Escape From Hell

by Larry Niven

  “As far as I know, but I was never part of the literary scene. But after Assia committed suicide —”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Killed herself and the daughter she had with Ted.”

  “Oh, God. Did I cause all that?”

  “I don’t see how, Sylvia.”

  “Well, after he went off with Assia, I wanted the divorce. He didn’t, really. I thought I could live on my own. And I couldn’t. Poor Ted. Allen, did you bring fire?”

  “I have it,” I told her. “Sure you want me to do this?”

  “Yes, please. Hurry while I’ve still got the courage.”

  “Sylvia, I’m scared. What if it doesn’t work? Nothing I’ve done has worked. You said it yourself, why would it?”

  “I don’t care. Allen, I can’t stay like this. I just can’t. Do it, please, hurry, Allen! Do it!”

  “Here goes.” My stick was burning down close to my hand, and it was now or never. I had piled all the faggots and branches I could find around Sylvia’s tree before I went looking for fire. I’d thought I might be in a hurry when I got back. I thrust the branch into the piled–up wood. It reminded me of the scene in Joan of Arc when they lit the fires that burned her. Where would the man who did that be? But this was the only way.

  The woodpile burned high, and her tree caught. The few black leaves flared briskly. Sylvia screamed. I ran over to try to put the fire out.

  “No! Let it burn!” she screamed. “Please! It has to be this way! Just don’t listen, Allen, I’m so sorry, I —” She screamed again. I wasn’t sure I could take this, but now there wasn’t anything I could do. It wasn’t just the faggots I’d piled up. Sylvia was on fire, too, trunk and limbs and branches, all burning. I smelled seared flesh as well as burning wood. The smoke rose but not very high, then settled and flowed out around the tree, making it hard to breathe. I was gasping, wheezing.

  I put my hands over my ears and closed my eyes, and stopped breathing. I could still hear her screams. It went on far too long.

  Then it was quiet. Her tree was burned out, a ragged stump still smoking and glowing. I looked around. Nothing but smoke.

  But the smoke seemed to be getting thicker. It was gathering in one place like a Hollywood special effect. Was this what Rosemary and the others saw when I regenerated in the Vestibule? The smoke thickened.

  It took shape. Not as a tree. The outlines of a woman, a little shorter than me, long hair in a ponytail. I could see through her. It seemed impolite to watch, but I couldn’t stop. The outline grew more solid. Flesh, then robes.

  “Sylvia?”

  There wasn’t any answer. The thickening continued, and I waited. “Sylvia —”

  “Allen! It worked!” She was staring at her hands. I remembered how I had felt when Benito first let me out of my bottle. I couldn’t get enough of looking at my navel. At being able to see myself, feel myself. It had to be that way with her.

  “Does it still hurt?”

  “Not anymore. No, no, Allen, I’m fine, I feel wonderful! Thank you!” She looked around, saw the trail of broken branches. “They went that way, didn’t they?”

  “Who?”

  “Ted and those women.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Sylvia, that’s upslope. We have to go down.”

  “And we will, but Allen, I think Ted needs help.”

  “We’ll probably be torn to pieces by those dogs.” I shuddered.

  “We’ll heal. I saw you heal from the dogs, and look at me.” She stared in wonder at her hands and feet. “I bet I’m a wreck. But I sure look good to me!”

  I wanted to hug her, but that didn’t seem appropriate. “You look good to me, too,” I said. She looked a lot like the pictures in the magazine article I’d seen. The ponytail gave her a serious look. She was pretty enough without being beautiful. Long face, teeth just a little too big, nose a bit too large for real beauty, but none of that mattered. She looked wonderful. “Okay, let’s go find Ted, but I haven’t a clue as to how to get him away from those women.”

  “We got me loose, and that was a lot harder,” Sylvia said. “Come on, we have to find Ted.”

  Chapter 16

  Seventh Circle, Second Round

  The Violent Wasters

  * * *

  There do the hideous Harpies make their nests.

