Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades (3 page)
Read Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades Online
Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
"I’m fine," she told him, smiling a little. She couldn’t believe people could still ask such inane questions. Empty civility. Like robot servants after a nuclear war, making tea for mummies long dead in their armchairs. Russ was that robot and that mummy at the same time. She dropped her eyes and hurried past him without trying to look obvious about it. "You?" she called back over her shoulder obligatorily. She saw he was watching her go.
"Okay. Goin’ to the mess hall?"
"Yup."
"Maybe I’ll see you there in a few."
"Sure."
He was cute enough, she supposed. White. A redhead. And she could not conceive of falling in love with any man here in Hades. As numb as she was, as hollowed out inside, as automaton-like in her work and her daily routines, she was not some robot with a bolted-on grin. Her programming had been shorted out. Civility had been an illusion all along.
Affection was a sham better left to the living.
When Maria turned a corner of the cramped hallway, the rainfall hiss of the showers still in her ears, she looked up to see a Demon plant itself in front of her.
"What is your sin?" it snarled, and backhanded her across the jaw.
The Demons didn’t apparently use names to distinguish one infernal race from another, but for their own convenience (since they had to manufacture them), the workers had given them designations, and this species was called a Caliban. It was like a cross between a sumo wrestler and an insect, bulgingly soft in some places and armored in others, the same sepia brown as the exteriors and interiors of Tartarus, except that its eyes glowed a bright white and its primary forearms shaded to almost black at the ends of their scorpion-like pincers. It was one of these appendages that had just sent Maria to the floor.
"What is your sin?" it demanded again, taking another threatening step toward her so that she smelled the choking incense scent burned into its dimpled flesh and glossy chitin. She might have made this creature herself for all she knew.
Her mouth lubricated with blood, which drooled out over the middle of her bisected lower lip, Maria managed to get out, "I have forsaken the Father."
It was true, wasn’t it?
On the night of the great and final fight, that frightening last battle like some apocalyptic war, after her father had left, Maria had found a crucifix on the floor. She recognized it as her father’s, and realized her mother must have wrenched it off his chest in their shoving and slapping. Without her mother seeing, she swept it up in her fist. And buried it under her pillow that night. But the next day, the first day of her father no longer being in her life, Maria had taken the chain and little cross out into their backyard and buried it there, partly out of angry rejection, partly out of despair.
Was it that some neighbor child or even adult had seen her dig the hole, and had dug up the silver crucifix? Or was it that her vision had been so blurred with tears at the time? Whatever the case, when Maria went to exhume the crucifix out of guilt and longing a week later, it wasn’t in the spot she had thought it would be. She tried another spot, and there she came upon a bundle in a green plastic trash bag. Now she remembered what she had buried in this vaguely familiar spot; their cat, which had been hit by a car a year ago. Disinterring this poor corpse was too great a punctuation mark to her pain. She reburied the cat, and didn’t try to find her father’s necklace again.
She had left it buried. And with it, her faith in family, in solace, maybe even in love. She had continued to attend church with her devout mother. But she had narrowed her eyes in contempt at the larger version of that symbol hanging above the altar. The man with his hands pinned where they could do no one any good.
The Caliban seemed satisfied with her answer. It shambled on down the hallway, and Maria pulled herself to her feet, blood still running off her lip. She had refused to cry, however. She prided herself on holding her tears even when she had no control over the flow of her blood. But the wound would heal, so that more wounds could take its place. Hadn’t it been the same, pretty much, when she had still been alive, before she was raped and murdered?
Maria continued on her way. But not to the mess hall. She felt vaguely apologetic as far as Russ was concerned, but she had lost her appetite.
««—»»
When she reached the enormous chamber in which she had been assigned a place to sleep, Maria realized that the explosion she’d heard earlier had occurred in here.
This chamber was circular and disturbingly organic, its ceiling lost in gloom but apparently taking the form of a dome. Honeycombed into the curved walls were row upon row of elliptical openings like slots in a mausoleum waiting to be filled. Formerly, this had been a tank in which were nurtured a species of Demons since discontinued. They had been one of the more human-like breeds, and perhaps it was because of their human traits that a number of them had rebelled in the infernal city of Oblivion. Most of these Demons had been killed by now, but there were still those that had escaped the purging.
Her own little cocoon space was in the third tier, and she kept a few belongings inside, which no one had ever deemed worthy of stealing. There, she would rest between shifts, curled like a fetus, reborn—or aborted—every day in an endless cycle.
But today there had been some unknown mishap, and from the room’s obscure heights, torrents of a thick, orange-colored gelatinous fluid were raining down to plop and puddle. Fortunately, the floor was subtly concave and the ooze was draining slowly toward a grille in its center. The foul-smelling matter put Maria very much in mind of the gruel they were fed in the mess hall—the only sustenance they were given—though that substance had a chemical-sharp citrus smell and taste, like slurping orange-scented dish detergent.
The irregular deluge went largely ignored by a few weary laborers who had also skipped mess hall and preceded her into the chamber, and who now climbed toward their cramped sarcophagi. Maria stared up into the leaking darkness only a few moments herself before navigating between aggregations of the viscous slime toward her section of the wall. Having arrived at it, she hoisted up one leg to begin the ascent to her own depression.
