Letters From Hades

It was during a break between classes, though that should not be taken to mean a break for rest. We were merely waiting for the arrival of our next instructor, and along with many of my classmates I had wandered into a courtyard of the university. The university is built entirely of black metal, some sections plated together like the hulls of immense battleships, covered in rivets and outsized nuts threaded onto bolts as thick around as trees…and other sections seemingly molded as a single, titanic piece of iron. All of it is streaked and caked in red rust like drying blood. Some of that might be, in fact, drying blood. On my third day here, it rained blood. In pounding torrents. When the rain was over, the grounds of the university steamed with scarlet pools and there were even squirming, flopping eels and jellyfish in those pools that I realized were actually organs and entrails. One of my classmates speculated that it was all waste ejected by a local torture complex.

I wish I had been able to begin this record at Day One, but for one thing, I had no paper or stylus until I began my classes in earnest, on Day Two. And frankly, it’s been just a little bit difficult for me to adjust to my new surroundings, so it didn’t occur to me to write these personal notes until today. Even still, I expect that they will take this book away from me once they find that I’m writing my own thoughts down in it. I’ve flipped the book upside-down so I can start my writing here on its last page. Hopefully they won’t look at the back of the book, should it be examined. At the front of the book, as my class has been assigned, I am writing lines of self-loathing, self-abasement:

I think—I hope—that writing in this book will be a distraction, at the very least. A focus, to remove me even a tiny bit from my intense physical pains. A mortar to hold together the crumbling bricks of my mind. Though maybe that’s a mistake. Maybe I would be better off if I gave myself over to madness. There might be peace there. Well, I suppose I can always do that later, if sanity doesn’t work for me.

I think the main reason I’m writing this is as a form of rebellion, a gesture of individuality. It reminds me of when I was in high school, which I ended up dropping out of…not because I wasn’t intelligent, or because I was a druggie or what have you, but because I was so shy, so alienated, an outsider. I wanted to stay home and read, and I wanted to write, dreamed of being an author (another reason I feel compelled to put pen to paper, even in this place). In high school, we were given an assignment to read one of two plays in a book. I didn’t read the play I was instructed to. Instead, while I was skipping school one day—waiting behind the garage until my father went to work so I could sneak into our attic and spend the day there—I read the other of the two plays. It wasn’t a planned gesture of defiance, it just happened. It was a personal instinct. It was my spirit of silent mutiny.

It feels like that now, with this heavy volume reversed in my hands. But where that was a slim and dog-eared paperback, this book is bound in living skin, and on its front cover is a single human eye. I’ve seen it following my motions, and I know it is cognizant of me. At first I thought it was a tool of the Demons, a means of spying on me, but a more experienced classmate told me it was all that remained of some published author, who was probably being punished for cherishing frivolous books over the majesty of his Father…for never having read the Bible, despite his passion for the written word.

"I’m sorry," I whispered to that one blue eye, which blinked at me mutely, the book resting in my lap. "I’ll take care of you. I won’t let any more harm come to you." I almost had to laugh at that. What more harm could be done to this soul? Even if a cigarette were ground into the flesh binding, it would be nothing. And yet, I think it understood my words or at least the sentiment behind them. I saw the eye grow a moist film, and a tear broke free to wind down that scarred, tanned hide.

I carried my book under one arm as I strolled the courtyard, though I had a sack slung over my shoulder to carry it in. The sack seemed to be the dried-out organ of some large animal, covered in brands and dyed black. All of us had one, and all of us were wearing a school uniform of black shirt, black trousers, black boots. We even had one pair of white socks and one pair of white underwear. On my first night (what I judged to be night, at any rate), I fingered the elastic band of my underwear and laughed soundlessly while sobbing soundlessly. This can’t be my real flesh. My real flesh is embalmed in a coffin. This is some sort of fabrication, my soul fossilized into matter, a clone, a golem molded of ectoplasm, an illusion. Our professors haven’t told us. But what is my underwear? Is it an illusion, too? Is it an extension of my soul? Or is it hundred percent cotton? In the sweat shops of Hell, do Asian child laborers sit at sewing machines all day and all night churning out underwear for Hell’s Wal-Mart chain?

I walked in circles around the courtyard like a prisoner during an exercise period, but not to exercise. It gave me the sad fantasy that I was walking away somewhere. There was still a pool of blood from that recent storm, gathered in a marshy pond at the center of the courtyard. I suppose those thorny shrubs and twisted miniature trees there are meant to be a garden. From the center of the garden looms a black metal sculpture of some Demon of note; I didn’t want to do him the honor of reading his plaque. From the top of the hideous being’s iron skull, emerald flames were lapping. Gazing up past the towering statue, I saw that the sky was a billowing mass of black smoke like thunderclouds rolling in. A very light dusting of pale flakes drifted down and turned to spots of powdery volcanic ash on my black clothing. It swept off easily.

Some of my classmates, however, did seek solace in the company of their fellows. I paused from my circling to listen to a few of them. One was babbling, "If they’re putting us through schooling, they must mean to better us…you know, so we can go to Heaven, later. First Purgatory, then Heaven…right? We’re here to be punished, like prison…but rehabilitated, so we can…can…"

"Well it can’t be that we have to suffer forever because of it…it wouldn’t be fair! Maybe I didn’t have a religious upbringing, huh? Maybe some people don’t have effective preachers to instill religion in them! Blame the scientists for telling us this didn’t exist—don’t make us suffer for their sins! There aren’t enough signs around us to make us believe!"

"Shh!" a woman in the same black uniform as the rest of us hissed, drawing close to me. She had been shaved entirely bald like the rest of us, as well. But she had three X’s branded in a row on her forehead. A prostitute? "You can’t say that word down here! I saw a man who called out to—Him—by name like that…and these Demons grabbed him…" She couldn’t describe what had followed.

I paced the courtyard, and looked again at those thorny plants that grew in its center, the ivy-like vines with purplish leaves which smothered one of the metal walls that enclosed us. Was any of it edible? I hadn’t eaten in five days. This cloned or illusory body of mine hungered desperately, though I was sure I didn’t require sustenance or fuel. My body had been given the same needs and drives only so that I could suffer hunger, pain…as I had in life. Five long days. I must say now that I can’t really be certain it has been five days, because of course there is no sun down here. Assuming this place is indeed "down", though I’m sure it isn’t simply beneath the Earth’s crust. Another dimension or plane, an elsewhere beyond my sense of space and time. But I’m trying to make it conform to my limited sense of time by relying on my bogus body’s internal clock, which seems to tell me that five days have passed. Also, each "day" here has one extra-long period in between our classes that I consider to be night. Maybe that is when the Demons themselves rest. As I’ve said, these breaks between classes cannot be considered rest for us, since giving one a period of rest is an act of concern, and mercy.

I came close to the wall blanketed in those purple tendrils, and I rubbed one of the waxy leaves between my fingers. A glance over my shoulder, then I plucked one, nibbled it. It tasted like something rotten and I spat it out. Even the smell from the snapped stem reeked, almost more like an animal flattened in the street than rotting vegetable matter. A single drop of blood welled from the broken stem. I didn’t want to know what these plants really were, or once were.

Though I had been branded on the forehead and badly beaten over the past five pseudo-days, I was afraid to touch this bug in case it bit me. But I forced myself to get past that, and put out my hand in front of the large insect. At first it tried to go around, but at last I got it to crawl over my hand and onto my sleeve, where it seemed to go still out of disoriented wariness. I moved it closer to my face for inspection.

So did Hell have its own indigenous animal forms, I wondered? Surely animals didn’t go to Hell, simply because they are weren’t sophisticated enough to acknowledge their Creator? Was there a separate but approximate ecology down here? Had this mantis, then, evolved to its current state? Adapted its camouflaged color and shape? Didn’t evolution contradict the very existence of Hell?

The simple, terrestrial-looking creature mystified me, suddenly, more than these walls of iron that reared about me. That flaming Demon statue in the courtyard’s center. The sky of smoke that I’d never seen clear. It was an enigma. Was it some human sufferer, transformed? Or did the Creator simply mold such things "down here" as He did "up there"…out of sheer artistic gratification? How could any Being so in love with blowing life into protoplasm the way a glassblower shapes vessels with his life’s breath be so cruel as to sentence his complex masterpieces to a world of eternal agony?

A distant rumble of thunder was followed by the nearer thunder of a door opening in one of the metal walls. Huge exposed gears and cogs turned gratingly as that panel screeched open. A hiss of released steam, and I turned to see three figures emerge from the steam into the courtyard. It was one of our instructors, accompanied by two lesser Demons who might have been assistants, bodyguards, instructors in training, or satellite-like extensions of his own body, for all I knew. They, like him, wore flowing ebony robes over chitinous black bodies armored and segmented like those of insects masquerading as skeletons. The central Demon was eight feet tall but skinny as my eight-year-old niece. His robe’s shoulders were padded and tented via some hidden framework, however, to give him a more impressive bulk. He carried a black iron staff with a bizarre crest or symbol at its head, like a splatter of calligraphy translated into metal. His face was that of a mummified skull, withered lips drawn back from a grimace of black teeth, but tiny eyes without an iris or pupil glowed a brilliant white in those gaping sockets. Atop his head he wore a tall miter made of metal, and its sides were full of holes in ornate designs. Through these grate-like holes in this headdress, one could see the green fire raging from the top of the Demon’s skull.

This volcanic orifice was more apparent in the two lesser Demons. They were merely six feet tall, and their robes did not have the bulky shoulders, nor did they carry a staff of office or whatever that was. They were also like charred, reanimated skeletons though the bright pinpricks of their eyes were not as piercing as their leader’s. They didn’t wear a miter or any other head covering, so I could see the opening in the top of their skulls as if the bone had been sawed away. Smoke wisped out of their holes; not that gaseous flame that jetted from the professor’s head, though this smoke glowed greenish as though their brains were made from some luminous, primordial ooze.

When the Demon spoke, his words were a hissing like the warning of a cobra. Like a cold draft blowing through a tomb. A scratchy, rustling sound…as if dead autumn leaves were being scuffed about by the wind in that tomb. He said, "You have answered your own question. It is an insect, as you are. It is here, as you are. The Creator is not obligated to make plain to you His design. His acts are beyond your comprehension, should He even care to explain them, which He does not."

With that, the professor put his other claw-like hand on his staff, and brought it down in a blurred black whoosh. That enigmatic design which crested it neatly sliced through my forearm. I saw half my arm drop to my feet, with the mantis still clinging to it. Blood geysered from my remaining stump like water from a fireman’s hose. I stumbled backward, struck my heel against a flagstone, fell heavily onto my back, wailing in agony, tears streaming from my eyes. But even in my blinding nova-blast of pain, I knew better than to ask my fellows for help. They stood watching me, helpless, horrified, and glad it wasn’t them.

Because I began my journal so late, I suppose I should go back at this point and fill in the blanks…begin at the beginning just to get myself quickly caught up to where I am now. Luckily most of it is a blur of pain and fear, anyway. I can’t believe I’m as sane now as I am, considering the panic and desperation I experienced in those first few days. Maybe my mind regenerated the way my flesh and bones do.

I woke up alone in a tiny room that was covered entirely in white ceramic tiles, even the ceiling and floor. At first, I thought I was in a hospital. After all, I had just propped a shotgun barrel under my chin and blown the top of my head off. When I swallowed, it was blood and teeth and loose gobs of flesh; a goodly portion of my decimated brain slid down my gullet like an oyster on the half shell. But why, if I were in a hospital, did I lie naked on the floor, my blood running toward a steel drain in its center?

And when a bright steel submarine-type hatch in one wall of the room opened with a hiss of steam, and the first Demon entered my shower stall-like cell, then I knew things were not what I had counted on when I made that teary, self-pitying decision. I thought it would be the last pain I would ever have to suffer; a microsecond of inferno in my skull, then sweet oblivion. It had been hard enough just to face that microsecond. Just to screw up my courage for that. But this…this…how could I face it, especially without much left for a face?

I couldn’t even scream as a pair of Demons, now, took hold of me. They dragged me out of what I assume was one of many, many points of deposit for souls when they cross over. We each arrive in one of these white coffin-like rooms, alone, before being transferred to the general populace. Butterfly emerged from its chrysalis, "born again" with its new body knitted from the spirit. So why did I still have the material injuries of my suicide?

"Suicide is a sin," rumbled one of the monsters dragging me, in a growl almost like a snarling dog’s. These creatures were not the ghoulish walking cadavers that are the academic class, but more like hairless baboons with their gray hides branded in spirals like a Maori’s tattoos, their heavy bony faces long and canine, with tusks like a warthog. They were muscular, naked, with fat stubby dicks, but crouched as they were only came to my shoulder in height. Low ranking demons, for menial tasks…simian-like, primitive, at the lower rungs of demonic evolution. Even their bat-like wings, which you would think would make them look regal, were raggedy, scarred, torn with holes in addition to being scarified with more spirals. The spiral is a symbol for eternity.

They reminded me of the flying monkeys in the movie The Wizard of Oz, but I wasn’t about to tell them that. They beat me enough as it was, for weakly struggling against them as they dragged me along dark, twisty corridors of black metal, lit with hanging bare bulbs. At one point I received a kick that audibly cracked a rib. At least I could cry, finally, blubber pleas and curses. It was, I soon realized, because my lower jaw was growing back.

Now personally, if I were running Hell, I might consider leaving everyone exactly the way they arrive. Someone who’d perished through cancer or AIDS would remain skeletal, weak, wasted away for all time. A suicide like me would be forced to go about with his skull shattered, horrific in aspect, shunned by the rest of the Damned, always in excruciating pain. But there is more sadism to be had through contrast. The fulfillment of Christmas morning, after all, is nothing without the anticipation of the night before. Waiting to be wounded again…knowing it is inevitable that your healed flesh will be ravaged…beats down the spirit even more, I think. The periods between the suffering, which only seem like breaks, make the periods of suffering more horrible by contrast. Yin feeds yang. Hot is hotter for knowing cold. If I had never healed from my suicide, I might have been able to lose myself forever in the madness of blind pain. But being able to recover, to come back to myself, makes the fear of losing myself again all the more frightening.

I was brought into a very large room and I mean very large, like Penn Station. There was even a vast window for a ceiling, though many of the panes set in its metal latticework were broken, and hence, here and there on the floor were pools of rained blood. A long queue of naked people, three abreast, was lined up with patrolling Demons half-sauntering, half-skipping like chimps along either side, poking people with spear-like iron pikes if they thought they were screaming too loudly, or about to crumple hopelessly to the ground, or might try to flee out of sheer panic. My escorts hoisted me to my feet and shoved me toward the end of the line. Miraculously, I was able to stay on my feet, my pain having greatly subsided. Though I was caked thickly in my own gore, I tentatively reached up to find that my face was intact and the top of my skull almost entirely fused whole.

Seated behind a long table at the head of the queue were three specimens of a new type of Demon. They resembled the skeletal teaching rank which I hadn’t as yet encountered, but without the green fire issuing from their heads. Instead, their skulls were immensely swollen, resembling balloons stretched almost translucent. These globe-headed creatures would fix their glowing eyes on each of us in our three advancing lines, and rasp orders to the baboon creatures in some alien language. Were we being cataloged? Categorized? Judged? Or were these clerks of Hell simply instructing the baboons which brand to mark us with?

For it was then that we were branded; I had been wondering what that red glow was all about, the increasing heat of the air and the sudden anguished cries, but I couldn’t see past the people ahead of me, at first. As my turn arrived I attempted to bolt, but two Demons seized my arms, one of them locking his pit bull’s jaws onto my neck to hold my head in place as another leering baboon-like monster, with entirely black eyes like the rest of them, turned from an open forge with a glowing brand in both scarred fists. I heard my skin hiss and sizzle when it was pressed to my newly healed forehead. It is the only wound I have received in this place which has not regenerated. An A…not a grade I have received in Avernus University, but standing for "Agnostic". It is my primary crime. Enough to buy my way into Hades.

We were then herded along a variety of off-branching corridors, toward the unmistakable rumbling and squealing brakes of subway trains. My group emerged into an apparently underground station with walls scaled in black ceramic tiles. When our train pulled in, one poor fool made a dash for the edge of the platform and dove off into the very path of the engine. If only escape were that easy—we would all jump off such a platform like lemmings. I imagine that after we departed, his remnants were shoveled up so that they could be dumped somewhere to reknit.

The train looked like something out of the 19th century, steam billowing out of multiple stacks, huge gears and pistons turning and churning, its black metal hide streaked with corrosion. There were no windows, however, on the string of cars pulled by the complex engine. When it had shrieked to a halt, jabs from iron pikes urged us on board. It was crowded, and there were no seats, but some of us, myself included, managed to change into our clothing along the ride ahead of us. The rest changed once we got to our destination…Avernus University.

At the university, my group was taken to what would become our quarters: an immense high-ceilinged room almost as big as the immigration station where we had been branded and broken up for transport. There were benches scattered about, but mostly the room’s inhabitants lay curled on the floor, or squatted against its iron walls, or milled about in small groups. Sobbing echoed against the cavernous ceiling, like a liquid layer of sound collected up there.

Later on, some of my human comrades came to shave the heads of the newcomers. I suppose the flying monkeys couldn’t be trusted to do it without taking an ear off. Already, on this sixth day, I am growing a stubble of hair back; funny how my hair grows back more slowly than my skull mended itself together. Mostly it was children and women who shaved our heads. Yes, there were children in that great room. I couldn’t bear their higher pitched wails. The cry of a child brings out an instinct in adults; it gets under our skin, it’s an alarm, it makes us want to protect that child, stop its crying (in sick parents, that instinct to silence the crying can be warped into punishing blows). The cries of these children made me jam my thumbs into my ears. I started wailing very loudly myself, reverting to their ranks. My Father must not have those protective instincts.

The hands of the woman who shaved my head soothed me somewhat, however. Hers was the first gentle touch I had encountered in Hell. She deftly clipped my hair away with shears, then shaved it with a straight razor without using shaving cream. But as rough as the process was, and though it left a dozen streaming nicks, her hands on my head had made me weep with pitiful gratitude. I was too much in shock to ask her what was going on, what had happened to me; all I could do, oddly, was thank her. And she smiled at me, before moving on to the next newcomer. A smile has never looked so beautiful to me, even though the woman was plain, middle-aged, and branded with a J on her forehead.

I would find out, once my education began, that she and others so branded were Jews. Jews and Muslims are here because they did not accept the martyred Son of the Creator as their only salvation. But because their beliefs are in the same general neighborhood, they’re spared the fullest tortures of the netherworld, are often made into servants and assistants such as these troops who shaved our heads. For those who follow Buddhism, however, Shinto, Wicca and so on, there is no such limited mercy. They’re treated no better than atheists.

These human workers keep their own heads shorn, but for the rest of us who are only here for a time, I think it’s just another way to break our spirits, to eradicate our sense of individuality, like dressing us entirely in identical uniforms. Like soldiers. Like convicts. We will grow our hair back eventually—some of the students who have been here the longest have full heads of hair—but it’s done for that initial impact.

I’m finding it hard to keep up with writing in this every day. I am too tired, too discouraged, or I can’t find private moments in which to do so. I have to be careful not to be seen by any of those who work for the Demons. One woman stole an apple from a man with an M branded on his forehead (though they don’t need to eat, the human workers are rewarded with humble meals, which they are ordered to eat in front of the rest of us), and he reported the theft to the Demons, who then converged on the woman like a pack of rabid dogs, tearing her apart with their fangs to teach her a lesson about the sins of gluttony.

Still, I don’t think our education was intended so much to introduce us to the laws and the ways of the netherworld, which are largely unfathomable anyway, but to put the suffering we will endure into the perspective of personal causation. So that we will not all feel like the innocent victims of some horrendous but anonymous tragedy, like an earthquake or flood. So that we will know thoroughly that every pain which lies before us has been earned, deserved, on the most personal of levels. Bought in the currency of the soul.

This seemingly pointless schooling—in the ultimate theological institute—did achieve one tangible change in me, in that it did convince me of the existence of a deity, which thirty-three years as a mortal hadn’t accomplished. Then again, my first view of a devil accomplished the same thing, without the lectures, the exercises like writing in our books, or cutting similar sentiments in each other’s bare backs with a stylus like an exacto knife. It was hard not to hate the person who was using your back as a blackboard (felt more like a dartboard), but we knew enough to transfer that hate to our instructors.

Our graduation culminated in each one of us being crucified, so that we might appreciate the suffering that the Son had undergone on behalf of our sins. Well, I think we’ve paid back that debt now, and then some. You should have seen the rows of crosses, a forest of crosses, in this great iron hall like a jumbo jet hangar we had never been in before. The crosses themselves were of iron, with holes in them for large screws to be inserted in place of nails. A baboon-type of Demon had thrust a pike into the chest of each of us. We all wore crowns woven of barbed wire. My stigmata has healed enough for me to be able to write again, without getting much blood on the page.

But you know…perhaps I’m naive about what lies ahead of me, yet I still feel an odd optimism. We have not been assigned to certain circles of Hell (for there are none, at least not in the way Dante envisioned them), exiled to certain specific regions according to the nature of our sins (real or imagined). We have been turned out to find, in a manner of speaking, our own Hells. Just as when college students enter into the scary real world.

Many of my classmates went forth in little groups. I don’t blame them, but it isn’t my way. Maybe later I’ll have the yearning for company, but right now I’m still digesting all this, and I prefer to go through that process alone. I did wave goodbye to a few of them, not quite friends, and one man gave me a hug goodbye, tears in his eyes, looking both fearfully hopeful and fearfully fearful at venturing beyond the school’s walls.

The terrain was mostly bleak, flat, dusty, with only scattered patches of tall grayish grass that looked translucent, and the occasional stunted and gnarled tree, either leafless or with dark purple leaves like that ivy growing in the university courtyard I would take my breaks in. At last, though, ahead of me I saw the scrub brush, grasses and trees become increasingly plentiful, until they merged into the outer edge of a forest.

It was my good fortune, relatively speaking, that I had reached this cover when I did. I heard distant shouts or cries behind me, and looked back across the wasteland I had crossed to see two tiny figures running in my direction…but they were a long way off from the shelter of the forest, or from any of the scattered trees. Then I heard the gunshots. I realized that the second figure was firing a gun of some kind after the first, fleeing figure. Shot after shot cracked, their echoes rumbling across the plain like thunder. From around the misshapen trunk of a tree that looked as though it had been sent to Hell for torture itself, I saw the pursued figure crumple. He or she had been hit.

I had learned at school that the Angels venture here to Hell—willingly of course—so as to hunt down or torture the Damned for sport. In that regard, they both find entertainment to sustain them through their long immortality, and aid the Father by essentially joining in the work of his Demons. These tourists are not truly Angels, at least not one of the celestial races that have never had a terrestrial form. They are the spirits of earthly men and women who have died and been reborn in Heaven. But in Heaven they become like those entities that have never walked the surface of our sad little ball of rock. In the same way, an Angel might consider me a demon.

The trees had become more like evergreens, now, taller and straighter, but their needles a dark purple color like the ivy, as well. The bed of dead needles under my feet was purple rather than brown. Because the sky was so dark, it was almost like night in that forest. I tried not to crunch too loudly across its floor. The treetops rustled eerily in high, whistling gusts that came from one direction and the next time, another.

I soon realized that it wasn’t only the wind I was hearing up there, but cries of despair. Looking up, I saw two human feet growing out of a thick trunk just above the level of my head. On the tree facing that one, I saw two more feet…growing out of the bark rather than poking out of holes in it. I craned my head further back, and saw two hands protruding out of the trunk, but too high up to belong to the same person who owned the feet. The same was true of the second tree. And yet I knew there must only be one person buried, somehow, inside both of these trees. And I knew, though they were too high and lost in branches for me to see, that a human head must protrude from both of those trunks as well. The source of the wails.

These two people had been merged with the trees, back when the trees were young. But as they had grown, over decades, they had stretched out the bodies of their entombed victims, as if on a gigantic rack. One pair of feet looked male, the other more feminine. Were they lovers, then, who had loved each other more than they cherished the Father? And so here they were together for eternity, perhaps…or at least until Demons came some day to cut down the trees, and release the prisoners so that they might be free to encounter fresh new punishments.

This spectacle made me think of my living book, and both made me terrified. I should not take for granted my freedom to roam, to explore. There were not only those who would hunt me as an animal, but capture me and imprison me in one certain torture for a generation at a time. I must stay alert, be stealthy. And so, in case those who were responsible for the suffering of this couple might be lingering nearby, I resumed my plunge into the deep woods.

There is nothing to eat in this forest except insects. At least I assume these plump, segmented black organisms I’ve found inside rotted holes in some of the older trees are insect larvae. They aren’t too bad…especially after not having eaten in a month. But the slow-crawling, six-inch long albino millipedes I uncovered yesterday under a mound of damp, decomposing leaves made me violently ill after I ate just one of them. The leaves and stems around me bleed red blood and stink like rotting meat when I break them, like that ivy back at school. In fact, the waxy purple leaves of one kind of plant which grows close to the ground are so big that you can see their veins pulsing very subtly.

But I find this purple forest quite beautiful, in fact…especially the tall, gently stirring fir trees. Is the beauty an intentional effect of the Creator, or an oversight? One would think He wouldn’t want a scrap of beauty to exist here, that every tree should be dead or black and misshapen. Maybe He doesn’t realize that there are those like myself who can find beauty in so alien an environment.

Yesterday, I saw a group of a half dozen primitive hominids passing through these deep woods. Hunched, naked, raggedly hairy and with heavy anthropoid faces. When they saw me they scampered off out of sight in fear, but they must know enough not to cry out and call attention to themselves. They looked unscathed, and didn’t even seem to have brands on their prominent brows, though I didn’t get a close look. Frankly, at first they terrified me as much as I did them; I thought they were lower caste Demons like those winged baboons, until they were gone and the truth occurred to me.