  The trail was easy enough to follow. Sylvia ran and skipped like a little girl. “Allen, thank you! It was so awful to be a tree!”

  I remembered my time in the bottle and shuddered. “That’s all done now,” I told her. I hoped I knew what I was talking about. Nobody had put me in charge of anything.

  We heard a commotion ahead. Women were shouting. The track led around a big tree. Ted Hughes was standing at bay, facing his critics, his back against a thorn hedge. I recognized him from a photo in a magazine article about Sylvia. He had craggy features and unkempt hair, and he stared at his tormentors in hatred. He was a big man, big enough to deal with a dozen of the critics, but he never tried. The harpies and dogs were gone. There were only the women. We stood at the edge of the circle and listened.

  One of the women shouted, “You got rich off her work. It was always better than yours, and you knew it.”

  Hughes looked contemptuous. “I published Ariel.”

  “After taking out the best work! And you only did it because you needed the money!”

  “Millions! You made millions, on Sylvia’s work. How much would you have been worth without her?”

  “Millions?” Sylvia asked quietly.

  “Well, counting the movie rights, yes, I’d say a couple of million dollars,” I told her.

  “Holy cow. And I was starving. One reason I — One reason I killed myself. I didn’t know where to get the rent money. And you don’t have to tell me that I ran away and left my problems for others.” She shook her head. “I had time to think about that for myself.”

  “You have no right to judge me,” Ted Hughes was saying. “You have no idea what it was like to live with her! I don’t have to answer to you.”

  “You should answer to Sylvia!”

  “I did that. For thirty years.”

  “Birthday letters,” someone said.

  “What are they talking about?” Sylvia asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Dynamite your life!” one of the women shouted. “Dynamite your life every ten years! You said that!”

  Sylvia’s voice went high. “When did he say that?”

  “Sylvia!” Hughes looked at her in disbelief.

  “In a letter he wrote to his brother Gerald just after his son was born,” one of the women shouted.

  “Ted!” Sylvia was shocked.

  Hughes turned away from her.

  “Can’t face her, can you?” a critic shouted. “Deserted her. Wasted your life and hers.”

  “You certainly dynamited my life,” Sylvia said.

  “What now?” I asked Sylvia. But I knew. “Hughes, all of you! You read Dante. It’s all true. There’s a way out of here. All the way down, through all the circles.”

  “This is Hell. There is no hope here,” someone said.

  “But there is,” I told them. “I’ve seen it, I’ve been there. I went there with Benito, and watched him leave.”

  “Benito Mussolini,” Sylvia said. “If they let him out they can’t keep you! You weren’t that big a villain, Ted!”

  Hughes ignored her bitchy tone. “It’s a long way,” he said.

  “Long and hard,” I agreed. “But you can do it.”

  “Not you, Ted,” Sylvia said. “Not yet. You have something you have to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Assia.”

  From what I’d read, Assia Wevill had deliberately set out to take Ted Hughes away from Sylvia, and succeeded. I’d also read that Assia was pregnant by Ted Hughes when Sylvia killed herself.

  “Assia. Allen says she killed herself, and her daughter.”

  Hughes nodded. “Our daughter.”

>   “I knew she was pregnant,” Sylvia said. “I knew.”

  Hughes looked awful. “She had an abortion after you died,” Hughes said. “Shura wasn’t conceived until years later.”

  “So she killed two children,” Sylvia said. “And herself. Ted, she’ll be a tree. You must know where she is.”

  “What do you care about Assia?” one of the women shouted. “She gloated when you — when you died. Hughes wrote that awful BBC piece about dead rabbits and how wonderful his mistress’s body was.”

  Sylvia looked away. “I heard it,” she said. “On the radio.”

  Hughes looked away in misery.

  “ ‘The Rival’! You wrote that wonderful poem about Assia!”

  Sylvia looked contempt toward the critic. “I hadn’t met Assia when I wrote ‘The Rival,’ ” she said.

  “Then who is it about?”

  Sylvia ignored that. “Ted, do you know where Assia is?”

