Thirteen Specimens

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  * * *

  Hades was full of settlements, either constructed and populated entirely by the Damned, or else by the Damned and the Demons in combination. There was everything from thatch-roofed hamlets to metropolises of soaring high-rises, these skyscrapers either familiar or uncanny in their varied outlines. Many times the look of the town or city had to do with the period of human history its Damned citizens came from, though mostly these characteristics became blurred and blended with the coming of new generations.

  Certain colonies of Hades alternated between freezing cold and scorching hot, as if each day contained the seasons of a year. Some were built in the shadow of glaciers, where it was eternally frigid, sleet ever stinging the skin, the rooms of the buildings heated with whatever meager measures the Damned themselves could devise.

  Other cities were ever burning. Maybe not with blistering, charring earthly fire – how then could the citizenry move about freely, so as to roam to the next place of suffering? – but with a lesser blue flame that nonetheless consumed a city like Apollyon entirely, the flames lapping high into the air so that every street, every room was filled with this hot blue light, so that it filled your mouth when you spoke or slept. It needed no fuel, it never ran out, it was silent and did not crackle. After a while, you could almost forget the pain it caused in every nerve of your body. Almost.

  Roger and Davina had drifted to the city of Apollyon at about the same time; it was where they met. He had been an atheist in life, a British soldier killed by a German machine gun in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, when he was twenty-eight years old. In September of 1993, at the age of twenty-three, Davina had been killed along with eleven-thousand other Indian people in an earthquake. She assumed all eleven-thousand victims, being Hindus rather than devout Christians, must be here in Hades with her. He assumed a fair number of the million-plus casualties of the Somme offensive were here for one reason or another, as well. But Hades was infinite. Hades had room enough for all.

  The first time Roger and Davina had made love, the sea of flame they were submerged in caused so much pain to their uncovered bodies that it left little room for pleasure. But they stared at each other’s faces as he lay atop her. And they smiled.

  Later, they had met the boy. Mark had died only recently, and Apollyon was the first city he’d encountered. He told them he had burned to death at the age of eight, and it was his opinion that he was in Hades not only because he wasn’t baptized, but because he had caused the fire that had killed him...and his parents.

  Roger and Davina had pitied the child. They had taken him in as a kind of son, and it was this act as much as their love that made them kind of a husband and wife. Kind of a family.

  * * *

  At least paper did not burn in the blue flame, and the Demons of Apollyon apparently did not deem it worth their time to otherwise destroy the books that Roger and his fellow workers produced, nor the presses they printed them on. Roger was adept with machines, and had helped improve these presses and the binding equipment – all designed and built by the Damned over many years – since settling in Apollyon. Currently, he was inking up one of the presses to resume work on a slim volume called Beautiful Hell, a memoir written by a Damned author who had stumbled upon this city and left the manuscript in their care until he should return.

  “Mark.” he called, looking up but not seeing his boy. “Bring me a fresh can of black, will you?”

  A clatter, a clunk (please don’t have spilled another can of ink! thought Roger), and the child appeared from another room, bearing a metal can, looking eager to be of help. His adoptive father even paid him several coins of the netherworld’s currency, every “week”, for the scraps of work he performed about the shop.

  Roger noticed a smear of red on the boy’s beaming face, and grew concerned, straightened up. “Did you cut yourself?”

  Setting the can down, Mark touched his cheek, examined his stained fingertips. He laughed. “No, Rog...it’s red ink. I was putting some cans away!”

  His own hands slicked with black pigment, fashioned from native minerals and flora, Roger reached out and dabbed some ink on the boy’s other cheek. “There. You can at least be stained in the same color as me.”

  “Hey!” The boy flashed out his own hand, and ran his reddened fingertips down Roger’s forearm, leaving smudges. “Now you’re stained the same as me!”

