by Matt Turner
Something splashed in the filth just beside her. She looked down to see that the corpse that had very nearly crushed her had begun to twitch about. Its movements grew more frantic and convulsive, and Vera took a step back. If this one tries to break my nose, I’ll break his head. The body—she couldn’t tell whether it was man or woman, for it was facedown in the mud—grew more and more agitated, until at last it tore its head out of the filth with one titanic effort. The muck dripped away, exposing its features more clearly.
“Oh Christ,” Vera screamed, for now that she could see the thing more clearly, she could see that it was a man after all, albeit with a third of his skull missing. He screamed something inaudible back, and she turned to run.
All around her, the bodies that had fallen from the sky began to move. Some were relatively undamaged, and rose to their feet easily, while others were broken and crippled from the fall, and flopped about uselessly on the ground. The others recoiled from them with fear and disgust, and now Vera could see that these weren’t corpses at all; they were people, men and women, naked like her, and—if the sound of their cries were anything to go by—just as frightened and disgusted. My fellow inmates. She stopped mid-run, but did not dare to approach any of them. What happens next? The crippled man she had left behind screamed something at her, but she paid no attention to him.
The milling crowd grew larger as more people—some injured, some not—wandered in from all directions. From her position on the outskirts, it was impossible to make out any of the hundreds of conversations that were occurring within the crowd, but it was easy to tell as the tone rapidly shifted from confused to frightened to angry. Just in front of Vera, a nervous burst of energy passed through the crowd as one man suddenly seized another by the arm and raised his fist to strike a blow. Vera had been in her fair share of riots and knew when one was coming; she instinctively began to back away.
CRACK! A loud burst of noise suddenly tore through the air, cutting through the frenzied conversations and immediately seizing everyone’s attention. Vera spun to see the source of the noise and quickly identified it—a man had just emerged from the receding mist. He was too far away to make out any distinguishing features except one: he was clothed. The trousers and tunic he wore were covered in filth, but Vera’s heart leapt at the sight of them. Clothes. She truly began to appreciate just how freezing and miserable she really was.
The clothed man held a white cone to his mouth to better project his voice. “Salve,” he called out. “Hello. Ni-hao. Bonjour. Zdravstvuyte.” He repeated the greeting in half a dozen other languages, using the informal tense whenever it applied. “Konnichiwa.”
Japanese, Vera thought. Wait, how the hell do I know that? Her ankle burned.
The clothed man was overwhelmed by a sheer wall of noise as the crowd hurled a thousand variations of the same questions at him. Where am I? What the hell is going on? Who are you?
Vera was astonished that they didn’t stampede him right then and there.
“Enough,” the man said. “ENOUGH!” he bellowed again when the crowd refused to quiet down. He briefly took the cone away from his lips and yelled something over his back into the mist behind him. “My name is Manuel Andry,” he resumed when at last the tumult of the crowd died. Again, he repeated himself, over and over, in Latin, Russian, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, and several other languages, and again, Vera found that she understood him perfectly each time. “My friends and I are here to welcome you to the Kingdom.”
When he was done talking, Andry pursed his lips together and let out a sharp whistle. In response, a handful of other clothed men began to emerge from the mist. “All will be explained,” Andry promised as his colleagues slowly began to approach the crowd. A few people backed away nervously, but the rest slowly drifted toward Andry’s alluring voice. “Clothes, food, shelter—the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace provides for all its citizens.”
Vera narrowed her eyes at the sound of that. This is wrong, she decided as she carefully surveyed the newcomers. Underneath the filth and sleet, their clothing was identical—same trousers, same shirt, same boots. She flicked her head to the side to see that another dozen of them approached from the opposite side as Andry. Their poise looked uncannily familiar. Soldiers.
“Now, if you could just get into two groups—men on one side, and women on the other.” Through the cone, Andry’s tone was almost conversational and friendly. His colleagues filtered into the crowd and gently began herding them into smaller clusters. The mass of confused and bewildered people meekly obeyed his polite commands. “That’s it, just like that.”
They weren’t dividing the crowd into just men and women; they were going for smaller groups of people. As she watched, she saw two large men—nearly identical in height and size—be separated, one into a group of similarly muscular men, and one into a group of men who had graying beards and sagging bodies. The only significant difference between the two was that one was clearly nursing an arm that had been broken by his fall. They’re separating the strong and the weak.
Vera glanced behind herself and cursed, for another group of men had emerged from the mist behind her. She was now effectively boxed in like a rat in a trap.
“Easy now, everyone,” Andry announced as the crowd shifted and divided. “We’ll be done soon. We just need a little patience.”
Just to Vera’s right, there was a slight gap between the approaching men and the crowd. She began to slowly make her way to it, doing her best to avoid any eye contact.
A woman who had lost both her legs in the explosion of her fall clawed at her from the filth. “Help me,” she gasped out through a mouthful of muck.
Before Vera could respond, a boot came down and gently placed itself on top of the crippled woman’s head. “Salve,” a man said. Vera glanced up to see that one of the clothed men had rushed ahead of the others to intercept her. “What are you doing here?” he asked her in Latin. “You should join the others.” He motioned to the rest of the crowd and gave her a winning smile, crinkling his eyes in the same way a friendly uncle might.
