Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades (8 page)

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Authors: Jeffrey Thomas

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"Sorry!" Eridan called out cheerfully, weaving the boat between furrows of the lapping blood. "I’ve been trying to steer us through the thickest clouds of them." He tilted his chin to indicate a swarm of the airborne creatures, off to their left. The animals squirmed like boiling maggots, a living storm cloud above the surface of the waves.
"What attracts them to one spot like that? Fish in the sea?"
"Maybe. Or a Damned, escaping from Sheol, or from one of the Obsidian Islands. If you think they’re thick here, sir, you should see the Valley of Steam. The air is a solid mass with them."
The other Angel tourist aboard the boat, who’d introduced himself to Petty as Mike Rule, was already at the harpoon gun in the boat’s bow, his fists clenched around the metal handles, swiveling it this way and that. It creaked with its patina of rust-or-blood. "I hope it’s a Damned," he said, pressing his eye to a scope. "Could I hit him from here if I saw him? Or would that draw the eels to us?"
"We’re a bit too far to hit someone there, if there is someone," Captain Eridan said. "But don’t worry, sir, you’ll have your chance."
"What if I see one of your kind swimming?" Rule asked, his grin showing under the cup of the scope. "Can I shoot him? Will I get in trouble?"
Petty glanced over at Eridan’s face, the entirely red eyes devoid of pupils, but the Demon remained courteous as he replied, "It is to be discouraged, sir, but of course you can do as you please."
"Thar she blows," Petty said, shielding his eyes with one hand, as he saw a flailing arm rise out of the water and submerge again. In that brief instant, eels had darted at it, and he was certain had torn chunks from it. The frenzied cloud of animals and the Damned man or woman, who could drown but be quickly resurrected to drown again, and again, were left behind them.
"I hope I see my ex-boss out here," said Rule, still swiveling the harpoon gun. "If that bastard didn’t go to Hell there’s no justice in the universe."
««—»»
After a short while, with the shore of obsidian cliffs and glittering volcanic sand lost in the distance, Captain Eridan cut their speed to a comfortable, leisurely pace. From a cooler in the stern, Petty and Rule took bottles of beer. Rule jokingly offered a bottle to one of Eridan’s crew, but the Demon shook its head and lowered its eyes, slapping away on its webbed feet to continue swabbing blood from the deck. "I’m getting hungry, Mike," Petty quipped dryly as he watched the creature. "Got any tartar sauce?"
"Can you imagine going down on one of their ladies?" Rule said. "That would really smell like fish." He looked over his shoulder at their vessel’s composed captain. "But you know what they say, Captain Sinbad…if it smells like fish, that’s my dish. If it smells like cologne, leave it alone!"
On the horizon they spied a much larger craft, a battleship compared to their sleek but weathered yacht. "Hey, is that a torture ship?" Rule asked their pilot.
"An ocean liner for vacationers like yourself, anxious to see the sights beyond the pearly gates." Petty thought he detected a mocking tinge to the cliche "pearly gates." "Drink, dinner, dance, shuffleboard, harpooning the Damned. I’m sure you would enjoy it, gentlemen. Ships like that find harbor south of here, should you be interested in booking passage when you’ve had your fill of my humble boat."
"We’ll have to talk to our tour guide about it when we get back to our lodgings," Petty said. Because he did indeed feel that he’d prefer cruising slowly on a large ship like that, instead of jouncing across the waves on this smaller craft. He had hoped a visit to Hades would shake up his jaded senses, after having found Heaven to be rather dull, rather lonely. But he hadn’t wanted to be physically shaken.
"I like this boat," Rule stated, however. "Much more exciting, huh, Steve?"
"Sure," Petty muttered.
‘It’s good to be alive again!" Rule chirped, raising his bottle to salute the churning Red Sea and the black layer of perpetual clouds that formed the ceiling of Hades.
««—»»
Petty had considered bringing his apsara with him on his vacation to Hell, but had ultimately decided against it. The apsaras were homunculi like the Demons, and made to order for those in Heaven, as servants and lovers. Because Petty had had no luck meeting a female Angel with whom to enjoy the boundless carnal pleasures he would have expected to await him in the afterlife, he had ordered one of these apsaras for himself. In life he had been a mortgage expert, so he had named his living sex doll Fannie Mae as a private joke, though she had the face and body of Demi Moore, as she had looked in her early movies like
St. Elmo’s Fire
and
About Last
Night
(in which she’d been deliciously nude). He had preferred her then, soft and young and small-breasted, over how she had looked in
Striptease
, with her phony-looking breast implants and her buffed body and harder face. Petty liked to think that he had a refined sense of taste, an artistic appreciation of the female form in its natural state. Not to mention that he was drawn to very young women. That they would be the last women to be interested in him made him long for them all the more.
He had enjoyed Fannie Mae on a physical level, but her uncomplaining accommodation, her dog-like complacency, and the fact that the homunculus was nearly monosyllabic had made him fairly discontented of late. Whereas Rule had come to Hades to hunt the Damned for sport, Petty had come in the vague hopes that a Damned woman would be a more willing sex partner than a fellow Angel. Or, if not willing, then an unwilling sex partner. He need not be concerned with raping a Damned woman, whereas such a thing with an Angel would be out of the question. He didn’t know if an Angel like himself could be sentenced as a Damned, but he wasn’t willing to risk it.
He had thought he might even persuade a female Demon to take him to her bed, but after seeing the red-scaled beings back at the Demonic seashore fortress where he and Rule had been given lodgings, he had ruled out the possibility.
