Once Upon a Time in Hell

by Guy Adams

  "I saw him."

  "What? You could see him before? But nobody was supposed to be able to."

  "I can't help that."

  "Why didn't you say something?"

  "I didn't think it was important. Are we going to the Dominion of Clouds to fight Alonzo now?"

  "I don't know why you even bother to ask."

  "Politeness."

  "Yes, we are."

  He nodded slowly. "It would be better were I to travel my own way, I think." He slowly began to shrink into the earth at my feet, tendrils splitting off from his arms and legs as he pulled himself under. After a moment he was gone.

  "Branches of Regret's going to meet us there," I said and went over to my rakh to sit in silence and be confused for a bit.

  "Just give me a minute to lock up," said Abernathy. "I don't bother for short trips, the rats police things pretty well, but if we might be gone a while..."

  Lucifer shook his head in despair. "Even the shopkeeper's coming?"

  "I heard that your munificent piece of shit!" Abernathy called, the sound of chains being dragged around inside the store. "Obviously I wouldn't give you any back chat, being so all powerful as you are. I'll do whatever you ask, even let you kiss my fat ass if that's what you're after.

  Because it sure sounds like that's what you're after..."

  "I blame you," Lucifer said to me. "You attract them like flies."

  "More the merrier! With Branches of Regret there's seven of us!"

  "Magnificent," he replied, with limited sincerity.

  Eventually we were ready to leave, heading back out onto the road the way we'd come.

  After a short while we veered away from the lake and towards the large cattle sheds I'd noticed earlier.

  "I'm not sure I want to see inside there," I admitted as Lucifer drew to a halt a short distance away.

  "You don't need to," he said. "We've seen all of Greaser's business we need to. This is just to send a quick message."

  He climbed down and began to slowly walk towards the sheds. "You all stay back here." The sheds stretched right across the field, row after row. The whole set up was more than twice the size of most of the towns I'd ridden through on my journey across America.

  "I'm here to tell you something," Lucifer shouted. I was reminded of the time on our journey to Wormwood when he had spoken and I had heard the words clearly, regardless of distance, as if he had been speaking directly into my head rather than my ears. "Greaser is gone.

  Buzz is gone. This trade is gone."

  I noticed a few people appearing at the entrances of the cattle sheds, some were armed and ready for trouble, most were just confused.

  "The Dominion of Circles is under my control again," Lucifer continued, "and I say you're done."

  He raised his arms, tilted back his head and, with a roar, a ball of fire rose up from his throat and sailed into the air like a cannonball. Then another, and another...

  The people that had appeared outside the cattle sheds weren't slow to run, still most of them didn't make it. When the fireballs hit the roofs of the sheds, they erupted with a light and heat the like of which I'd never seen before. The entire place was ablaze. Huge columns of fire exploding like the heads of cabbages. The sky filled with flame and debris. Even back where we were, maybe quarter of a mile away, the heat was enough to have us holding our arms up in front of our faces, the rakh shifting nervously beneath us.

  "I love him," said Biter in awe. "I ain't never loved a man before but I love this one. I want to roll over and be his goddamned bitch."

  "Stop talking," said Agrat. "Please... before I'm forced to vomit on you."

  Lucifer turned back to us, slowly climbed onto his rakh and nodded. "That'll do," he said, and we cut away from the burning crater and on towards the Dominion of Clouds.

  3.

  HAD I EVER READ the Bible? He asked me.

  Well, dear reader, I cannot claim to have done so, at least not in its entirety. I know it's terribly scurrilous to say so but I always got rather bogged down in the endless lineages of David and the rules about what you could or could not do with goats.

  I jest of course, but really, what a question! Well, no, not the question... the clear infer ence that lay behind it.

  I really didn't know what to say.

  I was being asked to write a sequel to The Good Book. Not something that had occurred to me as an option within my career of rollicking adventures and questionable facts (and no, be fore you ask, I am not attempting sarcasm, I'm not what you would call a religious man but I am not so bold—or stupid, given I was staring the sacred in the face—to mock such things).

