by R. E. Vance
Judith, Bella and I all stared as the snake slid across the ground toward me. I have no idea where Marty came from. He must have slithered down from the lighthouse, where he had been knocking out prison guards with what I hoped was sleep-inducing venom. The portal being big and gloomy and ominous must have drawn the little viper in.
Or maybe, given the time he’d spent wrapped around my arm recently, he had developed a sixth sense for where I was.
Great, my mother-in-law and Medusa’s best friend were here. Talk about a ménage-a-judgmental.
But before I could say anything else, Bella put a hand on my forearm. “Jean,” she said, stepping between us. “Please, Jean.” She reached over and hugged her mother.
As much as I didn’t like Judith, Bella loved her, and seeing them together made me blush with shame. I was so focused on being with my wife that I had almost denied Bella her second-favorite person in the whole world (after me, of course).
I pursed my lips. “It’ll be dangerous.”
Judith nodded, her quick wit slowed as she was overcome by her daughter’s hug. “I don’t care.”
I got it. I didn’t care, either. Danger or not, Hell or not, I was with the one person I wanted to be with. Needed to be with.
Standing at Bella’s side was always the right choice.
I gestured for us to start moving deeper into the forest. As I did, thought to myself, How fitting … my trip to Hell made all the more hellish by my mother-in-law.
↔
We had taken three steps from the portal when General Shouf clicked her tongue twice and shook her head. “This is a fool’s errand,” she said. “But then again, you’ve always been a fool.”
She tossed her gun and a few extra clips through the void. “Now at least you’ll be an armed fool.” She also took off her boots and socks and tossed them to Judith.
I shuddered as she did so, because what makes aigamuchabs aigamuchabs is that their eyes are on the soles of their feet. And if General Shouf ever looked at you through those eyes … let’s just say it gives a whole new meaning to “undressing you with one’s eyes.” The general’s stare was far, far more violating.
“There. Now you have everything you need to die in Hell.” She clicked two more times. “I will call in some favors and keep this island unoccupied for the next forty-eight hours. After that, I suggest you find another exit. Also, Jean”—she pointed to the left of me—“I’d be careful going that way. I sense sentient beasties unhappy about your presence. Best to follow the river in.”
“River?”
“Indeed,” she clicked, pointing away from where the beasts apparently roamed.
Like I said: eerie.
Not All Rivers Flow
As we walked toward the river, I stared over at my Bella, watching as she strolled through a forest that would have made the perfect setting for a vampire attack.
Or werewolf.
Or any monster, really.
And I didn’t care.
There she was. Her long, blonde hair cascading down the center of her back … A back that my hands and lips had spent many long, wonderful hours exploring.
I was so happy that if I had died at that moment, I would have done so smiling.
But that’s the problem with elated, unfamiliar joy: you start to wonder if it’ll last, and that thought inevitably leads you down the dark path of how this joy is even possible.
She was here when she shouldn’t be. What’s more, she seemed to know things about Heaven and Hell and the realm of the gods that she shouldn’t. No one should.
How?
I didn’t want to ask, because I didn’t care. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. I feared that whatever answer she gave me would break the spell and send reality crashing back in … and that was the last thing I wanted.
We may have been walking in Hell, but that didn’t stop me from walking on the clouds, too.
So whatever questions I had about how this was even possible would have to wait—for a few hours. Or forever. They could wait forever. Right now, all I wanted to do was find a private corner to be with her and be … well, private.
But then my thoughts wandered to Penemue. The twice-fallen needed me—us—and if Bella was right, then we had to hurry.
Fine, being private would have to wait. But I swore by the GoneGods, when this was done, I’d find a way to be with her forever. Whether here or in Heaven or on Earth … I’d find a way. I had to—it was part of our story. Our path.
Bella had told me as much when I’d last seen her. And if there’s anyone whose word you can trust, it’s your wife who ascended to Heaven.
I heard an “Ahem” as Judith stomped past me to get closer to Bella, taking her daughter’s hand in hers just as she had done so many times before. I didn’t mind; as much as I found Judith a perpetual thorn in my ass, she was just as happy as I was … And that, if nothing else, was common ground for the two of us to work from.
Who knows? I thought. Maybe a trip to Hell is exactly what this family needs.
Marty hissed, and I looked at the viper coiled around my arm. Marty was Medusa’s head snake, taking the prime position on the crown of her head. He was the largest of the serpents and Medusa’s favorite. He also loved the gorgon more than anyone, and when she died saving Paradise Lot from a rampaging, apocalyptic monster, Marty nearly died from a broken heart.
He hadn’t approved of Medusa and me dating, not that we went on more than one date. But in the end, he saw how hard I’d fought for the gorgon, saw how much I cared for her and, well, we forged a bond through our mutual love for Medusa.
But common bond or not, he could be just as judgmental as Judith. Marty looked up at me and narrowed his eyes, a snake’s way of saying, “I’m annoyed at you” before he hissed again.
“What?” I said in a hushed voice.
Marty flicked his slitted eyes toward Bella, then back to me.
