by Mur Lafferty
Daniel rushed forward and grabbed her in a hug, burying his head in her shoulder. “I’m so sorry I let you go ahead without protection. I wasn’t thinking, and you were so upset. I thought I’d lost you. I’m just so sorry.”
Kate stood still, staring at the opposite wall. “I’m not sure I remember what you’re talking about.”
Daniel raised his head to look at her. “You don’t remember?”
She shook her head as he stepped back. “I remember that am Kate. You are Daniel. I remember that we are friends. And- and we died together,” She rubbed her face again. “I’m sorry. It may take me some time.”
The Japanese woman came up behind Daniel and stood by his side. She bowed low and said, “I am Kazuko. It is an honor to meet again the woman who drives my companion to such passionate acts.”
Kate stared at her. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember you either.”
“That’s okay, you’ll remember,” Daniel said. He turned to Kazuko. “I’m right, right? She’ll remember?”
The woman shrugged delicately.
Kate made to stick her hand out, but then pulled it back and bowed clumsily.
“What happened to your eye, Daniel?”
He grimaced, touching the edges of the bandages that were spotted with blood. “That is a very, very, long story. How about some other time?”
#
The three sat in silence, content to recover from Kate’s disorientation and Daniel’s discomfort from his injury. They all looked up gratefully when the study door opened and a small boy came in.
Daniel’s eye widened. “Ganymede. Why aren’t you in Olympus?”
The boy, whose golden curls hung into his blue eyes, frowned at the floor.
“I am no longer needed,” he said. “There were too many deaths at the battle of Elysium.”
Kate raised her head sharply. “Who?”
Ganymede’s eyes filled with tears. “My master, Zeus. The goddess Aphrodite. The god Hermes.”
Kate gasped and sat back into her chair.
Daniel put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I’m very sorry, Ganymede.”
The boy shook his head. “I am instructed to bring this to you.” He handed Daniel a pair of backpacks and left the room.
Daniel put the backpacks on the ground. “Where do dead gods go when they die?” he asked Kazuko. “All the gods of Ragnarök, Susanoo, now the Greeks. Where are they all?”
The woman smiled slightly. “The gods can never go away. There are merely reinvented.”
Daniel put his hand on Kate’s knee. “He’s not gone, Kate, any more than you or I were when we died.”
She covered her face with her hands. “Him, I remember.”
Daniel removed his hand awkwardly and looked at her for a moment. Then he fiddled with the backpacks. He groaned.
“What is it?” asked Kazuko.
Daniel pulled out a tacky necklace from one of the backpacks. “Looks like we’re going traveling again.”
“This is not surprising,” she said. “He requires you still to travel heaven.”
Daniel opened an envelope he found under the gaudy necklace. He opened it and the color drained from his face.
“Not this time. We have to look other places for more missing souls.
“We’re going to hell.”
HELL
By Mur Lafferty
* * *
The Afterlife Series II
Hell, The Afterlife Series II
Version 1.2
Published by Restless Brain Media on Smashwords
Copyright © 2011 Mur Lafferty
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
This is a work of fiction. Resemblances to persons living or dead is coincidental.
This book is dedicated to the listeners, who encouraged me to take the step from one story to a series.
Thank you.
CHAPTER ONE
I’d had no concept of time or self when I was a soul. I remember casting about, watching the Divine punish world leaders (which is what Daniel and Kazuko had told me He’d done). When I lost form but was touched by the Divine, I was stitched back together enough to comprehend my surroundings, if not my own identity.
We sat, the three of us, in the study of the Divine. I could no longer give It a name as I fully remembered Its touch. It was beyond Man, beyond Woman. The face It wore was a mask so most souls could comprehend what they wanted to see. But there was no comprehending the truth. Such power It had, such wisdom. It embodied the qualities of every god and goddess I had encountered and It got me wondering: was It a mixture of all gods, or was It the spring from which all the other gods were born?
Theological arguments aside, we had a mission. Why the font of such power required us to undertake this quest was beyond me, but trying to understand Its will was like trying to drink from a waterfall. I could only drink in a little at a time.
Daniel handed me a backpack. I took it wordlessly and strapped it on. Kazuko rose from her solemn kneeling position. She pointed behind us.
“That is the way out,” she said.
A door stood where there hadn’t been one before, in the middle of the wall. A Greek symbol was etched on the door, and it took me a moment to recognize Omega.
Daniel led the way, with Kazuko following and myself bringing up the rear. The door opened to a dark corridor. “Great,” mumbled Daniel.
I closed the door behind us and left us in the pitch blackness.
“What did you do that for?” Daniel snapped. He’d been distant since his initial outburst. I think my inability to remember much upset him, as if he took it personally.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Habit, I guess. Don’t leave doors open. Grandma Nancy would always say flies would get in. Dogs would get out. Air conditioning would get wasted.” I rummaged around in my backpack until I felt something flashlight-shaped.
I turned it on and slipped past the two of them in the corridor. “Let’s go.”
We walked for some time. My head still buzzed with my experiences, and for a brief moment I regretted not taking the hawk’s form. The hawk would unlikely be worrying about the cold silence behind me.