They were cursed to Hell because they had not accepted the Son into their hearts, the Son being the only door to salvation. It didn’t matter, apparently, that they had lived and died many thousands of years before the Son came to earth. Just like unbaptized infants, who don’t live long enough to accept the Son, banished here even if they would have been very much inclined to worship Him had they only had the chance. (I remember Swedenborg writing that unbaptized babies go immediately to Heaven. I’m sorry, but that’s just wishful thinking.) Though I hadn’t stopped to think that prehistoric people might dwell in the netherworld, in school I had been told that aborigines and pygmies and other primitive peoples who had never been exposed to belief in the Father and the Son were still damned…not so much by predestination, but simply due to bad timing, the luck of the draw. However, the Father was not without some dregs of mercy, as in the case of Muslims and Jews; we were told that those who had lived before the arrival of the Son would not suffer nearly so much as those who had come after the Son but had turned their faces from Him. These souls would not be hunted by Angels, captured and tortured by the various tribes of Demons. But they would spend eternity in this nightmare realm, sentenced to immortality…denied the presence of their Creator, in His Heaven.

Still, the hominids frightened me as much as the Demons had when I first saw them. Seeing so primitive an ancestor of your species, so very animal-like but unmistakably human-like, is like having a glimpse of yourself as you will look one day, old and waxen in your coffin. It seems a violation of time. Yet another perversity, another blasphemy against Nature. But Nature is the Father’s raped and debased lover in this place, like a respectable wife who behind closed doors is forced to endure her husband’s sadomasochistic fetishes.

I am reluctant to leave the forest. If I am to discover any part of Hell in which I might be relatively safe from the Demons and the Angels, it seems it would be here. But despite my solitary ways at the university, I am beginning to at last feel a lonely desolation. I have seen a few other humans like myself openly wandering or creeping stealthily through these woods, but have no more than exchanged a nod with them. Not even a smile. Earlier today a Native American came running out of the underbrush and nearly collided with me. In fact, he raised a crude hatchet as if to cleave my skull down the middle. But when he saw I was a man more or less like himself, he darted past me and vanished into the forest. I changed my aimless direction sharply after that, in case I came face-to-face, next, with whatever it was that pursued him…

I spoke too soon about the comfort and shelter of these woods. There has been a fire, sweeping through the forest, and I imagine it was this that the Native American fled from. I didn’t know at first if it were purposely set by Demons or Angels flushing out game like myself, or if it were a natural occurrence (can such a thing be innocently called an act of You-Know-Who, now?). I suspected it might be natural, because I’d noticed a change in the high ceiling of clouds that forever smother the sky. They were blacker, heavier, more heaped-looking, and yet there was a reddish glow on their swollen bellies. It might have been the reflected glow of the forest fire, and the ash that fell like light snow could have been from the fire as well…but there was also a rumbling in the earth beneath my feet, occasionally a startling, deep boom like a thunderstorm raging in a subterranean world. I came to suspect that there was a volcano beyond the thick, obscuring trees.

I tried to keep ahead of the smoke that increasingly hazed the woods, but found it difficult; the forest all around me grew ghostly, misted, and I ran faster, faster, branches lashing my face, smoke beginning to sting my lungs. Once I even heard crackling ahead of me, and ran into a wall of heat, so that I had to veer madly in another direction. I heard people crying out in fear, here and there, distantly. I heard that bird-like screeching again, and at one point a dark hulking thing like a boar or a bear but apparently with a head like a denuded cattle skull went crashing ahead of me through the foliage.

At last, and purely through luck (although I may have unconsciously been following the lead of that horned beast), I emerged from the forest onto a vast, open plain. There was actually a ragged drop of about ten feet, as if the wasteland before me were a depression, a crater. In fact, I nearly pitched over this small cliff before I caught myself. The skull-headed shaggy beast had just leapt down onto the plain and splayed in a scrambling heap; I heard a distinct crack as one of its ankle bones snapped. Somehow, though, it desperately righted itself and loped away at a rapid speed. It has occurred to me now—though at the time I was too stunned by this vista—that the animal was of a species (perhaps even a very primitive form of Demon) specifically provided for those lesser-damned peoples such as the hominids, aborigines and the like, to be used for their hides and meat. Handily, their heads are already fleshless and ready for decorative purposes. Thank G** for small favors.

The plain seemed to extend forever. But it did not. For at its far side loomed an immense volcano, from the broken top of which rose an atomic mushroom cloud of boiling black smoke and poisonous gases. I wondered if I had discovered the source of the sky’s constant obfuscation. No lava ran down the sides of the titanic cone, but strewn across the plain I saw glowing hot embers and small fires. The embers were the white-hot fragments of lava bombs, cast like meteors from the eruption which had set the forest alight. A deafening howling as if from a hurricane issued from the volcano’s pit. It was like having pencils jammed into my ears (and I knew from experience, after having nodded off in one of my university classes in which the instructor was insistent on driving his point home to me). But there was another howling blended into the volcanic exhaust. I realized this was the source of the wailing that even as far away as the university could be heard sometimes mixed in with the wind, depending on its direction. It came from the plain, which from its apparently circular shape might actually be a huge volcanic caldera itself.

The heat rose behind me, roared against my back in a feral wind. I heard heavy branches cracking as they fell. The inferno wanted to push me off the ledge. Though I had seen the animal land on solid ground, only too solid, I was irrationally afraid that I would be swallowed up like these others if I leaped. But when I glanced over my shoulder, saw the flames, I knew I must. Yes, I could survive those flames, regenerate. Still, I did not want them touching my ectoplasmic flesh. Sometimes I thought that regeneration hurt even more than the injury itself.

"Listen," the black man hissed, and I returned my attention to him. "There’s a town in the foothills, to the right of the volcano. Can you see them?" He tried to jerk his head over his shoulder. I glanced in that direction. I could see the foothills he spoke of, entirely black. "There’s a town there—Caldera. We all lived there…we built it. For years it wasn’t too bad. Demons would come into town, and Angels, but it was bearable. The volcano never made a peep. And then one day the volcano woke up and took Caldera. And the Demons gathered up the survivors and planted us here."

"Mostly. But go there. It’s as safe as you’re going to get. And beyond it, if you can make it, beyond it is a city. If you can get there, you’ll be a little better off. Towns and cities are less open, there are more places to hide. They’re usually safer—when you can find them. But for all I know, that city might be gone now, too. Just be sure you don’t go into a Demon city. Make damn sure of that…"

Ahead of me the curtains of fog thinned…for the moment I had outrun the worst of the smoke…and I could see across the caldera again. I didn’t seem to be much closer to the volcano’s foothills. And to make matters worse, there was a wave of lava flowing across the plain in my direction, a bright orange. Oddly, though, I saw no streams of lava on the flanks of the volcano itself.

I ran. I ran. I ran. My legs ached, my seared eyes streamed, I thought my heart would explode (if it did suffer cardiac arrest, it would probably heal pretty quickly, but I didn’t want the inconvenience). The volcano did, at last, seem taller to me. That meant it was closer. Pausing to look back the way I had come, I saw the reverse view was lost in low-lying smoke, but I judged myself to be about halfway across the circular plain. And while looking back, I heard the crack of a gunshot in that smoke. Another. A third. An Angel, I decided, not sure whether any Demons themselves used guns. I could picture a robed Angel wandering amongst the rows of heads, untroubled by the choking air, idly shooting down into them.

Encouraged by my progress, I continued on. The Harvester’s sound dwindled and was lost behind me. There were more gunshots but at least none in front of me. But after I had covered a lot more ground, my fears about the spreading lava came back to me. It looked like my path to even the outermost of the foothills was going to be blocked, soon, after all. I wondered how thick the lava was and how far I could run through it before my melting shoes and then melting feet brought me down. I couldn’t afford to let that happen. I didn’t want to be entombed on this plain myself. I pitied the heads that were being covered in that advancing orange surf.

It was facing away from me, and I was grateful for that as I skidded to a stop, wondering which direction I should flee in now. The thing pulled itself out of the pit on rows of wheels that rippled independently like the legs of a caterpillar. It was an armored black thing, seamed with rust, dented and scratched, and though I couldn’t see its front I heard the whine and swish of a blade or blades that swept across the ground.

I rode the Harvester toward the lava. I would ride it through the lava until we reached the foothills (at which point I assumed it would turn around and head neatly back the other way as if systematically plowing a field or mowing a lawn). At least I hoped it would follow this straight line all the way to the foothills. As I rode on it I tried to tune out the horrid clashing/cutting sounds it made, the cries of terror, the blood fuming in its wake. The gore wafted over me, speckled my face, reeked in my nostrils. The devouring beast churned and chugged under me and my shaken guts wanted to heave. But there was nothing I could do for these masses…I could only concentrate on my own safety. Relative, of course, to the fact that I could never be killed. For long.

The Harvester hit a large cooling rock that had been cast by the volcano, and as it rode over it I was nearly pitched off its back. I had to fight to keep from sliding off, clawing for new handholds. When finally I hoisted myself back up, I saw that the volcano’s bulk nearly blotted out the sky, and the foothills were very close. I also saw that we had reached the wave of lava and it was pouring around the automaton’s wheels. But now I realized that it wasn’t even lava after all.

They were crabs. Bright orange in color, and each one of them tiny like the ones I had shooed off several of the heads…but there had to be millions of the things, a writhing carpet of living entities, with sharp little pincers to pull out hair and snip at skin and nibble at eyes. Maybe lava would have been better; I pitied the rows of trapped victims anew. I saw evenly spaced, crab-covered lumps in the orange carpet that I knew were human heads enshrouded with the things. I hoped the blades of the Harvester would reach them soon.

I leaped down from my unwitting transportation, luckily didn’t lose my footing and fall, then I was tearing across the crunching bodies. I almost slipped several times. I actually did hear their many little claws snapping and snicking at me like fingernail scissors. What was worse was the loud hissing, rustling sound their bodies made by their sheer numbers. Several latched onto my pant cuffs, or tangled in my laces, but I reached the cliff and pounced onto a rocky ledge, seized another, scrambled up the side like a spidery thing myself. And when I hurled myself onto the black sand above the rim, I brushed and tore away the hungry little parasites. Stomped every one of them. Though I didn’t study any of them closely, they each looked like they had a kind of stylized demonic face formed by the contours of their horny shells.

When I crested the hill I found a hollow below, and there protruded the flat roofs of several small buildings. Some jutted up in their entirety, starkly white against this ash like pulverized obsidian, while other roofs were half exposed, or only showed one piercing corner like the prow of a sinking ship. Lumps in the black blanket suggested roofs that were fully submerged. I descended, half-sliding, the ash getting into my boots, into the hollow and found myself standing atop one of the taller roofs. So tall that its top level of glassless windows was just above the level of the ash.

Crouching, I eased myself through one of these windows into an unlit, sparsely furnished room. The wind had blown so much ash into it that its floor was covered, dunes blown halfway up its crude walls, which had the look of stucco or baked white clay. But there was a rough door made of purple-colored planks across the room, and when I pushed it open I found myself in a narrow hallway that had only the barest sifting of ash across it.

I knew a Demon would not be moaning, but a Demon might be in there causing the moaning, so I looked around me for a weapon of defense. There was nothing, really. So I crept to the door as stealthily as I could, and pressed my ear against it. The moaning was clearer, but I heard no other sounds. No sadistic chuckling, no growling, as from the pathetic baboon devils. No sounds of blows or chopping. I decided to risk it. Steeling myself for the possibility of my own pending moans, I cracked the door open as quietly as I could manage and peeked into the chamber beyond.

We knew we were both of the Damned. She didn’t scream, but looked up at me with glassy-eyed anguish. I looked down at her with as much pity as I could squeeze out of my exhausted soul. The woman’s head was of normal size, but her body was as tiny as that of a five-year-old. A five-year-old made emaciated, cadaver-thin, naked and withered. Without strength to hoist herself up onto the room’s dusty bed, she had pulled off its blanket and made a nest for herself. She dragged a fold of it across her, more I think out of shame for her deformity than for her nudity.

"I was harvested," she explained, her voice distorted: squeaky and thin, "but my head was deflected off the blade before it was sucked in. It rolled aside and I was forgotten. When enough of my body grew back, I dragged myself here. It was horrible, worse than being buried. The crabs tried to eat me but I got away." She turned her face to show me where half of it had been nibbled to the bone but was forming new muscle and skin. "I don’t know how I ever made it in here, but I did." She let out a jagged, sorrowful sigh. "My body is coming back…but it hurts so bad…it hurts worse than losing it…"

The room was gloomy, without a window, so I had left the hallway door open to let in the barest dregs of light. Still, I wanted to write in this journal and wanted more light to see by. I set out on another search, and found a glowing lantern in one of the rooms. The gelatinous fluid inside it was not oil, was not even aflame, but it gave off its own cool, orange-hued luminosity even having been buried all this time. I don’t know what the slime is or where it was collected, but I’m grateful for it. When I returned to the woman I was now able to close the door and see well enough to write. Sitting down on the floor beside her, I opened this book across my lap. The woman respectfully did not ask me questions as she watched me write, but against her will let out the occasional moan as her body gradually fleshed itself out like an embryo growing at a remarkable rate.

The woman’s name is Caroline, and she used to live in Caldera, though her building is entirely buried she says. She was thirty-nine when she was killed in a shooting spree at an abortion clinic. She’d been accompanying her sister, who was the one having the abortion; she has no idea whether her sister was killed as well. She believes that the killer probably went to Heaven because he had devout faith whereas she did not. I gaped at her when she said this, but she shrugged her lengthening shoulders and said, "Hey, I don’t make the rules."

In the building where we took refuge I have found a bottle of homemade wine that is still good (rather, still preserved; it’s as syrupy and sickly sweet as cough medicine), a few strips of dried meat of some kind, tough and salty, and several stray crabs that had worked their way in here as we did; I killed them and experimented with their taste, finding them edible as well. Again, we don’t need to eat to survive (we’re beyond survival), but our bogus bodies crave it.

In my explorations I also found spare clothes for myself, and folded them into my book bag. And in one of the rooms that had a window, I saw bones stabbing up from the floor of black ash. Ribs, the top of a skull. I knew it wasn’t the skeleton of a human, because a human here would regenerate from even the most atrocious mayhem. And then I realized I was also seeing several long bones segmented like finger bones. They were the struts of a baboon Demon’s wings.

Caroline, I could see more clearly in the diffused open light, is very short and somewhat overweight, her face pinched and pained, though I could tell under kinder circumstances she would have been attractive. This morning (morning being a subjective term, as there is no day or night here) it bothered her that her tangled red hair was unwashed, and that seemed to be what she most looked forward to upon reaching Oblivion; there would be water there. "But it doesn’t grow longer than the length it was when I died," she explained. "I can shave it all off and it will grow back in a few weeks, but never any longer than it was. Same with my nails. You must have noticed you don’t need to shave."

We’d entered into another forest, but not as thickly wooded as the one I’d come through to reach the volcano, and there was even a broad dirt path through it which we followed, though keeping alert in regard to Demons and Angels. Also, the trees had leaves shaped like oak leaves, some with massive trunks as thick and wrinkled as the legs of dinosaurs, whereas the other forest had been of evergreens. Everpurples, anyway. These trees all had purple leaves. The grass and bushes that bordered the path were also in dark shades of purple, though some shrubs edged toward deep blue and others were almost fully black.

Her gentleness touched me; I actually felt choked up. The only real freedom we have here is that we can be kind to each other. Like that African-American man; he couldn’t free his body, but he could free his emotions, and try to help me. It keeps us human, even more so than these sham replica bodies. It’s something that the Demons can’t hack away from us, something they can’t truly understand, because they don’t have it.

"Nothing to live for," she repeated to herself. "If only we’d known how bad it would be. How death wouldn’t be the ultimate escape. I was afraid that there was no afterlife…terrified of it…but I just couldn’t bring myself to believe in it. And here I am. And it turned out to be real. If only I had been able to believe, I wouldn’t be here right now."

We went off the path, but snapped twigs and rustled leaves and I wondered if it were such a good idea after all. There were no more cries. It had seemed to be ahead of us, but I couldn’t be sure. But shortly, I found out. We pushed through the low-slung, twisted, leaf-laden branches between two ancient trees to see a figure etched white against a vast dark trunk, a stark silhouette in negative.

There were probably ten to twelve spikes pinning each wing, spaced between the four umbrella-like support struts, which were jointed like finger bones, and along the slender upper arm of each wing. I was reminded of the remains of the dead devil I had found in my hiding place back in Caldera. I noticed that veins squiggled across these pallid membranes, thick and dark beneath their translucent surface, like a mysterious calligraphy.

There had been controversy as to whether the Messiah was pierced through the palms or through the wrists. For good measure, this woman had been nailed through both palms and wrists with more of those thick, crude spikes with their broad heads. I suspected that these spikes were made by the Demons themselves, with purposes like this in mind more so than for use in construction, though the Damned had probably adapted them to such uses. I was reminded of my own crucifixion upon graduation from Avernus University. I began to suspect that this was a revenge meted out not by her fellow Demons, but by lost souls like myself, who also couldn’t forget their crucifixions.

The female devil was also spiked through both feet, but they were not placed demurely one atop the other as in the case of the Son. Her legs had been lasciviously spread out along the broad curve of the trunk, as if she sat astride the back of some huge animal, and they’d been further anchored in placed by spikes through her ankles. Still, I was surprised that even this many nails could hold her; every species of Demon was reported to be uncannily strong. Of course, she was no doubt weakened from the pain and blood loss from the black iron pike that had been shoved into her guts like a spear. Directly into her navel, in fact, pinning her there like a butterfly. Perhaps it was some perverse reaction to the fact that a Demon, spawned in no mother’s womb, would have an umbilicus at all.

My eyes rose to her breasts, which were not much touched by the inky blood. They were full but not overly large. Oddly, the nipples and their soft aureoles were a subtle gray color. And her skin itself was white. Not pale white. Not even the white of a bloodless corpse. She was paper white, her flesh without pigment. She looked like she’d walked out of some black and white movie. Her hair, long and damp with sweat, was black as oil. Her cat-like eyes were a pale gray. And her lips were the same gray as her nipples. Those lips…they were almost a caricature of fullness. Lushly overripe, fruit too long on the vine and about to spoil. When she closed her mouth, they seemed to pucker in a mockery of a little girl pout.

And when I lifted my eyes to her face, I saw tears gliding freely down her cheeks. Her face was no longer smug, but a mask of anguish. Her lashes were black, and around her eyes was a subtle grayness of the flesh, these heightening their striking effect. Sometimes I think women are more beautiful when they’re not happy than when they are. Maybe that’s why men mistreat them. All I knew then was that this unearthly being was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, and I wondered if maybe Caroline was right about my motivations for freeing her, all loftiness and morality aside.

"Develop? Don’t you mean to say evolve? Nothing evolves. See…it’s that kind of thinking that put you here in the first place." She paused to grunt as I levered out another nail. "There are birds with wings that don’t fly, aren’t there? Penguins and ostriches? The Creator gave my kind wings like He gave the peacock a beautiful tail. Because it pleases His eye."

After a lot of straining effort on my part, my palms blistering and my fingers slick with her blood, I removed the last of the nails in her wings. They drooped, shuddered convulsively, stirred as if to circulate their blood. Even after she calmed them the best she could they still visibly trembled. Up close to them, I could see that the bigger veins near the point where the wings rooted into her back pulsed with the flow of their blood.

She reached above her head to dig her fingers into the deeply fissured bark so as not to fall forward while I knelt before her like a worshipper, loosening the spikes that transfixed her feet. I freed one. Then, with a final effort of strained muscles, drenched in sweat, I dug out the last of them. And the Demon allowed herself to drop forward onto the ground, resting her forehead to the forest floor, her elbows and knees bunched under her, her rump pointed in the air and the wings tremulous over her like a collapsed tent of living skin.

"Thank you, little one," she purred. She was trying to sound cocky, in control again. A proud warrior, an Amazon with bat wings. But I could see that puffiness around her eyes, the droop of the lids, the tightness around her mouth. She felt shame at what had been done to her. Humiliation, that I had witnessed it. That she had needed my help. That she might even have died had I not come.

I spent the night, as I chose to call the hours of my rest, in a cave-like hollow at the base of a large tree that had fallen years before, either rotted out or struck by lightning. If it was charred, the evidence was covered over in a purplish moss that had blanketed the great trunk. The hollow wasn’t very deep, but deep enough to shelter me when it rained. The rain was water, this time, not blood. Caroline and I had finished the wine but I’d saved the bottle, and I set it out in the rain to collect some of the water. Not a lot accumulated, but I was grateful for it.

Then in the day I set out again in what I hoped was still the correct direction. Maybe we should have stuck to the path after all. It was only perhaps an hour after leaving my night’s shelter that the arrow hit me.

It’s a crossbow bolt, actually. What do they call that—a quarrel? Too short to be an arrow, almost like a long dart. The tip must be ruthlessly barbed, because after it had spun me to the ground and I had taken hold of it, I found I couldn’t pull it out without tearing myself inside. It had pierced through to the back of my rib cage, and I think in fact it is lodged in one of them.

I desperately clawed my way back to my feet, and plunged onward into the woods, frantic to outrun my hunter. My lungs burned so badly I wondered if they were filling with blood. Any moment I expected a second bolt to thunk squarely into the back of my skull…

No more bolts came. I lost the hunter. Not needing my flesh for food, my skin for leather, he was not inspired to rouse himself much from his easy play.

That was hours ago. I’ve stopped bleeding, but the razored flange still rubs against my muscles. Grinds at my bone like a knife across a whetstone. There is no real need for doctors, but I can only hope there are people in Oblivion willing to lend aid…

I find it ironic that I helped that Demon, by removing the spear I still carry from her body. But there is no one here to help me.

I’ve sat down here on this rock splotched in bluish lichen to rest. To finish the last sip of water from my bottle. I hope to emerge from these desolate woods soon. What if they go on and on for mile after mile, a forest wider than all the continents of the Earth combined? I feel that Hell is bigger than the Earth…despite what they say about there being more people alive on the Earth now than have ever died before them. All this room is waiting to be filled by the many successive generations yet to arrive. Maybe then these forests will be cleared to make way for more towns like Caldera, cities like Oblivion.

I’m caught up now in my journal. No excuse to remain here any longer. And I still fear that Angel catching up with me. So—onward.

I don’t know how many hours I walked through the woods; perhaps it was longer than a day. Eventually, accidentally, I found myself back on the path through the forest, though maybe it was a different path. It was broader, after all, and even rutted with wheels of apparently various kinds. And straight…so straight that in its distance I could see Oblivion rising from the horizon.

Earlier I mentioned how the spiral-branded baboon-like devils remind me of the flying monkeys from the film of The Wizard of Oz. It was easy for me to run further with that film as a frame of reference; after all, my surroundings were so patently unreal, as if I had been transported onto some immense and detailed sound stage. The woods reminded me of the haunted forest Dorothy and her friends passed through, and the city beyond the edge of the great forest now put me in mind of the Emerald City as it appeared at the end of the yellow brick road.

But the gold bricks of the road had all been carted away, and the Emerald City had seen better days.

Oblivion was a city of blackness. As I drew closer—though it would be several hours yet before I actually reached the city; it seemed as far away as boiling dark storm clouds—this initial impression was only strengthened. I was getting the sense that the city was built largely of black metal, like Avernus University but on a grander scale even than that imposing institution. This was not some town like Caldera that the Damned had built for themselves; the Demons had to have had a major, even organizing part in it. Why they would provide shelter and community for the citizens of Hell was as yet a mystery to me, that I was not counting on ever fathoming.

The city grew ever taller and wider, becoming more imposing, like some jagged silhouetted mountain range, reminding me of the towering volcano I had encountered above Caldera. But whereas the volcano exhaled massive clouds into the sky, to further blanket and obscure it, the opposite was the case with Oblivion. The sky above the city glowed orange, as if either dawn or dusk were breaking. The usual layer of clouds that had always blocked the sky from my view before was open in a rough circle above the city. Yet what was revealed was no cavernous ceiling of rock, as I had imagined it might be.

It was lava. An ocean of molten rock, its light subtly fluctuating. It was as amazing as if it had indeed been an inverted sea. How it could resist gravity was beyond my reckoning. Was this what hid behind the cloud cover throughout Hell? And why was it exposed here? If anything, one would think a city’s pollution would only darken its skies further. Perhaps its pollution had burned away the clouds overhead somehow, eaten them away.

As I walked, gaping at the city and its molten sky, I heard a rattling sound grow quickly behind me. A look back over my shoulder, then I was jumping off to the side of the broad dirt road as a carriage of some sort sped in the direction of Oblivion. When it grew close enough I marveled at its repugnant weirdness. It was like Cinderella’s pumpkin coach gone rotten. Its body was made of intricately wrought black iron, flowery and filigreed, even the wheels being metal. But this baroque framework supported a huge orange globe that had an organic look, and which possessed a luminous property. The carriage was pulled like a rickshaw by a team of six of the Damned, yoked and harnessed into position. Four men and two women, all of them nude, sweaty and dusty. The two women, in the fore, each wore a leather mask, out of the top of which rose a black plume. Every beast of burden had apparently had their eyes removed, and thick black screws fitted into their sockets to prevent the eyes from regenerating.

At first I thought that massive orange globe contained the coach’s rider. Then I realized it was the rider.

The spherical entity had a vast face across its front, small eyes nearly lost in rolls of gelatinous, translucent fat…a broad nose, and a wide mouth with thick lips that nearly split the globe in half. No limbs, no ears, nothing but that face. Its eyes were entirely black against its glowing flesh. It seemed a half-ethereal creature. I was reminded of how children draw the sun with a benevolent smiling face on it. It also reminded me of the lopped-off head of a huge statue of Buddha. But I knew that sun-like, Buddha-like smile and those jovial eyes were only deceptively benign.

Did the thing’s eyes like black marbles roll slightly in my direction as the carriage rumbled past me? I lowered my own eyes as if out of respect, but in reality out of fear. The coach did not stop…and soon, thankfully, it was dwindling in the distance…would reach the city long before me.

