by Mark Teppo
Rudolph passed through the apogee of his leap, and I felt the change in the air as soon as he started descending. My skin stopped freaking out. My lungs stopped panicking when they realized they might actually get good air soon, and when I felt Rudolph land on solid ground, I opened my eyes.
We were through.
The second circle of hell was an endless desert. We went from spongy fog-shrouded darkness to orange sky and pure white sand. There was no sun, just a sky the jaundiced color of a rotten orange, and the sand looked like it had been heat steamed of all color over the course of several millennia.
I gasped for air, and started choking as my lungs filled with hot air.
So that much was true: it was hot in hell.
"A towel wouldn't have been enough," Donner gasped as he landed behind us.
My gaze was drawn to the line between the two circles. The wall of crabs was coming down as the crabs lost their cohesion. The burning ones kept crawling forward, and as soon as they crossed the line, they flash-burned to ash, creating a thickening haze of drifting ash.
Of the team, only Rudolph was unaffected by the temperature. Blitzen was still wearing his rig, and while the reindeer moved a little more sprightly without the weight across their backs, I could tell the heat was taking its toll.
"Let's get moving," I said to Rudolph.
Rudolph nodded and moved out, trotting on a course perpendicular to the line between the circles. We kept to the ground. While flying would get us off the hot sand, it took concentration and a reserve of energy that none of the team had. Tongues dangling, the rest of the team followed Rudolph and me across the second circle of hell.
Dante claimed this circle was the prison of the lustful, where they were held captive by winds created from their own lecherous desires, but as we crested dune after dune, I started to think that Dante had gotten this one wrong. A wind had blown here once, because sand dunes didn't arrange themselves, but it hadn't blown in a long time. The sand was pristine and unmarked—not unlike the beach sand at the Le Grand Courlan Spa Resort.
The boatman had warned me against trusting Dante. The first circle certainly hadn't been as dull and boring as the poet had led me to believe. Unless the crab creatures were some demonic interpretation of being unbaptized, but I wasn't sure how you went from "Whoops, I forgot to get dunked in the river" to "OMG! I am teh hungerzz!"
"Maybe Dante got it backwards," I mused out loud.
"How's that?" Rudolph asked.
"Dante said the first circle was where the lost souls went. The second was where the lustful were imprisoned. But it sort of seems like he got them reversed," I said.
"Great," Comet groused. He was near enough to have overheard our conversation. "So the map is wrong."
"I never said it was right," I countered. "It's a metaphor. We interpret hell in our—"
"Bla bla bla," Comet interrupted. "This isn't a poetry—"
His leading hoof disappeared into the sand. He stumbled forward, trying to catch himself with his other hoof. That leg sunk into the dirt as well, and he barely managed to avoid a full face-plant. He struggled to pull himself out of the sand, but the ground shivered around him, sucking him down.
"Grab him," Rudolph shouted as he pranced close to the sinking reindeer. I wrapped one hand through the harness straps and leaned over, straining to reach Comet's rack.
The dune was shifting around Comet, trying to bury him at the same time it was sucking him down. The ground beneath Rudolph's hooves remained firm though, and I managed to wrap my hand around Comet's antlers. "I got him," I said to Rudolph, who started to back up. Comet stopped thrashing, and I groaned as the tug-of-war between the quicksand and Rudolph stretched me tight. I was suddenly aware of just how sweaty my palms were.
Donner charged over, sliding to a stop next to Rudolph, and he locked his antlers in Comet's, adding his incredible strength to Rudolph's. It was enough to overcome the pull of the sand, and Comet slid out so quickly it was almost as if something had spit him out. The dune quivered, grains of sand tumbling in a narrow wave, and then stopped.
I looked, and looked again. But I couldn't tell where the quicksand began. It all looked the same. The other reindeer crowded around, wondering what had just happened.
"It was right there," Comet said, nodding at the sand. "Something grabbed me."
"Where?" Blitzen said, his nose cautiously stretched toward the ground.
"There!" Comet said, and when Blitzen stopped moving, he amended his answer. "No, to your left."
