by Tad Williams
“Hello, Lameh,” I said.
“She doesn’t really talk any more,” Temuel said. “Not out loud, anyway. She’s very old.”
Which was an odd thing to say. I’d never heard anyone mention a guardian angel’s age.
“But she’s going to help you. She knows a lot, and she’s going to share it with you.”
“Knows a lot about what?”
“About Hell, of course.” Temuel did something, and suddenly the spark was smoldering on the end of his index finger. “You need to know much more than you do, or you’re going to be spotted as soon as you get there.” His face grew stern. “This isn’t a game, Bobby.”
“I know, I know!” But I couldn’t help wondering why this Lameh had so much information about Hell—not the normal college major for a guardian angel. Before I could think of a discreet way to ask, the archangel leaned forward and put his finger to my ear and something jumped into my head. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was just as odd as it sounds. Then Temuel took me by the arm and steered me back out of the Zipper again before closing the fiery, midair hole behind us.
“Now go home, Bobby,” my boss said. “Go to sleep and Lameh will do the rest. She’ll tell you what you need to know, then take you where you need to be.”
I knew the feeling of a guardian passing me information, so I wasn’t too upset about having something foreign in my thoughts, but I still had questions for Temuel. He, on the other hand, seemed to be finished with the conversation and was climbing the stairs that led out of the plaza. I called to him but he didn’t reply. Halfway up he broke into a trot, then a run, as if he were exactly the twelve-year-old kid he looked to be.
“Call me when you get back!” the archangel shouted as he melted into the shadows of the surrounding buildings.
When I got to the Walker house, I didn’t bother to check in with G-Man, but just climbed in through one of the unlocked windows and made my way upstairs. The sheet was still there from earlier in the day, and I took it with me as I slid under the bed, then rolled myself in it so it was under me and over me, covering my face and everything else. It was hard to ignore the fact that it was pretty much exactly like the shrouds people get buried in.
Lameh was in my head, just where Temuel had put her, murmuring words I could barely understand, things that sounded more like incantations than useful facts, and which entered me not like knowledge but like a chemical transfer. I did my best to relax and just let it trickle through me. It wasn’t like I could actually understand her anyway. She wasn’t telling me the names of things or the chief annual exports of various regions of the underworld. Everything she said was just a feeling I had, as though some benign but strange little animal had made a home deep in my skull and was going about its strange animal business there. But every now and then I could perceive things that hadn’t been there before, as if I had fallen asleep in a misty rain and now was feeling the water beginning to pool and run down my skin. I did my best to get comfortable.
At last I slipped into drowsy darkness, and for a little while that hard-to-hear voice accompanied me as I settled down, down. For a time I dreamed I was standing outside a door, knowing that the saddest thing in the world was on one side of it, but I didn’t know for certain which side the sadness was on, my side or the one I couldn’t see.
At last even the dream was gone, and I was alone with the near-silent whisper, sinking slowly into oblivion.
On my way.
On my way down.
All the way down.
interlude
I WAS ADMIRING a mole on her back, a smooth brown dot just below her shoulder blade, like a fairy-mound in a snow-covered field.
“So how did Hell know to put that perfect mole right there on your perfect back to make me fall in love with you?”
She snorted. “Right. Like Hell bothered to plan for you, Dollar. That happens to be my own original mole, direct from the Fifteenth Century.”
I bent and bestowed a kiss on the icy skin, then moved up to where the first pale wisps of hair grew on her nape. I spent a little while kissing her neck and ears and savoring the smell of her. I’ll never be able to describe it, not in its complex entirety, but I will never forget it even if I somehow beat the odds and survive to become a very, very old angel. Which would be a very long time.