As time passed, I saw smaller paths on either side of the main road, winding out of the forest. And more, I encountered people who emerged from these tributaries, to head in the same direction I did. Some stumbled along befuddled, perhaps newcomers like myself…or perhaps they had long ago let go of their sanity. Maybe these poor souls had even been mentally ill in life, exiled here because their minds had never been sound enough to admit the concept of the Son.

More and more people trickled onto the main road, until it was almost like an exodus, a pilgrimage to Oblivion. Inevitably, a few of my fellow travelers would fall in beside me for a while and we would briefly talk. One of these was a boy of about twelve with a British accent, who was carrying a wicker basket strapped to his back. It was filled with gourds like small albino pumpkins, which he said he would trade for some new shoes in the city. He was from some small town in the forest which he called Limbo. As we conversed, I came to understand that he had been in Hell since the nineteenth century. There was a fatalistic composure to him, even a kind of mild cynical humor. He seemed the worldliest person I had ever met.

Several more carriages happened along, but none occupied by that sort of Jack-O’-Lantern being. One was a wagon loaded with logs, and ponderously drawn by two animals that looked like bulky, shaggy yaks with six curling goat-like horns. An animal designed for multiple uses, like those provided to be hunted by the Native Americans, Neanderthals and such. I asked my youthful companion if dogs and cats and other Earthly animals went to Heaven. Or Hell.

"Neither," he said. "They don’t have souls."

"I’ve had some dogs and cats in my life that sure seemed to have souls. More of a soul than a lot of people I’ve known."

The boy only shrugged. It didn’t matter if he agreed with me or not; protesting this revelation was pointless…even if my own soul strongly argued against these facts. These celestial judgments, these cosmic designs.

Well, animals are lucky then, aren’t they? To just die, just cease to be. It’s what I longed for that day, seemingly eons ago, when I took my shotgun in my hands…

I envy the Demons, too. The same release is available to them. To the Creator, they must be like animals. Perhaps He even views His legions of devils as innocents. Merely driven to torture a human as a horse is driven to draw a cart.

Another traveler who fell in beside me introduced himself as Jesus (Hay-zoos); I expected a bolt of lightning to strike him at this information. He was very chatty and jovial, but the branded "R" for Rapist on his forehead reminded me that there were some people in Hell who truly did belong here. He never mentioned the arrow protruding from my back, as though it were the most natural thing in the underworld. When he discerned I was a relative novice to eternal damnation in general and Oblivion in particular he was a fount of information.

"Your best bet is to get work in one of the torture plants," he advised. "They’ll pay you for it…"

"Demons don’t do that work?"

"Some of it, but a lot of times they just supervise humans. They like to get humans to do that shit to each other…I guess they think it’s funny."

"They want to see how much they can get us to debase ourselves."

"But hey, like I said, they pay you. Then you can get better lodgings. Maybe even your own little apartment."

"I couldn’t do that to my own kind."

"Well, if you don’t work there or someplace else, you’ll be living in the streets. Maybe sleeping in an alley, some little nook or cranny if you can find one. But I wouldn’t want to be outside when it rains." He tilted his jaw at the churning sky above the city. I followed his upward glance. It wasn’t a pleasant scenario I envisioned.

I extricated myself from Jesus as quickly as I could. A middle-aged Indian woman in a self-made sari became my next temporary companion. She asked me why I was going to Oblivion. Shrugging, I told her, "I guess I needed some place to go. It’s as good a place as any. And I was advised that it’s safer in a city than out in the wilds."

"Not necessarily," she said. "But if you work for the Demons they can be lenient."

"Do you trade in Oblivion?" She had a bundle of possessions or such.

"No…I’m going there to settle for the time being. I’m coming from another city. The Demons invaded it in great numbers, rounding up the populace, dragging people out of their flats. Even workers in the torture plants."

"There is no reason we can comprehend. But I suppose, just so the citizens would not feel too complacent. Too sheltered. A lot of us escaped. The last I saw from a distance, my city was in flames."

"It’s the incomprehensible that scares me the most," I confessed to her. "More than pain, I think." After a few moments I asked, "Did you have friends and family in your city?"

"Friends. Friends from Hell, not friends from my lifetime…and I’ve never encountered family here. My friends were scattered in all the chaos. I hope some of them will find their way to Oblivion."

I nodded. "Have you ever seen a famous person or a celebrity in Hell? Like Ted Bundy…Lee Harvey Oswald?"

The little Indian woman gave me an uncomprehending frown. "I died in 1927," she explained.

"Oh. I’m sorry. People all seem like contemporaries here. Well…anyway…back at Avernus University I thought I saw Danny Kaye one time in a hallway. He was a film actor, a comedian; I loved his movies as a kid. But we were being herded along by an instructor so I didn’t dare ask him. I remember thinking that if Danny Kaye is in Hell, then there’s no hope for humanity. He’s the only celebrity I might have seen. No Jimmy Hoffa, no Hitler…"

"That name I’ve heard mentioned," the woman said.

"You’ve been here for a long time—do you think it’s possible to escape?"

"Escape? Hell? Oh, no…no, no…"

"Well, you know, look at the visions of Hell writers like Dante and Swedenborg, prophets and so forth have given us. Hell mentioned in the Bible…places like Hell in all these different religions and cultures. Where did they get their glimpses of it, unless they might have come here briefly and then returned?"

"Part of them may have come, a projection, but it is more likely that a window was merely opened for them to see through. Or perhaps they only sensed Hell instinctively. But in any case, no one who ever died and was damned to Hell could ever escape."

"Orpheus went to Hell and back."

"I used to say Hell was only a myth."

Some people weren’t heading toward Oblivion, but coming from it. The traffic grew more congested the closer the city loomed…and now it did indeed loom. It towered above me like the skyline of a great Earthly city, the tallest towers seeming almost to reach the sky of magma, which was now above my head. Looking up at it, and the ebony skyscrapers, was a vertiginous sensation. Orange light reflected on metal and glass, and sent a diffused glow everywhere, so that faces took on the look of people gathered by a fire.

Many of the smaller buildings appeared to be made from bricks that were either cut from black pumice or baked from clay that had been painted black, nestled between the larger structures like tenement slums. On their flat roofs were tents and lean-tos in a kind of elevated shanty town. The most imposing buildings, however, were even more mechanical than they had seemed from afar…covered in external circulatory systems of pipelines, and in clockwork gears that turned and pistons that pumped and grooved belts that flowed along recessed tracks in the rusty hides of the sooty black edifices, all to no apparent purpose.

Not only were there several titanic towers that might rival the Empire State Building, but some buildings that were not so much tall as vast overall, covering many blocks, and one of these didn’t even seem to have a single window in it. Most of the towers had rows of windows like Earthly skyscrapers, but some were lit while others were dark, some with glass intact and others smashed. Many were boarded over.

There was a clamor arising from Oblivion; not of cars and their horns as in the cities I had experienced, but of multitudes of voices, of gnashing and clanging machinery, and the hiss of steam that billowed up out of brick smoke stacks and out of strange vents and grills in the bodies of buildings. Oblivion was like a gargantuan factory busily manufacturing itself.

There was a wall surrounding the entire city, about four stories in height, and made from huge plates of iron impossibly soldered or welded together, these seams like silvery scars against the thick black sheets. Beyond the wall rose a refinery of some kind, and an immense mound of glistening coal. Structures that might be steeples or minarets, their metal surfaces layered and richly detailed. Huge fans turned atop various rooftops, perhaps windmills generating power. Water tanks rested atop others. Catwalks connected many of the tall buildings. Everything looked tremendously congested, lumped together, as if a city like New York had been compressed into half its length and breadth.

The wall around Oblivion was a hexagon, with a slender metal tower soaring at each corner. Like a skeletal iron lighthouse, each turret was surmounted by a glowing orange bulb. And then I noticed that an elevator-like contraption inside one of these needle-like towers was raising an illuminated globe up toward its presently unlit summit. I realized that the globe was that Buddha-faced Jack-O’-Lantern being I had seen in the carriage.

"What is that thing?" I asked the Indian woman, pointing.

"So…they monitor the city?"

"Yes. More or less."

"Where did that one go off to?"

"He didn’t go; he’s coming. He’s replacing one that must have perished. Sometimes Overseers sicken…grow dim, then black, and die. Sometimes they’re murdered by the Damned because the oil in their bodies can be used inside lamps."

Ahh. I recalled the mysterious lamp Caroline and I had used back in Caldera.

"Well, where is this one coming from?"

"He was probably born in the city of Tartarus. That is where most of the Demons in this region are spawned."

"Have you ever been there?"

The woman turned eyes of marveling horror upon me. "Go there? No one would go there! Not willingly…"

We were coming up on the massive gates to the city, which were set into grooved tracks and could be slid shut and bolted, closing the city off. I asked my companion what the city might want to shut out.

"Sometimes armies of Angels come here to lay siege to this city or that. War games, for their entertainment. They expect us and even the Demons to put up a good fight."

The exodus into the city was log-jamming at the gates, trickling through it at a slower rate. There were several Demons posted there, prodding people in the crowd with longer versions of the metal pike I carried, herding them in or out through the entrance. And I saw that these Demons were like the one I had rescued—very human, very white, with jagged dragon-like wings. These were the only devils I had seen in Hell that resembled Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy—the beautiful muscular bodies (but without the horns and tails). And I had thought the Demon I rescued had been stripped naked by her tormentors, but I could see these four males were nude, as well.

One of the Demons stabbed a man in the buttock with the sharp end of his lance. "Move, hog! You’re blocking traffic!" And he barked a laugh.

His companion laughed, too, until he abruptly turned to face…me. He had an alert look as if he recognized me from somewhere, and didn’t like what he saw. He shoved into the crowd to get to me.

"What?" asked his friend.

"Don’t you smell it, Vetis?" he growled. "Demon blood…from this one!"

The pike in my hand, I realized with terror. I wanted to fling it away from me but it was too late. I saw the Indian woman squeeze ahead between two people to get away from me. I didn’t blame her.

"Wait," I said, frozen in my tracks while other souls uncomfortably flowed around me, eyes averted. "Listen…"

The first Demon to reach me snatched the iron bar from my hand, and raised it to his nose. The one named Vetis soon joined him, seizing me by the hair of my head and pushing the bloody tip of his pike under my jaw. I groaned as it scratched my skin.

"It’s female blood," the first one snarled. "It’s Chara’s blood!"

"He must be one of those who attacked her…wounded her," snarled Vetis. I felt the lance’s tip break my skin, and blood flow in a thin stream down my throat.

"Chara," I babbled desperately. "Is she the one who was nailed to a tree?"

"Ah, so you admit it!"

"No—I’m the one who set her free! I pulled that rod out of her stomach!"

"Chara didn’t say anything about any worm setting her free."

"She didn’t? Well, didn’t she say how she got free? I did it…I helped her! Ask her!"

"We’ll take you to her, worm. And if she identifies you as one of her rapists, you will suffer like no soul has ever suffered in the history of Hell."

"Then take me to her…please!"

And so I had a personal escort through the gates of Oblivion.

I spent the night in this cell, with its low ceiling and walls of mortared stone, and even slept on its cement floor for what I judge to be a few hours. After searching me for weapons, my captors allowed me to keep my organ pouch containing this book and my spare clothing from Caldera. It’s at least given me the opportunity to jot down my approach and introduction to Oblivion.

My one cell mate must either be mentally ill or driven mad. And he has been severely wounded…yet, and this is something I haven’t witnessed previously, he has regenerated oddly, mutating, his head an impossible tormented flower of flesh, a row of puckered anus-like holes ringing its misshapen skull and his brains dangling from these orifices in ringlets of dry gray tissue. Perhaps his insanity has distorted his healing process. He sits in one corner hugging his knees to his bony chest, pounding his head back against the stones and whispering a series of numbers that might be mathematical equations or purely random.

It’s surprisingly cool in here, which is refreshing, though I’ve been given no food, water or blanket, unsurprisingly. Beyond the corroded bars of my cell I see a murky corridor and hear echoey shrieks, reverberating wails, and somewhere a baby crying. Behind these, muffled, is the ratcheting grind of great rotating cogs.

On the wall above me, inserted into it like the mortared stones themselves, are two globes that contain a milky-white gurgling fluid. I’ve touched the globes and they have a fleshy, resilient feel. The fluid does not emit light, so their function was not at first clear to me. They remind me of an organic aspect to Oblivion that wasn’t readily apparent until I was inside the wall, really. Mixed in with the external plumbing and the gears and such detail on the intricate exoskeletons of Oblivion’s buildings were grayish orbs like immense blind eyes or diseased organs…snaking, branching pipelines like gigantic black veins…and some of their composition seemed to be more of charred black bone than of metal, though the bones of no known creature…perhaps grown expressly for these purposes.

I wondered if the buildings were, at least in a very primitive way, alive. Each, perhaps, a vast half-sentient Demon, with the Damned dwelling inside them like parasites.

This book in my lap, I stroked its leather cover until the drowsing eyeball centered on the front awakened. As I had done before, I spoke to it soothingly. The single blue eye seemed to focus on my mouth, and it was then that I finally realized it might be able to read my lips somewhat if I spoke slowly and exaggerated my words.

"Can you understand what I’m saying?" I asked it. "If you can, blink two times."

The eye didn’t blink. Changing my tactic, I tore a page out of this book, and wrote a message which I held up in front of the book’s cover:

"If you can read this, blink twice."

The eye blinked twice. I had known the book was conscious of me, but I’d never been able to judge how much of a mind lay behind it. All along, I had been carrying about a mute companion. I felt less alone, and eagerly wrote:

"Tell me your name. I’ll recite the alphabet. Blink twice when I reach the first letter of your first name. Then the second letter of your first name. And so on."

It was a time-consuming process, but at last I had spelled out the name of the soul who had been trapped as the cover of this book, and thus prevented from regenerating. The prisoner told me his name was Frank Lyre.

"What crime is it that makes them trap some people in books, when the rest of us can go freely? I’ll recite the alphabet again. Blink twice when we reach the first letter of the first word you want."

The answer that was laboriously decoded was: "Writers who angered Creator."

"I thought it was something like that," I wrote back to the eye. "I wanted to be a writer myself. A novelist. But I had no luck, I’m afraid."

"Just as well," was the reply. "Might be like me."

"Will they ever free you?" I asked.

"What would happen if I pried your eye out of this cover? Would you then regenerate? Well, the leather of the cover is part of you, too. If I tore off the covers and burned them, would you then finally regenerate whole?"

"Don’t know," Lyre repeated.

"You might just regenerate as this cover again," I mused aloud, "just a hunk of skin with an eye in it." I changed the subject, and wrote to Lyre, "Are you aware of anyone ever escaping from Hell?"

"Is it possible, do you think, to at least send a message out to living people? To warn them, prepare them? Something like this book itself. Is it possible to smuggle out an object?"

"I’d like to find out," I replied. "I’d like to try to send this book back home. Maybe it would work if I stripped the covers off, because they’re your soul. Maybe somehow I could find a way to deliver just these inanimate pages."

"Don’t know," said my living journal.

Hours have passed. I would have thought the Demon Chara would have already been brought to look at me. I reasoned that she must still be recovering from her ordeal. I wondered, too, if she had caught up with Caroline before Caroline made it to Oblivion. But what would it matter, really? Caroline was destined to be mauled and mutilated by many Demons through eternity; one was as good as another.

Gripping the rough bars of my cell, I pressed my face between two of them to peer out into the dimly-lit corridor beyond. Intermittent bare light bulbs glowed inside little metal cages like miniature cells in themselves. There were other cells like mine, but the one directly opposite was in pitch blackness and I wasn’t sure if it was occupied, though I thought I heard a slight rustle of movement within. A rushing gurgling caused me to lift my eyes to the low ceiling. Along it ran a thick pipeline that was translucent and organic. Dark fluid was flushing through it, and seemed to be bearing along gobs of refuse. But it wasn’t sewage; the fluid was red, and the refuse borne along was offal, viscera, blobs of raw flesh. It was like listening to a train pass in the night, and when the cloacal flow had dwindled away, it looked like a few stray scraps of sundered meat lay inside that vein-like tube, its interior beaded red.

"That’s from the torture plant," chuckled the unseen occupant of the opposite cell, apparently amused by my wary upturned eyes. "That’s where we’re headed. You and I."

"Maybe you," I said. "Not I."

"Ha! I see…your lawyer’s gonna get you out of this, huh? A last minute appeal?" The figure of a raggedly dressed man emerged from the dark to grin at me between his own bars. "Maybe they’ll turn you into a book, too," he said, nodding at the volume I’d left on the floor behind me. "That’s where it’s done." Another chuckle. "Still got your book…that’s funny. What are you doing, postgraduate work? Going for a degree?"

"Hey…aren’t we on the same side, here?"

"Never mind. Look…you said they make these books in the torture plants?"

"Yeah. I seen where they do it. I used to work in a print shop, so it was pretty interesting. Watching the bindery and all." He snorted. "This will be my third time through a torture plant. I don’t take no shit from these fuckers. I don’t care. I’m not about to bow down."

"You aren’t scared?"

"Course I’m scared. You think I’m crazy? But all I got left here is my pride. When I lose that, they win. They can’t break me. I have to show ’em all…I got to show the Big Man…that I’m still my own person. I have my will. They can tear this phony body all apart and flush me down the drain but they can’t tear apart who I am. See? In that way, we can win. If you look at it like that, in the end we can always win."

"I hear what you’re saying. But I want to make things as easy on myself as I can. I’m afraid of the pain."

"That’s what they count on. That’s what they enjoy. You can’t give in to your fear, no matter what. Some people just go crazy from pain and fear. Others go blank like robots, just fall down in one spot like a rock and lie there. Like in a coma. Don’t do that; if they find you, they’ll gather you up and do some really extreme stuff to get your attention again."

"Do you know what my cell mate did?"

"He’s an autistic."

"And for that he’s in Hell?"

"If he didn’t know enough to accept the Son, then that’s what he gets."

"It just isn’t fair," I hissed, glancing back at my cell mate, who continued to murmur an unending stream of numbers. Maybe the days that we would be here, the hours of eternity.

"Fair? Oh man, you’re a virgin in Hell, aren’t you?"

As I was looking back at my cell mate huddled in his corner, those burbling fleshy spheres inserted into the wall caught my attention. There was an eye floating in both of them, unnaturally large, perhaps magnified by the milky liquid within. The eyes blinked. When they recognized that I had seen them, they withdrew…became blurry and disappeared. So, was this then some viewing device for my captors to check on me from a distance?

The eyes had looked familiar to me. Long, lynx-like, with heavy slitted lids. Irises grayish in color.

I swore they were the eyes of the Demon Chara.

"Get up," he commanded. "You’re free to leave."

"Free? I thought Chara would come to identify me…"

"She identified you. You weren’t one of her attackers. She confirmed that you helped her, as you claimed." He gestured at the hallway behind him. "So you can go."

Scrambling to my feet, I gathered up my book bag and threw a last look at my pathetic companion, still counting off numbers in the corner, and then followed the Demon out into the corridor.

I looked into the cell opposite mine. It was dark, but I sensed it was empty. While I had slept, its occupant had been taken away to the torture plant.

As I walked along beside the statuesque guard, I knew that it had indeed been Chara who had spied on me through that organic device in the wall. But in an odd way, I was disappointed that she had identified me in that manner. From afar. I realized I had actually been anticipating her arrival at my cell with more than just the desire to be freed. I had wanted to see her again in person…

Insane, I told myself. You’re going insane.

"Do you know where I might go to have this arrow taken out of my shoulder?" I asked the Demon as we walked. "It’s…"

The guard looked over at me, stopped in his tracks, took hold of the crossbow quarrel in one fist and jerked it out of my body.

I dropped to my knees, my vision going black for several moments, the ripped wound streaming fresh blood down my back. With his free hand, still holding the arrow in the other, the Demon took me by the elbow and hoisted me to my feet…helped me along as we resumed walking. Though his medical assistance and his grip were rough in nature, I still sensed that there was some consideration in his actions. What I had done for Chara had not gone fully unappreciated.

We passed through Moorish archways into new corridors, some lined with more cells and others lined only in damp grimy stone. As we neared the outer reaches of the prison, passing what I took to be offices with closed black metal doors, the hallways became cleaner—formed of glossy obsidian blocks mortared like bricks. At last we stopped outside one of the closed iron doors and the guard opened it to usher me inside. Behind a desk, also bolted together from slabs of black metal, sat one of the those skeletal demons with glowing eyes and the top of its head immensely swollen like a balloon fit to burst, like the ones new arrivals filed past when first being admitted into Hell. Without a word, the cadaverous entity looked up at me, seemed to stare into my very brain, then nodded at the guard. And that was that, whatever that was. We left the room, the guard shut the heavy door, and a minute later I was ushered out the front entrance and into the open air of Oblivion.

As I’d immediately been arrested upon entering the city, this was really my first exposure to life on the inside of its surrounding walls.

Stumbling down a broad flight of black marble stairs, I looked back at the looming prison. It was wide and tall, but there were wider and taller structures; I imagined that most of it existed below street level. A number of huge translucent veins of varying thickness—like those that coursed along the ceilings in some of the prison’s corridors—ran out of one face of the prison, connecting with a taller building that rose up next door. I watched as a wash of blood and pulped matter flushed through one of these connecting pipelines. The neighboring building must be a torture plant. From its flat roof, two vast brick smoke stacks soared against the lurid reds, yellows and oranges of the lava sky, billowing black smoke that filled the air with a noxious scent of burning flesh.

This street was very wide, paved with cobblestones, and through its center ran two far-spaced rail tracks such as a streetcar might ride on, but there were no motorized vehicles passing along the road. Did Oblivion have a public transport system?

I turned the corner of the block, and found myself on a much narrower street lined primarily with smallish tenements of black brick. On street level, I was surprised to see shop fronts glowing yellow against the dark faces of the buildings. The inviting smells of a bakery nearly masked the air’s pollution. There were several clothing stores. As I trudged along, my own clothes still wet with blood though my wound was already sealing, no one gave me so much as a second glance.

Two teenage boys came pedaling up the street on crude bicycles, wobbling and squeaking maniacally. An old woman ahead of me on the sidewalk pulled a rickety wagon loaded with groceries. As he passed her, one of the boys on the bikes reached down and swept up a sack from her wagon. She cried out, and I yelled, "Hey!", but the boys turned the corner whooping triumphantly.

Every fifth building or so, a wire was strung across this street, and hanging from these wires like drying laundry were rows of headless skeletons, each blackened as if charred, their joints wired together as if they were classroom displays. They swayed in the breeze, and clattered softly against each other like bamboo wind chimes. As in the case of Caroline, if a person were beheaded, the head would grow a new body…but the headless body would simply rot. Yet this was the first time I had seen human bones in Hell. I didn’t doubt that the torture plant one street over had contributed these macabre decorative displays to the city, perhaps to mark its outer borders.

The next cramped street I found myself in didn’t have the rows of strung skeletons dangling above it, and was something of a modest marketplace. Clothing folded on tables, pots and pans hanging on hooks, pottery glazed in glum colors, soaps and candles. There weren’t many foodstuffs to be had; a few vendors had nothing to offer but baskets of those white pumpkin-like gourds, and several others displayed tubs of ice in which were presented crabs like those that had swarmed across the volcanic plain outside Caldera. There were some salt-cured, eel-like creatures, as hideous as deep-sea fish, hanging by their tails from one makeshift booth. They had no eyes, but fangs overflowed their protruding jaws. I pointed them out to a Muslim woman swaddled in black, who waited in line to make a purchase.

"Is there an ocean or a large body of water near here?"

"There is the Red Sea, near here. But these fish do not come from the sea."

"Where do they come from?"

Her dark eyes, all that showed of her, narrowed intensely and her voice was gravely confidential. "They are mostly found in the Valley of Steam. They swim through the air…and a sufficient number of them can devour a man so quickly that they will eat him again and again before he can fully renew his body. One attacked by them could spend months trying to crawl far enough away from the valley to entirely regrow his form."

I nodded. "Um. Thanks. Well…I guess it’s only fair that we eat them, too, huh?"

"They’re quite good," she told me.

I wandered on, further scanning the market’s comestible wares. There were big canvas sacks and tall woven baskets of what appeared to be a kind of grain (from which the city’s bread is made, I gathered)—at least this stuff seemed fairly abundant. Here and there, a number of wooden trays exhibited gnarled roots that looked like the deformed and swollen hands of old women. But there was not much else to be seen, at least in this street, that indicated that many edibles found their way even to such a densely populated center of commerce as Oblivion.

However, I did see a man in a blood-caked apron pushing a wheelbarrow down the cobblestoned sidewalk, and in it was a huge slab of crimson meat marbled with fat and sinew. I thought it must be from one of those large animals that are provided for hominids, aborigines, Native Americans and others who predated the Son’s coming, to hunt for flesh and fur. But there was something disturbingly anthropomorphic about the shape of this butchered carcass. My eyes flicked to the doorway the aproned man had emerged from moments before, which had been held open for him by a similarly gory assistant.

In the front window of this shop, the headless and limbless torsos of three wooden mannequins hung from hooks. On each mannequin was painted a word: WALSH’S. FINE. MEATS.

"Oh…no," I muttered to myself, drifting toward that illuminated showcase yet unable to will myself to go into the store itself. But I did touch the arm of a man on his way toward the threshold.

"Are those…do they sell human meat in there?"

He smiled. "Good meat is scarce in Hell."

"But to eat other people! To kill other people! Don’t the Demons torment us enough, without people doing things like this to each other?" I ranted.

The man held up his beefy hands. He was burly, thick-necked, looked like he had enjoyed many a good steak in his mortal span. "Hey, hey…calm down…maybe there are other butchers who take their meat from unwilling victims, but Walsh doesn’t do that. His supplies are all donated. He pays good cash for them."

"You mean…people sell their own bodies?"

"Sure. Why not? Getting your head cut off is a lot to go through." He shrugged. "But your body grows back, right? And if you’re desperate enough for money, it’s a good way to make a nice pocketful."