“So when are you going to tell me what happened to your eye?” I asked.
Daniel made a small noise.
“Never mind,” I said.
“No. It’s okay.” His voice had lost the edge it had gained. “After you… had your… encounter with that angel demon thing… some stuff happened.”
“That’s not telling me much.” I didn’t look around but kept walking down the corridor, which had shifted from a hallway to a stone tunnel.
Kazuko’s soft, matter-of-fact voice floated up from the back. “After the altercation with the entity who attacked you, we were blown apart, God put Daniel back together: complete with his eye, but missing the wisdom of Odin. It turns out that God would need the All-Father’s wisdom to restore you. Daniel then found a way to regain what he needed. He got the wisdom back, gave an eye in exchange, and you know the rest.”
I stopped and shone the light in her face. She didn’t wince at the sudden glare. “I’m sorry. Can you go over that again?”
#
The cave emptied onto a barren plain. Distant screams sounded from afar. We stood at the mouth of the cave and stared at the gray waste and the gnarled, blackened trees before us.
“So which hell is this?” I asked.
“It isn’t hell,” Kazuko said. “This is purgatory.”
Daniel scowled at her. “And how the hell do you know that?”
“I am your guide.”
He turned to me, sighing. “See? She is still doing that.”
I didn’t return his exasperated grin. I pointed as figures came into view. In the gray afternoon (what time was it, anyway?) they lit up the dullness around them. Embers danced between the flaming figures, and they writhed as they walked.
“Good Lord,” Daniel said. “If this is purgatory, what is hell going to be like?” He swallow
ed. He apparently already knew the answer to his question; he had a god in him to tell him as much.
I was just me.
What was I doing there?
Kazuko spoke up. “Those are the lustful. The fire is burned from them as they prepare for entrance into Heaven. As soon as they are purified, they are permitted to wash in the river of Lethe and enter paradise.”
Daniel snorted. “Paradise. Right. It was a blast, huh, Kate?”
I remembered the touch of the Divine. “It is all they could ever hope for. They will receive their reward.”
Daniel’s jaw dropped slightly. “Please tell me you’re kidding. Don’t you remember getting to heaven, how it was all smoke and mirrors? We weren’t even together, but I found you and we left to explore?”
“Except we were sent to watch the end of the worlds,” I said absently.
He snapped his jaw shut. “You remember that?”
I nodded. “It’s coming back to me, in bits.”
“But that wasn’t my point. We agreed that heaven wasn’t all that, and we left. And now you’re buying into it?”
“You haven’t seen it,” I whispered.
“Seen what?”
“You haven’t felt the true touch of the Divine. Your view of it is colored by your anger.”
“What, are you a fundamentalist now? What the hell, Kate?”
I tilted my head, trying to understand. “You carry a part of the Divine within you, Daniel. When you realize that, you’ll understand.”
“Gah!” he shouted, throwing his hands up. He stomped out of the cave, heading toward the flaming walkers. Our guide, the stoic Kazuko, followed. I paused, and then walked in their footsteps.
The person in the lead, a tall woman in a flowing skirt, halted and bowed to us. Flames dripped from her hair, and her face twisted in agony, but she made no anguished sound. “Visitors to our hopeful land,” she said. “What news do you bring?”
“Uh, we’re actually on our way down. Can you point us the way out of purgatory?” Daniel asked.
“Way down? Do you come from the holy light of heaven?” the woman nearly wept in hope.
“Yeah,” Daniel replied. “God sent us on a mission.”
“Did He release us from our penance?”
“Uh, well, not so much,” he said, shifting from foot to foot, looking at Kazuko. “What are you in for? I’ll see if I can put in a good word.”
“I am Gloria Francis Smoot,” she said, bowing. “A prominent madam from New Orleans. My house of ill repute was notorious during the War of Northern Aggression.”
“Dude. You’ve been here since the Civil War?” Daniel stared at her.
“Well, yes; that much time is needed to remove the taint of sin, or until the Judgment Day comes. And our day will come.”
“What the fuck is going on!” Daniel yelled. He stomped around, flailing his arms. “Has the world gone insane? My best friend is a fundie, you’re sitting here, on fire, spouting some shit about how it’s okay that you’re on fire because you’ll be forgiven on Judgment Day, and you don’t even know.”
He stopped and grabbed her shoulders, gripping her burning flesh tightly. I winced in sympathy as his hands grew red.
“Listen to me,” he said. “It’s a ruse. Judgment Day was last Wednesday. It’s over. Heaven is busier than Macy’s on the day after Thanksgiving. He’s forgotten about you.”
She shook him off and took a step backward. Her compatriots shifted and glanced at each other through the flames. “Are you sent from Satan? Is this my final test?”
“You’re not paying attention,” Daniel said through gritted teeth. “We’re not from there, we’re going to there.”
“You lie,” she said. Her voice was barely audible above the crackle of the flames around her body.
“Really?” he asked. He pointed to the right, about one hundred yards away where an angel stood in front of an iron gate, staring at us. “Ask him. He probably can’t lie, can he?”