  Hughes nodded.

  “She has to have a chance to get out, too,” Sylvia said. “You’ll have to do that. You owe it to her.”

  Hughes was silent for a moment. “When did you get saintly?”

  “I’m not, I’m still a bitch,” Sylvia said. “And I never did like that woman, but Ted, I know what it must have been like for her! I do.”

  “Sylvia, you hated Assia! She was your last poem!”

  The moon has nothing to be sad about,

  Staring from her hood of bone.

  She is used to this sort of thing.

  Her blacks crackle and drag.

  “I’m glad you remembered. But Ted, look where we are,” Sylvia said. “What I thought of Assia and what she thought of me isn’t important. She killed herself because of us. And she’s your responsibility.”

  “Mine?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have given up, but I did. She’s certainly not my responsibility.”

  He thought about that for a minute. “What do I have to do?”

  “Allen —”

  “Remember Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc? You have to stack faggots around her. Then go get fire, bring it back, and burn her tree,” I told him. “It won’t be easy. She’ll hate that, and you will burn yourself. But you’ll heal. So will she.” I pointed to Sylvia as evidence.

  “And then what?”

  “Down. You’ve read Dante. All poets read Dante,” I told him. “He got the geography right. Enough of it, anyway.”

  “I never read Dante. I faked it,” Hughes said. There was a collective gasp, and a giggle.

  I said, “Down. Avoid the demons or deal with them.”

  “And that’s all there is to it? We don’t have to join churches and go to masses and that stuff?”

  I spread my arms out wide in a big shrug. “How do I know? I just know the way out of Hell. After that it’s up to you. If it’s any use to you, I never joined any church. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Not yet. What does that mean?” He seemed more comfortable talking to me than to Sylvia. I could understand that. I wasn’t sure why the harridans were just standing there listening, but they were quiet and that was fine with me.

  “I meant not yet,” I told him. “I’m fine with the idea, but what church? What should I believe? I’ll believe it when I know. Right now, I know the way out.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “Then stay and help me,” he said. “Show me how to get her loose, and then lead us out of here.”

  I looked at Sylvia. She clearly didn’t like the idea. Maybe it was Ted, maybe she didn’t want to face the woman who’d lured her husband away from her.

  Benito had been emphatic. No matter how many he started with, no matter how hard he tried, he only got one at a time down to the grotto. I was in love with Sylvia. It was an odd feeling for me. If she’d wanted Ted to come with us I wouldn’t have said anything, but she didn’t. If I could only take one, and the choice was Sylvia or Ted, that was no choice at all. “No. But you’ll be all right. Some of these ladies will be glad to go with you.”

  “Sylvia Plath!” One of the harridans came over to us. “I taught a whole course on your work!” she gushed. “I wonder how many times I ran past your tree? I’m so glad to meet you! I’m Carlotta.”

  “Thank you.” Sylvia was trying to be polite. “Where did you teach?”

  “Mostly community colleges. I tried to get on at Smith, but I couldn’t.”

  “Sylvia!” Hughes was shouting. “Let me come with you!”

  “Still hanging on her coattails,” Carlotta shouted. “It’s just like you.”

  “He’s afraid to face Assia,” someone else said. The others began to shout all at once.

  “Why wouldn’t he be? He drove her to suicide.”

  “Look what he did with Sylvia. Turn your back on that monster!”

  “It wasn’t Ted’s fault,” Sylvia said.

  “You would have killed yourself if he hadn’t abandoned you?” Carlotta asked. “And then taunted you about it with that radio play?”

  “No. But I did it. Not Ted.”

  “God, Sylvia, I’m sorry,” Hughes said.

  “I believe you. Ted, you know what you have to do. I can’t help you with that. Allen, let’s go.” She turned and went back down the trail of broken branches.

  I think Ted tried to follow us, but I can’t be sure. The mob started for him, and he ran deeper into the woods.

  Carlotta was following us. She kept glancing back in the direction the mob was chasing Ted. “You didn’t say much to him,” Carlotta said.