He had thought this adventure would exhilarate him, like a safari. Instead, he was already finding this remarkable ocean of live red blood cells boring in its redundancy. The thought of immortality began to depress him. To escape it for a brief while, in what was dubbed the little death (or was that what they called orgasm? he couldn’t recall), he decided it was best to retire to the forecastle for a nap, leaving Rule to his hunt. Though the Damned deserved to be here, because in life they had turned their backs on or denied the existence of their Creator (Petty and his wife had been church-going Catholics, Rule a Baptist), Petty wasn’t sure if he could bring himself to take a turn at the harpoon gun, himself.
««—»»
Petty’s heart, or the ectoplasmic replica of his heart, awakened him with a jolt as if defibrillators had been applied to him—again. He had been dreaming of his final living moments. Riding in the ambulance. Hearing its siren. The last sound he’d heard with his mortal ears, that banshee siren. Like a wailing cry of lamentation. It was as if the ambulance had driven him here, to the plane of the afterlife, instead of to the hospital.
He sat up on his cot, and listened to the boat’s puttering. They were moving very slowly. He raised his bulk with a groan of strain, and emerged from the shaded forecastle to see what was going on up front.
"Look at this, Steve!" cried Rule over his shoulder, crouched even more avidly at the harpoon gun. "Not much sport in shooting these three, but it might make good target practice!"
"Sorry this spot was a bit out of the way, gentlemen," Captain Eridan called above the motor sounds, "but I thought you might find it of interest!"
The boat had found its way among a series of small islands, some no larger than a manhole cover, the largest as big as a parking lot. All were flattish, and Petty had the impression that these were not the peaks of underwater rock, covered in a congealing slime of blood; instead, he grew convinced they were essentially giant blood clots floating atop the calm surface of the sea in this area. These masses were gelatinous, and so dark a red they were nearly black. Toward their centers, the matter went from a glossy pudding to a hard, flaking crust. Immense scabs, Petty realized. And if the normal scent of the Red Sea wasn’t bad enough—that iron reek of blood—these islets gave off a stench like rotting meat.
On the largest of these raft-like blood clots, somehow a windmill had been erected. It was a tall, metal framework with a fairly small blade at its top, which didn’t even stir in this becalmed air. The whole structure was encrusted with layers of dried gore. At the foot of the windmill, three naked figures stood with their hands chained high above their heads. The legs and support struts of the windmill obscured them, but Eridan began to casually coax his boat around the rim of the island so they could get a direct view of the prisoners.
"The wind should be along any moment," he informed them cryptically.
How grateful Petty was, seeing things like this, that he wasn’t one of the Damned. How foolish these poor people had been! He had gone to church like he went to the toilet; in an automatic, unthinking way—all that it had cost him for an afterlife-long membership to the celestial country club. It wasn’t like one had to be a contemplative monk, teach catechism, do volunteer work. Once he and Brenda left that high-ceilinged, gilded room with the solemn lisping voice of their priest lulling them nearly to sleep, Brenda would begin to gossip about this fellow parishioner or that, and glare at them when they cut her off as they all drove out of the parking lot. That didn’t matter. All that mattered was making an appearance, chanting the words the Creator wanted to hear from you, and you were safe. Was that so hard? Look what these creatures had brought upon themselves by being agnostics, atheists…running away from their Father.
They had almost reached the opposite side of the island, and as Eridan had predicted, a breeze had come up, turning sharp very quickly. He seemed to have almost cut his engine entirely, as if he didn’t want to reach the far side until the wind had mounted to its full strength. But Petty still began to make out more of what lay at the foot of the windmill…
A cage of tight wire mesh covered each of the three captives. These cages, in turn, were connected by chains woven through a mechanism of gears and cogs.
And the eels. About a dozen of them wriggled through the air, circling around the cages, sinuously winding their way through the girders of the windmill’s base. Once in a while one of the animals, with its phallic eyeless head and jaws overflowing with fangs, would try to nose its way through the mesh of the cages to get at the succulent meat within, but the openings were too small.
"Would anybody get mad if I shot these Damned right through the cages?" Rule whispered to their guide.
"Please be patient, sir. The wind current is approaching." He pointed a free hand up at the blades of the windmill, which had begun to spin…lazily, then more quickly, until bursts of breeze made the metal pinwheel blur.
They were near enough now that Petty could see the three Damned souls were nude young women. He leaned against the rail, gripping it more firmly.
Suddenly, like a freight train, the wind arrived. Petty was glad he had a firm grip on the rusty rail. His hood blew off. The calm surface of the Red Sea was whipped up into a pink foam, suds of it spattering him and the deck. The intermittent blurring of the windmill blades became steady, until they were invisible. At the base of the machine, there was a screech and grinding, as gears started to turn, greasy chains to move like tendons.
The three cages began to rise, uncovering their delectable contents. The women squirmed, twisted their lithe white bodies, but their wrists were still bound above their heads. A sound rose above the gusting wind, the noises of machinery. They were wailing. Sobbing. It was an unearthly sound, like sirens calling to Ulysses and his men…to drive them mad with lust…to lure them to their death among the rocks.
Then, the eels darted in. One coordinated movement, like a shoal of fish abruptly changing direction. And not only that, but other eels seemed to appear out of nowhere. Out of the sea? Out of hiding places in the windmill’s skeleton? Had they come up from behind the boat in a swarm? Wherever they had materialized from, the dozen had turned to a hundred…and they converged on the three screaming women in a dense flock.
"Like clockwork," Captain Eridan noted proudly, as if the torture device were of his own design.
Rule had stiffened at his gun, was obviously ready to launch a spear into one of the three newly exposed women, but the spectacle of the eels swooping in on them made him lift his head from the scope and mutter, "My God."

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