  “Watch it, watch it,” Roger said, drawing back in a futile attempt to avoid the swipe. In doing so, he felt an unpleasant grinding sensation in his chest, as he did from time to time depending on the nature of his movements. He often felt it while making love with Davina, and she swore she could feel the outline of the shape tucked against his ribs, though he himself could not.

  “Why did you ever do that?” she would scold him in her musical accent, her heavy black brows lowered.

  “You can cut it out of me if you want,” he would tease.

  It was not only groups, large and small, of Demons that had begun to revolt and skirmish with the Celestial infantry sent to squash them, and with their own brother races of Demons as well. No, even groups of the Damned had taken up weapons against their Demon and Celestial oppressors alike, lashing out through guerilla warfare, terrorist acts, even full-scale battle on occasion. There had even been cases where Demons and Damned had fought together in uneasy alliance. It was a turbulent time for the eternal afterlife.

  Several “months” ago, a major clash had spilled over into Apollyon. The wounded remnants of a Damned rebel outfit had taken shelter in the city, pursued by a type of Demon Roger had not as yet encountered despite his many years here; a race of bipedal tick-like creatures with pale greenish chitin. He assumed it was a brand new breed, designed as a replacement for one of the humanoid species, deemed less trustworthy now. The Damned fighters had had a few guns among them. Roger figured they had stolen these weapons from some Angels who were in Hades as tourists, or to hunt the Damned for sport, or to help out in the fight against the Damned for the sheer joy of battle (being Angels, they could quickly reconstitute after even the most grievous wounds).

  Roger himself had been a witness to one messy clash, in which the last of these particular rebels were overpowered and captured by those immense ticks with their awful, scythe-like praying mantis forelimbs, and other sets of arms ending in hooks, blades and pincers like surgical – or dissecting – instruments. One of the rebels had been dropped to the cobblestoned street, an arm lopped off, and had met Roger’s eyes as he wailed. Roger had wanted to look away in shame for not going to the man’s aid or defense. But the carnage he had experienced on Europe’s battlefields, the horrors that had sent his immortal soul here, had scarred him in a way his mock cells could not repair, however miraculous their mending abilities. Or was it simply that his time in Hades had made him cowed, defeated, a dog with his growl beaten out of him? One might think that having participated in so much violence in life and endured so much violence in the afterlife would make him inured to killing, make it easy for him to resume his life as a soldier...but Roger could not see himself ever taking part in a war again.

  Even though he had not gone to the wounded man, however, the gun the fighter had been gripping went spinning out of the hand of his severed arm and ended up not far from Roger’s boot. He was standing outside the print shop, and a coworker of Roger’s had hissed at him from behind, “Rog! The gun! Get it...”

  Mindlessly, Roger had taken a step toward the gun, a little semiautomatic pistol of a type designed after his time on Earth; a .25 caliber, he deduced. The gun was closer than the injured man. He might furtively retrieve the weapon without entering into the battle itself, as he would if he gripped that man’s remaining, outstretched hand.

  He didn’t know if it were because he scooped up the little pistol, or because the Demon mistook him as one of the actual insurgents, but as he rose he saw a tick scurrying at him, blood from the Damned sloshing darkly in its swollen abdomen, its arms flailing, and the next thing he k
new he was on his back, his chest split wide, blood spraying up from him in a fountain. He had to close his eyes against it. The spray went into his own mouth, as if to keep the fountain recycling.

  Bullets from somewhere – another of the rebels – crashed into the Demon, causing both its and its victims’ blood to spatter the cobblestones, and it fell convulsing with a terrible screech. Demons could die, because they had no souls, and this one proceeded to do so.

  “Rog!” his coworker cried. This man and another dragged their friend back onto the sidewalk, then around the corner, out of sight. His coworker took the gun from Roger’s hand, examined it a moment, looked down at the wound that would have killed a mortal man. “Rog, you need to keep this. We need to hide it.” He pointed the little weapon at that terrible pumping gash. “Let me put it in there, Rog. No one will find it, and you can always get it out again if you need it.”

