Petty was a bit insulted, but relieved, that Rule had not invited him to join him. When the servant poured him his second coffee, he told her to send word to Captain Eridan that he wanted to ride on his boat again today; specifically, he wanted to ride out again to the series of blood clot islands.
««—»»
When they finally arrived, after what Petty judged to be three hours or more, the wind current had already found the islands, the windmill was already spinning, the cages already lifted. The eels already feeding.
"I wish we could have gotten here sooner," Petty groused to Eridan.
"Sir?"
"I wanted to see their faces."
"Oh…I see…I’m sorry, sir. Well, when the wind dies down, we can linger a while. You can nap, sir, or have a few drinks. Their faces will reconstitute. Then I can draw us in closely, sir. We can even land on the island, if you like."
Land there. Disembark. Might he be able to touch some part of the living triptych through the holes in the mesh of their cages? Might he even coax Eridan, who was required to serve him, into opening one of the cages…even setting one of the prisoners free? That prisoner might be very grateful for her release. Grateful enough to serve him, as well…
"Yes," Petty said, trying not to betray to his guide the tremulous energies swimming through his system. "That would be fine…"
Petty fetched a beer, and watched the display again through the scope. (They couldn’t land on the island until the cages had lowered and the bulk of the eels had departed, for fear of being attacked themselves.)
The wind finally roared away across the ocean of red corpuscles. The eels fled, perhaps to feed on other prisoners on other island chains. The cages descended. Now, Eridan drew them in closer as he had promised, though in a way Petty wished he had waited a while—but he supposed a half reformed face would be no less horrible than these denuded skulls. More horrible, maybe. They came close enough that he could hear the wheezing through their gaping nose cavities, the gargling blood in their throats. He saw breasts rising and falling. Drops of blood flecked their chests like rose petals on snow. So lovely.
Two of Eridan’s men hopped off the boat, into knee-deep blood, and attached lines to the legs of the windmill. They drew the boat against the shining lip of the blood clot raft (and jabbed at the few remaining eels with harpoons to keep them at bay). But Petty did not climb ashore just yet. He had another beer. He watched the slow regeneration. He listened as gurgles became moans, evolved into sobs.
When they had lips again, would they curse him for being one of the blessed? An Angel, never tortured, never suffering? Well, what did they know of his suffering? In life, young beauties like these would have scorned him. It had been that way all his life. Was their Promethean torture any worse than that? Did their physical degradation really outweigh his psychological degradation?
It was unfair, was it not, that Petty was so gross and repulsive an Angel, and these Damned so perfect and lovely? Where was the justice in that? Since becoming reborn, Petty had repeatedly questioned the workings of the Creator’s mind. How could it be that in Heaven he had come to feel so numb, a reanimated zombie, and yet here in the netherworld he suddenly felt vital and alive? Was it the contrast of death? Or just the lust of a younger body whose urges he had forgotten over the past few decades?
The short red hair of the center girl was sprouting anew from the scalp it had been torn from. It was like watching the minute hand of a clock, but it was happening. He noted the curly black hair of the lush-figured girl, the straight mousy brown hair of the thin girl, but the center girl had become his crucified Christ, flanked by nameless fellow sufferers, though in this case all three were resurrecting from the dead…
Yes, he wondered if this were such a good idea after all. When they had eyes again, they would hate him as much as the Demons beside him. He couldn’t sneak his fingers through the mesh; they would withdraw from his touch. And even if he were able to persuade Eridan to lift the middle cage, free his little redhead, and even if she did submit to him, she would despise him. Reject him even as she gave in to him.
Maybe it was better to return to Heaven, flawed as it was. To content himself as best he could with the zombie-like Fannie Mae. She accepted him mindlessly. Wasn’t that perfection, if he could get past the fact that she was essentially a robot? He mustn’t be so jaded, so spoiled. Heaven, however imperfect, could do that to you…
Still, he knew he had to see this through. He had waited this long, and he wouldn’t feel closure unless he could see their restored faces closely. But even as he dreaded having their eyes on him, he couldn’t keep from admiring their bodies. Couldn’t keep from subtly pressing his erection against the bow rail. It was a blind eel aching to feed.
He realized Eridan was directly behind his shoulder, and he flinched as the Demon purred, "Do you wish to go onto the island, sir?"
"I can see well enough from here," Petty muttered.
Muscle now layered the bone, threaded together with bright lattices of vein, elastic bands of tendon tethering this section to that. Were those raw globes in their sockets really eyes? Petty’s own eyes watered to gaze upon them.
Soon, the outer rind of flesh started spreading like a fungus, a cancer, to again put a mask to the horrible beauty that lay beneath, just as it hid what lay inside the rest of their glorious bodies. The flesh asserting its mastery, even here in the spiritual world.
The rotting miasma of the island was so overpowering this close that he cupped his hand over nose and mouth. Or was that reek from the faces themselves, rematerializing in a reverse dissection, a rewound flaying?
The red hair of the center girl stopped growing at the edge of her jaw. That must have been its length when she died, and it would not grow beyond that point. Pretty red hair like copper, framing eyes that now showed blue irises, and black pupils, and which bulged and darted in mad agony.
