her eyes, stepping back a little, she gazed upwards as she exposed her underarms to the irregular streams that fell from the machinery high overhead, the fallen water then trickling into a grated floor rough against her bare feet. This large chamber was not intended for this use, but the Demons shrugged it off, didn’t bother stopping them. High above, cloudy cocoons in row after row were suspended pendulously like a crop nearly ripe for harvesting. The raining water rinsed these subtly pulsating sacs. Here and there, Maria could see a more pronounced bulge where a limb or wing pressed at the membrane that sheathed its owner.
A reverberating thud made her step entirely out of the torrents for a moment or two to listen. An explosion, perhaps. Another boiler blown? It wasn’t too uncommon. A dangerous mistake on the part of a worker (though even if shredded to chum, he would reconstitute) or simply an overtaxed machine. No further detonations followed, and Maria ducked back into the downpour.
After bathing herself, she dipped her shed uniform into a mechanical recess in one wall that had collected a puddle of this falling hot water, so as to clean it as best she could—then she changed into her fresh uniform and headed out of the shower chamber, her hair still dripping wet. At the entrance, one of the guards (his name was Russ, he’d recently told her) smiled at her again and shifted in his hands the heavy mallet he carried as a weapon. "So Maria, how are ya?"
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