Still, something about the way his lips twitched into position made Vera profoundly uneasy. She gave him a blank stare, gambling that he would think she couldn’t understand him, and started to go back on her way.
“Whoa, there,” the man said, this time in English. He nimbly leapt ahead of Vera, shoving the crippled woman’s face deep into the mud in the process. “You don’t want to go there, sweetheart. Trust me.” To emphasize his point, he raised his arms to block her progress.
Shit. Vera stopped in her tracks. All at once, she was grateful for the mud that covered most of her body—she didn’t like the way the man’s eyes roved over her chest and legs and lingered on the hand she had placed to cover her groin. “Broken face, but not a bad body,” he said in a warm, gentle voice. “You might even be good enough for Dis. Too bad you can’t understand a word I’m saying, you stupid fucking bitch.” He grinned at her and raised a hand to place on her shoulder.
Without even thinking, Vera slapped his hand away.
He blinked in surprise, then smiled. “That’s enough of that, sweetheart. Now go back to the others.” Again, he motioned to the crowd, but now there was a hint of anger in his forceful movements. “You understand?”
“Yes, I understand,” Vera replied.
The man’s mouth gaped open in astonishment at her perfect English. “Why, you—” he snarled, and he leapt forward to grab her. She nimbly dodged his clumsy attack and laughed as he lost his balance and slipped into the muck. “Bitch!” he screamed as he struggled to wipe the freezing shit from his face.
There was no time to think; Vera sprinted away into the mist.
“Stop her!” Andry’s voice called out behind her.
The muscles in her legs were tired and freezing, but she ignored the pain and ran, faster and faster, even though the mud viciously clawed at her feet, ignoring the calls from the cripples who still lay uselessly in the filth and the men wh
o pursued her. The mist grew thicker around her, and again she could hear the cacophony of the storm ahead. I’ll lose them there. She sprinted for the source of the sound—and suddenly stopped in horror.
The mist abruptly burned away in front of her, giving her a clear view of what lay ahead. Just as before, a man with a loudspeaker barked commands, and just as before, a crowd of naked, miserable men and women lurched before him—but here there were chains. Dozens of the clothed men roamed up and down the lines of the wretched before them, brutally beating them down to the ground with whips, clubs, and even blades when they encountered even a hint of resistance. Even more of them knelt before their captives, clacking on shackles and manacles. There must be thousands of them, Vera realized. An army of slaves stretched before her. Not even the crippled lying in the filth were safe. Hundreds of slaves combed through the mud, seizing any of the broken bodies that they found, and hurled them on massive carts that were themselves lashed to more slaves.
“God,” Vera whispered.
Too late, she heard the clash of something mechanical approaching her. She turned just in time to have a glimpse of something long and metallic splash into the mud next to her, and then something slammed into her thigh. She howled as pain engulfed her entire leg—and then screamed in fear as the thing grabbed her and lifted her high into the air, flipping her upside down and making her world a blur of movement and confusion.
“Well, well, what do we have here,” a voice drawled just beside her.
She twisted her head about and saw that one of the slavers was frowning at her. Five meters below, the world shifted and tilted. A wave of nausea twisted her empty stomach into a knot.
“That one’s ours!”
Just out of the corner of her eye, Vera caught a glimpse of her pursuers. The man she had knocked down was among them, more mud-crusted than ever, and glaring at her with a look of pure hate.
“Finders keepers,” the slaver who was somehow right beside her said. “This one’ll fetch a pretty penny in Dis.”
“Her face is all fucked,” the other slaver yelled up. “We’re taking this one to the Fourth Circle. Now hand her over.”
Vera’s captor laughed. “You think they give a shit about faces in Dis? No, this one’s mine.”
“No tits and no ass. That one’s a bitch, not a whore!”
“You think I care—” Her captor started to snarl down.
“I’m taking her myself, and if you have a problem with that, go to Cenodoxa. Now give that bitch to me, right fucking now.”
Vera’s captor was silent for a moment. At last, he sighed. “It seems our time together is over, my dear,” he said.
Something clanked above Vera, and her body twisted about, giving her a better view of what was going on. The man who had captured her was operating some kind of strange mechanical contraption that looked like a pair of enormous stilts, complete with a cage of sorts to hold their operator. A pair of clockwork arms extended from the operator’s cage—it was one of them that currently dangled Vera so high above the slavers below.
“Best be careful, dear,” the slaver stage-whispered to her through the bars of the cage. “That one down there don’t much like ladies. They call him Pliers for a reason. Can’t say I envy you.” He fidgeted with his controls and the iron grip on Vera’s leg began to loosen. “Oh, and welcome to the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace!” He chuckled at her expression, and then Vera’s leg finally came free.
For a sickening moment, she had a horrible sensation of falling—and then her body slammed down into the ground, and everything went briefly, mercifully black.
10
Consciousness slowly returned to John—at first a dim awareness of his ragged breathing, and then a burst of light as he opened his eyes. Through his tears, he could make out the looming trees of the dark forest still surrounding him. A wave of disappointment crashed down on his soul. I failed.