"It’s insane! I can’t believe anyone would debase himself selling his body like that…let alone eating someone else’s body!"

"Hey, you do what you have to do!"

"But we don’t need to eat to survive!"

"Things are different here. You’ll find out the longer you’re here."

"Look, we need our pride more than we need to eat!"

"Do we? Why? Anyway," he jerked his thumb at the shop, "it isn’t really flesh, is it? It’s an illusion. A copy." He winked. "And it tastes good on a grill." And with that, he pushed his own bulky meat through the front door.

Holding my head in my hands, as if I were afraid the devastation from my shotgun would reassert itself at any second, I stumbled toward the end of this street as quickly as I could. At its corner, however, I came upon a bakery, many of its wares on hand outside: baskets and trays of rolls, buns, loaves. The smell was heavenly this close, and even though I didn’t need to eat, my stomach churned painfully. I caught the attention of a woman seated behind the baskets.

"I want to get something," I stammered, "but I don’t have any money. Do you take anything in trade?" I slung my book bag around, started to open it. "I have some clothing…"

She winced with sincere apology. "I’m sorry, but we don’t take payment in trade. See that building down there? With the ivy?" She pointed and I followed her finger. Rising above the flat rooftops of the brick tenement slums was a colossal building apparently of black marble, with few windows, some of these looking like holes in the purple ivy that completely covered one of its faces. "That’s the bank," she went on. "They take trades there. They’d probably accept the clothing if it isn’t too shabby."

"Thanks," I muttered. For the briefest of moments, I envisioned myself putting my head down on a block while a man in a crusty apron raised his cleaver. Why shouldn’t money be of importance even in Hell? In life, I had found it to be one of the profoundest sources of anxiety.

Well, I supposed I needed to find me a job. Again, though I had violently rebelled against the concept, the torture plants came immediately to mind. This was why bakeries and food markets and such amenities were tolerated. Because one must suffer, and cause suffering to others, to easily afford these things.

Yes, I had some clothing to trade…but my current clothing was by now ripped, bloody, filthy from ash and sweat, not to mention having been a source of some amusement to that one man back on the plain of heads outside Caldera, since it was the uniform of Avernus University, marking me as a novice. I decided to change into fresh clothing, and use whatever extra articles remained for trade. I reminded myself, forcefully, that I did not require food, much as my body told me otherwise.

The buildings in this section were so tightly compressed that there were very few alleys between them, but at last I found one barely wide enough to accommodate me. Though the Demons went about nude, proudly showing off their powerful forms, I was too shy to change my clothing in the middle of the street.

What little there was of the alley was filled with trash, shards of glass and pottery, and an old man who blinked out at me from under a large discarded rug he’d pulled around him like a tent, despite the summer-like warmth of the streets that was perhaps a result of the sky of lava overhead. I nodded at him, then proceeded to change my clothes. There would be no privacy even in this little cranny.

I changed into a dark brown pair of trousers which were a bit baggy for me, a pale brown T-shirt also loose on my frame, with clean socks and underwear beneath that. The old man reached a hand out of his foul-smelling nest, and with understanding, I handed him my old clothes. Then I emerged onto the street again, feeling at least slightly better about myself. Had to look presentable if I were to find a new job. Smelling presentable was beyond me for the time being. I sweated, but at least I didn’t have to defecate or urinate unless I had food or water, which obviously I didn’t.

A woman was sweeping the door stoop of a building just ahead of me, raising up a gray cloud; actually I’d noticed a lot of sweeping going on, and that there was a powdery ash between the cobbles in the streets and sidewalks. Everything seemed dusty, in fact, even the citizens. I wondered if great storms of volcanic ash blew into the city; maybe it had come from that erupted volcano I myself had witnessed.

Before beginning any kind of job hunt, I still intended to try my luck at the bank, so I worked my way in that direction. I entered onto another of the infrequent wider streets, this one too with twin rails set into it, though I had yet to see a streetcar or train.

Two sphinxes of black marble flanked the arched front entrance to the bank, looking like bipedal lions with eagle’s wings, the comely breasts of human women and denuded human skulls. From the shorn-off tops of their marble skulls, lurid violet flames lapped at the air. As I trudged up the glassy ebon steps, I was almost afraid one of the giants would come to life, seize me and cram me into its fiery cranium.

The interior of the bank seemed to consist primarily of one huge room with a high echoing ceiling. Little open offices ran along the walls, with people lined up waiting to either approach the main counter or be seen in one of those side cubicles. All of the clerks I saw were Damned souls, though two Demon warriors, naked but carrying sheathed swords and tall spears, flanked the front door while two more stood at either end of the long main counter. And in a sort of huge black birdcage suspended from the ceiling, like an imprisoned sun, rested a somewhat smaller version of the half dozen serenely smiling, orange-glowing Overseers in their watchtowers surrounding the city.

After viewing the variety of transactions from afar, I decided on which queue to enter. (And not a moment too soon; it looked like one of the Demon guards wanted to give me a poke with his lance). Some tellers were handing over small bags of coins from shelves or cabinets behind the counter, which suggested that citizens could actually trust their savings to be safe here. Well, if money were so hard won here, it made sense to protect it from other citizens. Other tellers, however, were accepting goods across the counter, and giving bags of money in trade. Did the bank then turn around and sell these goods directly to vendors, supply the goods to stores it owned itself, trade them with other cities, or use them to pay their human employees? Possibly all these things, though I supposed that it really didn’t matter; the bank was just a way to create some order, some system, in the city. Money can do that, too.

While I was slowly shuffling along in line, I watched workers behind the counter load food, clothing, various crafts and wares into wagons and drag them off through doors along the back wall. From one of these far metal doors, I saw one of those bubble-headed, part-insect, part-skeleton Demons of the administrative caste emerge. I didn’t doubt he was the bank president, at least one of its primary supervisors, though whether he or the Overseer were of higher rank I had no idea.

Yes, it was beyond obvious now that—unlike Caldera, which had been entirely founded, built and populated by humans—Oblivion is a city that has been provided for the Damned. The Demons keep their presence to a minimum, but they are in the rafters, pulling the strings where necessary. But I didn’t want to fall into the trap of seeing them as our benefactors. I had to remind myself that Oblivion is not a refuge but just a different setting for suffering. Also, as I had learned, the Angels find it entertaining to visit Hell in full armies on occasion, so as to do battle with certain cities. To rape and pillage like lusty Vikings. Oblivion is like a child’s intricate castle of building blocks, stacked neatly up so that he can sadistically trample it down.

The skeletal Demon stalked off in ghastly slow motion, and then it was my turn at the counter. The teller was a pretty Asian woman, with a B that meant Buddhist branded on her forehead. I showed her what I had to trade: a white long-sleeved peasant blouse, a pair of black shorts and a pair of coarse woolen socks. She accepted them without any qualms, but instead of a nice little bag she pushed three individual coins across the black marble counter. Somewhat dejectedly, I picked them up. Each coin, heavy and gray as if molded from lead, had one of those fire-headed sphinxes stamped on one side, and an eye on the other that reminded me of Frank Lyre, on this journal’s cover, until I realized it was meant to represent the Creator.

"What do you think I can get with these, in the way of food and shelter?" I asked the woman.

"Depends on where you go. Maybe three nights in a hotel. Or three good meals."

"I guess I’ll try a combination of those things, then. Thanks."

So I departed from the bank in search of a place to stay. I suppose I was too discouraged by how rough it was going to be eking out a living in Oblivion to address the job situation just yet. As I wandered the city further, though, I did see more than just torture plants. There were carpenters’ places of business, and the steaming shops of blacksmiths. Small brick factories that clanged and hammered mysteriously. I tried to be optimistic; I couldn’t expect to find my fortune in a single day on the streets. If I could make it here, though, I could make it anywhere.

After traveling for several blocks I came into the presence of a monumental tower that seemed to support the molten sky like a column. Where most of the large skyscrapers had windows, housing either citizens or perhaps the Demonic class of Oblivion, this one had not a single pane, and its flanks were entirely formed of intricately woven black machinery heavily scabbed in corrosion like dried blood. Further, this machine building thrummed, gonged, chattered, whined, rang, chittered, hissed, rumbled, causing its immediate environs to vibrate. Steam billowed out of vents along its great height, curling like specters escaping from a gargantuan funereal obelisk.

In the foothills of this metal mountain was a shabby and skinny brick hotel that seemed squished between its taller flanking brothers. I ventured inside, found a man behind the front desk. As I had been advised at the bank, I was informed that one night would cost me one coin. That was what he said: "One coin a night." Obviously, the coins—without words or numbers on them—had never been given a name.

"Ah…one night, for now. Can I buy food here?"

"We can bring you a bowl of broth, a hunk of bread and a cup of water for one coin."

"All right, then. I’ll want that, too. Thank you."

The proprietor summoned a dirty-haired teenage girl from a back room, and she showed me up to my room on the third floor. Its one window’s view was obscured by the bulk of the machine building, which also caused the panes of glass to audibly tremble. Still, the sight of a bed made up for that, however meager the mattress.

Under the circumstances, I couldn’t tip the girl; not that I had bags. But she lingered in the doorway. After a hesitance, she said, "For another coin, I can come visit you tonight."

I was appalled, especially considering the girl’s age. But I pitied her. I didn’t know if the proprietor expected this of her, or whether she did such things just to feed herself. Not wanting to offend her, I smiled gently and told her, "No thank you. I’m…very tired…I need to rest now."

She smiled, appearing embarrassed, and exited without another word…leaving me here to record these events and impressions of my first day as one of the citizens of the city of Oblivion.

My second day as a citizen I spent scouring the neighborhood of the hotel for work, knowing that I only had one coin left to my name. Finally, toward the end of the day, I found a job in a factory several blocks away. The building is only two stories high but covers a lot of ground, and it has a tremendous solitary smoke stack. Its tarred roof is covered in little shacks and tents like a dog’s hide covered in fleas, but a lot of the inhabitants of this miniature rooftop shanty town work for the company.

All I really do is stand at something like a conveyor belt that has white marks on it like the increments of a ruler. Spaced here and there along the belt, though, are red marks. And they’re not evenly spaced, oddly enough. Several red marks will be fairly close together, then I might not see another one for ten minutes. I’m not sure how long this belt is, how far it extends through the mechanical guts of the place. In any case, every time one of these red marks comes along and lines up with a red mark etched on the border of its track, I have to throw a lever. And that’s it. But it’s an important task, my group leader has impressed upon me; if I daydream and miss just one red mark, one lever throw, I’m sacked.

Not only do I not know what I’m achieving by throwing my lever, I don’t even know what this plant produces. I’ve asked several of my coworkers, but they seem recalcitrant about it. One simply answered, "Shh." Another, "Who cares?" Someone said, "I think we make dolls; there are eyes on my belt, little eyes…they might be glass, or maybe they’re not." Still another laborer whispered to me, "We keep the Creator running." But someone told me this laborer has lost his mind.

At least I’ve found out what the dust in the street is, which is so frequently swept up from between the cobbles and flagstones. I’m watching it rain outside my window even now: a brightly glowing downpour of lava from the sea of magma over the city. It’s pattering against the outer sill of my window, even forming little rivulets and small pools, but they quickly go cool and fade to a gray ash. Orange fluid trickles between the cobblestones like a glowing web, runs in the gutters, pours into sewer grates. I’m so glad I’ve found a place to stay, lucked out and got a job. I pity the people who sleep in the choked little alleys, or camp out in tents and other inadequate shelters. In fact, I can hear someone outside screaming horribly even now.

On Day 47, I think it was, I was walking home from work when I saw two Demons burst out of a tenement dragging a man by the arms. Both Demons were female; one with a short banged Louise Brooks cut which I thought was both weirdly becoming and sort of absurd, and the other with her hair pulled back in a single thick braid. Both glanced at me, but the one with the braid held my gaze longer.

I recognized her as Chara. And I knew she recognized me.

But they dragged the weeping, babbling man away, and I approached a cluster of timid neighbors who were watching the incident. "What did he do?" I asked them.

"Nothing, probably," someone replied. "Sometimes they just pick people at random for the torture plants."

This person looked at me in awe. "Because it’s Hell, that’s why!"

A wailing made me turn my attention back to the man’s house, and I saw a woman clinging to the doorframe, sobbing violently.

"That’s his wife," another person said to me.

"Did they die together?"

"No…they met here in Hell."

This has set me wondering again why I haven’t met anyone I know here…not just family, like my father who died several years ago, but grandparents, uncles and aunts, my wife’s deceased grandparents, and so on. When my wife ultimately dies, and assuming she doesn’t go to Heaven (which I doubt, because she was an agnostic like me, though maybe her new boyfriend is a church-goer who can save her soul), will I ever run into her? Hell is vast. I think it might even be infinite. And even if I did meet her eventually, she might be an elderly woman who died of a stroke. An Alzheimer’s victim who would not even remember me.

I miss her. I hate her. I realize I still love her.

I have shelter. I have food.

I pity that woman who watched her husband dragged away to endure horrors, and I hope he is returned to her soon, though I’ve heard rumors that one might spend anywhere from days to years in a torture plant.

Chara helped take him away. She is evil. She has no soul. She is the enemy. I mustn’t forget that, however beautiful she is. Why I was hoping to see her again I have no idea.

The rain is stopping now…

On my conveyor belt there is one green mark. Just one, I think, though there may be several I’m seeing, very distantly spaced out. Does some other worker stand there all day, punching his lever just on this apparently single mark? I see the green mark once every hour, I’d say. And I’m tempted to throw my lever when it comes level with the red indicator etched on my track, just to see what would happen. If someone told me that in doing so, I would cause all of Hell to go up in a nuclear blast, vaporized out of any level of existence, I would do it. I would throw that switch. I would pull that trigger.

Because I am bored, and in a sardonic frame of mind, I have decided every day here is October thirty-first, so I have purchased white gourds from the market, hollowed them out, carved evil faces in them, and put scented candles inside. I have one on my bedside table and one in my window, facing out. I’ve viewed it from the street with satisfaction. I like to lie back on my bed with my Jack-O’-Lanterns as the only light, watery mellow orange membranes of light quivering across my ceiling and walls.

The girl who works here cleans my room, and she’s asked me once again if I wanted her to come to see me at night. Again I told her no, but it was harder this time. Hell will do that to you. Hell will pare down your sense of outrage, which doesn’t grow back like your flesh does.

If I could kill myself again, I would.

I saw Angels up close for the first time today. My shift had let out and I was entering onto my street when there came a low, resonant rumbling sound from the distance. It was too mechanical to be thunder, and I was accustomed to the various sounds of the skyscraper machine in whose shadow my hotel/boarding house squatted—it wasn’t that, either. Though some of the skyscraper’s sounds could be quite disconcerting, often waking me from my sleep, this was unsettling for its steadily mounting sense of approach. And…its familiarity.

It had been a while since I’d heard the sound of motorcycles. Numerous motorcycles.

The realization put me instantly in mind of my hometown of Eastborough, Massachusetts. Some years back, a child riding on the back of her father’s motorcycle had been killed when a drunk driver forced the bike off the road. Every year on the anniversary of her death, local bikers had gathered in a grim, noisy parade through the center of town and on into Pine Grove Cemetery, where the child had been buried. Yes…this sound was exactly like that.

When the first motorcyclist came growling loudly onto my street, I was too struck by the rider’s appearance to take much note of his bike, whether it was of an Earthly model or something more unique, exotic, celestial in some tangible way. Never having been the type to salivate over cars, trucks and other phallic extensions, I suppose the bikes looked just like big black chrome-trimmed insects to me.

But if the bikes were uniformly black, the opposite was true of those mounted upon them. I knew what they were as soon as I viewed the foremost of them.

Some of them wore monk-like robes, with hoods or cowls either up over their heads or fallen off to hang down their backs. Others, like the first rider, wore tall cone-like hoods, either with the face entirely open or else covered so that only the eyes showed through holes in the fabric. Some of these robes shimmered like satin, while others were of plain cloth…but all of the riders were dressed entirely in white.

When the last of them had rumbled past, bouncing over the roughly cobbled street, I realized I had unconsciously backed up across the sidewalk until my shoulder blades touched the brick face of one of the street’s dismal, dusty structures. A few of the Angels had turned their heads to hoot at me, but luckily none of them had pulled over to accost me. Perhaps they had some specific destination in mind. Anyway, it seemed that they had already had a bit of fun: I noticed blood stains vivid against the white cloth of more than one of them. Several wore swords like the Demon warriors of Oblivion did, but all of them had holstered pistols hanging from their black leather belts. Most had shotguns or what looked like various submachine guns slung over their backs, or rifles sheathed in long bags of stiff black leather like a cowboy might have by his saddle.

I could swear one of them had a crossbow.

The rumbling receded, thankfully, but I was still unnerved just knowing they were still within the city’s borders, however expansive. I pitied whoever might encounter them more intimately than I had. At first I thought that they might be headed toward the Aviary.

The Aviary was a long street I had discovered recently while exploring the city during my free hours. The brick buildings ranked along its length were much like the shops in other blocks, but instead of glass windows they had cage fronts of chicken mesh or net-like rope mesh or iron bars, as crude as those of a prison cell or filigreed and flowery like the railings of romantic terraces. The wares displayed within these diverse birdcages were prostitutes even more variegated. White, black, Asian. Naked or clothed. Anorexic or obese. Gray haired or adolescent. Female or, in lesser numbers, male.

The majority of this menagerie’s inhabitants struck me as being willing prisoners, winking or cooing or calling to passersby like myself, baring their breasts or spreading their legs, bending over to present their bottoms. But there were those who looked sullen, in despair, even in terror, whom I took to be the victims of other Damned souls exploiting them as my landlord apparently exploited his young helper. At the very least, they were victims of their own desperate need. Despite the guilty visual pleasures, it was ultimately as debased a display as would have been a street lined with bodies writhing on stakes. I haven’t been back since.

No, I decided…the Angels hadn’t gone there. Where would be the fun? Better to ravage those who chose not to sell their bodies. To chase women down in the street, or boldly drag them out of their houses to rape in front of their husbands.

I have learned that a good number of people marry in Hell, the ceremonies carried out in secret by former justices of the peace or the occasional minister who suffered a rude awakening upon rebirth. And while procreation in Hell is impossible, there are children here in abundance, and it isn’t at all uncommon for married couples to adopt them as their own. It is this kind of behavior that reassures me even as a place like the Aviary disillusions me. And it is just these sort of people, I presumed, that the Angels would feel most drawn to in the course of their sport.

But all I could be certain of, at this point, was that I was glad the parade hadn’t stopped to have sport with me.

Last night, in a dream, my afterlife flashed before my eyes.

At first, I was a boy—alive—and I was in my grandmother’s garden. I was reliving the time I saw a praying mantis crawling on her lilac bush. I had forgotten about that time, until this dream. The mantis was green, not purple.

There was a rumbling growing in the distance, like a train coming. I ran around to the front of her house and stood on the bright green grass of her front lawn, shielding my eyes from the summer sun as a parade of motorcycles filed past, on their yearly pilgrimage to Pine Grove Cemetery…where my father is now buried. Where, I suppose, I must be buried.

Even in my dream I wondered if I had subconsciously stolen these things—the mantis, the parade of bikers—as material from which to build my experiences in Hell. Even while dreaming, I wondered if this were perhaps merely a dream within a dream…

When the last cyclist had passed, I tilted my head up to gaze into the sun. Its fiery radiance seemed to be spreading across the sky. The entire sky was becoming molten. The light became less whitely concentrated, more diffused and reddish. When I looked down again at the street, I saw that it had become cobblestoned. The pretty New England houses across South Street were now a solid wall of brick row houses. They looked so tangible, but I knew they were not. Every brick was made of the same ether as my body, compacted, compressed, just molded differently.

I watched as one of the many bricks in one of the many buildings of Oblivion began to wriggle its way out of its slot, mortar trickling down like dust. Then the brick worked itself free, and flew toward my now adult body. I did not try to dodge it. The brick struck my flesh with only the faintest breeze of an impact, and disappeared inside my chest.

Another brick dislodged itself. Another. From a second building, a third. They flew at me now from multiple directions, blurred streaks like arrows into St. Sebastian, and vanished into my body as I spread my arms like wings to accept them.

A man walking along the street suddenly turned to stare at this phenomenon. Startled, he began to run away. But as if his legs were under my command, they sent him veering toward me. He rushed headlong at me, and when he collided with me, it was like the barest mist breaking against me. He was gone. I spread my arms wider. My arms were longer. I was taller. The city was feeding me…

A woman came racing around the corner against her will, running into my open embrace. I consumed her. A window smashed, and an infant hurtled toward me. I accepted him into my bosom.

The parade of Angels came tearing up the street. One by one they launched themselves into me and now I was taller than the roof of the hotel I live in.

Multitudes now swarmed toward me, bodies tumbling over each other, crashing like waves against me. Demons. I looked for Chara but it was impossible to isolate a single face in the chaotic flood.

If we had the power to regenerate our bodies, didn’t we have the power to shape our own cells? Thus, all of the citizens of Oblivion, all of the inhabitants of Hell, were willing our cells to blend together. So shouldn’t we have had one anonymous communal mind? But I recognized this consciousness as my own mind, my own personality, my own distinct being. The others were lost, extinguished within it as they fed into me. Was I more powerful than they? No, I realized. Suddenly, I had an enlightenment. I had an epiphany…

This was why I had never met anyone I knew in Hell. Or anyone I knew of. No historical figures, no celebrities, no family. These millions, billions of people were not losing themselves in me. They were returning home.

I was steadily assimilating, gathering into me every man, woman and child—every Demon, Angel and praying mantis—in Hell. Each consumed, processed, made a part of me; each a single cell in my body which grew more and more huge, like an ocean built raindrop by raindrop, the rain coming in torrents like the rains at the beginning of the Earth. I swelled, I expanded, a giant looming higher than the six towers of the beacon-like Overseers, higher than the skyscrapers. I thrust my head through the ceiling of glowing lava. Beyond it was so glaringly bright that at first I thought it was still the white-hot lava. But no. It was light. Then I thought I am in Heaven. No. Not yet. Maybe not at all…

I continued to launch myself higher in my growth, as if I sucked matter in through the soles (souls) of my feet. But I realized now that my ectoplasmic body had lost its illusion of appearance, of physical substance. And as I lost substance, the void of light around me took on substance in a kind of trade off, as if it in turn was feeding off me.

Red stars appeared in this negative of deep space. Then I saw one of them closer up. A shining red planet, smooth as a river pebble. Another, in the distance beyond that…also a bright but dark red. Another, so close now I could see more of them reflected in its glossy surface (though I could not see my astral face reflected there). More and more planets, more than there are in the universe.

Soon they were all around me. But as I shot higher (and at last, I could no longer feel a solid surface below my feet—I had either flown upwards or it had dissolved beneath me), the planets appeared to recede a bit below me. They were so many, they took on the appearance of clusters, galaxies. Mixed in were some planets of other colors. Whitish. Grayish. These planets might have been asteroids, as they had less regular shape than the smooth red bodies. Heavenly bodies…

The surrounding light was losing its blinding glare. I could see something now beyond the red constellations, a blur taking on darkness and color. A body taking on form, even as I had lost mine, translated into sheer force, pure essence. I knew Whose body it was. I was not afraid to say His name anymore. I had grown too powerful to fear retaliation, punishment. Solidifying behind the hanging stars was the figure of the Creator.

I was in the presence of God.

It was not so much that He was behind the red stars, but below them; I seemed to be lifting above His still obscure head. The crimson galaxies themselves obscured Him like a veil. Titanic as I had grown, He was vaster yet. And yet…was it mere self-deception that I sensed in myself the greater power? His waning, as mine gathered? He trapped in that mountainous form which came gradually into focus, as I was liberated into unadulterated spirit?

The red planets were so distant under me that they looked more like mists than galaxies. Mists suspended in one incredibly drawn-out moment in time. Time standing still.

Standing still like a photograph of a volcano erupting, spraying droplets of red fire in all directions. God’s head was frozen in time like that. And it had erupted like a volcano. God’s head had opened like a flower, pollen billowing up from it. His halo was a cloud of blood, an aurora borealis of blood suspended in the air and in time but I was not suspended, I was moving, still rising, rising above it all…I was going to leave it all behind me, below me, it would grow so small and distant that it would be lost to me. Then there wouldn’t even be this surrounding light. (A shotgun’s muzzle flash, also locked in time?) Even light was something. I would shed even that like a cocoon. There would only be darkness and sweet nothingness: the only Heaven I could crave, believe in, or invent.

At last…at long last…after all my suffering on Earth…after all my suffering in Hell, though now I knew it had lasted only a fraction of a microsecond in a mind gone kaleidoscopically insane with its obliteration…I was free. I was filled with peace.

In nothingness I was reborn. I was the phoenix of oblivion.

I was the fleeting thought and the fleeing soul of a suicidal God.

…but when I awakened, I stared at cracks in the plaster ceiling that looked so real, so mundane. It was only illusion that this was all just an illusion. It was only a dream that this was all simply a dream. Or, rather, the ceiling was indeed an illusion. But it would protect me from the illusion of the lava rain. And the hunger gurgling in my belly was only an illusion, but I had to rise now and chew my illusionary bread, drink my hallucinatory tea.

My head never did truly, literally regenerate after that shotgun blast. But I lifted it, nonetheless, from my pillow so I could breakfast and write these words.

I’ve had this bug or flu for several days; it started out as a cold but now I’m feverish, light-headed, with an intensely focused pain behind the bridge of my nose and one eye like a sinus headache. Since I arrived in Hell, I’ve seen people with rashes, sores…sneezing, sniffling…hacking up phlegm, vomiting in the street. Are our ailments imaginary, illusionary—in a sense, psychosomatic? Are we all hypochondriacs, deluded into our respective sicknesses? Or does the Creator manufacture demonic microorganisms as He does those flesh-eating crabs and air-swimming eels, to torment us from within? Last night I had a feverish dream, inspired by a drawing by a 15th Century artist in one of my parents’ books, which had terrified but fascinated me as a boy. It showed St. Anthony being set upon by colorfully bizarre demons who tugged at his garments and hair, clawed him, raised clubs to smite him. I imagined these demons inside my body, and tearing at my blood cells like that, biting into them, ripping them to shreds. Microscopic vampires.

