The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

by Brian Evenson

“Before you go,” said Carlton quickly, “might I trouble you to point me toward a hotel?”

  The man made a coughing noise that it took Carlton a moment to understand was laughter. “No trouble,” he said. He took Carlton by the arm. He gripped the arm oddly, awkwardly, because of, so Carlton supposed, his lack of thumb. He steered Carlton lightly but firmly over the narrow-gauge tracks. On the other side lay a grassy field. The man edged them along it until they came to a nearly hidden path cutting through. Together they followed this into the darkness. The path was narrow, and the other man fell behind him, still holding on to his arm, pushing Carlton ahead of him. There was enough moonlight that Carlton could make out the general contours of the path, but little more, and it felt strange to have the man at once pushing him forward and holding on to him, almost as if he were being employed as some sort of shield. Carlton thought, for the first time in a long time, of how frightened he had been of the dark as a boy, and realized that fear was still within him, carefully locked away, but still there.

  And perhaps, he began to feel, not nearly so carefully locked away as he had hitherto believed.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked the man.

  “Keep going,” said the calm voice from behind him.

  “I don’t even know your name,” said Carlton.

  The man gave again that same coughing laugh. “I don’t know yours either,” he said.

  “It’s Carlton,” said Carlton.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Carlton,” said the man.

  The field abruptly ended, and the path debouched onto a larger dirt road.

  “Here we are,” said the man, releasing his arm. He tapped Carlton’s left side. “Hotel is that way,” he said. “Unless you stray from the road you won’t miss it.” He tapped Carlton’s other side. “I’m going this other direction myself.”

  “How far to the hotel?” asked Carlton.

  The man grunted in the darkness. “Four miles,” he said. “Perhaps five.”

  “Five miles!” exclaimed Carlton.

  “You should have remained on the train,” said the man. “You can transfer to the branch line at the next stop as well, and there’s a town there. A hotel, too.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me so while we were still on the train?”

  “You didn’t ask,” smoothly answered the voice from the darkness. “You appeared to know what you wanted.”

  “I can’t walk five miles. I would have to start back almost as soon as I arrived. Not to mention the rain.”

  “True,” said the voice. “True.”

  “Is there nothing closer?”

  “You could stay at the siding, on the bench,” said the voice, “but there is little protection from the elements there.” For a long moment the voice stayed silent. “Or,” it finally said, “you could come home with me.”

  Later, Carlton told himself that if it had not been so dark, he would not have followed the man. If he had been able to see the fellow’s face, the cruelty he knew to be engraved there, he would not have given in. But the man’s voice was so different from his face, so soothing, so melodious, and the rain was falling faster, and he had, really, no place else to go.

  So they had walked the quarter mile or so to reach the path that led to the man’s house, the man all the while propelling him forward and retaining that odd grip upon his arm. Then they took the three dozen steps over mossy ground to the man’s door, and the man led him in and lit first the lamps and then the fire. Only then did Carlton see his face again and regret having come. But by then it was too late.

  Once the fire was blazing, the man helped Carlton off with his coat and encouraged him to warm himself by the fire. There was that same contrast between the cruelty of his face and the mellifluous quality of his voice, and the combination made Carlton slightly sick. He tried not to show it. The man hung Carlton’s coat on a hook to one side of the fire, his own coat just beside it. Soon he had pulled another chair beside Carlton’s and was holding his own hands near the flames to warm them.

  After a moment, he stood and left the room. When he returned, it was with a wicker tray, two tumblers on it as well as a decanter half-filled with a viscous amber fluid. Between the decanter and the tumblers lay a lacquered wooden box. It was covered with scrollwork that resembled flowering vines, except that rather than ending in flowers, each vine terminated in what appeared upon closer inspection to be a monstrous head.

  “What a curious box,” said Carlton.

  The other man ignored this. He placed the tray on the floor between their chairs. “I don’t have a second bed,” said the man, “but you can doze here in the chair near the fire until morning. Or, if you prefer, I can make up a pallet of sorts for you on the floor.”

  “The chair will be fine,” said Carlton.

  The man nodded, then reached for the decanter. “A drink?” he asked. “It will warm you, perhaps allow you to sleep. I promise to make certain you awaken in sufficient time to not miss your train.”

  Carlton nodded. He watched the man fill the glass three fingers deep and then gesture at Carlton to take it. Carlton took it and sipped. Not whiskey exactly, at least not of any variety he’d tasted. Not scotch either. But not far from either.

  “What is it?” he asked the man.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” said the man. He lifted his own tumbler. “Cheers.”

  The tumbler grew empty sooner than Carlton expected. He leaned down and returned it to the wicker tray.

  “Another?” asked the man, already filling it for him.

  Carlton hesitated, then assented.

  “It’s early yet,” said the man a few minutes later. “Shall we play a game of cards?”

  Carlton shrugged. “Why not?” he said. He felt warm inside.

  The man brought over a small end table from some other part of the room. He slid the wicker tray to one side with his foot and placed the end table between them, then reached down and picked up the lacquered box. Placing it on the end table, he opened it, removed from it a set of playing cards.