"Here?" Blitzen tapped the sand lightly with his hoof, and nothing happened. He moved his hoof to the left and tapped again. "Here?"
"Yes," Comet said, struggling upright. "It was right there." He stomped over, ignoring my squawk of alarm, and banged his hooves against the sand. "It was . . . right . . . . It was right here!"
He glared at us. We stared back. Nothing moved on the desert. And no reindeer sank.
"Okay," Rudolph said. "It's a mystery, but let's not dwell on it. Keep moving. Watch your step. You know the drill. We're easy targets when we stand around like this."
My arms ached, and I leaned against Rudolph's neck. His skin was warm, and I could feel a distant quiver in his muscles. He was tired. We all were. "We're easy targets anyway," I murmured. "Anyone watching can see us coming for kilometers."
Rudolph leaped forward suddenly, and my head snapped back as I tried to hang on. He pranced about, bouncing me around on his back. "St-st-st-stop it," I chattered. "What's wrong?"
A tiny whirlpool turned in the sand where he had been standing. It stopped as I watched, filling up and smoothing out until there was no sign anything had happened.
"We're surrounded," Vixen muttered. "They're under the sand." He squawked in surprise as the sand sucked at his front hooves, dragging him down to a kneeling position. The others leapt to his assistance, dragging him out of the quicksand, and he stood gingerly a few meters away from where he had been standing. We all stared at the flat sand, squinting for some sign that something had actually disturbed the sand.
"There's nothing here," Ring said. He nosed my leg and directed my attention to the way we had come. "All it wants is to stay that way."
All sign of our passage across the desert was gone. There were no hoofprints.
What happens to the lustful when they finally give up?" Blitzen asked. "What becomes of them then?"
"Despair," Ring answered.
Blitzen nodded. "They lose hope, and that's when the sand claims them." He pawed the ground. "How long has it been since Dante wrote Inferno? More than seven hundred years. None of the souls here lasted that long."
"What? You mean eternity came and went, and we missed it?" Comet was still stepping gingerly, as if he expected the ground to open up at any moment.
Blitzen shook his head. "No, they may still here. For centuries, they were tormented by what they didn't have, and after a long time—a very long time—they gave up. They couldn't sustain that desire any longer, and that's when the sand took them." He tapped the sand. "They're down there somewhere, entombed in this sand by their own hopelessness. An oubliette of eternal despair."
"That's depressing," Prancer said.
Blitzen cocked his head. "Don't dwell on it," he said. "I'm not, and that's why I'm still standing."
"That's only because using words like oubliette makes you all tingly," Comet said. He titled his head and tried to shake out some sand that had found its way into his ear. "Okay, Mr. Sunshine, if you're right, then all we have to do is keep our mood up, and we'll be fine."
I stared off at the endless ridges of sand dunes, and Rudolph snorted at me as he quickly pulled a back hoof from the cloying sand. "Sorry," I said. "The idea is a little daunting. We have no idea how long it's going to take to cross this desert."
Rudolph kept moving as the sand kept trying to suck him down. "Knock it off," he growled. "Or you're walking."
"Carols," Ring giggled. "We can sing carols." He pranced around Rudol
ph. "Oh, you know Dasher and Dancer and—"
"Not that one." Rudolph glared at him.
Prancer nudged the bigger reindeer with his shoulder. "Loosen up, you old stick in the . . . uh, sand," he said, trotting off and nodding for Ring to follow him. "Come on, kid. I'll teach you a new one. "Ambrose the amber-assed antelope had a very shiny ass," he sang in a clear contralto. "And if you ever saw it . . ."
Ring skipped along beside Prancer. "Saw it. Saw it. Saw it," he sang.
I slapped Rudolph's flank gently, starting him out of the mood he was in. "Made of brass," I said. "You'd say it was made of brass. Come on, you know how it goes."
Rudolph exhaled noisily, and the stern flick of an ear in my direction was the only acknowledgement I got that he had heard me. He fell in behind the rest of the team as they followed Prancer and Ring, though he didn't join in with the other reindeer games.