After a while I started back down the other direction, rubbing my face against the smooth, chilly bumps of her spine as I descended, stopping to pay my respects at the fairy-hill mole again, then continuing on down her back to the soft protrusion of her tailbone and the cleft of her buttocks. Some Greek guy, Aristotle or Plato or Onassis or someone, said there were five perfect solids, five absolute geometric shapes. To these I would like to add the shape of Caz’s ass, because if you’re looking for perfection, well, there it is. I think it’s a tribute to my maturity that I’d already pretty much fallen in love with her without ever seeing it in the firm, silken flesh. Once I had . . . well, I don’t want to overwhelm everyone with sentiment here.
A little while later:
Her slender back stretched out before me like stone smoothed by ocean waves. The curve of her backside was flattened against my groin. As I entered her, she let out a gasp, and I felt her tighten, then freeze like a terrified animal. I paused.
“Does it hurt?” I asked. I let my hands trail down her skin. “Do you want me to stop?”
“I don’t know. Yes. No.” She tried to look back at me, but the angle was bad. “It’s just . . . it feels so vulnerable. I don’t . . .” She trailed off. “I’m sorry, I do need to stop. Can you just hold me?”
“Of course.” I withdrew gently, then pulled her with me as I collapsed onto the bed, so that the cold length of her back was against my belly. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close. “I didn’t really want to have more sex, anyway,” I said. “I know people say they like it, but I think the whole fad is kind of overrated.” I felt her quivering silently against me. Was she laughing? It hadn’t been much of a joke.
When she hadn’t stopped a few moments later, I asked, “Caz? Are you crying?”
“No.” But I could feel the back of my arm getting damp. I leaned away and tried to turn her face toward me, but she wasn’t having it. She wiped angrily at her eyes before she’d let me look at her. “Just fuck off, Dollar. Don’t say anything.”
“What’s wrong? Did I do something?”
“No, you didn’t. It’s not always about you.”
“Then what?”
She blinked, scowled. “I’m just not . . . I don’t do tenderness very well.” She snuck a look at me before burying her head against my arms again. “Arsehole. Don’t make me self-conscious, or I’ll go back and get my knife and I will cut off your winkie.”
Ah, the romance of threatened castration!
I just held her until she felt better, then we kissed and whispered for a little before dozing again. The Countess of Cold Hands had many wounded places, many broken places, but what was astonishing to me is how much I cared about those hurts, how much I wanted to try to make things better for her. That was by far the scariest thing that had ever happened to me.
Caz was a high-ranking official in Hell, she was my sworn, deadly enemy . . . and she had issues. Any remotely sensible angel, even at that late stage of things, would have got up then and run out the door and never looked back. But, of course, I’ve never been that kind of angel.
thirteen
gob
SO ONE moment I’m lying under somebody’s spare bed like a bargain basement King Tut, the next I’m in deep, deep darkness. And things got even stranger after that, because the darkness was bumpy.
I’m not talking texture here, like undercooked oatmeal, I’m talking about the fact that I could feel myself going bump, bump, bump as I went down, as though I were being lowered by very clumsy hands. I was in some kind of closet or tiny room. No, I realized as the entire enclosure lurched around me, throwing me toward one of the walls. No, I was in an e
levator. I was descending to Hell in an elevator, ratcheting down on a squeaky cable toward the ultimate basement floor. I wondered if other new arrivals got different conveyances. Handbaskets, for instance.
I felt different, I realized, and it wasn’t just the sudden absence of Lameh the guardian angel (apparently she herself wasn’t accompanying me) or the presence of the ideas she’d whispered into my memory. My whole body felt different in ways I couldn’t quite understand, and the feeling was so strange that it took me longer than it should have to realize that I must be in a new body as well, that as part of her duties Lameh had housed my soul in something more suited to travel in Hell. A new body and a few new thoughts, too, but the same old hopeless situation.
I found it all very creepy for those first moments, but as the jolting descent continued, my situation just became boring. Then the very boredom, the length and unrelenting sameness of the journey, became creepy again. If it hadn’t been for a few bone-rattling jolts and the very occasional smolder of light through the little window that seemed to be in front of my face, I might have been in some kind of endless video loop, the same meaningless five seconds cycling for eternity. I was fairly certain that Hell’s high rollers didn’t travel in and out this way, since it seemed to be taking hours.