  “No,” the other man said, “it could be found if he’s tortured and cut open some day. They’d put him in a snake pit for a fucking century, for having that...”

  “Quiet! Rog...”

  Did he nod or gurgle his assent? Maybe he did, in his delirium, or maybe his friend simply interpreted Roger’s agony that way; he couldn’t himself recall, so blanked with pain was he at the time. But the next thing he knew, his coworker was stuffing that hard lump of metal deep inside him like a crude lover.

  The coworker had vanished from Apollyon a week later. Rumor was that the fighting had stirred him, and he himself had joined the rebel movement. And the gun...the gun still lay inside Roger’s chest, healed without trace of a scar – not even the scars of the German machine gun bullets. Inside him like a black pearl. A hunk of shrapnel. Like a dead, cold organ.

  “You okay, Rog?” the boy asked, noticing the wince, seeing the man’s hand involuntarily touch his upper chest. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No...I’m fine, fine.” Roger smiled at him, but sadly. He hated to hear him fill so quickly with guilt, with self-blame. And he wished Mark wouldn’t call him Rog. Or Davina, Davina. Maybe someday, he hoped, the boy would truly think of them as his parents.

  * * *

  Roger and Davina were awakened by the sound of a child’s screams.

  There were two bedrooms in the little flat they rented; Mark’s room was the smaller, but that was like saying the other room was the larger of two closets. Both had space enough for the bed they contained, and not much else. There were lanterns and candles for light, but even with them extinguished the air had that constant blue glow. Cold burning fire, filling each room to its ceiling. When Roger and Davina opened their eyelids, it took a blinking moment or two to readjust to the pain against their bare eyeballs. It was Davina who slipped out of bed first, her skin very brown against the white pajamas she had made for herself, and shuffled barefoot from the room. Roger trailed after, not as swiftly. He knew what the screaming was about. It was not the first time.

  “What is it, my baby? What’s wrong?” Davina cooed, sitting on the edge of the bed and gathering Mark up into her embrace. He wrung her in his arms, his face pressed into her chest.

  “Fire,” the boy spluttered through his tears. “The fire...”

  “I know, my darling. I know.” Davina rocked him. She glanced up at Roger, framed in the room’s threshold.

  As concerned as he was for the boy’s anguish, he couldn’t help but smile proudly, affectionately at the sight of him in his lover’s arms. Her thick black hair, curly as Medusa’s, wild around her face. Those huge black eyes, so solemn and concerned. Could there ever have been a more affecting portrait of a Madonna? Still meeting his eyes, she kissed the top of the boy’s head and whispered comfort to him.

  “It’s my fault,” he wept. “I killed my Mom and Dad...I killed them...”

  “No, my dear. No...”

  “I did! I did!”

  “It was an accident, my love.”

  “It doesn’t matter...it’s my fault...I killed them! I killed my Mom and Dad!”

  At last, Roger came to the bed and sat beside Davina, took one of the boy’s hands and clasped it between both of his. “That’s not why you’re here, Mark.”

  “I’m bad! I’m bad!”

  “No. Look at me. Look at Davina. Are we bad, too, Mark?”

  The boy didn’t raise his face from her warm breasts, but his muffled voice said, “No-o...”

  “It’s not fair, the things that happen. The fire. Us being here. Not fair, then, is it? But we don’t have to accept it. We may have to live with the pain of things, but we don’t have to accept them. I don’t accept that I belong here. I don’t accept that you belong here. That’s what makes us human – that freedom they can’t beat from us or bleed from us – and I’ve found that being human is more important than being an Angel. Or a...deity.” He sighed, still holding the child’s hand. “I must not be making sense to you. But, what I’m saying is, they can punish us from now until the universe burns out, but that doesn’t make us evil. And you, my boy, are a beautiful, beautiful soul who would shame the most powerful, most lordly, meanest and ugliest God that anyone could ever worship.”

  Davina put a hand to the back of Roger’s head, stroked it, and spread her lips in a smile.

