Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  ««—»»

  Maria had been raped again. It was bad enough when a Demon raped her, but much worse when one of her co-workers did. She expected better from them, since they shared her plight. She supposed these men needed to vent their terrible, frustrated rage. Or else they simply felt that this world was a place where evil was expected, being the very substance of the walls, their masters, of their own mock flesh. Still, they expressed their humiliation by humiliating her. Spent their bottled anger by filling her up with it instead.

  A Demon had come along the narrow corridor in which they lay, and had kicked the man hard in the ass. The man had scampered to his feet, his slick cock bobbing ridiculously, and scampered off down the passageway to wherever his work station was. The Demon had then strolled on, not bothering to help Maria up from the floor. As she rearranged her wrenched and ripped clothing, she watched the Demon recede. He hadn’t been concerned for her, but only for the work that waited to be done.

  The first man who had raped her, on her second day in Tartarus, she had afterwards struck across the back of the head with a huge two-handed wrench swung from over her shoulder. He had dropped to her feet with blood already pouring heavily out of his nose and ears. An hour later, the damage almost entirely regenerated, the rapist had sought her out with a lead pipe in his hand for his own club…but a Demon had pushed him away and told him to leave her alone. "Thanks," Maria had told the creature.

  "Go back to work," it had rasped at her. And several days later, she thought it was this very same Demon who raped her against the wall of a hiss-filled boiler room…though it was hard to tell some of them apart, especially the ones like this who were less human in form.

  Brushing off her bottom with both hands, Maria resumed her interrupted journey to her current work station for the beginning of her shift. She picked up her pace, afraid of being late, and thus punished. She had been allowed a period of sleep so as to recuperate from yesterday’s seemingly endless shift, and the workers were even given food to eat. These sham bodies they possessed did not really require sleep or sustenance, just as it wasn’t true blood that ran in their veins or live sperm that spurted from rapists’ pricks. (And nerves did not really scream at the touch of a torturer’s brand or blade, however it might seem they did.)

  The bodies of the Damned thought they were still alive, and so they had the urges and instincts of the living.

  ««—»»

  Tartarus was one of those far-spaced cities of Hell in which its Demonic population was not only trained for their duties…but made.

  This was Maria’s line of work. She was, for all intents and purposes, a manufacturer of the very creatures that had rustled her up for this employment.

  Shifts were long. One often burned or froze their hands, depending on what sort of Demon—or what stage of that Demon’s progression—they were working on. Toward the end of today’s shift, a gust of hot steam had scalded Maria’s left hand…but already, on her way to this floor’s showers, the pain and angry redness were fading.

  Whenever she was badly burned, by steam or splashed corrosive chemical or by bumping into a red-hot metal surface, Maria was reminded of her father. His right arm had been terribly scarred as a toddler, when he had tipped a pot full of boiling water off the stove top. He had told Maria that his mother was passed out on the sofa at the time. He had told Maria that his mother was a worthless bitch and whore, and a neglectful mother who ultimately left her husband for a man who was younger but just as drunken as herself.

  Maria’s own mother had met her father while she was living for a time in San Antonio. He was white, she a Mexican. When she was eight years old, after an escalating series of terrifying fights, her father left her mother. She had never seen him again, and her mother had moved them back to Mexico to be with family.

  Maria had thought that her father loved her; that he would never leave her as his mother had ended up leaving him. Now, she couldn’t even remember his face clearly. But she remembered the scars on his arm. They had never faded away, like the burn on her own hand today.

  Maria nodded in mute greeting to the three men who stood watch outside the women’s shower area. The Demons had not assigned them to this duty; they had volunteered, to protect the women from other men who might enter the showers to attack them. On the rare occasion, though, a Demon or even a pack might enter into the showers, and for them the men lowered their eyes and stepped aside.

  Maria stripped and angled her wide pretty face toward the pelting hot streams, turned slowly around, her long hair plastering to her back. Opening her eyes, stepping back a little, she gazed upwards as she exposed her underarms to the irregular streams that fell from the machinery high overhead, the fallen water then trickling into a grated floor rough against her bare feet. This large chamber was not intended for this use, but the Demons shrugged it off, didn’t bother stopping them. High above, cloudy cocoons in row after row were suspended pendulously like a crop nearly ripe for harvesting. The raining water rinsed these subtly pulsating sacs. Here and there, Maria could see a more pronounced bulge where a limb or wing pressed at the membrane that sheathed its owner.

  A reverberating thud made her step entirely out of the torrents for a moment or two to listen. An explosion, perhaps. Another boiler blown? It wasn’t too uncommon. A dangerous mistake on the part of a worker (though even if shredded to chum, he would reconstitute) or simply an overtaxed machine. No further detonations followed, and Maria ducked back into the downpour.