  He left me, confused and unable to comment, saying that we would discuss it more later.

  The replica of my childhood home had begun to seem less charming as I became more disorientated and confused. As I had predicted earlier, with Billy and the good lady Forset, the sense of being a puppet dangling on a string was becoming more pronounced by the moment.

  I stepped out of the library and found myself in a cloister of such gargantuan proportions that I felt unsteady on my feet for a few moments.

  "Feel free to have a look around," Alonzo called, as he strode away, "dinner will be served in an hour or so."

  Dinner, yes... but served where? I would have to cross that bridge when I came to it. I stood at the edge of the covered arcade, leaning back on a pillar fashioned— like every thing else I could see—from white marble. It was so clean and perfect it didn't feel real. I touched it, the stone was cool and unblemished, it felt more like glass.

  The quad was filled with a garden, neat and immaculate but still somehow possible to lose oneself in. I was reminded of pictures I had seen of Japanese gardens (despite the evidence of my story Krahjira—King of Monsters I have never been there). A network of streams cut through the manicured grass, small wooden bridges crossing back and forth. Several pagodas stood between the trees and, at its centre, there was what I took to be a bandstand, a raised pearlescent structure surrounded by statues.

  Idyllic but empty.

  This was the same everywhere I went. I looked in through large windows into ornate halls, galleries and living spaces, everywhere offered a genteel, beatific decadence but no residents. As far as I could tell, Heaven was empty.

  Once I had found the stairs, I descended to ground level and made my way into the garden.

  I squatted down by the stream and dipped my fingers into the water, it was the same temperature as the air and I could barely tell it was there. No fish swam in it, the stream was as devoid of inhabitants as everywhere else.

  I sat down on a bench and tried to decide what to do with myself. As a writer I felt it was important to try and explore the place but it all felt somehow hollow, like the ceramic dainties that ladies like to buy for their mantels. A thing of crystalline beauty but surprisingly little soul. I began to suspect that everything was as false, as dreamed up for my benefit, as the library I had first found myself in. Could I even be sure I was in Heaven at all? Or Hell? I would later come to understand they were movable concepts. Both had their physical geography and yet both were also states of mind experienced by dead mortals who passed into them. At that point, however, I was just a man lost by the side of a stream, wondering what ridiculous situation he had got himself into.

  Perhaps more would be revealed at dinner.

  As the time passed, I found myself becoming absurdly sleepy, lulled I believe by the soporific sound of the water and the general air of calm. I am not entirely sure if I slept or not.

  Possibly, the brief vision I experienced was a dream. I suspect such distinctions don't even matter.

  A young girl walked across the grass towards me. She was dressed in the sort of white raiments that classical painters do so love to drape their celestial visions in. A jumble of Roman and Greek, shimmering togas and skin pale as milk. She pulled a toy train behind her on a piece of string.

  "What are you doing?" she asked.


  "Waiting," I replied. It seemed the only truthful answer.

  She sat next to me on the bench. "Waiting's boring isn't it?"

  "Yes," I agreed, "though that depends on what you're waiting for. If you're waiting for something horrible the time passes quickly enough, if you're waiting for something nice..."

  "I don't like it. I just like things to happen."

  "But then we wouldn't be able to enjoy them. If something was happening all the time, when do you get to relax and think about them? Appreciate them for what they are?"

  She shrugged. "I suppose. I just get impatient."

  "So do I sometimes. Even more so when I was young like you." She smiled. "Being young is nice. Nobody expects things from you."

  "Oh, I don't know. You have to tidy your room, do your schoolwork. Do you play an instrument?" Most little girls I knew were forced by their parents to do so. Trudging their bored way along the keys of a piano or the strings of a violin.

  "No, do you think I should?"

  "Up to you. I suppose it's nice to be able to make music. It takes a long time to get good at it though, you need to be patient."