Then the eyes locked on him with such a force that he almost flinched again. They remained fixed on him. The girl’s struggles against the chains binding her wrists and ankles grew more frantic. Her body moved in serpentine jerks, like the eels had when they were worrying free a hunk of flesh. Her sobs rose, rose in a wail, a banshee shriek, a siren…
And there were words coming on that scream; he could sense them struggling to take form as her flesh was doing. He could feel the words riding at the top of her cry, building toward a crescendo…
"Dahhh…" the center girl screamed.
"Oh God," Petty groaned, letting go of the rail as if blown back by the cry and the stare. He thumped backwards against Eridan, who did not budge.
"Daaaahhh!"
Petty had been disappointed in Heaven, but now he knew that Hades was much worse, even for the casual visitor. Because the remade face of the central girl, this Nike of Samothrace with its head restored, was that of Petty’s teenage daughter, Christina.
"Daaaad!" the cry came in full at last, like lava exploding from a volcano.
Petty whirled away and squeezed his eyes shut tightly. He clamped his hands over his ears, like Ulysses’ sailors, blocking their ears with wax to keep out the call of the sirens. But then he opened his eyes and glared up at Eridan, who was watching him with a little smile, as if he possessed some secret, satisfying knowledge.
"You did this on purpose, you bastard!" Petty sobbed. "You knew she was out here!"
"I’m not the Creator," the Demon told him mildly. "Only He weaves, Mr. Petty."
"You let her go! I order you!"
"I can’t, sir. She’s been Damned. She should have followed her wise and pious parents to church. She should have embraced her Father."
"I’m an Angel! I’m an Angel!" Petty blubbered. "You fucks can’t do this to me!"
"This is Hades," Captain Eridan said simply. "Do you wish to leave it?"
"Yes," Petty cried. He fell to his knees, palms still clamped to his ears. "Yes!"
"Daaaad! Help me!" he heard, regardless of his efforts to blot out
the sounds.
Thank God that Eridan started up the motor then. The sound of it helped drown out the screams. The lines were cast off, all the crew clambered aboard, and the boat turned its nose away from the island of congealing blood.
"Your daughter is very beautiful, sir," Eridan told him casually, as he piloted them away and the voices dwindled in their wake. He looked down at Petty, still humped forward as if bowing on the deck in supplication. "Very beautiful."
Sweet Oblivion
Most breeds of Demons didn’t require food as sustenance—but the Buddhas, as the Damned workers had dubbed them, were ravenous beings. They had been designed that way, in the factory city of Tartarus where most of the Demons in this region of Hades were mass produced.
The Buddhas were vast, dinosaur-like travesties of humanity, nine feet tall and wider around. Patrick thought that they made sumo wrestlers look as if they might be the Buddhas’ infant offspring. Their flagrantly naked bulks were an awful canary yellow in color. These elephantine entities had heads as small as a mortal baby’s, however, with eyes crushed shut and sulky pouts. Their heads reminded Patrick of human fetuses who are born with acrania—absence of that section of the skull which contains the brain.
To be born without a brain, Patrick mused. Such blissful oblivion. He had never thought he would envy such a tragic fate, until he had awoken from death to find himself sentenced to eternal damnation.
He had been twenty-two when he died. He estimated he would have been forty-four by now. He had stopped berating himself, long ago, for not having been religious in life, not bowing before the Creator. Though he had never met any of his friends or loved ones in the infinity of Hades, he doubted that any of them would pass the Creator’s harsh criteria to make it through the pearly gates, the golden arches, or whatever the gateway to paradise looked like.
Patrick, Eleanor, and Wally worked close together, wading through the knee-deep (occasionally, waist-deep) bog in which they seeded, grew and harvested the food for the Buddhas. Eleanor had been in Hades the longest; she had died in 1870, when she was twenty-eight. She and Patrick had taken Wally under their wings. Although he had been much older than they, physically, when he died—sixty-seven—he had only been in Hades for a single month. He huffed and panted as he slogged through the marshy plants, cutting free the fleshy globes the Buddhas craved with his curved knife and storing them in the waterproofed leather bag he wore slung onto his back. He paused often to wheeze, to hold his chest with one blistered hand, to squint up at the blazing sky—a ceiling of churning lava. The three of them wore straw hats like Vietnamese farmers laboring in a rice paddy, to protect their flesh from being burned by that intense glow. Of course, they were immortal; their skin would have regenerated even if it had been immersed in lava. This was why Patrick often teased Wally when he saw him clutching at his heart.
"You’re not going to die, Wally, don’t worry."
"I should be so lucky," Wally grumbled, wiping his knife’s blade clean of sap against his pants leg. "I should be so lucky to really die."
"Then we wouldn’t have your charming company," Eleanor teased him in her good-natured British accent, flicking some water at his face. "Would we, my love?"
"He’s your love," Wally jerked his knife toward Patrick, "not me."
"You are too young for me, Wally," Eleanor admitted.