  After bathing herself, she dipped her shed uniform into a mechanical recess in one wall that had collected a puddle of this falling hot water, so as to clean it as best she could—then she changed into her fresh uniform and headed out of the shower chamber, her hair still dripping wet. At the entrance, one of the guards (his name was Russ, he’d recently told her) smiled at her again and shifted in his hands the heavy mallet he carried as a weapon. "So Maria, how are ya?"

  "I’m fine," she told him, smiling a little. She couldn’t believe people could still ask such inane questions. Empty civility. Like robot servants after a nuclear war, making tea for mummies long dead in their armchairs. Russ was that robot and that mummy at the same time. She dropped her eyes and hurried past him without trying to look obvious about it. "You?" she called back over her shoulder obligatorily. She saw he was watching her go.

  "Okay. Goin’ to the mess hall?"

  "Yup."

  "Maybe I’ll see you there in a few."

  "Sure."

  He was cute enough, she supposed. White. A redhead. And she could not conceive of falling in love with any man here in Hades. As numb as she was, as hollowed out inside, as automaton-like in her work and her daily routines, she was not some robot with a bolted-on grin. Her programming had been shorted out. Civility had been an illusion all along.

  Affection was a sham better left to the living.

  When Maria turned a corner of the cramped hallway, the rainfall hiss of the showers still in her ears, she looked up to see a Demon plant itself in front of her.

  "What is your sin?" it snarled, and backhanded her across the jaw.

  The Demons didn’t apparently use names to distinguish one infernal race from another, but for their own convenience (since they had to manufacture them), the workers had given them designations, and this species was called a Caliban. It was like a cross between a sumo wrestler and an insect, bulgingly soft in some places and armored in others, the same sepia brown as the exteriors and interiors of Tartarus, except that its eyes glowed a bright white and its primary forearms shaded to almost black at the ends of their scorpion-like pincers. It was one of these appendages that had just sent Maria to the floor.

  "What is your sin?" it demanded again, taking another threatening step toward her so that she smelled the choking incense scent burned into its dimpled flesh and glossy chitin. She might have made this creature herself for all she knew.

  Her mouth lubricated with blood, which drooled out over the middle of her
bisected lower lip, Maria managed to get out, "I have forsaken the Father."

  It was true, wasn’t it?

  On the night of the great and final fight, that frightening last battle like some apocalyptic war, after her father had left, Maria had found a crucifix on the floor. She recognized it as her father’s, and realized her mother must have wrenched it off his chest in their shoving and slapping. Without her mother seeing, she swept it up in her fist. And buried it under her pillow that night. But the next day, the first day of her father no longer being in her life, Maria had taken the chain and little cross out into their backyard and buried it there, partly out of angry rejection, partly out of despair.

  Was it that some neighbor child or even adult had seen her dig the hole, and had dug up the silver crucifix? Or was it that her vision had been so blurred with tears at the time? Whatever the case, when Maria went to exhume the crucifix out of guilt and longing a week later, it wasn’t in the spot she had thought it would be. She tried another spot, and there she came upon a bundle in a green plastic trash bag. Now she remembered what she had buried in this vaguely familiar spot; their cat, which had been hit by a car a year ago. Disinterring this poor corpse was too great a punctuation mark to her pain. She reburied the cat, and didn’t try to find her father’s necklace again.

  She had left it buried. And with it, her faith in family, in solace, maybe even in love. She had continued to attend church with her devout mother. But she had narrowed her eyes in contempt at the larger version of that symbol hanging above the altar. The man with his hands pinned where they could do no one any good.

  The Caliban seemed satisfied with her answer. It shambled on down the hallway, and Maria pulled herself to her feet, blood still running off her lip. She had refused to cry, however. She prided herself on holding her tears even when she had no control over the flow of her blood. But the wound would heal, so that more wounds could take its place. Hadn’t it been the same, pretty much, when she had still been alive, before she was raped and murdered?

  Maria continued on her way. But not to the mess hall. She felt vaguely apologetic as far as Russ was concerned, but she had lost her appetite.

  ««—»»

  When she reached the enormous chamber in which she had been assigned a place to sleep, Maria realized that the explosion she’d heard earlier had occurred in here.

  This chamber was circular and disturbingly organic, its ceiling lost in gloom but apparently taking the form of a dome. Honeycombed into the curved walls were row upon row of elliptical openings like slots in a mausoleum waiting to be filled. Formerly, this had been a tank in which were nurtured a species of Demons since discontinued. They had been one of the more human-like breeds, and perhaps it was because of their human traits that a number of them had rebelled in the infernal city of Oblivion. Most of these Demons had been killed by now, but there were still those that had escaped the purging.

  Her own little cocoon space was in the third tier, and she kept a few belongings inside, which no one had ever deemed worthy of stealing. There, she would rest between shifts, curled like a fetus, reborn—or aborted—every day in an endless cycle.