  They were of a larger format than Carlton was used to, and yellowed with age. He watched the man fan them, separating them into suits. They smelled faintly of smoke and of some herb, rosemary perhaps. The images on their faces were different than what he was used to: There were no spades, clubs, hearts, diamonds. He saw shields and hawkbells, a flower of some sort, what might be a crude acorn or some similar nut. Only one in every four or five cards had human figures on it, but all of these showed an injury: a woman with a unicorn’s horn run through her chest, a smiling king with a knife buried hilt-deep in his eye, an exhausted younger man lacking a hand with blood spurting from his stump.

  The man across from him had discarded all the cards in the flower suit and was tucking them back into the lacquered box. When he had finished, he snapped the lid shut and deftly cut the remaining suits together.

  “It’s easier with just three suits,” he explained. “Shall we begin?”

  How much time has gone by? wondered Carlton. How many drinks have I had? The game wasn’t hard for him to pick up, being a variant of Watten for two players rather than four. Or, rather, three players, since a hand was dealt for an absent third and left to one side.

  “For the devil,” said the man. “If he cares to join us.”

  “The devil?”

  The other man shrugged. “Just a tradition,” he claimed. It felt strange to Carlton, still, to see the hand sitting there on the table, awaiting the devil.

  Once it was clear Carlton had grown proficient with the rules, the man lightly asked if he’d care to bet. “Just a small nothing,” he said. “To make the game more interesting.”

  And Carlton, feeling warm inside, more than a little drunk, pleased to be dry and out of the rain, thought Why not?

  The first three games they bet just a few shillings apiece. Carlton won each time. The other man seemed frustrated, his eyes darkening, his mouth a tight line. This pleased Carlton more than he cared
to admit; he did not like the man. The man dealt again, and again Carlton won. Everything became decidedly blurry. He put down his cards and stretched, yawned.

  “Perhaps that is enough for tonight,” he said.

  “You appear to want to quit while you are ahead,” said the other man. “Hardly very sporting of you.”

  “It’s late,” said Carlton.

  “One last game,” said the man. “One final bet.”

  For a moment Carlton protested, but he quickly gave in. “One last bet,” he said.

  “For something meaningful this time,” the man said. “For a thumb.”

  “A thumb?” said Carlton, surprised.

  “If you win, you shall have my thumb. If I win, I shall have yours.”

  “But you’re already missing a thumb,” said Carlton.

  “Yes,” said the man. “I’ve played this game before.” He waggled the hand that was still whole. “But I still have one.”

  “This is absurd,” said Carlton.

  “Of course it is,” said the man.

  “If I lose, you’ll cut off my thumb?”

  The man shook his head. “I’ll remove it carefully and place it on my hand and use it. It won’t hurt you. You will hardly even feel it.”

  “And if I win?”

  “Then I suppose you will have three thumbs. I’ll attach the third wherever you’d like.”

  Carlton laughed. “This must be a joke,” he said.

  The man smiled his cold smile. “If you like,” his warm, welcoming voice said.

  “All right,” Carlton said. “I’ll play along. One last game.”

  …

  But it was as if the game had changed, or perhaps the other man had been holding back the whole time, setting him up. It became clear after the first exchanges that Carlton would be hard-pressed even to achieve a draw, and clear as well that he was much drunker than he had realized. The room seemed to waver, moving slightly, and out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw the cards that had been dealt for the devil move. He looked at his own cards, confused, unsure for a moment what game they were playing.

  “Yours to play,” said the other man, and at first Carlton thought the man was addressing not him but the devil, who seemed suddenly to be there, kneeling just beside the end table, his fingers touching his hand of cards. Or no, rather, nobody was there—what was he thinking?

  “Yours to play,” the other man repeated, and this time it was clear to Carlton that he was the one being addressed.

  He played a card. A moment later, the game was over.

  “You won,” Carlton said.

  “So I did,” said the other man, and he smiled. The devil’s cards were face up now, Carlton saw, though he could not remember the other man having turned them over. In one of the devil’s cards a king was in the process of gorily severing his own head. In another, a queen or a princess held tight to her amputated leg, cradling it like a baby. The third card was partly covered by the first two, and Carlton could not see it. He reached to move it, but before his fingers could touch it the other man’s hand closed around his wrist.

  The man was muttering, a dark gibberish that was more like spitting than speaking. He tightened his grip until the bones in Carlton’s wrist began to ache. Then, in a flash, the other hand, the thumbless one, shot out and closed its fingers around Carlton’s thumb.

  “What are you—”

  “You lost,” the man hissed in a voice that better matched his face. “I shall take what is mine.”

  Carlton felt his thumb tingling and then a tightness in it and then, abruptly, he didn’t feel the thumb at all. When the man drew his hand away, where the thumb had been the skin was planed flat, as if there had never been a thumb there in the first place. He could see his thumb now on the man’s hand, the color of the skin too dark to match the rest of his pallid hand.

  The man stared admiringly at his own hand, turning it back and forth, flexing the new thumb. He looked up and smiled.

  “Who are you?” asked Carlton, his voice shivering.

  “The question is not who,” said the man, if man was in fact the proper word, “but what.”