Bad as I felt tonight, I needed to get out of my claustrophobic flat, so I dragged my sorry carcass down to a café of sorts I discovered recently on an idle walk. The place is just called Blue. I think any place in Oblivion that might call itself Hellishly Good, Devil’s Food, or something cute like that would be set upon by a very humorless mob.

It’s one large, gloomy, low-ceilinged room, with most of its light coming from gas jets burning inside open-topped glass globes, set into the rough stone walls. The odorless, hissing gas is blue…hence the aqueous glow to everything…hence the name of the establishment.

I’ve heard there are secret places in Oblivion—speakeasies, really—where you can buy rotgut, moonshine, whatever they choose to call the half-poisonous brews that are concocted in the black market’s stills. (Just as I’ve heard there are drugs to be had in Oblivion; but I was never much into those, even in life.) But Blue is right there open to the street, and so it doesn’t take chances. There are places where you can buy a steak made from one of those animals provided for the Neanderthals and such, and not from human flesh…but if one is caught eating or selling this meat, which is not intended for those of us who had the opportunity to be enlightened by the Creator’s only child, then one can be expected to be harshly punished. Being eaten alive by baboon Demons is, I understand, a typical response.

So in Blue, one eats human meat dishes (not me, though; I still haven’t given in to that and I hope I never will). There’s cool water to drink, brought into Oblivion from outside its borders via underground pipelines, I’ve learned. (It only rains lava, not water, in Oblivion, where there are no clouds above to cover the fiery sky.) There is an artfully concocted imitation coffee available that is almost as good as the worst decaf I have ever tasted, watery and weak and bitter, but hot and dark, at least. Much more successful is their hot mulled cider, which tastes like an instant brand I used to buy in life. Nowhere near actual mulled cider, but still nostalgically approximate. I enjoyed one tonight, letting its aromatic steam rise up into my face as if it might clear my sinuses, hunkered over my small sticky table in a cave-like stony corner.

The first time I’d come here, I’d found two musicians sitting on a scrap of stage, playing lovingly made lutes. Another patron told me the musicians had died centuries earlier. While they played, I saw a woman at a nearby table weeping softly.

Tonight there were no musicians. I had hoped to catch one of the jazz acts I’d heard about. I contented myself with chewing my salad, sipping my drink and eavesdropping on the conversations of those around me. I was comforted by the proximity of other people, by their laughter, by the atmosphere of near normalcy…but I had no desire to interact with any of these people on an intimate level. In life I had always been reserved, introverted, not unusual traits for a writer…but here, I am even more withdrawn. Traumatized, still. My soul dazed and stumbling even two months into eternity. At work I resist the efforts of several other laborers to draw me into friendship. But I’m not singular in this respect; the boisterous, guffawing sorts are definitely in the minority. Many of us shuffle through our days, smiling shadows of smiles at each other, if at all. The walking wounded.

I didn’t hear the door to the café open, but I did notice the sudden lull in conversation, the abrupt suppression of laughter, and this is what caused me to turn toward the entrance. In the threshold there was a Demon, and I recognized her appealing haircut like Louise Brooks in Lulu, short and glossy black with bangs hiding her eyebrows. She was the Demon I had seen with Chara back on, I think, Day 47, dragging a man out of his home…

And in fact, following Lulu through the door was Chara herself, her hair again cocooned behind her head in a thick braid as she had worn it that day.

Both female Demons wore nothing but a thick leather belt which supported a sheathed sword, Lulu’s apparently short and wide-bladed like a Roman infantryman’s gladius, and Chara’s longer, its straight blade more slender and no doubt double-edged, the tip of its scabbard almost scraping the floor.

But they weren’t arriving alone. Two Angels trailed them inside, the latter closing the door behind him. Now the place really got subdued.

One Angel had a white robe with a cowl which he had pushed back off his balding head; the other wore a white headdress with a conical peak. Neither had swords, as I had noticed on some of the bikers I’d seen arriving in town, but both had holstered pistols on their belts. Slung over his shoulder, the paunchy, balding one carried what looked like an Israeli Galil assault rifle, roughly like the AK-47, its hinged skeleton stock folded to make it more compact. The tall, lean one with the cone to make him even taller carried an MP5 Heckler & Koch submachine gun, with its distinctive short barrel and long magazine. Like just a few other Americans, in life I had an interest in guns; after all, I owned that nice Ithaca 12-gauge that had been my ticket to this place.

Looking at the one with the gut, then the tall one with his acne-cratered hollow cheeks, I thought it odd that Angels weren’t all transformed into Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise when they entered Heaven. I guess that even there, one has to make do with the literal replication of their living self. Then again, would the Creator really stock Heaven with the billions who die elderly and bed-ridden? Maybe, at least, they can choose the age they want to be restored at.

With a mix of surprise, disgust and something I couldn’t then admit to as jealousy, my first impression was that the two devils were escorting the Angels for a night on the town. I soon realized I was wrong.

"Hey, come on," the shorter man said, trying to take hold of the edge of one of Chara’s folded wings. "Why won’t you talk to me, missy?"

"Little butterflies flyin’ away," said the taller man. His Southern drawl was even more pronounced than his friend’s.

"Mm-mm," said the first, trailing the two women to a small table near the service counter. They pointedly chose one with only two chairs, not four. He hovered over them as they took their seats. "What do you prefer, Mr. Franklin?" he asked. "Wings, breasts or thighs?"

Chara finally lifted her eyes to the two tourists. Her deep voice was chilly but restrained. "You gentlemen might be interested in visiting the Aviary. It’s not far from here and it’s open all night…"

"We know what the Aviary is."

"Been there, done that," said Franklin, the tall one.

"What we haven’t done," the balding Angel went on, "is try somethin’ a little…spicier." And with this, he brazenly reached down and cupped one of Chara’s breasts in his hand. Tightly, it looked, from the way the soft flesh bulged between his fingers.

Chara took hold of his wrist and extricated his hand firmly but without inflicting pain. I could see the tendons standing out like supporting struts in her neck, and a vein raised on her forehead like my branded A. "If you boys don’t mind," she told him through her bared teeth, "we’d appreciate a little respect."

"Respect? Respect?" The Angel bulged his eyes at his friend in exaggerated shock. "An Angel should respect a Demon whore who struts her body around like she’s in a damn nudist camp? Do you hear what this thing’s sayin’, Mr. Franklin?"

"I think these devil-bitches ought to be treatin’ us with a lot more respect, Mr. Butler."

Butler leaned down into Chara’s geisha-white face. "You soulless little devils are just my Father’s wind-up toys, you know that? But Mr. Franklin and I, here, we’re His children. I don’t think you girls better be forgettin’ that."

Chara turned her face away, her jaw set, heavy lips composed in a surly pout.

"Do you hear me?" Butler persisted, like a father lecturing his child.

"Tell them to come with us, Mr. Butler," said the tall one.

"Do you hear what Mr. Franklin said? You’re my Father’s servants. That means you’re my servants. That means I order you two to come back to our hotel with us."

A waiter approached the table timidly, wondering if he should be taking orders. Franklin looked over at him with flat dead eyes. The waiter veered toward another table instead.

"I’m gonna ask you for the last time," Butler spat, this time seizing Chara’s braid in his fist and jerking her head back to look up at him. "Do you hear what I’m sa—"

Then Chara was spinning around in her chair, striking Butler’s wrist with her own forearm, causing him to lose his grip on her hair.

"You fuckin’ bitch!" Butler cried, more startled than hurt, and taking an alarmed step back from her.

I saw his pudgy hand go for the pistol holstered on his hip…

Bolting up from my seat, I called out, "Leave them alone!"

If the café had become subdued before, it was frozen into a grotto full of statues now. Customers gaped at me from their tables and the bar at the counter. The two Angels, Butler and Franklin, stared at me as if dazed with horror. The two Demons, Chara and her partner, stared as well.

"What did you say?" Butler fumbled. "You…you aren’t sayin’ that to me, are you?"

"You’re going to get in trouble messing with them," I fumbled, but trying to keep my voice stern.

"Trouble? Trouble with who, you fuckin’ grave worm? I’m an Angel!" Butler’s squat face was flushing red. He ripped a Glock out of its holster so violently that it almost went spinning out of his hand, but a moment later it was pointing across the room at my face. "First I gotta put up with this whore’s attitude, and now I have to listen to a vermin like you talk to me that way?"

"Shoot that son of a bitch," hissed Franklin.

"Shooting him is too good for him. I’m takin’ this sucker down to the nearest torture plant myself, and I’m gonna make sure they never let him out of there. You hear that, devil lover?" Spittle was ejected from his mouth like venom. "They’re gonna have you in a meat grinder from now ’til doomsday!"

"It is doomsday," Chara said, rising from her chair and drawing her sword all in one graceful, fluid blur of white flesh, flashing white steel.

A whooshing arc. A solid thunk. A wet spatter across the floor, as the blade hewed through the Angel’s skull just above the eyebrows. The balding top of his skull thumped onto a neighboring table and rocked upside-down like a bowl.

"Fuck!" the lower part of Butler’s head blurted.

"Shit!" Franklin said, backing off fast and unslinging the Heckler & Koch from his shoulder.

Lulu, as I thought of her, shot up from her own chair, whisked her short sword out of its sheath and hurled it end over end at Butler. With a practiced throw, the heavy blade lodged itself into the center of the Angel’s chest, audibly cracking through his sternum. He stumbled back a few steps more with a terrible grunt.

Butler’s head was now a volcano, spewing red lava while more poured down its sides. Through this caul of gore his eyes blazed white with fury and pain. His gun hand had faltered, but it rose up again to aim at Chara.

But Chara hadn’t finished. Her blade hadn’t stopped soaring through the air, but instead continued in a smooth figure eight. From the backhand blow which had cleaved through the Angel’s skull, its momentum carried it around again in an upward, crosswise strike.

This time, the honed edge caught Butler squarely across his spongy neck. What remained of his head was hacked off its shoulders, and toppled backward into his cowl, which caught it like a guillotine’s wicker basket. Butler staggered, and managed to get off one shot that bored harmlessly into the floor, before he crumpled.

My eyes flicked back and forth between the two bloody Angels as I half-crouched behind my table.

Franklin had already straightened up from the impact of Lulu’s lightning fast response. Though the sword jutted out of his chest, he hadn’t even lost his peaked hat. Now Lulu was unarmed. Now his eyes had that flat, dead look again as he tucked the submachine gun’s stock up against his cheek.

Her wings half-opening, so that she descended on him like a raging dragon, Lulu lunged at the former human, actually began to bat the gun’s muzzle to one side and reach a powerful hand to his throat even as Franklin pulled the trigger.

The chattering burst of gunfire was crisp and deafening, jackhammers in my ears in this enclosed room. Meant to bore straight through her center, Lulu’s swiping hand caused the blast to instead stitch across the side of her chest…but I still saw several exit wounds wink open in her back, one of the slugs tearing a hole through the membrane of her wing.

I learned Lulu’s actual name when Chara roared, "Verdelet!"

Verdelet was spun half around by the impact, yet still remained on her feet.

Franklin was free to raise the gun to his shoulder once again, as if resighting on a wild turkey.

Chara descended with her sword rising. Her wings half-opened, as well, like a ragged cape billowing behind her.

The second short blast of automatic fire, with nothing to impede it, struck Verdelet square in the face, and drilled out through the back of her skull in a leaping expulsion of blood and bone shrapnel. Gobs of tissue, clotted with hair, splatted onto surrounding tables.

And just a microsecond later, Chara’s sword hummed through the air, struck Franklin in the top of his skull (his dunce cap causing no resistance) and split his head so far down the center that, had it traveled just a few inches lower, it would have struck Verdelet’s blade, still wedged in his breastbone.

Franklin fell. I thought I saw one of his eyes, in its bisected half of a head, roll to look up at Chara as she positioned herself over him and swung her weapon again. She whacked him across his cloven throat, disconnecting the torn head from its shoulders before the two halves could fuse back together. Usually in a beheading, as in Caroline’s case, it is the head that regenerates and the body which rots…but in a case like my own, and with these two Angels who’d had their skulls decimated, the body would resurrect instead. Even now I saw Butler’s hands closing and unclosing as he lay there on the floor. I knew that Angels regenerated at least twice as quickly as the Damned did. I swore I could hear a liquid rustling or stirring from Butler as a new head was preparing to grow from the lengthening stump of his neck. My only consolation was that Angels could suffer the excruciating agony of reanimation as well, since they retained all earthly sensation, the better to enjoy sex and drink and food, and pain was an incentive to succeed in their war campaigns in Hell.

Only Chara and I remained standing, and we were both looking down at Verdelet. Her face was lost, chiseled away to a raw pit, black blood pooling beneath her. The Demons could withstand wounds that would kill a mortal man, as Chara herself proved, but this damage was too extreme. Despite her immense strength, in this way I was superior to the demonic warrior, this fallen angel. Verdelet was dead.

Around me I heard Blue emptying, as its terrified patrons scattered to the street. I won’t quip there would be hell to pay for this unthinkable altercation with two vacationing Angels.

Chara and I lifted our eyes to each other. The pain and loss in her face was almost heart-breaking, but the fearsome hate mixed in with it tempered my pity with wariness.

"Go!" she hissed at me.

"You’d better go, too," I said.

She kicked Butler’s dropped Glock, causing it to skitter to a stop near my foot.

I held her gaze a moment longer, then knelt down to scoop up the pistol. I tucked it under my waistband and covered the handle with the tail of my shirt. While I was down there I jerked Franklin’s handgun out of its holster, and shoved that in the back of my pants. When I straightened, I saw that Chara had sheathed her sword, and was recovering the Heckler & Koch from the floor.

The wet, unpleasant sounds were more insistent now from Butler’s carcass, and beginning with Franklin’s as well. There was a knot or lump of tissue on Butler’s shoulders, the glistening red ball of an embryonic head affixed to an adult’s body. The hands of both bodies were clenching, flexing, and the legs had begun to slowly pedal and writhe. Butler appeared as though he were gathering himself up to rise to his feet…

"Now!" Chara ordered me, gesturing with the gun toward the door.

"Come see me!" I told her.

"So we can talk about this! I live…"

"I know where you live," she said, positioning herself in a broad stance over Butler and aiming the submachine gun at his burgeoning head. "Get out of here!"

This time I obeyed, crossing the empty café to its gaping door. This time I didn’t look back, even when I heard the bellow of automatic fire as Chara took out her frustrations and bought me time to escape. I heard one long discharge, and then another as she switched her attention to Franklin. Even when I was a block away I heard the sputter of gunfire. I was sure that Chara had emptied the long magazine of the Heckler & Koch, and had switched to the Galil, emptying that weapon into the two Angels as well, to make the process of their reanimation as drawn-out and painful as possible. The distant echoing patter of fire made me feel as though I were in a city at war.

But when I started to tell her where I lived, she said she knew. Even if some Demon census bureau keeps track of where Oblivion’s residents live, which I find extremely doubtful, why should Chara specifically have knowledge of my living situation? Unless she looked it up. Or, more realistically and improbably at once, observed or followed me one day when I walked to my hotel.

Having reread yesterday’s journal entry, trying to relive the sequence of events in Blue, I’ve asked myself if Chara attacked the Angels out of scorn for their treatment of her, or to protect me from their threats of bringing me to a torture center. It’s both, of course. But she didn’t act until that gun was aimed at my face. The thing is, I would have reconstituted from a bullet, would have survived even years of suffering at a torture plant. But had she herself been shot in the face during the struggle, she wouldn’t have survived. Just as Verdelet wouldn’t regenerate. I can only hope that Chara doesn’t regret protecting me now. Resent me, even, for the loss of her partner’s life.

I went to work today as if it were any day, though I looked over my shoulder on the way to work, expecting Angels on bikes to come roaring around a corner—Hell’s Angels—seeking revenge for the actions I had been a part of.

After my long, mind-numbing shift, my coworker Larry insisted on walking with me even though I had done my best to discourage his dog-like attention. His appeals for my friendship made me feel like a woman with an unwanted suitor. He wanted to go to get a bite to eat, and I only wanted to hide in my little bedlam and breakfast, lighting the candles in my gourds for yet another in an endless chain of Halloween nights.

"Hey," Larry chirped, almost desperate to engage me somehow, "did you hear they caught five guys who raped a Demon and crucified her on a tree? I hear they’re torturing them in public…they’re really making an example of them…"

Finally Larry had won my undivided attention; I stopped in my tracks to face him. "Where’d you hear this?"

"From Jarrod, at work; he saw them yesterday. They’re on display. Jarrod heard they’re going to keep them on display for years, after what they did."

"Which torture plant are they at?"

"The one down by the waste treatment center. Do you wanna go have a look with me?"

"Yeah…sure. Let’s go have a look."

All you had to do to find the waste treatment center was follow the smell. It was huge, and employed hundreds whose jobs I had no desire to fathom…though I had heard that sometimes citizens were chained in its depths and forced to dispose of the city’s waste products by eating them, as punishment. Maybe the torture plant next door sent them over.

Both waste treatment center and torture plant faced onto another of those uncommon wide streets laid with twin rails for trains I had never seen. I asked Larry about them.

"Oh, those are for the Black Cathedral."

"It’s a church that moves around the city, stopping in one street for a few days at a time and then moving on to someplace else. I heard it even follows an underground railroad like a subway, and goes to other cities."

"You get rounded up and brought inside. It’s never happened to me, though, knock on wood." He rapped his forehead. "They torture you inside; what else would it be for? But they do it psychologically."

I nodded, hoping to never know more about it than this.

Speaking of institutes of punishment, before me now stood the largest torture plant I had seen in Oblivion—a skyscraper which inspired vertigo when gazed up at from its base, much taller than the more factory-style structure with its twin smoke stacks, adjacent to the prison where I had been briefly held. Its flanks seemed largely mechanical, and windows were few. I saw enclosed, movable rooms rising or descending like external elevators, sometimes even traveling sideways across the great edifice before they slotted into place. Steam hissed out of dozens of grates or ports, and thick greenish grease like slime lubricated its gears and crankshafts and chains massive enough to moor a battleship. Just beyond this skyscraper was another, equally vast, which Larry told me was the major barracks for Demons. They lived quite well in there, from what was whispered by the carefully selected human servants permitted to work inside it. But Larry said he’d just as soon enter into the Demon city of Tartarus as venture inside that ominous black tower.

The torture tower had various terrace-like structures, tiers or layers, that grew narrower as the building rose, causing it to taper as if it were some very attenuated ziggurat. It was on the lowest and broadest of these tiers that the five prisoners were being exhibited; there was already a small crowd of pedestrians gathered, craning their necks and shielding their eyes against the glowing sky for a half-fearful, half-morbid look.

The prisoners were evenly spaced across the front of this ledge, right above the massive iron doors of the plant’s front entrance. Just as we arrived, they were being executed. Again.

One man sat in a chair with his wrists shackled to its arms, his ankles to its legs, and a noose around his neck. A trapdoor gave out and he fell, jerked in his restraining chair, which turned and swayed as the man choked and gagged and finally lost consciousness. The way the noose was knotted or looped around his neck, or the short length of the fall, or some other factor prevented it from being a quick and merciful hanging. But as soon as he was unconscious, the man and chair were hoisted higher, the trapdoor swung back into place, and the chair was lowered onto it again. Eventually the man would heal, recover, wake…to go through it all again. And this, Larry reiterated, would go on for a year at least. Who knows…maybe ten. Maybe for generations.

Another man sat in a similar metal chair, but he was being electrocuted. We could smell his burning flesh as he quaked horribly in his chair, the air crackling with a charge so powerful I thought I could even feel the hairs stirring on my arms from this distance. We saw the man’s eyes burst, and blood oozed thickly to further stain his already caked shirt. Like perennials, they would grow back. To be harvested again. The endless cycle of death and rebirth. Yin and yang.

The other three men suffered in similar ways. Mock executions. A guillotine (this victim was longer in recovering than the hanged man, naturally). A gas chamber made of thick glass, looking a bit like a phone booth. These five young men not only suffered the intense pain of death, again and again, but even more horribly, the anticipation of that death. Would they get used to it eventually? Even find a way, Zen-like, to tune it out, to project their consciousness outside of themselves? Or, similarly, would they merely flee into an insanity from which they might never be resurrected?

In a voice of exaggerated reverence, Larry said, "When I look at these five guys, I don’t see a warning to behave myself. You know what I see?"

"I see martyrs. Like saints…"

My reaction was more mixed, more ambiguous. I had seen what these men had done to Chara, how they had crucified her and stuck a spear into her and perhaps left her to die…die as they themselves couldn’t (though they might well consider her more fortunate, for that). And they had defiled her with that spear before sticking it through her. She was a woman. And they were men.

But still…she was a Demon, a monster. And they were men. In life, they might not have been rapists, gangsters, terrorists, but just regular working guys like me. For being brave enough to attack a Demon, and best one despite her strength and fighting prowess, shouldn’t I view them as heroes like Larry did?

Larry raised his hand high and gave the peace sign, so the prisoners could see it, and know at the very least that there were those who appreciated their efforts, and sympathized with their pain.

I thought I saw the eyes of the man who would soon be hanged again flick to Larry, attracted by his gesture, and then dart nervously to me. I, however, did not raise a gesture to him.

On the way home, Larry quickly forgot about the tortured men and gave me a list of his favorite movies. (Sophomoric, misogynistic splatter flicks, mostly.) I was grateful, since I didn’t want to end up telling him that it was me who had rescued the Demon crucified by his five suffering saints.

While I was dressing for work, I thought I heard a rustling sound or movement outside my flophouse flat’s door. I thought it might be the landlord’s young assistant, but when I got my shirt over my head and went to the door, I found no one in the dim narrow hallway beyond.

Had it been someone? But maybe not the young girl?

Who was I kidding? Chara wouldn’t be coming to meet with me. For all I knew, she had already been captured. Executed…

I was late to work because I’d had to wait out a lava shower. Good thing it was only a brief one. I thought my group leader Bruce would be angry, but my concern shifted to other directions when I approached my work area and found Bruce waiting for me there looking very timid instead. An Angel and a Celestial were waiting with him.

The Angel turned to address me, Bruce remaining quiet all the while—as did the Celestial. After confirming my identity, the Angel introduced himself: "I’m Inspector Turner." And he actually held out his hand for me to shake, which I did. He had a mild Southern accent, a low soft voice, his silvery sideburns the only hair that showed under the conical white hat he wore. He was shorter than I, thickset. The Celestial was distinctly less meaty. Where this Inspector Turner was once a mortal man, Celestials are akin to the Demons in that they’ve never known a terrestrial life, are golems without a true soul. This unspeaking creature was tall, very slender, wearing only a kind of snug white sarong around its hips and legs, its chest shallow and bony. It had no wings, but its flesh was as white as a Demon warrior’s…whiter, in that it seemed to have a faint bioluminescence. This subtle glow gave it an almost blurry aspect. Its hair was longish, more white than blond…the face very pretty, if dour, and so androgynous that I wouldn’t have known its gender if not for the absence of breasts. Then again, unlike the humanoid Demons, it didn’t even have nipples (or a navel), so maybe gender was not a consideration. Its eyes were most disturbing of all; unnaturally blue, weirdly flat like the eyes of a character in a video game, and even more blurry than its phosphorescent flesh. Even when it moved its head only slightly the blue eyes seemed to leave brief trails of color smudged on the air.

"What can I do for you, Inspector?" I asked in as polite and panic-free a voice as I could muster.

"Why don’t we go and talk in Mr. Gold’s office, where it’s less noisy, shall we?"

"Mr. Gold?" I asked.

"Your supervisor. Mr. Gold."

Was that his name? This was the first I’d heard of him. I only ever saw Bruce, and I knew no more regarding the purpose of this plant in general and my job in particular than I had on my first day. I suspected there was no purpose. Just something to keep the Damned laboring. Well, from what I’d heard it was better than working amongst the scorching foundries and forges in the multi-leveled cellar world beneath Oblivion, or in the adjacent mine tunnels where ore was transported from the Slag Mountains. If you worked down there willingly, as many did, you could afford a nice apartment, maybe your own little house. Many didn’t work there willingly; if found to be jobless, loitering, aimless, one might be rounded up as slave labor. Either way, I’d stick to my perhaps bogus job, no questions asked.

Turner led me into a little room dominated by a desk of welded metal plates, so thoroughly oxidized that it looked painted in coagulated and flaking gore. When the Celestial closed the door behind me, I turned to see that Bruce no longer accompanied us. I never thought I’d miss that little prick. Turner gestured to a chair of purplish wood, and I sat. He himself slipped beside Mr. Gold’s cluttered desk. The Celestial stood by the door, unnervingly out of my sight behind me though I imagined I could feel his/her chilly glow.

"I have a few questions for you, about this Demon named Chara, who attacked two Angels in the establishment called Blue a little while back." He didn’t say a few "days" ago. He might not portion out time in the same way I did.

"I’ll do what I can," I offered, after I had swallowed a hard lump I thought might choke me. I imagined that ethereal being pinning me from behind while the Angel removed something scalpel-sharp from inside his robe.

"I was a detective in life, you know," Turner said, leaning back in his creaking chair, absently rifling some enigmatic graphs or charts on Gold’s desk. "Thirty-two years… Montgomery, Alabama."

"Never been there. Alabama."

"Ahh. And where are you from?"

"Eastborough. Massachusetts."

"I went to Boston once, for a conference. Nice old town."

Turner leaned forward again. "You rescued this Demon, I understand, when you chanced upon her on your way to Oblivion."

"Yes. I found her nailed to a tree, with a spear in her. She was weak and might have died, so I guess I felt sorry for her."