“What?” I repeated. “She’s my wife. Well, the ghost of her, at least.”
Marty snapped his venomous jaw twice before giving me an expression that could only be described as a lipless scowl. I knew what he was thinking … Marty, as normal looking as he was, wasn’t a normal snake. He had been Medusa’s (as in Queen of the Gorgons, turn-you-to-stone Medusa) head snake for centuries. That little scaly guy had seen things, knew things …
And one of those things was that Medusa and I had kind of been dating.
I was more or less wearing Medusa’s poisonous wingman on my arm. I had to choose my words carefully.
“First of all,” I said under my breath, “Bella had been dead for six years before I started seeing Medusa.” I looked up to see if Bella could hear me. I was fairly sure me seeing someone else years after her death was OK, but then again … why take that chance?
If Bella could hear me, she made no indication of it.
“Secondly,” I whispered, “I really liked Medusa, and her death nearly ended me. But that woman there is my wife. I’m sorry you’re pissed that I’m all googly-eyed for someone else. But again … my wife. She’s back.” As I said those last two words, I looked up at Bella just to confirm she was still there and that this wasn’t some cruel dream.
There she strode, hand in hand with Judith, as alive as one could be in a place like this. To me, she looked incandescent.
“She’s back,” I repeated.
Marty hissed, gave me another scowl and wrapped his body farther around my arm so we didn’t have to make eye contact.
Turns out, you can’t escape judgment in Hell. Who’d have thought?
Hostile Rivers and River Hostiles
Sartre famously said, “Hell is other people.” But when Penemue read that, he just shook his head and said, “Interesting fellow. Too bad he’s completely wrong.”
“About?” I had asked. At the time, I was elbow-deep in flour as I tried to bake Bella’s famous chocolate chip and macadamia nut cookies.
“About Hell, of course.”
I gave him a strai
ned look, annoyed that he wasn’t helping. Then again, his help probably would have involved the history of flour, nuts and fire.
Penemue closed the book he had been reading. “Hell isn’t about other people. Hell is about being stuck in now.” And with that, he pulled out a bottle of Drambuie from only the GoneGods knew where and started drinking as he meandered out of the kitchen.
That was years ago, and now I was walking in a dark forest, lost and wondering about time. We had walked for what I guessed was an hour before hitting the river’s edge.
But then again, we could have been walking for ten minutes or three hours … I had no idea. Time here didn’t seem to work in any way I understood, and I honestly couldn’t gauge how long our little ramble had taken.
I took a look down at my Mickey Mouse watch and saw that the poor little fellow wasn’t really moving. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t broken—he was just stuck, his second hand clicking forward four seconds before bouncing back to its previous position and committing to four more clicks.
According to Mickey, all that time spent walking took place in the span of four seconds. I tried to look up at the sky and gauge time by the position of the stars. Of course, that only worked so well, but with a few points of reference, I could at least confirm the passage of time. But that proved to be a dead end as well, because the stars didn’t seem to move at all, but rather hung still in the night air.
I was starting to think that it was just part of the design—that we were really in another plane of existence with its own night sky. That the celestial lights above were more decorative than anything else.
But then we got to the river and I realized that time really did stand still in Hell. “Hell is about being stuck in now.” I was starting to understand what the angel meant as I stared at river that flowed forward for exactly four seconds—the same four seconds of Mickey’s second hand—before its low waves and bubbling whitecaps reset and the river flowed those same few feet again.
And again.
And again.
“Hell is being stuck in now.” I snapped my fingers at the river, whose waters didn’t appear remotely appealing. They frothed as though polluted, hued in a strange shade of red. “That’s what the bastard meant.”
Bella nodded as she stared at down at the same repetitive flow. “This kind of makes sense,” she said. “This is exactly what I would have done if I were Hell’s architect.”
“How so?” Judith asked.
“Think about it … we’re stuck in the now. Which means that whatever is happening now is how it will always be. Tomorrow, and the day after that, will be exactly like this. And when things will never change—can never change—well, that is when hope is truly lost.”
“And that’s why Hell is now. It’s the only way our celestial torturers could stamp out our hope.” I walked over to Bella and reached for her hand.
She willingly took mine, and things just felt perfect … aside from being in Hell.
“Yeah,” Bella said, “but I think it’s a bit deeper than that.”
“Jean-Luc Matthias being shallow? Well, I never,” Judith said in a mocking tone.
“And Judith being a sarcastic b—”
“Play nice.” Bella retracted her hand, folded her arms over her chest and gave us a look perfected by many second-grade teachers. “And as I was saying, I don’t think the point was to stamp out our hope. I think they constructed it this way to mock it. After all, hope is so ingrained in us. Humans built everything we have on hope. To truly remove it would be to change who we are. But torture, to be truly effective, needs to keep our essence intact. Hence the repetition.”
She looked down-river before adding, “And I’m willing to bet that other places in Hell have longer loops … You know, just to keep things interesting.”
I considered her words and saw the truth in their simplicity. “Hell is now,” I mused. “The Devil was a bastard.”
“He was smart,” Bella corrected. “He understood us better than we understood ourselves.”