  But today there had been some unknown mishap, and from the room’s obscure heights, torrents of a thick, orange-colored gelatinous fluid were raining down to plop and puddle. Fortunately, the floor was subtly concave and the ooze was draining slowly toward a grille in its center. The foul-smelling matter put Maria very much in mind of the gruel they were fed in the mess hall—the only sustenance they were given—though that substance had a chemical-sharp citrus smell and taste, like slurping orange-scented dish detergent.

  The irregular deluge went largely ignored by a few weary laborers who had also skipped mess hall and preceded her into the chamber, and who now climbed toward their cramped sarcophagi. Maria stared up into the leaking darkness only a few moments herself before navigating between aggregations of the viscous slime toward her section of the wall. Having arrived at it, she hoisted up one leg to begin the ascent to her own depression.

  She hesitated, however, as her eyes were attracted to where some of the rotten-smelling matter had flowed down the wall and accumulated in a particularly large, glistening heap. She saw that there were several bones protruding from it; some ribs, and the bat-like struts of a wing. Not the bones of a human; humans reconstituted, their bodies were notional, they could not be killed. Demons, however: they could die. But there was more than the bones. One spot in the mound was subtly but definitely pulsing. Also, Maria could just discern a muted gurgling sound with an unsettling, familiar quality.

  Holding her breath against the reek, she crouched by the edge of the pile, and from it drew a loose leg bone. She then used this to probe the slime in the area where it was undulating. There was resistance as she prodded a mass buried within it. And then, a tiny arm thrust up through the jelly, its stubby fingers wriggling.

  Maria used the bone to paddle away as much of the slime as she could around the arm. Then, leaning forward carefully, she reached out and took hold of it. It was slippery, and cold, and she was repulsed by the fingers that squirmed against her wrist, but she pulled…and in standing, she extracted a body drooling streamers of muck. She held the thing out at arm’s length to examine it. Pudgy legs pedaled the air sluggishly, eyes squinted open in its sliding mask of ooze, and its wings moved as if to fan the goo from them. Free of the half-congealed amniotic fluid in which it had once been nurtured, the Demon gurgled more freely, but not loudly enough for anyone else to have noticed as yet.

  Though Maria had never seen a mature version, she realized what this creature was. One of those discontinued Demons that had been nurtured in this chamber before it had been emptied and converted into barracks. It was a miracle—or, more accurately, an oversight—that it had survived this long. Overlooked in the cleansing that had eliminated all its siblings. Now, accidentally but belatedly miscarried.

  Maria was afraid to bring the infant Demon close to her, but was even more afraid of being seen holding it. She glanced behind her furtively, but determined that her back had as yet shielded her find from anyone who might have looked in her direction. She then did the first thing that came impulsively to mind. Rather than drop the immature creature back into its afterbirth, rather than fetch an adult Demon to tend to this matter, she again hoisted up a leg to begin climbing to her tiny nook. In so doing, she was forced to fold the creature close to her chest.

  She was afraid that at any moment, the larval Demon would snap its jaws onto her throat. But instead, it merely mewled faintly, and instinctively clung to her so as not to fall.

  ««—»»

  Working through her interminable shift, knowing what she had left hidden in her skull socket of a bed chamber, Maria was agitated and distracted and made a number of clumsy mistakes. Her function, of late, was to pour large glass jars full of maggots into molds that crawled past her on a conveyor belt. The squirming, pale brown things were not truly maggots, but close enough for the workers to refer to them as such. A co-worker, Patty, told Maria how this particular process reminded her of a carbonated soda plant she’d worked for in life, where bags of hard plastic pellets were melted down so as to be shaped into the two liter soda bottles they would become. But here, Patty and Maria were molding containers of flesh instead of those of plastic. To be filled with bile, venom and vitriol instead of corn syrup and caramel color.

  Patty would hand Maria a bottle of the maggots, which she would tip into one of the molds (today, they were for Baphomets, a towering Demon with a blackened, goat-like head enshrouded in a caul of cool white flame). Maria would pass the empty jug back to Patty, who would set it aside to be washed out and reused later.

  At one point Maria fumbled and dropped a bottle, which shattered below the little platform she stood on. Patty jumped back as the pool of writhing, half-alive matter spread at her feet. Fortunately, they were able to sweep it all up and dispose of it before any of the Demon supervisors could see them.

/>   Sometimes, when there were no supervisors in sight, Maria would spit into the open molds as she filled them.

  She was relieved when the shift ended at last, but also dreaded returning to her sleep chamber to find her secret discovered…or expired. Before she could check on it, however, she first had a stop to make.

  ««—»»

  Russ the shower guard was entering the mess hall as Maria was just leaving it. He looked like he was coming off his regular duties; his uniform was stiff with caked Demon blood, from recycling old bodies for the recasting of new. When he saw her, he grinned and said, "Hey! There’s the pretty senorita. I missed you yesterday."