"For a Demon. Interesting."

"I’d never met her kind before. The human kind. So that sort of…effected me, I guess. If I’d met them sooner…been mistreated by them…I dunno…maybe I wouldn’t have…I don’t know."

"Well, it’s a noble gesture. You needn’t try to rationalize it."

"Thanks." I wanted to glance behind me at that ghost in the flesh.

"Did you know that they captured the five men who did that to her?"

"Yes, sir—I saw them yesterday."

"How did you hear about that?" Did I see his eyes narrow ever so slightly? Where did he imagine I might have learned about the capture of the men?

"A coworker told me. He took me there to have a look."

"I never found out what she was doing out there, in the woods, when they caught her," I said truthfully, hoping he might enlighten me.

"The Demon Chara and some others were flushing out a gang of humans who were camped in the forest. A little gypsy-style band of troublemakers. They’d killed an Overseer and his attendants a while back, and maybe some other Demons. It seems like it was becoming an occupation for these men, but I suppose their biggest mistake was letting one of their victims live to identify them. When Chara’s group raided the humans’ camp they scattered, so the Demons had to split up to chase them down. They became separated from each other. When her companions didn’t find Chara they assumed she’d herded her prisoners on back to Oblivion for proper punishment. She might have been discovered by a search party before she died. Or maybe she wouldn’t have. So it was indeed an admirable thing you did, my boy." He sighed, looked around him at more charts and grease-smudged reports on the walls. "And while I feel badly for what this creature suffered at the hands of those troublemakers, and I’m glad that they’ve been tracked down and brought to justice, it’s still ironic and unfortunate that now she herself is guilty of some grave misconduct. And, has become a fugitive from justice, just like her own attackers." His blue eyes, more piercing than the Celestial’s despite being less unearthly, returned to lock onto my own. "Her attack on those two gentlemen in Blue is an extremely serious matter. Angels visiting Hell during war games expect to be attacked, within the context of those games…but certainly not in this manner. This was not a game, but an act of pure hostility and disrespect. For a Demon to behave in this way toward two Angels…" He wagged his head, tossed up his hands and let them fall fatalistically to the desktop. "It’s beyond insubordination. It’s blasphemous…sacrilege."

"I understand," I said lamely.

"At least her partner, the Demon Verdelet, has already paid for her own involvement. In fact, it was by identifying Verdelet’s body that we determined who our fugitive was."

Turner fondled a paperweight, a greenish lump of half-melted glass. Inside it like a fly in amber was what may or may not have been a doll’s eye. He weighed it in his palm, as if contemplating a skull’s resistance to it. "According to my report…the statement of Mr. Butler and Mr. Franklin…you acted in a chivalrous manner toward the Demon Chara, for a second time, in this Blue establishment."

"Well," I stammered, "it’s just my upbringing, I guess. I know she’s a Demon, but she looks so human. And so when I saw two men bullying her…well…I guess I felt protective, or…"

"I understand." He held up his free hand. "Honestly. And I realize you didn’t perpetrate any violent acts against either of these gentlemen, yourself. Though I have to tell you, they are rather unhappy with you." He gave a little chuckle, as if sharing a joke with me. "They’d like to see you punished severely, just for the disrespect you showed them as well…"

Again the chuckle and the staying palm, raised as if to give me a blessing. He set down that chunk of waste glass with the hopefully insentient eye. "I assured the gentlemen that you’d be helpful when I questioned you. It’s obvious that a human wouldn’t be in allegiance with a Demon."

"Right. Thanks. I’m trying to be helpful."

"And I appreciate that, sir. As I said, I knew you’d be cooperative. Granted," he pouted and spread his blunt hands, "it is odd that on two occasions you acted in a chivalrous way toward this same creature, but I imagine that coincidence comes into play."

"You didn’t intend to meet Chara in Blue that night?"

"No sir. I had no idea she’d be there."

"You haven’t ever met with her socially, I would take it?"

"No sir…never. Like you say, that isn’t done."

He nodded. "Of course. It’s just…well…Mr. Butler thought he heard an exchange between you and the Demon, but his head was still largely unformed so he may have been mistaken…"

"Well, he thought you said something to the effect that Chara should come see you. To which the Demon was said to respond that she knows where you live."

I tried not to swallow again. I tried not to hesitate, or protest too strenuously, when I said, "Mr. Butler must be mistaken, Mr. Turner. Like you said, his head was still reforming. I’m not associated with this woman…Demon…no matter what I might have done for her. She’s a Demon, sir. I’m nothing but an animal to her, if even that."

"Perhaps. Then again, from what I’ve heard from witnesses, and particularly from the two victims, it seemed that this Demon was trying to protect you from Mr. Butler."

"Sir…you know, maybe she was. Maybe she was trying to repay me for what I did for her. But I didn’t ask her to. Like you said, I didn’t participate in the attack myself. And maybe she wasn’t protecting me…maybe they had simply harassed her beyond her breaking point."

"That could be. Not to exonerate her; there is no excuse for what she did, however insulted she herself might have felt…"

"But we aren’t friends, sir," I chuckled myself this time, to show that even the notion was absurd. "That would be like me climbing one of the watchtowers to play checkers with an Overseer."

Turner snorted a half laugh and pushed his chair back, rising to his feet. I did the same. He shook my hand again as he emerged from behind the desk.

"I appreciate your candor, sir," he told me. "And please…if you ever should spot Chara in Oblivion again, report it to another Demon immediately. They’ve been instructed to capture her, despite their feelings about her being of their own kind. They know they’re expected to demonstrate their loyalty to their jobs, first and foremost."

"I should think she’d get out of Oblivion altogether, as fast as she could."

"You may be right. Then again, it is a large city. With many nooks and crannies."

We exited my alleged supervisor’s office (maybe there wasn’t even a Mr. Gold; another possible sham). I was relieved to see the Celestial’s cadaverous spine as it walked away ahead of me. But Turner turned toward me again, and the Celestial paused as well.

"Just one more thing, sir," Turner apologized. "When Butler and Franklin reconstituted, they found their assault rifles beside them. But both were missing their pistols. Do you know anything about that?"

"Missing their pistols? No, sir…I don’t…"

"Well, a patron might have snuck back and grabbed them. And of course it’s very possible that Chara herself took them. While Demons favor their swords and such, they can use a gun when they have to…as Chara proved with those assault rifles."

Turner clapped his palms together, as if catching a fly between them. "All right, then. Good enough. I thank you again."

"Anytime, sir." I forced a smile as I watched the Angel investigator and his bodyguard or escort turn down a dingy corridor. I half-expected the affable detective to look back and give a wave.

How had Turner found out where I worked? I supposed that the factory owner was required to report my employment to some office or other of the city’s demonic government.

And might the owner of the hotel/lodging house also report to some office the names of those like myself who rent on an extended basis? Maybe there is a kind of census bureau in Oblivion after all…

Might Turner, like Chara, know where I live?

I stopped briefly in a small bookshop along the way, as I had done before. There was a printing press in the back room; I’d seen the door left half open, had heard its churning sounds. The offering was small; chapbooks, stapled at the spine, nothing perfect bound. Memoirs, brief autobiographies. Poetry or short story collections, novellas at most. No religious propaganda or anything like that, and it was not any kind of diabolic establishment. It was managed and operated by a small group of citizens, publishing and distributing the writing of other citizens.

Naturally I found most of the work I’d already bought to be amateurish, sophomoric. The typos few (I credited the publishers for this more so than the authors), but the actual prose seldom above the level of a high school creative writing class. The fiction cliched, often maudlin, the nonfiction of little interest to anyone who had not lived it themselves. And yet I was grateful for even the worst of it, and was only too happy to spend my hard-won coins on it (even though I wished Anne Sexton and Yukio Mishima—writers who interested me greatly, having both ended their own lives as I had—were citizens of Oblivion). Today I bought a slim collection of poems by yet another obscure author.

Not for the first time, I wondered if this publishing house—Necropolitan Press—might be inclined to publish this journal of mine. I had been entertaining the fantasy of slipping it through some crack in the wall of Hell, sneaking it into the living world through a portal. Might some of the more infernal of the world’s books have found their way into the hands of Satanists in that manner? Might these Satanists heed my warnings, mend their ways so as to avoid my fate?

But it seems unlikely that it’s possible. It’s said that the spirit cannot be translated back into matter. If it were so, I might as well try slipping through some chink myself. I’ve heard only Demons and Celestials can accomplish this feat, as they never had mortal flesh in the first place…though they are generally forbidden to do so, and I’m sure it’s a rare occasion indeed when it is permitted (at which time, it’s rumored, they would be almost invariably invisible to mortal eyes, anyway).

But being a writer, I yearn for readers. It would be ironic if I fare better in Hell than I did in life, in acquiring them. That would even give Hell a positive aspect for me, and I like that idea—the notion of turning my punishment into something that works favorably for me, if even in some small and humble way. Yes…I must approach the owners of this bookstore/publishing house one of these days soon. Before my journal gets too big for them to print in the format they use. I can always write a volume two, and three, and so on. A continuing series, if readership warrants it. Perhaps in reading about my personal experiences in Hell, others will feel less alone in their suffering, more connected to their fellows. It’s the aspiration of art; to share, to connect. But I won’t limit myself to these memoirs. I will also write of the world we left behind. I’ll write escapism, because art serves that less lofty but just as valuable purpose as well. My own poetry and short story collections. Yes…this gives me something to look forward to (I won’t say something to live for).

There were narrow alleys between some of these black brick row houses, which had a kind of Colonial look and which I assumed to be among the oldest of Oblivion’s structures. As I began to pass one alley that had a black iron gate blocking its end, a voice emerged from its shadowy throat.

"In here," it said. "Hurry."

I stopped, looked, and saw a white apparition near the back of the alley. It took one step forward. It was Chara.

After a glance over my shoulder to be sure no one was close enough to identify me, I gave the barred door a push. It swung open on its rusty hinges. I slipped into the alley, closing the gate behind me, and went to Chara’s side.

"I don’t live in my barracks anymore; I have a room. I’ll take you there, if you want," she whispered. She looked serious, intense; no smile of greeting, though why should there be? Then again, why should she be here at all? She had obviously done reconnaissance on my recent path home from work.

"Yes," I answered. Then I asked, "Are you being hunted by your own kind?"

"Some of them. Not others."

"An investigator came around my work to talk to me. He was an Angel. He…"

She looked even more grave, but said, "Wait until we get to my place. Then you can tell me all about it."

I nodded, and followed her out the other end of the alley. It fed into a larger alley, heaped with broken furniture and half-stripped unidentifiable machinery, with sentinel trash cans presiding over the detritus. Then, we plunged into another narrow alley, emerging onto a street unevenly paved in flagstones and almost as narrow as an alley itself.

This went on for a while, and I soon lost my orientation. We were in an obscure warren of streets I had never explored before. We were seen by various pedestrians, but they lowered their eyes in fear of Chara. Fortunately we encountered no Demons, who were in minority in Oblivion in any case. I could see more clearly now that her hair was not braided as she characteristically wore it, hung freely down her back as it had the first time I’d met her. She wore her sword. I wished I had my guns on me, but they were hidden back in my flat. As I had been doing lately, I had propped this book against my window so Lyre could at least have a view of the street (if not the skyline, blocked as it was by the vast machine building) to pass his intolerable hours. I hoped he wouldn’t be worrying where I was.

"Act like my prisoner," Chara hissed, as we emerged onto a broader street. She drew her sword and held it in one fist, her other hand gripping my wrist, and she almost literally dragged me stumbling along. People were really afraid to glance at her now that she looked like she meant business, though I imagined that they felt sympathy for me.

We climbed a stone stairway wedged between two close tenement houses, and emerged on an upper level of street. Ascending behind Chara, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her buttocks as they pumped, her strong legs, the wings folded against her back. I wondered if the wings had sensation, how it would feel for her if I touched them. My furtive lust left me feeling guilty, especially knowing how my fellow humans had suffered at this creature’s hands; it was like lusting after a Nazi. But it seemed impossible for me to not stare at her incandescent white flesh.

There was a bridge ahead which people were walking across, though mainly it was just another available surface for building, covered in houses and reminding me of photos I’d seen of Florence’s Ponte Vecchio. We would be passing underneath it through one of the shadowed arches of its stone base. Once we were underneath the bridge, however, Chara slipped a key out of a small pouch affixed to her scabbard’s belt. She unlocked a rust-scabbed metal door set into the bridge’s broad leg, and led me into the small apartment she had rented or acquired.

It was larger than my own flat, actually, but without even my single window. The walls and ceiling were entirely sheeted in copper, stained green with verdigris, especially on the ceiling where the bare pipes that crossed it sweated moisture. There, a mineral encrustation had accumulated to the point that it swallowed the pipes in spots and miniature stalactites had formed here and there. Gas jets hissed on several walls. There were also banks of levers set into one wall, leading me to think this was originally meant as a utility area of some kind. Chara threw a heavy bolt to secure the iron door, then turned to face me.

"When you first set me free," she husked, "I thought it might be because you were afraid not to. I thought maybe you were just a brown-nose, and a coward."

"I did it out of compassion!" I protested.

She held up her hand. "But when you stood up to those fucking swine in Blue, I realized you were stronger than I thought."

"Listen, there’s this detective of some kind, who came to my job…"

Before I could finish my sentence, Chara came at me. For a moment terror blanked my mind. Had she lured me in here, then, to punish me? Did she think I had betrayed her to Inspector Turner?

She seized my skull between her hands. Her face swooped at mine, her head tilted forward so that her dark-rimmed eyes looked up at me from beneath her brows, her too-full lips parted so that I only saw her bottom row of teeth. Then her predatory mouth was on my mouth. Her tongue was inside my soul.

Chara’s mouth squashed desperately against mine, and it seemed like she wanted to suck the very breath from me. My arms had gone around her and my hands across her warm bare flesh, until I awkwardly came up against the unfamiliar jut of her wings. It had been so long since I had embraced Caroline back in the ruins of Caldera, and before that, my wife who rejected me. My whole body ached with a yearning beyond lust, seemingly beyond passion. Chara seemed just as frantic, feverish. I heard my shirt rip as she wrenched it up over my head.

There was a bed that was little more than a cot, which Chara pushed me down on before sitting astride me. She reached between us to guide me into her, then plunged her weight down in one thrust so that I cried out more in shock than in pleasure. Straddling me, the female devil ground herself with a deep rotating rhythm atop me.

Her wings opened and spread to their full length, trembling subtly with the overall tension of her body. They overshadowed us like a tent, one gas jet glowing through their translucent membranes from behind, silhouetting dark veins that seemed to visibly throb. I saw thick scars spaced along the wings, now, too…from her crucifixion in the forest. I couldn’t see her hands, wrists, feet or ankles at this angle, where there must be more scarring; as Chara herself had told me, the Demons could heal, but not as thoroughly as we humans could. My eyes dropped to her navel, where she had been skewered with the iron pike, but no wound was evident in that shadowed indentation. Its alluring mystery was intact. A navel is like both an eye and a vagina.

Moaning, I ran my hands over her smooth thighs, slid them up to hold her waist as she rode me, reached to grip and squeeze her paper-white breasts, their gray nipples straining rubbery and hard against my palms.

After we had both spent ourselves, she lay on her belly while I lay on my back, one of her arms and one of her open wings lying across me as we cooled, sweat glistening on us, the air humid from our breath and heat. The wing was like a blanket; I ran my fingers lightly across it, tracing the veins, then touching one of the raised white scars. Stigmata. I stole a look at her face. Those thick gray lips were pressed into the subtlest of contented smiles, her heavy eyelids shut. Her beauty nearly made my chest tighten painfully.

"I wanted you from the second I saw you," I whispered.

Without opening her eyes, she said, "Did you know Verdelet was more than my partner?" A pause in which I said nothing. "She was my lover as well."

"I’m sorry," I said. I meant it, though I felt a foolish stab of jealousy and wondered if, with her eyes closed, she was imagining it was her dead lover whose shoulder she pressed her cheek to. I saw that her smile had faded. Her eyes opened, and head lifted to look up at me.

"You’re different. You’re the first man who I didn’t want to be afraid of me."

"I don’t want to be afraid of you either." I smiled.

"I don’t know why I brought you here," she said. "I don’t know what I’m doing."

"You’re rebelling. Against this whole thing. The Angels, and what they want to do to you now. Your job, which must be as mind-numbing as mine. The lack of freedom you suffer as much as I do…"

"I am bored," she confessed, her gaze moving to the far wall. "Do you know we Demons try to think up different ways of torturing humans, just to stave off the boredom of it all?"

I wanted to joke how awful that must be, and how it made my heart bleed for the Demons, but I was in fact still afraid of her. I let her go on.

"We’re punished like you are, just like you said. We have no freedom. We’re born to a hive like ants. Nothing in the universe is promised justice, but my heart still cries out for this nonexistent justice like yours does. The Father’s sense of justice is as alien to me as it is to you; when you don’t analyze it, you can accept it, but when you make the mistake of scrutinizing it then nothing makes sense any more. At least you had a chance at Heaven. My kind are born as adults, our destinies preordained. There is no Satan, no Lucifer, but I wish there was; my own deity to look after his own kind…"

"Are you here with me now because you’re bored? Because this is something new and exciting for you? Or is it because you were touched by the mercy I showed you?"

"Both," she answered without hesitation.

But I hesitated before I said, "I am truly sorry about Verdelet. If you hadn’t fought to protect me, she might still be alive."

"I’ve thought of that. But it isn’t your fault. I don’t hold it against you."

"That’s very Christian of you."

Scorching eyes flicked up to mine. "Don’t make light of my compassion. It isn’t something to be taken for granted."

"I don’t," I assured her. "But I trust in it. I know you have integrity. And loyalty. So that’s why I don’t understand how you can hurt human beings."

"It’s my job. I was born to it, I told you. An ant doesn’t go to school. I was born as I am now. It’s my very nature. The fact that I’m acting against that nature now shows what a freak I’ve become. How years of sameness have warped my thoughts and made me an aberration. I almost wish I could go back to the way I was."

"Please don’t," I whispered, stroking the smooth round ball of her shoulder. "Don’t even say it."

"Your friend, from the forest," she began.

"I didn’t catch up with her. I’m not sure if she made it to Oblivion or not."

"But if you had found her, you’d have punished her. Because she wanted me to kill you."

"I didn’t catch her," Chara snapped. "That’s all I wanted to tell you. You must have been wondering."

"She wasn’t my girlfriend. We had sex once. Out of loneliness."

"I didn’t ask that, did I?" She sighed, calming her temper. "Tell me about this man who came to see you," she said. "Tell me everything…"

So I related Turner’s visit. I told her about the Celestial.

"As frightening as they might seem, they can be killed like we Demons can," Chara said by way of slight reassurance. "They’re tougher to kill and faster to heal, but they can die. Like Demons, they aren’t true souls. Not human souls. We aren’t immortal like you Damned and the Angels are."

"You said some of the Demons are hunting for you. But others aren’t?"

"I think nearly all of my own kind would turn the other way if they saw me…even Abbadon. He’s Captain of the Demon soldiers in Oblivion. But there are other demonic races in the city, not of my kind, and not as sympathetic. I can’t let myself trust any Demon here, just to be safe."

"Then shouldn’t you get out of Oblivion? Go someplace far away, another city or someplace remote?"

"I’m sure I will."

"So what have you been waiting for?"

A few beats, then: "I’ve been waiting to see you."

I lifted my hand to stroke her sweaty black hair, then kissed her damp white brow. "I want to go with you," I said.

"All right," she answered, perhaps too embarrassed by her unfamiliar feelings at that moment to meet my eyes.

But we didn’t discuss plans or destinations just then. We made love again. This time Chara allowed me to take a more aggressive position, entering her from behind, holding onto her waist as I pumped into her hungrily. Her dragon’s wings again extended to their full length, and I switched my hands to them, running my palms over their taut skin, then gripping them at their roots as I drove myself deeper into Chara’s body. I cried out in a series of moans when I came, and sounded to myself as if I were being tortured.

She told me about the Red Sea, which was not far off. It was an ocean of living blood. I pictured this crimson ocean stretching off vast into the horizon, thick foam-crested waves of gore rolling in to crash against rocks of obsidian and beaches of glittering black sand. When the tide went out the shallow tidal pools began to congeal. Masses of gelatinous tissue as small as a fist or as large as a whale were frequently washed up, but were eaten away by the eel-like creatures that swam through the air. Chara assured me there were parts of the immense shoreline where these voracious eels were less common. She cautioned that there were occasional jet boats driven by Angels, who harpooned the Damned who attempted to make their way on rafts to the secluded obsidian islands sometimes found offshore.

Besides these smallish islands, there were caves in the cliffs of volcanic glass that towered above some sections of the Red Sea. These possibilities did not sound attractive; the living sounded bleak. I told her I had never been much of an outdoors person, and it was hard for me to give up the idea of living in a city.

There was a city called Sheol, she related, on the floor of this sea. Getting to it was a bitch, but the Damned couldn’t stay drowned or suffocated. Once in the enclosed sections of the city one could breathe the air again. The Demons who presided over the city were a gilled aquatic race. Chara herself could drown, so her kind were not to be found amongst its citizenry…and thus the city itself was out of the question, as was any large city, really…at least in this vicinity.

Farther away and perhaps more safe an area was a frozen waste of snow and ice, a good many days’ walk from here. There were small towns there, and a huge city made largely of ice, called Pluto. Its Demons were for the most part a race of shaggy, primitive, wolf-like creatures, but her own kind were not unknown there. It sounded like a good possibility, as uncomfortable as that constant cold sounded. Still, it was more attractive a concept than the scorching desert areas she described. Given a choice between heat and cold, I find cold the lesser evil.

Chara paced her room and muttered to herself, "We’ll have to pretend you’re my servant most of the time. Or my prisoner." And then she mused, "Maybe I should cut my wings off. Then I could wear a robe and a hood, and pass for human from a distance…"

"No," I protested. "Don’t say that. I love your wings." Then I felt a bit embarrassed, but she looked at me and smiled. "Anyway, up close people would see your skin, and gray lips, and…"

"I wouldn’t be the only crippled Demon in Hell. Anyway…since I was attacked and crucified, my wings have been in pain."

"I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that." I hoped I hadn’t handled them too roughly in the frenzy of ardor.

"It was just a thought," she murmured, pacing again.

"It’s ironic that they’re hunting you down at the same time they’re torturing the men who attacked you. Turner told me the background on what happened to you…how you and some others were hunting those men, and you got separated…"

"They’ll make martyrs of them, torturing them in public like that. It might convert more to their cause than it does dissuade others from following them."

Chara stopped pacing like a caged lioness to eye me. "Turner didn’t tell you everything, then."

"What didn’t he tell me?"

"Those men we were flushing out…the ones who attacked me…they’re rebels. They’re trying to organize a force, an army. Most of these little groups are small and scattered, but some of them have been trying to combine their efforts. This was one of the more determined units."

"Rebels? Turner made it sound more like they were just this little band who killed Demons out of spite, or vengeance."

"It isn’t much more organized than that. Yet. But there are rumors that it’s building up, getting ready to launch a full scale attack. Possibly on cities like Tartarus, where a good many of us Demons are given birth and trained."

"Sounds like pure suicide."

"Maybe. But remember…even though Tartarus can churn out more and more Demons to make up for those that are killed, the bottom line is that Demons can be killed whereas the Damned cannot be. And as I told you, even if the Celestials were sent here to put down a large-scale rebellion, they can be killed, too. A truly organized army of the Damned, if it was large enough, could be slowed down, split up, inconvenienced, made to give up its efforts. But it could never be killed. Not even by an army of Angels. It’s the greatest fear of Demon and Angel alike. It’s no wonder Turner didn’t put it in that perspective for you."

Now it was my turn to pace the small flat thoughtfully. "Wow," was all I could think to say at the moment, however.

"So now you sympathize with those bastards who attacked me."

"I don’t justify what they did to you. Raping you. Torturing you. Not for a minute. But…"

"Well they deserve what they’re getting now, don’t they?" she challenged, her tone icy.

"Yes!" I faced her. "They do! These individuals do. But I can understand their hatred, and their cause…"

"They can never organize themselves into a large enough group to take control of Hell. Maybe a town. Maybe even a city. But in the end, they’ll be overthrown, and they’ll regret it like these few bastards are regretting it. That’s what keeps the average Damned from pursuing these feelings of rebellion."

"You just told me that an army of the Damned couldn’t be destroyed."

"It can’t be killed. But it can be stopped. People fear pain, even if they’ll recover from it. People are sheep, and they can be easily broken. People are selfish, and they’ll take the easier way out, even if it means an eternity of misery. Better that than an eternity of intense torture, like these rebels face." Her eyes narrowed to cruel-looking slits. "If you ever think of joining in an effort like that, you can kiss me goodbye."

"But you hate the Creator, the Angels, this whole system, too!"

"What do you want me to do? Sympathize with an effort that would pit you against my kind? Help you to slaughter my kind?"

"I’m not asking you to sympathize. Just…understand."

In a softer tone she said, "I do. I do understand. But now is not the time to get intrigued with the idea of revolution. We have to think of ourselves, just you and me. That’s the only thing we can join in together. A war would by necessity split us apart."

I came closer to Chara. "I’m falling in love with you." I saw her eyes avert. "Do you love me?"

"No? What is this, then?"

"I desire your companionship." She paused, groping for words. "Because you interest me."

I didn’t want to press the point, and goad her denial into anger. I steered us off the personal again, back to the larger picture. "I understand your commitment to your kind. But I have a responsibility to my own."

"Good for you. But you’ll find that few of your own kind are as noble as you are. It’s a waste of time to think of these things. But if you want to go off and pursue them, then be my guest. Go fight alongside men like those who defiled me."

"I told you, I don’t condone what they did to you!"

"These people are terrorists."

"They’re guerillas."

"It’s all semantics."

"You’re right, there. I might think of a Demon as a terrorist. For inspiring terror in people like me. Do you condone that?"