  “What was there to say?” Sylvia asked. “I loved him, he left me. For a while I was able to deal with that. I wrote most of Ariel after he left me. But — well, he got on with his life. I didn’t.”

  “That can’t be all!” Carlotta shouted. “I followed him, denounced him. Accused him. I turned down an academic appointment because he was going to speak in Canada and I had to be there! You can’t just — you have to have more to say!”

  Sylvia shook her head. “Carlotta, I spent a lot of my life angry with the world — with God — because my father was dead. I threw the rest of it away because Ted left me. I won’t spend eternity making the same mistakes. You shouldn’t, either. Stop talking for a while. Pretend you’re a tree.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out. Down and out,” I said.

  Carlotta looked at us, stared at Sylvia, and suddenly turned. Without a word she ran back up the trail, still in hot pursuit of Ted Hughes.

  Chapter 17

  Seventh Circle, Third Round

  The Violent Against God, Nature, And Art

  * * *

  Thus was descending the eternal heat,

  Whereby the sand was set on fire, like tinder

  Beneath the steel, for doubling of the dole.

  We reached the edge of the woods. Sylvia looked out through the last shadows and shuddered. Fireflakes fell on burning sands. “You went out in that for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “How do we get across it?” she asked. “Dante never went out in it at all.”

  “No, he followed a stream. I don’t know where the stream is. When we looked for it last time we found a place that didn’t exist when Dante was here. It’s worse than this desert. I think we’ll have to run.”

  “All right.”

  “Faster than that,” I said. “These creeps have invented umbrellas. The game is, you’re the umbrella. I think we need to outrun any pairs of big men. Or big women.”

  She stared at me, doubting.

  “Now,” I said, and slapped her butt, and ran.

  Sylvia ran. “Ow!” She was as fast as I was. Faster. “Eee! I’m on fire! Again. Allen, that river ran down from the wood? All we had to do was run along the wood!”

  “Dante said so. I don’t quite trust the geography here. We couldn’t even find the wood last time. I’d rather run straight across. Last time we had a car.”

  “Car?”

  “Car. A demon car. There’s a freeway — a
highway.”

  “Do you see —”

  “What?”

  She didn’t answer, but she veered a little to the left. In the heat–curdled distance I saw an oblong trying to shape itself. “Mirage,” I said, but she was yards ahead; she might not have heard me.

  But we were still running straight away from the forest. Good enough. I followed.

  “Allen, it keeps hurting!”

  “Can you take it?”

  “What, pain? I had two children, Allen. I know what pain is.”

  “Women always play that trump card.”

  “But it’s true!” She ran — and slowed. “Allen? Umbrellas — I wasn’t sure you meant it.” She pointed. A Pi shape, two human spirits carrying a third, the third struggling. She pointed again. “Maybe we can reach that.”

  “Mirage,” I said. A distant oblong shape, as real as any false pool of water on a hot pavement. A cone stood up from the roof, point down.

  “Landmark,” she countered, and ran toward it. Over her shoulder, “Be bad if we got turned around.”

  It was still hazy as we got closer. Then two men ran toward it. Toward it, to it, and right through the walls. They came out the other side, not slowed a bit.

  A mirage. A filthy joke. “We’re in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism,” I said.

  Sylvia wasn’t listening. She was from New England, she’d never been out West … but any poet would know what a mirage is.

  She was running away from me. I had a horrible picture of two men using Sylvia as an umbrella to shield them from the fire. I ran after her, but she was faster than I was.

  We were running through a blizzard of fireflakes. The sand below was covered with fire as well. Sylvia’s hair held half a dozen fireflakes, and so did mine. But the mirage had stopped retreating.

  There was an outside service counter, but the window was closed. Next to that was a door. Sylvia pulled it open. “Come on, Allen!” She went inside.

  I looked at the door. Real? Once you accept miracles, anything becomes possible. Where would this lead? Other worlds? The Vatican? But my touch found the handle solid, and I followed her in.