He had a different way of maintaining focus. As always.
After carols came an extensive Elvis retrospective. Throats were past parched as we hit the last years of the King's life, but the reindeer kept on, their voices falling to rattling whispers as they trotted and staggered across the hot sand. I lay flat on Rudolph's back, soaked with both mine and Rudolph's sweat—and well past caring about it.
I had long since given up on trying to keep track of how far we had gone—counting dunes was just asking to get clobbered by a depressing thought. Depression was tantamount to giving in, and we all knew what happened then. The team was tired, and the idea of having to pull someone out of quicksand was almost enough to open up the sand right then.
Prancer was teaching Ring something like the fifth alternate version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" when the young reindeer squeaked.
"Lookit, lookit, lookit," Ring crowed.
I raised my head and glanced at the prancing reindeer on the top of the next dune. The team staggered up the slope and spread out, and when Rudolph reached the top, I struggled up.
In the distance, past a very finite number of dunes, a dark line ran along the horizon.
"Hooray," I croaked. "Something new."
"We made it," Ring sighed.
"Almost," Rudolph said. He went ahead, stepping and sliding down the far side of the dune. The others followed, slowly.
Still, step by step, the dark line got darker. And thicker.
IX
The line became a bank of black clouds straining in chaotic motion at the edge of the desert. There was no sign of any ground, and when we reached the verge of the second circle, we saw why: the desert simply ended in a sheer cliff. Comet walked to the edge of the cliff, ignoring Blitzen's warning, and sniffed the boiling clouds carefully.
"They're just storm clouds," he said. "You can smell the rain." A bolt of lightning flashed somewhere within the cloudbank, and thunder shook the cliff.
Comet backed up, and we all watched part of a dune quiver and slide over the edge of the cliff. The white sand was picked up by the winds of the third circle, and the clouds swallowed the grains instantly.
Rudolph was eyeing the tall plumes of clouds, and I knew he was wondering what the air was like up there. There was a definite temptation to fly over the cloud cover, as they had so many snowstorms during Zero Hour. But it was a dangerous temptation to succumb to.
Ring strayed close to the edge, his nose working. "It stinks," he whined. "Like Brussels sprouts."
"Where?" Comet joined him, testing the air too. "I didn't—oh, yeah, there." He made a face, sticking out his tongue. "Oof. That's not good."
"We have to go down," I said, mostly for Rudolph's benefit. "You descend into hell. We can't fly over this." I had pulled out the book, speed-reading to figure out what Dante had written about the third circle.
And I had just hit the spot where he talked about the guardian of the third circle. The big one.
Rudolph lowered his horns grimly, as if he were going to charge the storm. "Down it is," he said.
"I'm not going first this time," Comet said. Whatever was down there, he had smelled it too. And he looked a little green.
I glanced at the others. We were haggard and exhausted, and this was only the third ring. I didn't have the heart to tell them how many more there were. Blitzen caught me looking at him, and I quickly gazed back down at the book.
I saw the word my finger was resting on—misery—and I quickly closed the book. That wasn't helping.
Blitzen sighed, reading something in my sudden panic about the book, and lowered his antlers. He gently prodded Comet in the rear.
Comet danced forward in surprise and then realized he'd been suckered as he danced right off the edge of the cliff. He took it gracefully though, and turned his moment of shock into a somewhat graceful leap. The clouds embraced him, and we heard his caterwauling shout as he dived.
Blitzen jumped off next. Cupid shook his head as the second reindeer vanished. "Lemmings," he sighed as he followed the first two. The rest followed in quick succession. Once a couple go, the rest follow. Reindeer stick together like that.
Ring backed away from the edge until he bumped into Rudolph. "It really stinks," he said.
Rudolph walked around Ring, and glanced back when he reached the edge of the cliff. "You can't stay here," he said gently.
"I could," Ring protested. "I could wait for you right here. I'm good at waiting."