The long descent gave me time to take a little stock. I lifted up my hands to see if I could get some idea what my Hell-body looked like. They seemed darker than usual and the nails were nearly claws, but otherwise not too freaky. There wasn’t enough light to make out any of the rest of me, but I bent what I could bend, felt what I could feel. Mostly it seemed pretty normal, although my skin definitely seemed thicker than before, a bit like the rubbery hide of dolphins and orcas.
At last, the elevator shuddered to a halt with a whine of metal on metal. The door banged open. I half-expected to see Housewares or the Children’s Shoes department or something, but instead I stood on one side of a narrow expanse of yellow dust, everything above me and beside me lost in shadow. But it was a big space—that much I could tell. Impossibly big. On the far side of the dust loomed the Neronian Bridge, my first glimpse of that impossible span of stone. The featureless bridge curved up and across the monstrous abyss until it narrowed into near-invisibility over the pit’s dark center, illuminated only by the fiery red glow licking through cracks in the walls.
I had enough light now to look at myself. My hands were roughly human, but my skin color (or colors, to be more accurate) wasn’t even close; what I could see was ashy gray with stripes of black and orange. At the joints the skin hardened into black plates, and when I twisted my arm or leg I could see bright red flesh appearing or disappearing in the crevices as the plates pulled apart. It was a bit unsettling, to tell the truth, so I stopped doing it. I felt my head, which seemed fairly ordinary except that where I normally would have had hair I was feeling something more like bristles or even quills. No horns, then. My feet were flat black and leathery, with only one division, between my big toe and the rest of my foot, like Japanese tabi socks. If that was standard issue for demons, I could understand where the idea of hooves had come from. No tail, either, which was a bit of a relief. In fact, everything I could see except for my color and my toes felt and looked at least human-ish. Could have been a lot worse.
I felt different on the inside as well, but it was impossible to know whether all the new sensations flooding into me were because I was wearing a new body or because I was in Hell. Still, I reminded myself, this body might be strange and the skin tones might be un peu poison-dart frog, but what was important was that my new demon shape was like an astronaut’s suit; it was going to help keep me safe in this very unhealthy place.
I already told you what happened on the Neronian Bridge. Here’s what happened when I stepped off it and into the hot, thick mist at the edge of Hell.
I had been expecting something like the old border crossing into East Berlin or maybe even the Black Gate into Mordor, but instead entering the Bad Place was as easy as stepping out of a taxicab—at least at first.
From what the guardian Lameh had planted in my memory, I knew I must be in the Abaddon levels, somewhere in the upper middle of Hell. But if this was upper middle, I knew for sure I didn’t want to visit anything lower, because even before I could see any of it, I could smell it. Abaddon stank. I don’t mean simple, ordinary foul odors like shit or rotting meat. I mean a combination of every foul smell that biology and geology could create, blended into a heady bouquet that combined not only all that a nose would normally detest, but wafts of things so odd and unexpected—like copper and burning hay, just to throw out a couple of examples—that I simply could not get used to it. I never really did, either. The architects of the underworld were, excuse the pun, fiendishly clever: They knew that a single stench, or even a million unchanging stenches, can become familiar after a while. But small changes can keep anything new, no matter how horrible. As long as I was there, I never learned to ignore the stink.
As I left the bridge behind and walked through the swirl of stinging, acid mist, voices filled the hot, damp near-darkness, some human, some animal, some horribly in-between—shrieks, moans, arguments, even tatters of laughter that sounded as though they had been jerked painfully out of whatever spawned them. The noise of the damned. Pretty much what you’d expect. The air was horribly hot and slimy, muggy as the worst August day in the New York subway times a thousand. Already I could feel the gears grinding at the interface between what my mind expected my body to do—pump gallons of sweat as quickly as possible—and what the demon body actually did, which was nothing. This was normal, you see, and the body I wore treated it that way. One hundred and forty degrees and drippy as a Florida swamp? No problem.