His head felt as though it were pinned in place against the tree which he still hung from. He moved his arm to free himself. Nothing happened. What? He twisted his eyes as far to the right as they could go and was only able to make out the dim outline of bark. My arm… Again, he tried to move his arms, and again, nothing happened. It was as if his arms were encased in stone—he was utterly unable to move either one of them.
Panic began to set in. He tried kicking his legs forward, and although he could just barely feel his muscles tense, he may as well have been trying to move a mountain for all the good it did him. No, he desperately thought. This can’t be happening. He furiously tried to jerk his body in every direction to free himself, to no avail. From the neck down, he was utterly paralyzed.
Fear rose like bile in his throat. Help me, he tried to scream out, but his lips would not form the words. He tried to pry them apart, but something had encased the lower half of his face in an iron vise. Speech was impossible. Stay calm, a distant part of his mind tried to say. John could feel his eyes bulging out in utter fear. His eyes roved around like insane globes, searching for any possibility of help.
Now that he was paying more attention to them, he realized the trees in this forest were far different than the ones of Massachusetts—they were taller, darker, and covered in coarse barbs and thorns that jutted out in every direction. Many were so massive that they towered far above John’s line of sight, blocking out much of the blood-red sky. A soft breeze made their jagged limbs twitch and groan in a manner eerily similar to men.
Just across from John, two branches began to convulse in the wind. Like arms, they reached out toward him. Like arms… There was a strange thorn-coated bulge in the trunk of the tree where the branches came from. And just above that…
A pair of eyes, nearly completely covered by a thick layer of dark-green bark, blinked at him. Just below it, the tree trunk ever-so-slightly twitched. Oh God.
John tried to open his lips to let out a shriek of utter horror and despair, but the thick layer of bark around his face was immovable—all that came out from the base of his throat was a hint of a groan that joined the choir of the forest about him. John Hale had no mouth, and he needed to scream.
He had no idea how long he was trapped there in the hellish forest, unable to do anything but mourn, and weep, and dwell on his past mistakes. The madness of his imprisonment came and went, clawing at his sanity, until at last it finally died down as his soul slipped into the darkest place it had ever known. God, let me die, he prayed over and over, but he knew that it was useless. There was no more mercy for him.
“John Hale…”
John’s eyes jerked open at the sound of his name. What was that? He frantically scanned the dark forest before him, but there was nothing but the twitching of branches and the faint moans of the damned. Someone’s there.
“Joooooooooohn Hale….”
The soft voice was certainly closer now. Fear grew in John’s chest. Who could be looking for me? His thoughts raced. Satan, a voice in his mind whispered. No doubt the fallen angel was coming for him, ready to drag him into the deepest, darkest depths of Hell. Or even worse…a memory of Tituba sprang to his mind. I’ll find you, John Hale, the witch had screamed as the flames licked at her body. In Hell. He would have pissed himself at the memory if he had been able.
Go away, John prayed. Please, don’t let her find me. He closed his eyes, willing the tree to utterly swallow him up and protect him from the coming damnation.
Even through the bark, he could make out the sound of sticks breaking under the trod of feet. “There you are, Reverend,” the singsong voice said merrily. The devil behind it slowly walked toward him—the echoes of its footfalls sounded horribly like the cracking of bones, John imagined.
John squeezed his eyes even more tightly shut. Just let me be.
“Don’t be shy, Johnny,” the thing said. Hot breath washed over what little was exposed of John’s face. “Don’t you want to just sneak a peek?”
No. Here, in this petty last act of defiance, he’d make his last stand. It may be
too late for salvation, but he still had his pride—
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” the voice said impatiently. “Just open your goddamn eyes and tell me if you’re John Hale or not.”
John couldn’t help but snap his eyes open at that.
“BOO!” Half a foot away, a young man grinned at the silent fear in John’s eyes.
“Forgive me, John, I couldn’t resist.” The stranger laughed. He took a step back and carefully studied the tree trunk with a pair of bright, cunning eyes. “You are John Hale, correct? Born in Massachusetts Bay 1656, suicide by hanging in 1692?”
John could do nothing but blink. He had no idea what to make of the stranger standing before him. His pale, clean-shaven face, topped with a crop of messy red hair, had a manic energy about it, particularly in his eyes. A hint of a cruel smirk seemed to perpetually tug at the corners of the stranger’s mouth, and below that… John’s heart sank when he saw the necklace of what looked like human molars decorating the young man’s neck. The rest of his body was hidden underneath a long black cloak, aside from a belt around his waist. Two dark-stained cloth bags hung from it, bouncing off his hips with every step. The entire effect of his peculiar appearance quickly led John to one conclusion.
He’s utterly mad.
“Welp, guess I have to trust you.” The stranger shrugged. He reached into the folds of his robe and drew out a wicked knife—it looked more as though it had been ripped out of the spine of some hideous creature than made by a blacksmith. “Best hope you’re not lying to me, friend.”
He took a step toward John and gently placed the blade against the bark where John’s mouth should be. “Now, this may hurt just a smidge,” he said with a smile that showed off far too many of his teeth. “And—” He gouged down with the knife into the bark.