  "Oh, I haven't got a lot of that."

  "Patience?"

  "Time. Never mind. I'm sure it wasn't important." She held up her little train and scruti nised it. "I like trains. They drag people around."

  "And then you drag it around."

  She smiled and nodded then stood up and skipped away.

  "Bye then," I called after her, but she had vanished into the trees.

  Later, either woken up from my sleep or shaken from my thoughts, a bobbing light, like a willow-the-wisp from a child's story book, appeared before me.

  "And what are you?" I wondered.

  It bobbed as if in reply and then slowly began to move away. I decided, in the absence of anything else to do, to follow it.

  4.

  THE SIEGE ON the Land Carriage was brief and seemingly unproductive. Inside, keeping away from the windows, it was hard to decide whether the crowd had given up or been struck into guilty silence by a realisation of their own actions. Lord Forset was quick to expound such a theory but then, with Billy's assistance, he had just carried the body of Brother Clement inside his cabin and the horror of that old, lifeless face hung heavy on him. The Order of Ruth, with the exception of Brother William, had retired to their cabins in order to pray.

  Billy suspected they would be hiding more than talking to God, but that was fine, he didn't blame them. The rest of the party was now crammed into the front compartment, having decided it was better to stick together.

  "Do you think they'll just leave us alone?" Forset wondered, the question aimed at no body in particular.

  "I think they're still angry," said Brother William, "and will want to lash out more before the day is done."

  "It depends what happens doesn't it?" asked Elisabeth. "If more people were let in to Wormwood then they'd forget all about us."

  "But they're not going to be, are they?" said Billy. "Be honest, it didn't make sense in the first place. 'We're going to do this a few at a time because there are so many of you?' It's sup posed to be the afterlife, not a riverboat."

  Elisabeth couldn't help but nod. "It's just as Patrick said, we're puppets with our strings being tugged."

  "I don't understand it," bemoaned her father, "this was supposed to be something beautiful. An amazing experience. Not this... horror."

  She held his hand. "I'm sorry." She had always suspected that his lifelong obsession with the miraculous Wormwood would end in disappointment. Not like this, of course, her expectation had simply been for an empty field and a gradual sense of disillusionment. This was much worse. To discover that the

  myth was real but then be cheated of fully exploring it. More than that: to be left with the inescapable impression that you had been had, that a greater plan was at work and its intentions were vaguely hostile. She knew he must be suffering a great deal.

  The carriage shook again.

  "Oh God," said Forset, "they're back."

  "I'm not sure," said Billy, "that didn't feel like people pressing at the outside."

  The carriage shook again, and Billy was right, this wasn't an external pressure, they were rocking on their wheels.

  "Someone's trying to get her started," said Forset, the idea somehow even worse to him that a simple attack. This was his creation, his great invention, that it should be manhandled by these idiots...

  The Land Carriage began to move.

  5.

  ALONZO STEPPED ALONG the shores of The Bristle lake like a crane hunting for food, constantly darting away from the lapping liquid so as not to ruin his boots.

  After a few minutes he found what he was looking for. With a sigh, he removed his jacket and draped it over a rock. Then he rolled up his sleeve and grabbed at the thrashing torso at the lake's edge. He yanked it back onto the dry shore, letting it roll amongst the thick hairs that grew there. While the torso tried to right itself, fractured arms slapping against the soil trying to tip itself onto its back, Alonzo removed a handkerchief from his pocket and did his best to wipe his hand clean.

  They both finished their tasks at the same time.

  "Es oo es at?" said the torso, its mouth no longer functioning after its tongue had been wrenched out by one of the other residents of the lake.

  "Yes Greaser," Alonzo said, "it's me. You look well."

  "Uck aff ant."

  Nothing would please me more than to do so, but first a little warning: did you tell them about me?"

  The torso was silent.

  "Yes, well, that probably answers my question doesn't it?"

  "O ice."

  "There's always a choice, Greaser, just varying degrees of difficulty in making the right one."