“Clever, yes.” I pointed at the river’s looping rush. “Still a bastard.”
Bella smirked and Judith scowled, just like the old days. Then the specter pointed in the direction the river would have flowed if time permitted it to do so. “I’m assuming the entrance is that way. Make sense that water would flow into a village or town, rather than away. At least, that’s how we built our own settlements.”
Bella shrugged. “We can’t assume upstream or downstream.”
“Well, we have to make a choice,” I said. “We can’t sit around here all day if time really is limited. And given what’s at stake, whatever choice we make better be right. What happened in Dante’s Inferno?” Then, rubbing my hands through my hair, added, “I don’t suppose anyone brought their smartphone or a copy of the book?”
Judith scowled again. “In the poem, Dante doesn’t encounter a river until they are inside the cave.”
“So we’re looking for a cave, then.” I stretched my memory back to my own reading of the poem. But that was a long time ago and most of my memories of the epic verse came from Penemue quoting it to me and then correcting all the things the Italian bard got wrong.
So really, I was stretching my memories back to the angel Penemue. Thinking of the old drunken fool made my heart ache; he had his flaws, but if you weighed every wrong he ever committed against the good he did, the scales would tip over and away from a place like this.
I shook my head. No time to get sentimental now. Now, we needed to find him and … and … do whatever it took to get him away from here.
Looking over at Bella, I saw that she had stretched out her hands, fingers folded. “What are you doing?” I asked her.
She lifted a shushing finger. “I’m concentrating.”
I was about to ask, “On what?” but that shush floored me with the tidal wave of memories it brought flooding back. It was the same shush she had used a million times during a million arguments that I’d lost, and hearing it again was heaven.
Bella stretched her hands out. “I was brought here as a guide, but I don’t know much more than you. It’s almost like the position of guide needed to be filled, and I was the only applicant. Still, I might not know where he is or what’s happening, but I can feel him. It was his pain that first called me and it is his pain that beckons to me now.”
“So, what are we doing?” I asked. “Some twisted version of The Wizard of Oz, except instead of the Yellow Brick Road, we’re following the echoes of pain?”
Bella lowered her arms and opened her eyes. Her lips pursed as she suppressed a smile. Then one finger went up—another shush—and she started her pain-finding, tai-chi-esque motions.
“What she ever saw in you,” Judith said, drawing near to me, “I’ll never know.”
I looked down at my no-longer-a-ghost of a mother-in-law and said with a wink, “That’s because I’m wearing clothes … So yep, you never will.”
Judith winced at my crassness and, to my satisfaction, stepped away.
In the game of immaturity, I am unrivaled.
↔
As we stood on the river’s bank near the forest that encroached so close to the water, greedy roots popping out of the soil and disappearing into the water, Bella continued her strange motions for seventy-three river loops (I counted) before she finally pointed in the direction that, for a normal river, would have been upstream. “There,” she said.
As soon as those words left her lips, a growl echoed through the shuddering trees and over the water. “That’s not good,” I whispered as Marty tightened around my forearm.
I’d been right. A prescient tingle ran up my spine just before a three-headed monster the size of Labrador leapt from the tree line. The three heads were a wolf, a lion and a leopard.
Seeing the monster reminded me of another fun tidbit Penemue had shared about Hell. “In the Inferno, Dante’s isn’t beset upon by three separate beasts, but rather one beast with three heads.” I
didn’t pay much attention to him then, and seeing that thing now, I really wished I had.
The monster jumped at Bella, its claws raking her extended hand, sending blood gushing from her forearm.
Seeing her in pain sent me into berserker mode, and letting a Rambo-worthy roar, I charged forward and kicked the beast so hard in the ribs that I heard the unmistakable crunch of cracking bone.
The beast fell into the water and writhed in the shallow waves, each head wailing the howls of its species before friggin’ dissolving in the water. Note to self, I thought, do not drink the water.
I rushed over to Bella, who held her arm. Judith was already by her side, ripping the hem of her dress to use as a bandaid. “Are you OK?” was all I managed to say before Marty hissed, his viper’s body leaping off my arm as his fangs dug into the neck of another three-headed beastie.
“Shit,” I yelled as I saw what was coming for us. There was a pack (or was it pride? Or spot?) of these creatures coming at us. They weren’t enormous, but they didn’t need size when they had numbers. “Run,” I yelled, scooping up Marty as we rushed in the direction Bella had pointed.
“Hellelu—ahh, I mean … Empty Hell,” I groaned to myself as we ran.
↔
Bella and Judith ran ahead of me, and even though I had General Shouf’s pistol, I chose not to use it. I only had so many bullets, and if this was what waited for us outside of Hell’s gates, then I could only imagine what waited inside.
Pulling out my hunting sword, I took the rear and chopped down any three-headed monster who got close enough. Fun fact: chop one head off these little beasts and the body dies. I’m guessing they’ve got three heads, one heart.
We followed the river, running as fast as we could while the monsters tracked after us. Based on the pattern they were chasing us in, I knew their tactic immediately. They weren’t trying to run us down—they were trying to tire us out.