Letters From Hades (15 page)

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Authors: Jeffrey Thomas

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The wet, unpleasant sounds were more insistent now from Butler’s carcass, and beginning with Franklin’s as well. There was a knot or lump of tissue on Butler’s shoulders, the glistening red ball of an embryonic head affixed to an adult’s body. The hands of both bodies were clenching, flexing, and the legs had begun to slowly pedal and writhe. Butler appeared as though he were gathering himself up to rise to his feet…
"Now!" Chara ordered me, gesturing with the gun toward the door.
"Come see me!" I told her.
"Why?"
"So we can talk about this! I live…"
"I know where you live," she said, positioning herself in a broad stance over Butler and aiming the submachine gun at his burgeoning head. "Get out of here!"
This time I obeyed, crossing the empty café to its gaping door. This time I didn’t look back, even when I heard the bellow of automatic fire as Chara took out her frustrations and bought me time to escape. I heard one long discharge, and then another as she switched her attention to Franklin. Even when I was a block away I heard the sputter of gunfire. I was sure that Chara had emptied the long magazine of the Heckler & Koch, and had switched to the Galil, emptying that weapon into the two Angels as well, to make the process of their reanimation as drawn-out and painful as possible. The distant echoing patter of fire made me feel as though I were in a city at war.
Day 65.
I
 half expected Chara to come see me last night, late, after the furor had died down a bit. She didn’t. I suppose it was foolish to think that she might…
But when I started to tell her where I lived, she said she knew. Even if some Demon census bureau keeps track of where Oblivion’s residents live, which I find extremely doubtful, why should Chara specifically have knowledge of my living situation? Unless she looked it up. Or, more realistically and improbably at once, observed or followed me one day when I walked to my hotel.
Having reread yesterday’s journal entry, trying to relive the sequence of events in Blue, I’ve asked myself if Chara attacked the Angels out of scorn for their treatment of her, or to protect me from their threats of bringing me to a torture center. It’s both, of course. But she didn’t act until that gun was aimed at my face. The thing is, I would have reconstituted from a bullet, would have survived even years of suffering at a torture plant. But had she herself been shot in the face during the struggle, she wouldn’t have survived. Just as Verdelet wouldn’t regenerate. I can only hope that Chara doesn’t regret protecting me now. Resent me, even, for the loss of her partner’s life.
I went to work today as if it were any day, though I looked over my shoulder on the way to work, expecting Angels on bikes to come roaring around a corner—Hell’s Angels—seeking revenge for the actions I had been a part of.
After my long, mind-numbing shift, my coworker Larry insisted on walking with me even though I had done my best to discourage his dog-like attention. His appeals for my friendship made me feel like a woman with an unwanted suitor. He wanted to go to get a bite to eat, and I only wanted to hide in my little bedlam and breakfast, lighting the candles in my gourds for yet another in an endless chain of Halloween nights.
"Hey," Larry chirped, almost desperate to engage me somehow, "did you hear they caught five guys who raped a Demon and crucified her on a tree? I hear they’re torturing them in public…they’re really making an example of them…"
Finally Larry had won my undivided attention; I stopped in my tracks to face him. "Where’d you hear this?"
"From Jarrod, at work; he saw them yesterday. They’re on display. Jarrod heard they’re going to keep them on display for years, after what they did."
"Which torture plant are they at?"
"The one down by the waste treatment center. Do you wanna go have a look with me?"
"Yeah…sure. Let’s go have a look."
"Great!"
All you had to do to find the waste treatment center was follow the smell. It was huge, and employed hundreds whose jobs I had no desire to fathom…though I had heard that sometimes citizens were chained in its depths and forced to dispose of the city’s waste products by eating them, as punishment. Maybe the torture plant next door sent them over.
Both waste treatment center and torture plant faced onto another of those uncommon wide streets laid with twin rails for trains I had never seen. I asked Larry about them.
"Oh, those are for the Black Cathedral."
"Oh. Which is?"
"It’s a church that moves around the city, stopping in one street for a few days at a time and then moving on to someplace else. I heard it even follows an underground railroad like a subway, and goes to other cities."
"What for?"
"You get rounded up and brought inside. It’s never happened to me, though, knock on wood." He rapped his forehead. "They torture you inside; what else would it be for? But they do it
psychologically
."
I nodded, hoping to never know more about it than this.
Speaking of institutes of punishment, before me now stood the largest torture plant I had seen in Oblivion—a skyscraper which inspired vertigo when gazed up at from its base, much taller than the more factory-style structure with its twin smoke stacks, adjacent to the prison where I had been briefly held. Its flanks seemed largely mechanical, and windows were few. I saw enclosed, movable rooms rising or descending like external elevators, sometimes even traveling sideways across the great edifice before they slotted into place. Steam hissed out of dozens of grates or ports, and thick greenish grease like slime lubricated its gears and crankshafts and chains massive enough to moor a battleship. Just beyond this skyscraper was another, equally vast, which Larry told me was the major barracks for Demons. They lived quite well in there, from what was whispered by the carefully selected human servants permitted to work inside it. But Larry said he’d just as soon enter into the Demon city of Tartarus as venture inside that ominous black tower.
The torture tower had various terrace-like structures, tiers or layers, that grew narrower as the building rose, causing it to taper as if it were some very attenuated ziggurat. It was on the lowest and broadest of these tiers that the five prisoners were being exhibited; there was already a small crowd of pedestrians gathered, craning their necks and shielding their eyes against the glowing sky for a half-fearful, half-morbid look.