  3: The Searchers

  Dawn hid her face in her hands, as if they might staunch the flow of her tears...as if, if she refused to look at her surroundings long enough they would be gone when she uncovered her eyes, and she would be in Paradise again instead of this apartment provided for her and her husband, here in Hades.

  Their Demon hosts no doubt believed they provided a comfortable and even beautiful environment for their angelic guests. The glistening, metallic scarabs that covered every inch of the walls were a living (in a sense) mosaic, that shifted every so often into an entirely new pattern of color and design. And even though Michael had assured her that last night the beetles had not swarmed off the walls and across him in his bed, she still shuddered at their numbers all around her. It wasn’t these creatures, though, that had brought her to such a state...but having been met by Iblis Al-Qadim and two lesser Demons, upon her arrival into the netherworld. Even though Michael had gone back to Paradise to fetch her personally, had told her what to expect, and held her hand when that metal hatch in the white-tiled wall squealed open, she had still gasped and squeezed her eyes shut at her first sight of the three skeletal devils – the looming governor with flame lapping out of the top of his head, inside the black miter he wore, and his two attendants: comparatively smaller and without headgear, a luminous green smoke wisping out of their open skulls in place of their superior’s emerald fire.

  Neither of the lesser Demons had a black cephalopod perched on one shoulder, and the one on the governor’s shoulder seemed to have become more affectionate, or aggressive, in the mere hours since Michael had last seen it. It now had one of its slinking arms coiled tightly around Iblis Al-Qadim’s scrawny neck, like a noose.

  But now Michael and Dawn were alone, and her sobs were finally diminishing...though she still refused the ice water he offered her from a pitcher. He didn’t proffer any of the brilliantly red unknown fruit, heaped for them in a silver bowl. Even he thought they looked too much like the small hearts of human children.

  “And to think that Mark is in this place, huh?” Michael told her, pacing as she sat on the edge of the bed. “This is how you feel, even though you know you can return to Heaven anytime you want. Imagine being stuck in this place forever. And this,” he waved an arm around the room, “this isn’t how the Damned live, down here.” He still couldn’t help but think of Hades as being “down”, as if beneath the Earth’s rind, though he knew it was more like a parallel dimension.

  “Terrible,” Dawn sniffled, at last lowering her slick hands from eyes burned red. “Terrible. I don’t think I ever really believed in a Hell,” she admitted quietly, as if she herself might be damned by the confession, “did you?”

  “Yes,” her husband muttered.

  “I’m n
ot even sure...I hate to say it, Mike...but I’m not even sure I really, really believed in a Heaven. I mean, I went to church every Sunday, like I was expected to...the way my parents did. But, I don’t know...I didn’t like to really think about an afterlife, even a Paradise, because...it just didn’t seem possible...”

  “You see? This is what I don’t understand. The Father only counts the heads that go through the doors of His churches – He doesn’t look into their hearts. If He did, a lot of the people in Heaven would be here, and innocents like my son would be with us in Paradise. Instead of judging you by your acts, your purity, He’s...petty. He’ll throw you into the pit for buttering the wrong side of the bread.”

  “Honey,” she looked up, “shhh!”

  “I don’t care. I don’t care anymore,” he grumbled. “I never thought that all Buddhists would go to Hell, even though I was told a million times there was only one way to get to Paradise – through the Son. I never believed every Muslim, every Jew, every atheist would be punished without even a look at their souls! It’s insane...it’s crueler than anything I could have imagined, even from Satan. And now, of course, I understand. There never was a Satan. Just our Dad – the big old Yin/Yang. He’s the real Lucifer. The angel of light, turned ruler of Hell. Angel and demon in one. Our Creator is the Devil.”

  “Michael,” Dawn warned him, glancing with a start at the seething, rustling walls as the insects suddenly scurried over each other to reconfigure their positions. For a moment, she had thought the bugs would pour over her husband and eat him alive for his blasphemies.