A ghost of a smile touched Rudolph's lips. "No you're not," he said. "You didn't wait for us to come back to the Residence."
Ring hung his head. He took one step forward, and then his nose started working again, and he backed up two steps. He was quivering from nervous exhaustion, and I was struck by how young he really was. The others were old Zero Hour veterans. They had done the impossible more than once. They might not like what was asked of them, but they knew how to push themselves.
"Come on," Rudolph said. "We don't leave any behind."
"But, on the barge . . . ? You said I was expendable."
The smile vanished as a ghost of old memories darkened Rudolph's eyes. "No one is expendable," he said. "I was making"—he shrugged as if it didn't really matter what he had been trying to do—"Come on, little buck. It's time to fly."
Ring still balked. He knew what Rudolph was saying, but his hooves refused to cooperate. He was a sniffer, that one, and he couldn't turn his nose off. The noxious odor assailing him was paralyzing the motor function center of his brain.
Rudolph snapped at Ring, baring his teeth, and the little reindeer spooked. Ring bolted—in the wrong direction at first, but he corrected quickly and nearly flew past Rudolph as he sprinted off the edge of the cliff. He dropped soundlessly into the clouds.
Rudolph didn't move. "There. I apologized. You happy?"
"I'd pencil in a note to be thrilled later," I croaked. "Right after my note to fall down in stunned amazement. Hang on. Let me see if there's a pen in my utility belt."
Rudolph took two steps forward, and as soon as we left the white sand, the wind rose around us. "You can write your memoir later," he said as he flew into the storm of the third circle.
There are reports that Venus harbors a horrifically violent atmosphere beneath its gently swirling cloud cover. I've read a couple articles in Sky & Telescope filled with graphs and charts comparing our pleasant Earthly weather to the raging hurricanes that blow night and day across the barren face of Venus. Somewhere between the two extremes fell the weather of the third circle of hell. The weather was only tempered by the fact that if the wind was blowing that hard, you couldn't really enjoy the stench rising from the landfill that lay beneath the storm clouds.
Rudolph's descent was initially an out-of-control freefall defying the laws of physics and gravity that shoved my stomach between my lungs and spine. We didn't fall that long—or maybe it was forever, and my brain blocked it all out—and when we broke through the layer of clouds, the wind dropped in intensity to a good, stiff kite-flying sort of breeze.
My ears were ringing, and I felt like I had just be
en wrapped in burlap and trampled by a herd of musk ox. The ground, which I smelled well before I got a good look at it, came up quickly, and Rudolph botched the landing. He smashed through a mound of garbage, and I lost my grip on the book as a banana peel tried to force its way up my nose.
I tumbled to a stop in a mountain of used coffee pods, and I lay there for a minute, trying to figure out how to breathe without actually breathing. I heard Rudolph groan nearby, and eventually he appeared in my field of vision. Dark stains—like rotten jam and old 40-weight oil—smeared across his withers, and he moved like he was favoring his front left leg. "We can do that again if you like," he offered.
"I don't think I pass the height requirement on that ride," I said, extricating myself from the coffee pod mound. The top layer was loose trash, but the layer was fairly shallow. Looking for the copy of Inferno, I scuffed a few microwave pizza boxes out of the way and found packed garbage beneath. Hard, like granite, but still aromatic as only a landfill can be. One that was being baked by eternal fires deep below.
While Rudolph hobbled around, trying to determine whether he's suffered a cramp or a sprain, I kept looking for the book, even though I knew it was lost in all this trash. Hell wanted me to lose my mind over the book, and I had to fight that urge.
I focused on finding other things instead. Like the rest of the reindeer. They all knew to ground themselves in inclement weather. I found a pile of garbage that was solid enough to support my weight, and climbed high enough to take a peek at the landscape.
The terrain wasn't flat. There were ravines and trenches as if centuries of wind and rain had slowly carved courses through everything we've ever thrown away. The Grand Canyon of Trash. Off to my left, movement caught my attention, and I waved when a pair of reindeer crested a nearby ridge. It looked like Dasher and Dancer.