  "Reee.."

  "I'm sure you are." Alonzo looked at his mostly clean hand and sighed again. "Oh well,"

  he said. "One can't keep one's hands clean forever."

  He reached down, grabbed Greaser's arm and pulled him back into the lake.

  "O! O!" Greaser begged.

  "Shush now," said Alonzo, "what's good for the goose is good for the gander, as a place of punitive contemplation, the mortals seem to love it."

  Greaser bobbed back into the lake, pulled by various other hands, his shouting mouth choked off by the slopping tide. Alonzo walked back up the shore and thought about what was likely to happen next.

  6.

  AS WE RODE away from The Bristle, the after-effects of the last day or so weighing heavily on me, I found myself sinking lower and lower in my saddle until, eventually I must have fallen asleep.

  I woke up later to find I was moving along at some speed, my rakh galloping across a wide field. The grass was a faint yellow. I squinted at it to try and make sure it wasn't hair but we were moving so fast it was hard to tell.

  "Elwyn's woken up!" Meridiana shouted, laughing.

  Nobody else cared enough to comment.

  I tried to sit up but found that some considerate soul—let's be honest, it would have been Meridiana—had tied me to the saddle with my reins. I suppose I was glad of it, some sleep was better than none and at least I hadn't fallen off and been trampled on. Now that I was awake, though, I just felt trapped and stupid. It took some wriggling (and my rakh couldn't have made its disgust at my writhing around clearer had it written me a letter on the subject) but I eventually got myself loose and was able to sit up.

  The terrain around us now was very different to the deep red gloom of The Bristle. The sky still held a stormy weight but everything was much more open and light. I'd almost have called it pleasant if I wasn't being beaten up ass-wise and still in an utter state of confusion.

  I wondered how long I'd slept. More to the point, how long did we still have to ride? I asked as much but either nobody heard me above the sound of beating hooves or nobody could be bothered to answer. The landscape was all but bare, the occasional dead tree throwing aggressive finger gestures at us as we pa
ssed. If The Bristle had been a place of constant horror this was a region of absence, plain and empty stretching on seemingly forever.

  We stopped about five minutes later, giving me a chance to climb off and do a proper job of untangling myself and straightening my clothes.

  "You were like a baby," said Biter, "riding along on its mother's back."

  This amused him so greatly I decided to be nice and not punch him in the face.

  "How far have we got to go?" I asked.

  "Another couple of hours should do it," said Lucifer, staring out towards the horizon, at absolutely fuck all as far as I could tell.

  "You don't drag your heels when he's by your side," said Biter, offering the old man his usual doe-eyed look. "We've been flying!"

  "Literally?" I had visions of waking up in free fall.

  "Well, no, but we've been riding real fast. We passed through the Archimedes Belt in, like, twenty minutes!"

  "Good," I wasn't going to ask, I'd sit down and nod at a map one day should all this pan out fine. "You think they know we're coming?"

  "Of course they do," said Agrat. Her mood, as far as I could tell was getting even worse, the closer we got to the Dominion of Clouds. "Omnipotence is hard to beat you silly little man."

  "Alonzo's not omnipotent," said Lucifer. "And, in my experience, the Boss was only ever as omnipotent as he could be bothered to be. Being able to know everything is fine, caring enough to do so is another matter." "You two obviously got on real well," I said, the ramification of that slowly starting to sink in. Maybe I could see why Agrat was so foul-tempered; how stupid did you have to be to pick a fight with the supreme being?

  "I loved him," said Lucifer, "but I don't believe the feeling was reciprocated."

  Those of us that needed it took a few mouthfuls of water then we got back in the saddle and continued on our way.

  7.

  "WE'RE GOING PAST Wormwood," said Brother William, leaning out of the window.

  "Get your head back inside," said Elisabeth, "before someone tries to shoot it off."

  "I don't think there's much risk of that now," said her father, "they're happy to ignore us back here now they have control of the engine."