The prisoners were evenly spaced across the front of this ledge, right above the massive iron doors of the plant’s front entrance. Just as we arrived, they were being executed. Again.
One man sat in a chair with his wrists shackled to its arms, his ankles to its legs, and a noose around his neck. A trapdoor gave out and he fell, jerked in his restraining chair, which turned and swayed as the man choked and gagged and finally lost consciousness. The way the noose was knotted or looped around his neck, or the short length of the fall, or some other factor prevented it from being a quick and merciful hanging. But as soon as he was unconscious, the man and chair were hoisted higher, the trapdoor swung back into place, and the chair was lowered onto it again. Eventually the man would heal, recover, wake…to go through it all again. And this, Larry reiterated, would go on for a year at least. Who knows…maybe ten. Maybe for generations.
Another man sat in a similar metal chair, but he was being electrocuted. We could smell his burning flesh as he quaked horribly in his chair, the air crackling with a charge so powerful I thought I could even feel the hairs stirring on my arms from this distance. We saw the man’s eyes burst, and blood oozed thickly to further stain his already caked shirt. Like perennials, they would grow back. To be harvested again. The endless cycle of death and rebirth. Yin and yang.
The other three men suffered in similar ways. Mock executions. A guillotine (this victim was longer in recovering than the hanged man, naturally). A gas chamber made of thick glass, looking a bit like a phone booth. These five young men not only suffered the intense pain of death, again and again, but even more horribly, the anticipation of that death. Would they get used to it eventually? Even find a way, Zen-like, to tune it out, to project their consciousness outside of themselves? Or, similarly, would they merely flee into an insanity from which they might never be resurrected?
In a voice of exaggerated reverence, Larry said, "When I look at these five guys, I don’t see a warning to behave myself. You know what I see?"
"What’s that?"
"I see martyrs. Like saints…"
My reaction was more mixed, more ambiguous. I had seen what these men had done to Chara, how they had crucified her and stuck a spear into her and perhaps left her to die…die as they themselves couldn’t (though they might well consider her more fortunate, for that). And they had defiled her with that spear before sticking it through her. She was a woman. And they were men.
But still…she was a Demon, a monster. And they were men. In life, they might not have been rapists, gangsters, terrorists, but just regular working guys like me. For being brave enough to attack a Demon, and best one despite her strength and fighting prowess, shouldn’t I view them as heroes like Larry did?
Larry raised his hand high and gave the peace sign, so the prisoners could see it, and know at the very least that there were those who appreciated their efforts, and sympathized with their pain.
I thought I saw the eyes of the man who would soon be hanged again flick to Larry, attracted by his gesture, and then dart nervously to me. I, however, did not raise a gesture to him.
On the way home, Larry quickly forgot about the tortured men and gave me a list of his favorite movies. (Sophomoric, misogynistic splatter flicks, mostly.) I was grateful, since I didn’t want to end up telling him that it was me who had rescued the Demon crucified by his five suffering saints.
Day 66.
M
y little wind-up timer woke me up this "morning" after I’d set it for six hours. I’d slept entirely through without once waking from a nightmare, or hearing an especially loud scream from outside, and I was more comfortable at night now that my flu was letting up.
While I was dressing for work, I thought I heard a rustling sound or movement outside my flophouse flat’s door. I thought it might be the landlord’s young assistant, but when I got my shirt over my head and went to the door, I found no one in the dim narrow hallway beyond.
Had
 it been someone? But maybe not the young girl?
Who was I kidding? Chara wouldn’t be coming to meet with me. For all I knew, she had already been captured. Executed…
I was late to work because I’d had to wait out a lava shower. Good thing it was only a brief one. I thought my group leader Bruce would be angry, but my concern shifted to other directions when I approached my work area and found Bruce waiting for me there looking very timid instead. An Angel and a Celestial were waiting with him.
The Angel turned to address me, Bruce remaining quiet all the while—as did the Celestial. After confirming my identity, the Angel introduced himself: "I’m Inspector Turner." And he actually held out his hand for me to shake, which I did. He had a mild Southern accent, a low soft voice, his silvery sideburns the only hair that showed under the conical white hat he wore. He was shorter than I, thickset. The Celestial was distinctly less meaty. Where this Inspector Turner was once a mortal man, Celestials are akin to the Demons in that they’ve never known a terrestrial life, are golems without a true soul. This unspeaking creature was tall, very slender, wearing only a kind of snug white sarong around its hips and legs, its chest shallow and bony. It had no wings, but its flesh was as white as a Demon warrior’s…whiter, in that it seemed to have a faint bioluminescence. This subtle glow gave it an almost blurry aspect. Its hair was longish, more white than blond…the face very pretty, if dour, and so androgynous that I wouldn’t have known its gender if not for the absence of breasts. Then again, unlike the humanoid Demons, it didn’t even have nipples (or a navel), so maybe gender was not a consideration. Its eyes were most disturbing of all; unnaturally blue, weirdly flat like the eyes of a character in a video game, and even more blurry than its phosphorescent flesh. Even when it moved its head only slightly the blue eyes seemed to leave brief trails of color smudged on the air.
"What can I do for you, Inspector?" I asked in as polite and panic-free a voice as I could muster.
"Why don’t we go and talk in Mr. Gold’s office, where it’s less noisy, shall we?"

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