"It’s all horrible. All of it." Her voice drifted. "All of it. That’s why I want it to be just you and me. Not armies, not races, not prisoner or punisher. Just you and me. Is that a terrible thing?"

"No," I sighed. "It isn’t. It’s what I want most, too." I went to her and embraced her tenderly, this time more mindful of the constant aching in her wings. I stroked them gently as they lay folded to her back. "We’ll go to Pluto, then. I always liked winter more than I liked the summer."

"We should leave soon, then. Maybe waiting a few days, though, until the hunt for me dies down in intensity. They’ll assume I’ve already left. Also, this band of Angels who rode into town will leave in a few more days, I heard. I doubt that the two who are crying for my blood will remain behind."

"Okay," I said. "That will give me time to buy some heavier clothing, to gather up my things, make a little more money before we leave."

"You should go back to your apartment, then, and your job. Act normal. I’ll be in touch with you, somehow or other."

"All right. But if I don’t at least hear from you in a few days, I’ll come here looking for you."

Chara didn’t argue.

So I left her in her apartment, or compartment, under the viaduct-like bridge, and with some effort found my way at last back to my own neighborhood.

When I was finally outside my own flat, unlocking its door, I noticed the subtlest of glows casting my shadow in front of me. A soft footstep. I whirled about.

"Sorry to alarm you!" Inspector Turner chuckled sympathetically, holding up a calming hand. "I should have called your name first."

The androgynous Celestial stood beside the robed Angel. In the gloom of the hallway, it seemed more luminous than it had at my plant.

I tried on a shaky smile. "That’s all right, Inspector. Um…can I help you?"

"Well, I’m sorry to disturb you again, and I know it hasn’t been long since last we spoke, but I thought I might touch base with you…see if you’d heard anything new. I went back to your work but found out it was your day off. So I was directed here. But…you weren’t here, either." He threw up his hands. "I assumed you were shopping, or visiting a friend. So I came back later and you still weren’t here. I was beginning to think you’d left Oblivion." He chuckled again. "But I thought I’d try your hotel one last time, and here you are!" He smiled.

"Yeah…sorry about that. Yes, I was visiting a friend. Hey, uh, would you two like to come inside to talk?"

"We could talk here, if it’s any trouble…"

"Oh no, that’s okay. Here, come on inside…"

But as I finished unlocking the door, my mind scrambled madly ahead of me into my flat. What might be lying about that could bring trouble on my head? The guns were safely hidden. I just hoped the Celestials didn’t have the sense of smell that the Demons had. It was no doubt my imagination but I thought there was a hint of machine oil from my two stolen pistols in the air.

"Sit down," I offered. "Can I make some coffee, or…"

"Oh no, no. We can’t stay long." Turner waved his hand. "Not a half bad little place you have here." He pointed to one of my carved gourds, now beginning to wither into what looked like a toothless octogenarian Jack-O’-Lantern. "Cute. Yeah, this is a cozy place, in a way. Not to brag, really, but I have a very nice place of my own, back home. I had it custom designed, a complete replica of my boyhood home. A lot of Angels want castles, palaces, plantations, and they can have them, of course. But I have more modest needs. I never believed in being ostentatious."

"I know what you’re saying."

As before, the Celestial said nothing. Its blurry-looking blue eyes seemed not to focus on anything in particular, even me, which I found more disconcerting than if it had openly glared at me.

"So…you get a day off," Turner said. "That’s very good. Not every place does that. How often?"

"Every nine days. Or every nine work periods. However you look at it. I don’t know why nine."

"Well, you’re lucky."

"Yup. So how can I help you, Inspector?" I repeated.

"No sign of the Demon Chara, still? She hasn’t made an attempt to visit you here?"

"No sir. I really don’t see why she would. Even when I rescued her from those rebels she seemed contemptuous of me."

"Well, she wasn’t so contemptuous that she didn’t feel obligated to come to your aid in Blue." Turner was bending down to examine another of my Jack-O’-Lanterns, but his eyes lifted suddenly to mine. "Rebels? That’s a bit of a glamorous term for those few troublemakers."

Shit. My mind scrambled again. "Well, whatever they are."

Turner straightened. From inside his robe he produced a metal tin, and for a second I cringed, expecting a weapon. He flicked the tin open and there were cigars inside it. "Care for a smoke?"

"Oh, no thanks. That stuff will kill ya."

"Ha! That’s funny. Mind if I…?"

"Oh no, go ahead." I placed a coffee mug in front of him and indicated with a gesture that he could use it as an ash tray.

"You sure? Some folks really hate the smell."

"Actually I like the smell of cigars and pipes, though I never smoked them myself." With his having once been a cop, I didn’t add that the same had been true with pot smoke.

Turner lit up, exhaled, savoring the act. He hadn’t offered a cigar to his companion. "See? Even in Hell one can find little advantages. One can smoke without fear of the repercussions."

"Maybe I should take it up after all, then."

Turner smiled at me and in an off-hand tone said, "I’ve been busy talking to Demons since you and I last spoke. Everything from Chara’s kind to the Overseers. No one has spotted her. Or if they have, won’t admit to it."

"It’s possible she’s already fled Oblivion, and that they’re telling the truth."

"Mm. Well, I certainly hope so, for their sakes. Even Captain Abbadon professes to know nothing about her whereabouts, but I was under the impression that with their skill at tracking down renegade humans, and with their great sense of smell, that they should have located her by now." He shrugged.

"That’s why I’m sure she’d have left already. Maybe you should send a party out beyond Oblivion, and…"

"Oh, we already have a team on that." He exhaled again.

How difficult would that make our escape to Pluto? And did this hunting party consist of Angels, Demons or, most frighteningly, of Celestials?

"But if she is still here in Oblivion," Turner went on, "then I may have to take some drastic action. You see, Mr. Butler and Mr. Franklin are still very upset at the way they were treated, and they expect me to see to it that justice is done." He made a face that was meant to elicit sympathy from me. "So I told Captain Abbadon that I expect him to step up his efforts to locate the Demon Chara. And I also told him, quite frankly, that we may soon have to gather up and execute every last Demon in Oblivion…every one of them, and replace them with brand new Demons from Tartarus…to teach all of the Demon races an important lesson in where their loyalties should really lie."

"That sounds very extreme," I managed. I felt numbed by Turner’s casualness in conveying this possibility.

"Well, we’re talking Demons here. And we’re talking two Angels who were mistreated by Demons. Demons are replaceable, but the honor of an Angel is another matter."

"Of course," I muttered.

Turner wandered to my window, where I had propped Lyre so that his cyclops eye would be directed upon the street below. The glass vibrated with the muffled sounds given off by the looming machine building which eclipsed the skyline. When the investigator picked up and handled the book it felt as though he had plucked the heart right out of my chest and was turning it in his hands. He cracked the book open to its start, read a few lines from my imposed self-debasement.

"You kept your exercise book from school?" He looked up at me.

"Yeah. I like to reread what I wrote in there. To remind me of how wrong I was in not following the word of the Son. To remind myself how lowly I am because of it."

"Huh. You see, friend, that’s what’s so tragic about folks like you. You have some really good qualities. You were almost there; you almost made it."

"I wish there was a chance for us to repent."

"Well, that’s the thing. You have to repent in life. Not when it’s too late." Without reversing the book, and opening it to its last pages where I write this journal, Turner propped it back in the window as he had found it. "What is this…your look-out?" he joked.

"Not without a mouth," I joked back. "I, ah, I just want to give it something to look at."

"You have a liberal heart, don’t you? A lot of compassion for Demons. People like this, who have been severely reprimanded…"

"Maybe it’s a failing."

"Not so much a failing, as simply goodness misdirected. I respect you for it—I do." Turner sighed. "Ah, well, it was a long shot coming to see you again…I don’t imagine that this Chara would have much to gain from seeing you. But if she should be so foolish, please tell her about what we’re contemplating. About having the entire Demon population of Oblivion replaced. She might just consider turning herself in, if she has as much loyalty to her own kind as they apparently have for her."

"If I were ever to see her, sir, you can rest assured I would pass that along."

"Good man." He patted my arm on his way past me. The Celestial drifted before him to open my door for him. Turner had just stepped through the threshold when he turned to address me again. "You need to get handy with a needle and thread; it isn’t that hard. Not a skill a man needs to be ashamed of."

Turner pointed to the tear in my shirt. The tearing that had occurred when Chara tore it off my body.

"Oh…well…yeah, it isn’t something I’ve tried before. I should."

"You should. My mama taught me. Came in handy more than once in my lifetime."

"I know I’m on the shabby side, and not to complain about my well-deserved lot, sir, but I am a poor man."

"Yes, but you still have your pride, don’t you? Pride isn’t a sin, I say." He confessed this in a whisper, as if to keep the Celestial from hearing. "Just excessive pride."

"The friend you were visiting when I came before…is she a woman?"

"If your friend’s a woman, maybe she’d be willing to do a little sewing for you."

"Oh. Well, no, it was a male coworker. But maybe he knows how to sew," I joked.

"Don’t be afraid to learn new things," he mock chided me, and then he turned away at last, and the Celestial floated eerily after him.

In a half-choked panic, I wanted to fling the door shut; it was agonizing to close it slowly and gently. Even then, I found it hard to believe that Inspector Turner wasn’t still lingering just outside my locked door.

A loud rush of liquid, perhaps sewerage or chemicals, flowed through the huge conduit that crossed the ceiling (the pipe trembled visibly with its force), and I waited for the sound to pass before I asked, "No, what happened?"

"I guess you couldn’t hear the gunfire from your station."

"We heard it in my area, but of course we couldn’t go outside to look. But Jarrod’s girlfriend just came to meet him for lunch and told him what happened…"

"A group of Damned stormed the torture tower where those five devil-rapists are on public display. Remember the ones we saw?"

"Yeah…so these people stormed that torture plant? For what?"

"To rescue those five guys! Can you believe the balls? They were actually able to break three of these guys free before the Demons moved in…it was a really well-planned attack…"

"Man. So…how many of these raiders were there?"

"Ten, maybe a dozen. Anyway, so the Demons were able to capture three of them, and they recaptured one of the rapists they rescued, but the other seven to nine guys got away with two of the devil-rapists. Can you believe it? And to top that off—they killed four Demons in the process."

"They had a couple guns. That’s how they were able to do this. I don’t know where they got those from. Probably from Angels they’ve ambushed, though once in a while I’ve seen a Demon carrying a gun."

I hardly knew how to absorb this turn of events. Even in my short time in Hell it seemed utterly unthinkable. But at the same time, I recalled what Chara had told me, about rebel movements in Hades…and she’d said those men who’d attacked her had been part of such a movement which she had been flushing out.

"The Demons will really be cracking down on us now," Larry predicted.

"It could be worse than that," I muttered, thinking of Inspector Turner, and what he’d told me only yesterday about the possibility that every Demon in Oblivion might be executed and replaced in order to make an example. Might the Angels, the Celestials, the Creator Himself view these most recent acts as more of an indication that Oblivion was out of control? What terrible measures might they take to resume that control?

"Wouldn’t you hate to be one of the raiders they caught?" Larry went on. "And that one prisoner they recaptured? These guys are gonna get tortured like nobody’s ever been tortured before."

"I wouldn’t doubt it."

"Poor bastards…I feel sorry for them. If I was as brave as they are, I’d organize my own little army to go in and rescue all of them."

"I think the ones on public display, if they remain on public display, will be guarded from now on."

"They’ll probably want to put on some new kind of public show, even more scary, as a deterrent. If they gave up on doing a public display, it would look like they can’t control the situation…and they won’t wanna lose face like that."

Larry tried to get me to go to the immense torture center with him after work, to see if the two unrescued rapists were still on display, and if the three rebels and single recaptured rapist had been added to their ranks already, but I told him we probably wouldn’t be able to get near the place right now. The Demons, leery of another attack, would no doubt cordon off the area. But mainly I just wanted to get home to see if Chara would come see me, or try to contact me in some way.

I didn’t tell Larry what Chara had told me about these men being part of a burgeoning rebel movement. I didn’t tell Larry about Chara at all. What Demon-hating human would accept my intimacy with her? Though I’m certain that many a human has lusted after these beautiful warrior Demons, I’m equally certain that very few if any of them would understand my feelings for one of them.

As I walked home alone, I half-hoped that Chara wouldn’t come to my flat tonight. What if Turner were watching me? Or other Demons, no longer loyal to Chara, afraid of Turner’s threats? But at the same time I longed to see her again, as if we’d been apart for weeks.

Did I dare go to her, instead? I was afraid to lead lurking enemies to her hideaway. I wanted to tell her that Turner had found out where I lived, come to my flat, and threatened to kill all of her fellow Demons. Didn’t he suspect that I was in contact with Chara? And didn’t he, thus, intend for me to tell Chara about his threats…hoping that she would surrender herself to protect her comrades?

I couldn’t risk leading Angel or Demon to her. I must be patient. She had told me she’d contact me somehow, some way.

I just hoped that she’d live long enough to do so.

As I resumed consciousness, lying on the black brick sidewalk with my blood running along the curb into a grate, I saw my gouged chest through my tattered and saturated shirt. Damn it. I’d have to go home, throw it out, and change into another. I’d be late to work and catch hell, pardon the expression, from my group leader Bruce. But my main concern at present was the pain that made tears flow down my cheeks, and had me curled sobbing in a fetal position, each jolting sob making the pain worse. I was too absorbed in my own suffering to do much more than note that a girl of about nine had had the top of her skull shot off in the same attack, and lay in the arms of the Damned woman who had taken her in as her own child. This surrogate mother wasn’t weeping, but the haggard look of impotent rage and beaten fatalism in her face was just as tragic. I saw the girl’s skinny legs twitch and then convulse as she began her agonizing reconstitution.

Finally, still losing blood from the larger exit wounds in my back (at least I wouldn’t heal with annoying bullets trapped inside of me), I dragged myself into my flat. There, I sat down until I mended some more and the edge of the pain grew duller. The entry wounds were just bloodless puckered craters which I counted (six) with my fingers through my clean shirt as I returned to the street and half-trotted to work, hoping no more Angels would ride past me. When I got to the factory at last, Bruce was waiting for me, furious, hefting in his hand a fearsome-looking toothed wrench sort of thing the like of which I’d never seen before in life or death.

"Where the fuck were you?" he fumed, red-faced. "I’ve got Yolanda covering your belt for you. You think maybe I should give her your job permanently and fire your ass? Why are you late this time…was it raining again?"

"Chill out," I muttered. I’d never seen him this bad before, and to make it worse some other workers were looking over at me.

"Don’t tell me to chill out! I ought to crack your skull open!" He half raised that greasy, weighty tool. "We have to keep things running here, do you understand?"

"No," I snapped, lifting my eyes to his, "I don’t understand. What exactly are we keeping running in this place? And why are you threatening to brain me, Bruce? Did you wake up as a Demon today? Maybe you ought to look in the mirror…you’re still a man. A man like me. Aren’t we on the same side, here?"

"What side? We have a job to do, and it isn’t for us to understand the whats and whys. You want to argue with Mr. Gold about it, instead of me? He won’t just threaten to brain you, he’ll see that you end up in the sub-basement of a torture plant. Now go man your belt!"

"I was wrong about you, Bruce," I said as I started away. "You aren’t human, after all. You’re just a Demon wannabe."

"One more word, and I take it to Mr. Gold. Go on." He smirked furiously.

I just gave him a little smile and trudged off toward my work station. This was why the Damned could never hope to truly unite against the Demons, or the Angels. The majority were too afraid. And sometimes that fear made them align themselves with their oppressors. Forget about the legends of devil worshipers kissing the behind of Satan. In Hell, people like Bruce had their whole head up the collective demonic ass.

But I gave up on the argument, didn’t I? I was afraid to push it further, afraid of what Bruce and Mr. Gold, who apparently does exist after all (unless Bruce is being misled himself), might do to me. In their allegiance to the Demons, they are indeed like Demons themselves. And I was too cowardly, or at least too beaten down (like that surrogate mother with her adopted child in her arms) to act upon my pride. This demoralization hurt me more, in a way, than my bullet wounds did. Because those would go away.

As I write this, I’m home, and it’s what passes for my night (even though others are heading off to work in the street below me as if it’s the start of their day). And I still haven’t heard from Chara. What I hear is the chatter of automatic fire from far away…the Angels have been very loud tonight. At first I thought it might be more attacks by those rebels, but I’ve been hearing the distant roar of motorcycles as well.

Maybe they’re painting the town red one last time before they head back upstairs, or wherever it is that Heaven resides. Their paradise of Disneylands abutting every city. I picture rows of solid gold motor homes inside which hang neon-framed portraits of the Son, who bears a suspicious resemblance to Elvis, His eyes radiating intoxicating beams stronger than the fountains of bourbon in every Astroturfed park.

Or maybe the Angels are agitated, all fired up. Because two of them were savagely humiliated by an uppity Demon. And now the Damned are killing their captors and freeing prisoners from torture centers. The whole town is going to Hell in a hand basket.

And Chara is at the center of it all. My frightening Eve who is not falling from grace…but discovering it.

Today, the Black Cathedral came to my neighborhood. There was an ear-splitting grinding screech that approached steadily from the distance and mounted to such an extent that at first I ran to the window to look out at the machine building, then actually went down into the street to look at it again. With all the horrible sounds that thing made in the course of its unknowable functions, I thought this was some new and extra-loud emanation. Or, perhaps, a terrible malfunction that might cause the thing to explode.

But the mechanical skyscraper wasn’t the source of the metallic shrieking. The opposite side of the machine building faced onto one of those wider avenues with the twin rail tracks laid into the cobblestones. In this broad street, rising above the roofs of the intervening smallish tenements, I saw the black spires and steeples of the Black Cathedral for the first time. I knew instantly what they were, because they were moving along from left to right, like the masts and sails of a ship seen above the roofs of some old seaport town. Even from here, it was apparent that they were made entirely of black metal. The cathedral soon disappeared behind the machine building, however, and the screeching stopped altogether. The migrating, nomadic cathedral Larry had described to me had found a new location to temporarily set up camp in.

I hadn’t seen or even heard from Chara since the 68th and now I was really beginning to worry. Maybe she was being more patient than I was…or then again, maybe she was already captured, tortured and executed. It tortured me not to know.

She might be furious for it…but I decided today to go to her room under the bridge, and see if she were still there.

The trick was in finding the place again, and I took many a wrong turn, but because I had found my way home from there on my own once before, I was able to locate it eventually. All along the way, I would look back over my shoulder to see if I were being followed. I saw no one suspicious, no one tailing me. There was one odd occurrence, however. At one point I passed a troop of maybe a dozen Demons, on their way to some bit of no doubt unpleasant business. Their apparent leader was carrying a black iron spear and sported an insignia on his belt that must indicate the rank of a sergeant or such. As we walked past each other, I met the eyes of the sergeant, and he held my gaze a long moment, even turning his head slightly to keep our eyes locked, before we had fully passed one another. Maybe it was simply because he wanted to stare me down. Maybe because I am involved intimately with a Demon, I was making the mistake of fearing the other Demons less; up until recently, I would have avoided a devil’s gaze. But still, I had the strange notion that he recognized me, somehow, as if he knew who I was. The lover of Chara, their comrade they were being forced to hunt.

Glancing over my shoulder once more, I rapped on the metal door set into one arched leg of the stone bridge. After about ten seconds, which my heartbeat heavily counted off, I pounded a bit harder. This time, the door squealed open, and a familiar figure stood before me.

"Oh…well, I suppose I should have been expecting you," said Inspector Turner, his smile more forced than usual. He was wearing his outer white robe but not his peaked cap, and his gray hair was mussed as if he’d been napping. "Come in," he invited.

I saw no further need of playing games. I remained where I was. "Where is Chara?" I half choked, trying to sound tough.

"Well, obviously you could have told me that, before. I had to find out about this cozy little nook through my own channels. Really, please come inside. I insist."

Still I didn’t budge from the stoop. "Is she in there or have you already taken her?" I demanded, a bottomless abyss yawning open in my guts.

"Unfortunately I haven’t seen her."

"Then you’re waiting for her to come here. So you can trap her."

"I’m no doubt waiting in vain. I’ve been here since yesterday, so I guess that means she’s found a new hideout. Odd, though, that she hasn’t told you about it."

"She’s probably left town already."

"As you’ve said before. But you knew even as you said it that she was still here in town. Please…come inside…"

"So you can hold me hostage?"

Turner made a wincing expression. "I’m not a crude man. I don’t like using force, brutality…I never did. I prefer subtlety."

"You prefer playing games. It’s a sport to you."

The door opened wider. Over Turner’s shoulder I saw the Celestial. Its oddly flat, strangely blind-seeming eyes stared at me threateningly. I knew it wasn’t above using force and brutality. I noticed that it was as naked as one of the Demons, without the loincloth it had worn the last two times I’d seen it. The faintly luminous being had both a penis and, below that, a slitted hairless mound in place of a scrotum. A hermaphrodite. It was odd for it to be so generously gifted with procreation apparatuses, being a creature without nipples and a navel.

"These things are best discussed more discreetly, don’t you think?" Turner politely persisted.

"You want me inside and out of sight in case Chara comes along after all. Do you expect me to help you catch her?"

"Well, it would be wise if you were more cooperative. There’s still time to redeem yourself, before you get yourself in a great deal of trouble. And I don’t want to see that, honestly I don’t. You must understand that I could have already brought you into my custody by now."

"You make it sound merciful. But the only reason you haven’t is because you couldn’t prove anything."

"This is Hell, my friend, not the Supreme Court. I don’t need to prove anything."

"You’ve only let me off the hook so far because you thought I’d be useful if I were free."

"Look here, you know that it’s only a matter of time before Chara is caught…"

"Maybe. But I’m not going to have any part in that."

"Do you love her, then? Is that it?"

Finally, I stepped inside the apartment. Turner backed off to give me room. So did the Celestial. But I only entered so that he couldn’t slam the door in my face.

This time, fearing that I might be followed to Chara’s hideaway by her enemies, I had brought both my stolen pistols with me, hidden in the deep pockets of the baggy brown outer jacket I wore. As I entered into the apartment with its walls and floor sheeted in greenish copper, I drew the two handguns from my jacket, one a Glock and the other a chunky, smallish SIG-Sauer P-225 semiautomatic. I extended them both at the ends of my arms, both pointed at the face of the Celestial.

The entity started forward, its glow seeming to brighten with its intensity, but Turner held up an arm to bar its way. "No, Nephi!"

"Let me ask you a question," I said to Turner. "Do you love Nephi?"

"You aren’t a killer. Don’t do this."

"In life, I wasn’t a killer. In life, I don’t think I could shoot somebody in the face, Mr. Turner. But I’ve seen a lot of horrible things since then. I really don’t think if I shoot your lover that I’m going to feel a damn thing."

"Yes, Inspector, to answer your question—I do love Chara. Are you courageous enough to admit that you love Nephi? "

"I love all the Celestials, and all the Angels, and…"

"But you don’t fuck them all, Inspector. All right, you don’t have to admit it. Maybe it isn’t that deep…maybe Nephi’s just a little piece of ass on the side. I can see the Celestials are designed for pleasure, so I guess there’s no shame to sucking dick in Heaven…however hypocritical that might seem to me."

"They have no gender!" he protested. "The Creator designed them first, but decided to split their attributes when He made us!"

I ignored him, went on: "What really matters here is that I’ll kill this thing if you don’t give me your word of honor that you’ll drop your investigation."

"You know I can’t do that!"

"Then go through the motions. Pretend you’re hunting Chara. But leave her alone."

"I can’t lie to my superiors, you must know that!"

"Then your friend here can be a sacrifice for your integrity."

"All I can promise you is that I won’t report you for what you’re doing right now."

"Not good enough. If you can protect me, you can protect Chara."

"But it’s not you they want!" Turner glanced at Nephi, then back at me. "Yes. All right? I do love Nephi. And no…we aren’t supposed to be intimate with each other. Only with our own respective kinds. So I understand your love for this Demon…I do. I sensed it right away, and I can sympathize with it. But the critical difference here, my friend, is that Nephi is a Celestial. A blessed creature. And Chara is a Demon."

"That distinction means absolutely nothing to me, Inspector. Who told you Chara was hiding here? Who betrayed her?"

Turner looked hesitant, but then he confessed, "Captain Abbadon. The leader of Oblivion’s warrior class. Regrettably, he had to be tortured for the information. And since that, executed. Today his body will be crucified and publically displayed." Turner wagged his head. "An awful thing, but I warned them. The command has come through, and it’s official. The rest of the Demons in Oblivion will be rounded up by a force of Celestials who are even now on their way. A new army of Demons will be coming from Tartarus to replace them."

"It will be messy, and chaotic, but it must be done. We can’t have this rebellious spirit in the Demons! And the Damned have been too rebellious as well. This city must come under control."

"You can’t even control yourself, Inspector. You’re no different than any of the Damned. Even you can’t believe that you are."

"You and I are alike. So I’m asking you not to hurt this being."

"But you won’t promise not to hurt Chara?"

"You can kill Nephi, but you know you can’t kill me, and you know I’ll hunt you down with every Celestial and Demon I can call into service."

"You want threats?" I shouted. "I’ll blow its head off, I swear it!"

"Wait!" Turner held up his palm. "Please. I’m telling you…I can’t stop hunting for Chara. But…maybe you’ll find her before I do. And if you find her first, I suggest you both get far away from here. I might still follow, unless I get called away to another case. But maybe, if you’re lucky, you two can stay one step ahead of me. I’ll let you go now. I promise not to let Nephi come after you, and I promise not to report your actions to anyone. You have my word of honor on that." He spread his hands. "I can offer no more."

After a few moments, I lowered my guns to my sides. The Celestial still looked tensed to spring, but it didn’t. Still, I wasn’t ready to put the pistols away entirely.

"So now neither one of us knows where she is," I said.

"Maybe she has left town without you. Maybe she doesn’t feel as strongly about you as you do about her."

"Maybe you’re right."