She hesitated, however, as her eyes were attracted to where some of the rotten-smelling matter had flowed down the wall and accumulated in a particularly large, glistening heap. She saw that there were several bones protruding from it; some ribs, and the bat-like struts of a wing. Not the bones of a human; humans reconstituted, their bodies were notional, they could not be killed. Demons, however: they could die. But there was more than the bones. One spot in the mound was subtly but definitely pulsing. Also, Maria could just discern a muted gurgling sound with an unsettling, familiar quality.
Holding her breath against the reek, she crouched by the edge of the pile, and from it drew a loose leg bone. She then used this to probe the slime in the area where it was undulating. There was resistance as she prodded a mass buried within it. And then, a tiny arm thrust up through the jelly, its stubby fingers wriggling.
Maria used the bone to paddle away as much of the slime as she could around the arm. Then, leaning forward carefully, she reached out and took hold of it. It was slippery, and cold, and she was repulsed by the fingers that squirmed against her wrist, but she pulled…and in standing, she extracted a body drooling streamers of muck. She held the thing out at arm’s length to examine it. Pudgy legs pedaled the air sluggishly, eyes squinted open in its sliding mask of ooze, and its wings moved as if to fan the goo from them. Free of the half-congealed amniotic fluid in which it had once been nurtured, the Demon gurgled more freely, but not loudly enough for anyone else to have noticed as yet.
Though Maria had never seen a mature version, she realized what this creature was. One of those discontinued Demons that had been nurtured in this chamber before it had been emptied and converted into barracks. It was a miracle—or, more accurately, an oversight—that it had survived this long. Overlooked in the cleansing that had eliminated all its siblings. Now, accidentally but belatedly miscarried.
Maria was afraid to bring the infant Demon close to her, but was even more afraid of being seen holding it. She glanced behind her furtively, but determined that her back had as yet shielded her find from anyone who might have looked in her direction. She then did the first thing that came impulsively to mind. Rather than drop the immature creature back into its afterbirth, rather than fetch an adult Demon to tend to this matter, she again hoisted up a leg to begin climbing to her tiny nook. In so doing, she was forced to fold the creature close to her chest.
She was afraid that at any moment, the larval Demon would snap its jaws onto her throat. But instead, it merely mewled faintly, and instinctively clung to her so as not to fall.
««—»»
Working through her interminable shift, knowing what she had left hidden in her skull socket of a bed chamber, Maria was agitated and distracted and made a number of clumsy mistakes. Her function, of late, was to pour large glass jars full of maggots into molds that crawled past her on a conveyor belt. The squirming, pale brown things were not truly maggots, but close enough for the workers to refer to them as such. A co-worker, Patty, told Maria how this particular process reminded her of a carbonated soda plant she’d worked for in life, where bags of hard plastic pellets were melted down so as to be shaped into the two liter soda bottles they would become. But here, Patty and Maria were molding containers of flesh instead of those of plastic. To be filled with bile, venom and vitriol instead of corn syrup and caramel color.
Patty would hand Maria a bottle of the maggots, which she would tip into one of the molds (today, they were for Baphomets, a towering Demon with a blackened, goat-like head enshrouded in a caul of cool white flame). Maria would pass the empty jug back to Patty, who would set it aside to be washed out and reused later.
At one point Maria fumbled and dropped a bottle, which shattered below the little platform she stood on. Patty jumped back as the pool of writhing, half-alive matter spread at her feet. Fortunately, they were able to sweep it all up and dispose of it before any of the Demon supervisors could see them.
Sometimes, when there were no supervisors in sight, Maria would spit into the open molds as she filled them.
She was relieved when the shift ended at last, but also dreaded returning to her sleep chamber to find her secret discovered…or expired. Before she could check on it, however, she first had a stop to make.
««—»»
Russ the shower guard was entering the mess hall as Maria was just leaving it. He looked like he was coming off his regular duties; his uniform was stiff with caked Demon blood, from recycling old bodies for the recasting of new. When he saw her, he grinned and said, "Hey! There’s the pretty senorita. I missed you yesterday."
Maria could not speak. In her mouth she held some of the orange, gel-like gruel she had been served in a bowl by one of the human mess hall workers. She tried to smile at Russ, rubbing her belly and wagging her head as if to indicate she didn’t feel well. Concern flashed into his face and he stepped aside to let her pass.
"Are you going to be sick?" When she nodded, he asked, "Can I help you?"
She shook her head, patted him on the arm as she moved forward again (hoping he didn’t take the contact as having flirtatious meaning) and left her would-be beau behind.
It was not unrealistic for him to believe she might be ill. In Hell, there were microscopic Demons, or at least infernal creatures, that could infest, infect, cause grief to the Damned. Maria knew this well; from the irregular holes rotted open in the walls on the 53rd floor of this building, she had been able to look outside at a narrow building that reminded her of a spinal column, in which these viruses were manufactured by other workers like herself.
"Hope you feel better!" he called after her.
When Hell freezes over, she thought.
She had walked only a few steps when she heard Russ cry out in alarm and pain. Turning, she saw that a Caliban had loomed up behind him and seized him in its pincers. One of his wrists, pinned, was half severed and jetting blood. Another pincer had ripped his trousers down, while a third was closed around his genitals as if to masturbate or castrate. The weight of the immense body doubled him over and the creature was no doubt entering him.
"What is your sin?" the Demon wheezed.
Russ and Maria held their eye contact. Russ looked more ashamed than in pain. Maria was ashamed, too, that there was nothing she could do for him. She knew the next time they met he would be physically healed, at least…and she knew they would not discuss this.
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