A woman put her hand on Gloria’s arm. “Do not despair, Gloria. You must keep the faith.” Her friends crowded around her, making the individual fires grow to one great bonfire, and we stepped back, squinting.
“This is ridiculous. Let’s get out of here,” Daniel said.
We left them crouched and weeping. Daniel stalked far ahead of us, his spine straight and his fists balled.
“That was a pretty shitty thing to do,” I told Kazuko. “He took away what remaining hope they had.”
“Daniel is dedicated to uncovering the truth,” she replied.
“How very X-Files,” I muttered. I ran to catch up to Daniel and put my hand on his shoulder.
“We need to camp, dude,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” he grumbled.
I pointed to the troubled sky. “It’s getting dark. We’re not in heaven anymore; apparently the other places have night.”
We tried to build a fire, but couldn’t find any wood. I thought about suggesting we convince a lustful soul to join us so we could see by their tormented light, but figured Daniel wouldn’t find it amusing.
Kazuko stretched out on a light blanket, her hand on her sword. Daniel hugged his knees to his chest and stared in the direction from which we’d come, facing the fires of the weeping souls.
Memories sat in my mind like stories I’d once read but not experienced myself. I hesitated a moment, then went to him and sat down, my back to his, and leaned back. He relaxed against me.
“I am sorry I lied to you, Kate, and I’m sorry I let you go ahead to that angel thing without me,” he said. His voice was tired, defeated.
“I never would have claimed my independence if it hadn’t been for you, Daniel,” I said.
“Still. I lost you for what felt like a long time. I really missed you.”
I was silent for some time.
“Do you want to tell me about what happened?” I finally said.
“Can we talk about that later? It’s still a little fresh,” he said, and he shifted as his arm touched the bandage across the wound on his face.
“Sure.”
“So why didn’t you ever tell me you were in love with me?” he asked.
I should have felt nervous and flushed, but I wasn’t. “Several reasons, I guess. I knew it would make things weird if you didn’t feel the same way. And if you did feel the same way, we might someday break up and I’d lose all of you. And then there was the fact that I did tell you about a year and a half ago and you didn’t return the feelings.”
He turned his head, trying to see me in peripheral vision. “What? When was this?”
“It was Christmas, we were hanging out at your house watching TV, the lights twinkling. It seemed like the perfect time. I gave you a love note with your present the next day, and you never said anything about it.”
“Oh… Right. Hell, I was in love with ten different people a week back then. I didn’t realize you were serious.”
I snorted. “How much clearer could I have been?”
He didn’t answer. I stared into the darkness, and I suppose he stared at the flickering, burning souls.
“What are we going to do about them?” I asked.
“Do?”
“Yeah. The tormented souls? Weeping and burning and all that?”
“Nothing. It’s not our jobs to release them, we’re just looking for the lost ones.”
“I guess with all that god stuff you got, you skipped out on compassion.”
He was noticeably still. I yawned, tired from returning to my corporeal body, and stretched out behind Daniel. I leaned against him, keeping contact, and fell asleep, with a nagging sense of something in my brain.
#
When I woke, Daniel was still seated, but his head was on his arms, and he dozed. Kazuko was seated cross-legged, making tea. I watched her pour water from a canteen into her teapot and the idea that had been nagging at me finally solidified.
I grinned and gently shook Daniel’s shoulder. He ra
ised his head and then winced and put his hand to his neck. He glared at me. “You are never, ever going to let me sleep, are you?”
“Not when I keep having brilliant ideas. You need to stay awake to keep up.”
He groaned and looked at Kazuko. “Aren’t you supposed to protect me?”
She didn’t answer, but sipped her tea.
“Fine. Tell me, what glorious idea has sprung, fully grown, from your head?”
“Come on,” I said, and pulled him to his feet.
All at once, it felt wonderful to have a body again, and I grabbed both our backpacks and ran toward the hill that the tortured souls surrounded. My feet pounded the ground and I outdistanced Daniel, who fell behind, complaining that his eye hurt.
I stopped short when I heard them, singing and wailing, calling out to God to remember them. I dropped the backpacks onto the ground and reached inside one until I found what I needed. I grasped the handle and lugged out a bucket of water.
Daniel caught up with me. “What the hell are you doing?”
“The Divine did not restore my soul, did It?”
He passed a hand over his face. “No, He made me do it.”
“And how did you have the power do to something that amazing?”
“I got some Odin in a cut. What are you getting at?”
I thrust the bucket into his hands. Some of the water slopped over the side and got on his jeans. He swore.
“Free them. Forgive them. Release them.”
He stared at me, his one eye wide. The souls staggered closer, recognizing Daniel. Their desperate faces turned angry and ugly. They pointed at Daniel and began running toward us.
The ssssshhk of steel coming out of a scabbard sounded behind me, but I held my arm out to block Kazuko. “Wait,” I said.
She stepped around my arm and stood at my side, ready.
The flaming mob neared, and Daniel cast a look over his shoulder at me. “Are you serious?”
“Definitely.”
He shrugged. “Worked for Dorothy.” And with that he tossed the bucket of water at the mob.