All three of them turned their heads abruptly, and fearfully, when they heard the bellowing roar of one of the Buddhas roll across the swampy farmland. All three were relieved to see that one titanic yellow guard was lumbering slowly, terribly in another direction, perhaps to berate some other knot of workers, instead of coming their way. Wally wagged his head. "They invented this fruit just to give us something to do. Something hard and awful to do. And they invented them just to eat the fruit." By "they," he meant the Creator.
Patrick lifted another of the bright red, rubbery globes out of the water and slipped it into his own heavy sack. "Come on, Wally." He shooed a blood-drinking insect (or miniature Demon, depending on how you looked at it) that had jabbed him in the back of the neck…then patted the older man on the shoulder. "It will drive you mad to dwell on the whys and wherefores."
They had sloshed their way to an outcropping of rock like an island jutting out of the flat landscape. They could climb up on it and rest for a few minutes, on its far side where they wouldn’t be spotted, but not for too long or they’d be missed. It would give them a chance to dry off a little in the heat of the molten sky, and to pluck leeches off each other. They’d throw the leeches back into the mire instead of killing them, just in case those creatures could be considered Demons, too.
It was Patrick who climbed onto the outcropping first, gratefully slinging his sack off his shoulder as he did so. It was Patrick, then, who first spotted the cat.
The cat clearly had heard them coming; it was wary but not surprised. It was tensed, ready to hiss, ready to claw, ready to leap away. But leap away where? Into the water? Most cats hated water. How had it ever gotten to this isolated rock in the first place?
"Oh my!" Eleanor exclaimed. "Oh!"
"It’s a cat," Wally observed, dragging his old, dripping bones onto the barren oasis. "An ugly one," he added. "So what?"
The cat had indeed seen better days. It looked like it might have become tangled in a tattered, filthy curtain. Or could that have been a burial shroud? Scraps of it were twined around its limbs and tail, a loop of it even obscuring one eye. And in one battered ear it wore three earrings. It had been someone’s pet, obviously, at one time. Or something more important. But it looked a long way from having been anything to anyone, in its present condition.
"It’s impossible," Patrick said to Wally, as tensed and unmoving as the cat.
"Why?"
Eleanor answered for him. "There are no cats in Hades. No animals can come here."
"What do you mean? These bloodsuckers…and mosquitoes…"
"There are infernal animals. But no animals from the mortal world can come here upon death, Wally. According to the Creator, animals don’t have souls. They don’t go to Heaven or Hell. They simply cease to be."
"Sweet oblivion," Patrick muttered.
"Then this is an infernal animal, then," said Wally. "Like the leeches. Look at it. Looks infernal to me."
The cat hissed at last. Patrick smiled. "It doesn’t like you, whatever it is, Wally."
"There are no cats in Hades," Eleanor insisted. "I’ve been here well over a century. I’ve covered a lot of ground in that time. I’ve never seen a cat, a dog, any earthly beast."
"There." Patrick pointed. "Look."
Behind the cat, and lower on the opposite face of the rock, there was a deep crack or fissure. Its edges looked black, as though charred. Wally climbed over next to Patrick carefully, trying not to startle the cat. Even in the short time he had been in Hades, he knew this rock well enough to recognize that this fissure had not been there previously.
"He came from the crack," Eleanor said. "He had to have. From some other part of Hell, do you think? Maybe animals do go to another realm, after all…"
"I had another thought," said Patrick.
"What’s that?"
Wally said it before Patrick could. "Maybe it came from our world. The mortal world. You know?" He picked his way nearer to the cat, the fissure below it, less concerned about upsetting the animal now. "Maybe if he could find his way here, we could find our way out…"
The cat gave a warning yowl and hissed again, backing off just a little bit, its broken tail giving an angry flick. Seeing this, Patrick caught Wally by the arm to halt him.
"Shh, puss," Eleanor cooed, extending a delicate white hand to the creature. "Shh. Don’t be afraid. We won’t hurt you."
"It’s probably hungry." From his sack, Patrick withdrew one of the buoy-like, bobbing red orbs they cut free of the stalks in the swampy water. He sliced into it with his tool, which always reminded him of a linoleum knife. A thick, crimson sap began to well o
ut.
"Don’t feed it blood," Eleanor admonished him.
"What else do I have to feed it? Maybe you could nurse him, eh?"
She swatted his arm.
"It’s seen a lot. It’s been to Hell and back," Wally murmured, staring intensely at the animal as it stared back at him. "I’m telling you, it’s come from someplace far away. If it can come here, we can go there."
"Think, Wally," Patrick said, while he proffered the bleeding fruit to the cat. It didn’t come near it. "If where it comes from is better, then why’d it want to come here?"
"Anyway," Eleanor added, "look at the crack. It isn’t wide enough even for me."
"But we could widen it!" Wally blurted, beginning to sound desperate.
In the distance, the terrible foghorn bleat of one of the Buddhas sounded. The noise rumbled across the watery fields like thunder. The three prisoners of Hell exchanged quick glances. Patrick said, "They’ll notice us gone, soon."
"We have to smuggle the cat back to our barracks with us," Eleanor stated. "We can’t leave it here."
Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades Page 7