Lovely day, sir and madam. Expect it might rain diarrhea later so I brought my brolly, eh what? Cheerio!
As I emerged from the mists near the bridge I could see for the first time where I actually was.
According to Lameh’s briefing, facts now stuck in my brain like some kind of half-forgotten college survey course, Hell is a monstrous cylinder, wide as a small country and almost infinitely high and low, its countless habitations piled in layers like some impossibly huge core sample, the pith of an entire world. Abaddon, like much of Hell, was a sort of self-contained country made up of several levels, and its cities were built almost entirely from the wreckage of other cities.
“Wreckage” sure seemed to describe what lay before me. Stones and mud had been dragged into new arrangements, the rubble of old towers and walls rebuilt into a thousand new shapes to make an immense insect hive with scarcely two shoulders’ width of passageway between the stacked structures, and every bit I could see teemed with hellish life. The variety of body shapes was astonishing. Some of them could hardly be called bodies in a normal sense, being little more than moving piles of goo (often disconcertingly full of eyes); others wore the shapes of beasts or half-beasts, or upsetting reworkings of the basic human form. One of them a short distance away from me, crawling up a muddy facade of linked and interconnected holes over flimsy ladders of wood and mud and twisted rawhide, looked like one of those giant Japanese crabs with incredibly long legs, except each of this creature’s legs had a row of human hands growing down its length. The head perched on top of the crab shell was human, too, and looked as if it was whistling a tune.
But now I noticed something even stranger than that. Just a few yards behind me in the mist lay the near end of the Neronian Bridge, a path that led both in and out of Hell, but nobody on the Hell side seemed to realize the bridge was there. I watched people walk into the mist and go right past the end of the bridge as if it were invisible. Maybe it was, for them. All those people stumbling around in misery only yards from a way out that they couldn’t see. Suddenly, I felt sick. If I had not yet truly realized where I was and how bad it was going to be, I began to grasp it then.
There was no sky, of course. The makers of Hell hadn’t needed to bow to physical reality any more than the folk who b
uilt Heaven, and the very shape of the place was meant to be a constant reminder of confinement and punishment. Parts of Abaddon, however, did stretch very high above me, especially along the walls where crude materials were scaffolded upward many times the height of a man; but above it all was a great roof of jagged, pitted rock. We looked up at the bottom of the level above us, not at sky.
Weird and new as all this was, I had very little time to drink it in, because as soon as I stepped out of the mist, I was surrounded closely by noise and stink, bumped and jostled by some of the ugliest fuckers you’ve ever seen.
“Worms!” A froggy-looking guy with no back legs waved a sheaf of blackened, muddy sticks in the air. “Crispy like you like ’em!”
“Gin! Swaller of gin, just a spit.” This from a guy who looked as though he’d been sawed apart by a very bad magician and put back together by the magician’s amateur-surgeon brother. His off-kilter eyes caught me staring. “You, there. You look like you need one. Guarantee you’ll not have a clear thought again ’til last lamp. Only a spit!”
Last lamp. Lameh’s inserted memories stirred. There was no daylight or moonlight here, so first lamp was lit to signify morning, a second at midday, then one of those was put out and they went back to a single lamp until day’s end. (The fiery cracks in the walls, which provided the only brightness after day’s end, were called “afterlights.”) And a “spit” was an iron coin. The gin was almost certainly made from something horrible and did not tempt me in the least. Hell is remarkably realistic compared to Heaven, which I guess makes sense—real nakedness, real food, real shit, real money, you name it. The fairy lights and muted, pastels of the Celestial City were looking better and better by comparison, and I’d only been in Hell for a few heartbeats.