  When Carlton said nothing to this, the man smiled again, even broader this time. “Double or nothing?” he inquired.

  He woke up with his head aching, lying just off the road. It was a little past dawn. His bag had been opened and his possessions scattered all around in the damp grass, and he was shivering, very cold. He looked around for the man’s house, but there was no house to be seen.

  At first he thought it had been a dream, but then he made the mistake of lifting his hand and staring at it. The thumb was gone, the forefinger as well. He remembered only vaguely the specifics of the second game he had lost, but he remembered the end of it, with the devil’s hand of cards somehow floating upright in the air while the other man kept affixing Carlton’s forefinger to different parts of his own hand to see how it looked and then removing it. In the end he left it beside his own forefinger, rooted in the web of his thumb.

  Carlton gathered his wet things and made his way back down the road to the railway stop. It looked different than it had previously: there was a small covered waiting area that somehow had escaped his notice the night before, and a small shack too for the signalman. The signalman was outside, checking the condition of the tracks and raking footprints out of the gravel.

  When the signalman saw him, he asked, “Which train, sir?”

  “Branch line,” said Carlton.

  The signalman nodded. “Which direction?”

  “Inland.”

  The signalman led him to the covered waiting area.

  “Don’t get too many passengers here, either getting on or off.”

  “No,” said Carlton. “I imagine not.”

  He fell asleep in the waiting area. He dreamt that he was again sitting at the other man’s small table, cards in his hands, a roaring fire to one side. The lacquered box was not visible at first, and then he saw it, tucked into the top of his traveling bag, the corner just visible. There were only two players, but a third hand had been dealt and lay facedown in one of the two remaining quadrants of the table. But this hand was not the devil’s hand, it could not be, for the devil was there, across from him, where in life the other man had been, immense, skin red and scaled, waiting.

  Carlton swallowed. “Whose turn to play?” he asked.

  Not yet, said the devil.

  “Not yet?” said Carlton.

  The devil nodded slightly at the third hand. Who, the devil asked, will you bring to the table?

  He was awoken by the signalman shaking him. His thumb and forefinger were still gone. He rushed quickly to the train and boarded. Almost immediately the train began to move.

  His car was all but deserted. He opened the first compartment he found and looked in. It was empty. He stood in the doorway, but in the end did not enter; he did not wish to be alone.

  He moved down through the car, opening each compartment door. The first three were empty. In the fourth and final one was a lone man. He had dozed off.

  Carlton entered quietly and took a seat directly across from the man, facing him.

  He watched the man sleep. Seeing him there, so peaceful, something struck him.

  He looked at the man’s hands. All his fingers were there, every single one. He did not seem to Carlton like the sort of man who needed all his fingers. He was unlike Carlton in this way.

  He crossed his legs at the knees and placed his clasped hands atop them, the missing thumb and forefinger prominently displayed. He waited.

  The man began to move. He opened his eyes.

  “I awakened you,” Carlton said, and smiled.

  He tried to flex his missing thumb. In his mind, he began to deal the cards. He placed three of them before the devil and then waited, to see if he had been favored, to see if the devil would guide him in what to do next.

  Nameless Citizen

  1.

  The world is a hel
l because we have made it so—I have always thought so, even before. This is not something to be regretted, only something to be accepted, and with each passing year I have come to accept it more. I doubt anyone would argue with me about it now, even if there were others left to argue.

  The last person I argued with, indeed the last person with whom I had had contact of any kind until two days ago, I argued with seven years ago. He left on foot, carrying a small titanium cylinder, its surface etched with red script. He asked me to go with him—a simple delivery, he said. I declined. “You won’t come back,” I told him. “They won’t let you.” He knew this to be true just as I did, and yet, stubborn or naïve or simply confused, he chose to go anyway. He shook my hand and then turned and left. As predicted, he never came back.

  Two days ago, I spent most of an afternoon in the basements of the houses surrounding my own. The houses here are now ramshackle or collapsed, subject to decades of heat and cold and unnatural rain and wind since the disaster, but the basements are still more or less intact. I have broken the concrete floor of each basement, turned the soil beneath and, with great effort on my part, set about attempting to fruit mushrooms and fungi. For many years I did not succeed in growing anything at all, and instead lived on the food storage scavenged from the basements and closets of empty houses around me. Outside, I attempted to grow various grains, but either the seeds or the soil is sterile, or perhaps both. Every few years, whenever I discover a cache of seed or grain sheltered in some fashion from the air, I try again.

  With mushrooms, I managed finally to fruit several dozen translucent and wracked buttonlets, each no bigger than my fingernail. I ate half of them, a tasteless mouthful that did not make me ill, and then transferred some of the others to adjacent basements, hoping that soon I’d have half a dozen separate colonies that would eventually feed me. But their brief moment in the outside air between basements may have been enough to kill them, for only in the first basement do mushrooms continue, lethargically, to grow.

  The air might, still now, be more deadly than I imagine. Hard to know since the air that killed everything around me has had no effect on me at all. Or, rather, a salutary effect: my body absorbs its poison and channels it, making me feel more alive.