"Then again, she could still be here in Oblivion. And it looks, now, like Abaddon didn’t betray her after all. He probably knew he was putting me onto a cold trail."

"I can’t kill you, Inspector, so I can’t stop you from tracking her. But if I ever catch you two following me, I’ll shoot your lover, I swear it."

"Maybe we’ll be lucky, and neither of us will lose our lover."

I took a step backwards. "I’m going now, Inspector."

"Good luck to you, then." Was his smile sincere? At the very least, it was relieved. "And thank you for listening to reason."

"It’s called mercy. You Angels might want to try it some time." I slipped my handguns back into my jacket pockets, and opened the door to the tiny apartment, letting myself outside again. With my back turned and my weapons stashed away, I half expected Nephi to pounce on me, but it didn’t happen. I closed the door after myself, shutting the lovers in the room where Chara and I had made love.

I sought out Bruce, and told him I was quitting, and that I wanted my coins for the last pay period.

"What?" he fumed. "You can’t quit like that! I need you on that belt right now! I need a notice first so I can find a replacement for you!"

"You can cover my belt yourself. Give me my money."

"Fuck your money. You don’t get it! File a complaint with the Labor Board!"

I wasn’t about to go anywhere anymore without my guns, but I resisted the temptation to whip one of them out right now. Instead, I merely shoved Bruce with all my might, so that he crashed down hard onto his ass.

"Uh! You son of a bitch!" he raged, scrambling to his feet as I turned away. "I’ll tell Mr. Gold about this! He has powerful friends!"

"Fuck Mr. Gold. And tell him his Demon friends are gonna be rounded up and tossed on a pyre any day now."

"You’re insane! You won’t find another job in this city, I’ll see to that!"

I wouldn’t work in this town again? Some people are walking clichés. But I didn’t invent Bruce, believe me.

Larry saw it all happen, but he didn’t dare laugh at Bruce or cheer me. For all his rebellious talk, he was afraid to ruffle feathers. I felt sorry for him.

As I neared the hotel where I lived and the ectoplasm that served as my adrenalin began to dissipate, I started to reconsider the wisdom of my actions. Chara might indeed have decided it was too risky to take me with her, might have already fled the city…or, like her captain, had been punished for her insubordination. So I might not be leaving Oblivion anytime soon, after all. Did I really want to venture out in search of Pluto or some other distant city alone? And what if I did leave Oblivion and Chara showed up looking for me after all, only to think that I had abandoned her?

Well, I had clothing, a roof over my head. I didn’t actually need to eat or drink despite my hunger and thirst. So as long as I could stretch my meager savings a while in order to pay my rent, I would be okay without a job for a short time.

My hotel was in sight, and the black metal steeples of the Black Cathedral reared above the roofline like a grove of forbidding trees, when the Demon came at me swiftly from behind and seized me by the arm.

I spun, tried to jerk my arm free, but the male Demon’s stern features barely shifted as he dragged me along. "Don’t fight me or you’ll make it worse," he muttered calmly.

"Where are we going?" I was impudent enough to demand.

Luckily for me he was patient and bored. "The Black Cathedral," he said.

"Because you’re in Hell," the Demon answered, and that was answer enough.

I resisted less as the powerful creature dragged me along, but my mind raced wildly. Irrationally, I considered telling him that I was a friend of Chara…but he might not know Chara personally, or be sympathetic to her rebelliousness. Once I remembered that I carried them, I also considered pulling one of my guns out of my jacket and shooting the Demon in the gut. I hadn’t been frisked, because the Damned didn’t by any stretch of the imagination make a habit of carrying guns (in this respect, I suppose, Hell was safer than the world of the living).

But if I fought him, I might end up having to flee Oblivion or at least go into hiding without having a clear plan…and without Chara. Then again, how long would they keep me in the Black Cathedral? Long enough to make Chara think I’d abandoned her? At last I decided not to fight my captor. If Chara came looking for me, she’d find my journal in my apartment, and she knew I wouldn’t have left without that. If she read my journal, she’d see that I had made no such plans to flee without her.

So, with great reluctance and with the beaten fatalism of the Damned, I allowed the Demon to firmly escort me past the immensity of the machine building’s base, and around the corner into the wider avenue where the Black Cathedral had come to its rest.

Ahead of me, further down the street, I saw a female Demon jerking along another captive toward the menacing structure. There were also two of the Damned stumbling wearily down its front steps, unescorted. Released after an unknown period of time, and unknown torments. One of them appeared to be sobbing violently, the other seemingly numb and vacant.

The cathedral, like the towering machine building, appeared composed of countless mechanical parts interlocked together, and all of it night black. Steam hissed from various apertures. It was not especially huge, and it was narrow enough along its length to fit through those avenues in the city in which its tracks were laid, but it was imposing nonetheless. There were numerous jagged and barbed steeples, and along its sides were stained glass windows which seemed to portray only abstract or geometrical designs, each pane of glass blood red. In the front of the building, above the broad steps that led to the iron double doors of its entrance, there was one large circular window, again blood red and lit from within, like the pit of a volcano or the eye of some gigantic creature waiting to be fed its sacrifices.

Engraved into the metal of the double doors, and highlighted with rust so that the letters looked written in dried blood, was the inscription:

Though I’d never read it, I knew the lines must be from Faust. The quote’s presence here was provocative, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to ponder its meaning long. As we started up the front steps I heard a pitiful wailing over my shoulder and looked back to see a feeble elderly woman being dragged out of one of the buildings lining the street. As if it weren’t bad enough that she was frail and barely able to walk, for all eternity.

At the top of the metal stairs, which rang under our footfalls, the Demon reached into a recess in the cathedral’s body and tugged on a chain. That either rang a bell, announcing our need for entry, or in itself operated the door mechanism. In either case, the twin doors creaked rustily inward, and then we stepped into the gloom within. It smelled of machine oil and incense.

As the doors clanged noisily shut behind me, I took in the high vaulted chamber we had entered. Its arched ceiling was hazed with steam and that almost choking incense. Doorways branched off either side and at the back of the room. I saw a woman being escorted through one of these doors, and a man emerging from another of them, a Demon accompanying him but no longer needing to grip his arm. The Demon went off in a different direction, and the man was free to leave. As he passed me on his way out I saw a crushing sadness in his face.

A mournful, distorted organ piping sounded from somewhere. It had a mechanical, lifeless quality, that was no doubt generated by the clockwork cathedral itself rather than by any hand. With its unsettling slow motion dreaminess, it sounded like the moaning of ghosts.

In the center of this main hall, a desk rested atop a raised platform like a circular altar. Seated behind the desk was one of those balloon-headed, skeletal administrative Demons like the one whom I’d been brought before upon my entry into Hell, and upon my release from prison. Its translucent, seemingly boneless skull was lit from behind by a hissing gas jet on the wall, and I saw silhouetted veins and a dark cloudiness within which almost seemed to churn, unless that was the rippling effect of the flame. The lipless grimacing face turned its glowing eyes onto me, as the soldier Demon held me in place at the foot of the altar. I imagined that it was probing my mind in a kind of telepathic and unwilling confession.

After a few wordless moments, a gaunt arm lifted, a bony finger pointed at one of the doorways lining the room, and without further ado the warrior led me toward it.

Behind the door was a small room with only a chair bolted to the floor, thick leather straps affixed to its arms and legs as if it were an old fashioned electric chair, and—facing that—a tall narrow window. Its shape and position told me it must be one of the red stained glass windows I had seen outside, but on the inside it had a different appearance. It was a black emptiness…though I thought I could just barely make out the odd geometric designs I had seen on the outside, a blacker black against the darkness.

I didn’t resist as the Demon strapped me into the chair, concerned only that he might detect the shape or weight of the guns in my jacket pockets. But soon, and without another word, he left me alone in the room, closed the metal door after himself. My head, too, was strapped to the chair however, so I couldn’t look back at him.

The torture commenced after only a few seconds.

Whether the window was a kind of portal, or nothing more than a sort of television screen, I don’t know…but gradually the darkness lightened, and I watched a scene already in progress.

What I was shown didn’t at all surprise me, as if I’d been expecting exactly this. Then again, maybe they would show me only what I expected, the programming I devised in spite of myself.

My wife Patricia, who I called Patty, was lying on an unfamiliar sofa, and behind her head I could see a section of a Christmas tree which sent its mix of pastel light across her face like sunlight through a conventional stained glass window. Lying atop my wife was her coworker Keith, now her boyfriend. She had on a red nightshirt with a cute snowman on the front, hiked up around her waist, while Keith’s sweat pants were pushed down far enough for me to have to watch, hypnotically, his colorless and stubbled buttocks which pulsed rhythmically as if they were the very heart of him. Every detail of this lingering scene (did Keith have a lot of stamina or was I watching an endless loop?) etched itself with increasing sharpness, branding my inner head more forcefully than my outer head had been marked, until I noticed that one of Patty’s green socks with their candy cane patterns had a thread hanging loose, and that Keith was trying not to be too conspicuous about peeking at the TV, which was out of frame but evident in the blue glow reflected softly on his profile, leaving me to wonder if a sports program or a porno was on (I doubted it was a National Geographic special or A Room With A View).

From my room with a view, I watched as Keith’s pulsations mounted, deepened, and Patty seemed to be moaning though there was no accompanying soundtrack. But as Keith ground his orgasm into her, and Patty’s fists squeezed the folds of his sweatshirt, I didn’t avert or close my eyes. While perhaps my subconscious mind had told my captors that this was the type of scene that would most torment me, in fact it stirred only a small degree of loss and anger in me. To mourn the loss of Patty now felt to me like resenting someone for removing a steak dinner from under my nose and then revealing to me a dead mouse buried in the mashed potatoes; I should be grateful for the revelation. I couldn’t hate these two. They were pathetic, as I was in life. Sad, rooting little things, hungry and greedy, scared and discontented, squirming in their nest. I had lusted after other women when I was married. I might have cheated on Patty first had an inviting enough opportunity come along. I was not purer, less sullied by much.

But there were two greater reasons that I was fairly unmoved by the scene. For one, the suffering I had experienced in Hell had taken the edge off this torture, which once would have had me bawling. And, most importantly of all, I was in love with another woman now.

I blinked involuntarily, and in the space of that blink the scene changed. This scene was more painful, and this time I did feel more of an ache at the loss of my wife. Because at this time, we had been a couple, and sharing a great suffering. We were in the waiting room of a clinic. We were waiting for the test that would confirm what we already knew…that Patty had had a miscarriage.

I remembered—no, I felt again—the anger, more than anything else. The resentment that these other women around us were still pregnant, had not had their dreams crumpled like paper, too. That teenage girls were getting pregnant, getting abortions, even while we sat there, despairing. We had planned this baby. But the Creator had apparently had other plans, just to remind us of who really pulled the strings.

Another scene; my father’s funeral. He was wasted and withered like a mummified gnome in his coffin, with his red plaid tam-o’-shanter on his head and, because he no longer had a nice suit coat, wearing my russet corduroy jacket he had helped me pick out to wear to my cousin’s wedding when I was a teenager. Worse, I saw my poor, small, wilted mother, dazed in the funeral parlor as if embalmed while still alive. Suddenly I had a great terror of seeing my own funeral, of seeing my mother in that funeral parlor. I mustn’t think about it, lest my captors seize upon the idea! That scene I would have to look away from, in guilt. The agony I had inflicted on the woman who had brought me into this world, who had already suffered the loss of her husband, the loss of her unborn grandchild. How selfish I had been, how blinded by my own petty concerns. I thought, then, that if they showed me moping over my fat file of rejection slips for my writing, I would die all over again out of sheer embarrassment.

But the sequence of scenes appeared to be in reverse chronology. I saw my old dog Tippy die in my arms by lethal injection. I hadn’t cried at my father’s funeral, but watching Tippy die when I was ten years younger and ten years less hardened to the world made me feel that young again, and tears started to film my eyes. I couldn’t wipe them away and the next few scenes were somewhat blurred.

One of the last scenes I watched was curious to me because of its subtlety when compared to the more conspicuously dramatic ones.

I was in third grade, in art class, and a pretty young woman who was substituting while our regular teacher was on maternity leave had us making cards out of colored construction paper to give to our mothers for Mother’s Day. We were instructed to put glue on the back of the central overlay for the card, and then approach the front of the room so the teacher could position it for us on the card itself. She told us not to put too much glue on the top layer; just dots here and there. I suppose I didn’t think that was really going to be enough to hold, however, and I put on a more liberal amount…so that when I approached the front of the room, the substitute snapped, "I told you not to use too much glue." And in disgust, she slapped my glued section onto the card, so that it was blatantly crooked.

I remembered clearly my dismay as I looked down on this card that I was supposed to give to my mother as a gift. But just like when my child was miscarried, my sadness at that moment was secondary to my anger. It was anger at a kind of injustice. I knew that my crime, of squirting a little too much glue on a Mother’s Day card, was of less significance than the reaction of an adult woman who should be so moved to contempt by so simple an act of a child. It was as if I suddenly realized how small even grownups were, filled up with their anxieties and failures and resentments so that they’d rather inflict those feelings on others than see to it that no one else suffers as they have. I felt a precursor of the injustice I’m experiencing now, again from my supposed betters. I did not feel shame, however. I did not feel regret. I knew then, as I do now, that I was unfairly judged, unfairly treated. But it obviously stuck with me, this small, seemingly forgotten incident. Because it wasn’t about someone beating me, cheating on me, abandoning me. It was one of the smallest but most numerous pieces of the mosaic of the Hell we live when we’re still alive.

I remembered trying to pry the card apart so I could reglue it properly. In the end, I threw it away before I left school…and when I went home, I recreated it as best I could with my own construction paper and glue. It wasn’t crooked, at least. And my mother loved it. It was a triumphant feeling, in a small way. Like a tiny act of defiance that doesn’t undo the incident, but at least preserves some sense of dignity, balances out the injustice ever so slightly. It’s all that we can really hope to achieve, in either version of Hell.

My tears had dried by the time the Demon returned to unstrap me from the chair. I felt the spirit of defiance in me still, and wanted to tell him to give me a bucket of popcorn next time…but I didn’t want him to strap me in again for a second feature. Maybe my own funeral, this time, after all.

Not really sure just how long I had been inside it, I left the Black Cathedral…and I was not interrupted again on my way home to my hotel.

But Chara was not waiting for me there.

When I first heard the close gunfire, I thought the Angel motorcyclists still hadn’t left Oblivion, were still hanging around until Chara could be caught and brought to justice. But when I went to my window and looked down into the street, I saw a furtive figure run by on foot, apparently with a rifle or shotgun in his hands. He wasn’t wearing white robes. He had to be one of the armed, rebel Damned…

In the distance, now that I was close to the window, I detected more gunfire; either rattles of automatic fire or crackling individual shots. And then, a flat heavy thud made my window, already trembling from the vibrations of the machine building, shudder more deeply. It had to have been an explosion.

On the tail of this thud there rose from the city a terrible ululation, that sounded like a perfectly synchronized chorus of children wailing in fear or agony. It took me a few minutes to realize that these were the voices of the pumpkin-like Overseers, in their six towers along the boundaries of the city, calling out a siren-like alert. It was pretty ghastly. It kept up for a good fives minutes, during which time I think every synthetic cell of my body squirmed.

As I sat penning a formal proposal to Necropolitan Press, in the hopes that they might publish these memoirs, I heard more gunfire shift and spread through the city, and occasionally there were more of those heavy thuds…one so loud and rumbling that I actually felt my floor quiver. Even had the Overseers given no warning, there was no question now what was happening…

The force of Celestials had arrived in Oblivion, to do away with its untrustworthy Demon population. To squelch the rebel movement. To put the whole town back in order.

"What’s going to happen to Chara?" I asked Lyre, who gazed up at me dolefully. And what would happen to me? Could Inspector Turner really be trusted not to send Celestials here to arrest me, and spirit me away to tortures that would make everything I had yet experienced pale in comparison?

As the hours passed, and I paced the flat, unable to concentrate on my query letter for long, I eventually grew restless enough to descend to the street and take a better look at what was going on in my local vicinity, my view from the window being so limited by the machine building.

I smelled smoke in the air, straight off. And the crack of gunfire was more sharp, distinct. I even heard far-off screams and shouts. Not much different from any time in Oblivion, really, but there was a subaural hum in the air, a vibration, as one might feel before an encroaching tornado…ominous forces building…

Concealed on my person, under my coat, were my two pistols, but they were not much comfort against this awareness that the city around me was becoming a battleground. Tilting my head back, I stared at the roiling molten sky, that hole in the clouded heavens like a vast red eye glaring directly down on Oblivion. The ruddy glow reflected on the upper face of the soaring machine building. The hateful, blood-soaked eye of the Creator, not so much frowning on the violence below but thriving on it, lusting for the endless wars and jihads. I wanted to pull my useless little pistols out of my waistband and fire them straight up into that lake of fire.

Then I heard the motorcycles coming.

So they hadn’t left town. And here they came now, just two of the Angels, driving side by side up the road on their heavy bikes, each bike dragging a length of chain, and the ends of both chains hooked through the wings of a male Demon. His flesh was torn, shredded to the bone by the cobblestones, and he flopped brokenly, probably already dead. Though my own kind without number might have been tortured by that very Demon, I still felt the strong urge to whip out both my guns and fire them into the backs of the Angels who dragged the creature after them. Instead, I watched them roar down the street and turn the corner out of sight.

Then, from around that corner, there immediately came a deafening fusillade of machine gun fire. There were chaotic sounds…shouts…cries…and it seemed to me from the commotion that both motorcycles had crashed.

I was just deciding I’d best get myself back inside when I saw one of the two Angels running around the corner and directly at me, his peaked hat missing and his robes splashed with lurid gore. There was fear in his jowly face, and a moment later the reason was revealed, as a half dozen Demon warriors tore around the corner after him, their wings thrust wide, most of them with swords upraised but two of them with MAC-10 machine pistols. Though they could not kill him, the thought of being set upon by the savage pack rightfully had him in a panic.

The Angel locked eyes with me. Seemed to be running right to me as if I might help him. I saw a shaven-headed female Demon begin to level her MAC-10 on him as she ran, but several of her sword-wielding comrades were ahead of her and blocking a clear shot.

This time I followed my impulse, slipped the Glock out of my waistband, and began shooting the Angel again and again. It was as if he threw himself onto my bullets, impaling himself on them in his frenzied momentum.

The projectiles, as they thunked into him, made him jolt awkwardly, horribly, as if he had dropped to the end of a gallows rope. He spun down onto the ground, and then the first two Demons were upon him with their swords.

However, one of my bullets had either gone straight through the Angel or missed him entirely, and pierced the wing of one of the sword-wielding Demons. With a bellow of pain, he bounded past the fallen Angel and straight at me, his blade held high for a blow that might split me down the center. I shifted my pistol to point at him, now…

"Cresil, no!" the shorn-headed female shrieked. "Not him!"

The Demon Cresil faltered, skidded to a halt, but didn’t dare take his eyes off me.

"Don’t," I told him. "You have more to lose than I have!"

The female with the MAC-10 ran up beside him. She lifted her chin a little and seemed to sniff the air. "He’s Chara’s friend."

"All the more reason to cleave him," the powerfully muscled male rumbled, like a wolf growling deep in its throat. "He’s the cause of all this. Both he and Chara…"

"Chara is our sister. Remember that."

"Where is Chara?" I demanded, still not lowering my gun.

"Maybe alive, maybe dead," Cresil snarled. "All of us Demons might be dead, soon, thanks to you! But what do you care, who cannot die?"

I looked past these two, and saw that the remainder of the demonic pack had chopped both of the cyclists into various barely human chunks, which they carried or dragged behind them. They also had more guns, now, stolen off their victims. They had dismembered the Angels with such passion that one of them had broken his sword’s blade against the cobblestones. I nodded at the soaked bundles they bore. "What’s the use? They’ll just grow back."

"They’ll grow back in a cell to which only we have the keys. And we’ll lose the keys," said Cresil. He grinned ferally. "If I had my way, I’d chop you up and throw you in the same hole with them. There are cells in this city that only we know of…and these two may never be found…"

"Come on," the female urged, "before they regenerate in our arms, or the Celestials come…"

Cresil thrust his face close to me. "You look familiar. Didn’t some friends and I rape you in the street once? Before even your deluded friend had you?"

"You wish," I muttered.

His hand shot out to grab my neck but his wrist was seized by the female, who was even faster. "Cresil, there’s no time!"

"You see how he divides us?" he choked.

"Look around you, Cresil. We’re already divided. Things are changing. If that’s possible…"

"My feelings for these fleshlings will never change," Cresil said through gritted teeth, but he allowed the female to pull him away by the arm.

"If you see Chara, tell her I’m waiting here for her!" I yelled after the creatures as they whirled and began to flee, like bats bursting into flight.

"If I see her I’d just as soon kill her myself!" bellowed Cresil, but he was gone before I could protest.

Before more Angels might come in search of their buddies, I got myself swiftly back inside the hotel.

A detonation, very near, woke me from the doze I’d fallen into. From my window I saw nothing unusual but a haze of drifting smoke. Gunfire still stitched the town around me. Were shells being fired by one of the battling factions, or were these explosions simply provided by improvised Molotov cocktails?

I was about to leave the window when an earthquake began to shake my shabby little flat, causing Lyre to slip off the edge of the bed and me to grip the window’s frame for support. An immense rumbling, sounding as if a multi-stage rocket were preparing to launch itself from right across the street.

It was the machine building, I realized, and it wasn’t about to launch into space…but had begun to sink down into the ground. At first I thought the explosion I’d heard had brought the great structure down, but I realized it was lowering itself ponderously into some incredibly deep chamber or silo beneath it. Along with the rumbling was the screeching of metal, as ear-rending as the arrival of the Black Cathedral had been.

Since I had no idea of the function(s) of the apparently fully automated machine building (I had never seen workers come or go, unless they were kept constantly prisoner inside it), I couldn’t really guess what it was up to now. I could only assume that it was protecting itself, as the violence around it began to escalate.

A loud knocking on my door turned my attention from the window. I scooped up one of my pistols, and took only a single step closer to the door.

"Who is it?" I yelled.

"Who do you think?" barked a familiar, strong voice.

I rushed to the door, swept it open. Chara was there, with a second Demon lingering tensely behind her. She was shiny with sweat, plaster dust sticking to her slick legs, and a wound on one shoulder was crusted thickly with half-congealed black blood. Her hair was in the single thick braid she favored, while the male Demon accompanying her wore his hair in a topknot like a samurai. Both had shotguns in their hands, presumably stolen either from Angels or Celestials.

"What took you so long?" I fumed in relief.

"You’ll see in a minute. Are you ready to leave town?"

"Leave? Right this minute?"

"Well you’ve had time to pack, haven’t you? You just complained about the time you waited. Grab what you need…hurry."

The Demons came into my flat and closed the door while I scurried to fill a single pillowcase with Lyre and a few extra articles of clothing. While I worked I asked, "So where are we going…to Pluto?"

I looked up half jealously at the strange Demon. "How many are coming with us?"

"You’ll see in a minute," she repeated tersely, glancing toward the window as the machine building continued to sink. A crack had appeared in the window’s shuddering glass.

"What happened to, ‘no armies, no races, just you and me’?"

Chara drew in a deep breath in an obvious effort to remain patient. "Don’t be childish. This is the best way out for us, now. Strength in numbers. Team work. You and me will come later."

Discreetly, the male Demon kept out of our little spat, focused on the machine building. "I wonder if it’s going to migrate to another city as well," he said, moving close to the dirty panes to watch the skyscraper withdraw into the bowels below the city, which were just a rumor to my own experience.

The window shattered. At first I thought it was due to the crack already in it, the rattling caused by the machine building, but when the male Demon stumbled back and sprawled between Chara and myself I saw the bullet hole in his cheek. A spray of his blood and scraps of brain had fanned out across my bed behind me. I realized I was speckled and streaked with his gore.

"Let’s go!" Chara hissed.

I slung the pillowcase over my shoulder, both pistols tucked in my waistband, and reached down to take the dead soldier’s pump action Ithaca, with its pistol grip in place of a stock, before dashing out into the hallway after Chara.

Another of the lodgers peeked out into the hall at us, but when she saw Chara and our guns she withdrew in a blink. On the landing, I encountered the landlord’s young assistant, who had offered herself to me. In terror, her arms full of dingy folded sheets, she flattened herself to the wall to let us whoosh past. I suppose I didn’t need to tell her I was checking out.

As we hit the ground floor my heart, or its ethereal counterpart, was punching at my ribs. The shotgun seemed too heavy to hold in one hand, and I dreaded its bottled up fury as much as I relied on it for security. I hadn’t used a shotgun before on anyone else but myself.

Chara headed out the front door first, and before I had even stepped over the threshold after her she had opened up with her own shotgun. I let my pillowcase drop to my feet to swing my own weapon up into a two-handed position.

Two Celestials had been running at a crouch across the street, one with a sword in its fist and the other with what looked like an assault rifle. I assumed, as Chara no doubt did, that this latter Celestial had been the sniper who saw and shot her comrade through my window pane.

She fired, pumped, fired again, and by the time she got off her third spray of buckshot I had added one of my own, the recoil jarring my whole body so that my teeth seemed to clatter against their neighbors. The Celestial with the automatic rifle tried to whirl and return fire, but it was slammed back against a wall, its robe blossoming with huge red blooms. The one with the sword was knocked to its belly, tried to drag itself away in vain as Chara’s third blast ripped through and stilled it. Both could have been clones of Turner’s lover, Nephi.

"Come on!" Chara commanded, darting ahead. I recovered my makeshift luggage and followed.

The summit of the machine building was now lower than the roof of my hotel. We skirted around its wide perimeter, but when I glanced back at it I felt a last earth-rocking thud and saw that the flat top of the building was now flush with the street. A cloud of dust, from lava rains that had beat against the roof and turned to ash, billowed up to obscure the spot where it had been.

Ahead of us now, no longer obscured by the skyscraper, lay the Black Cathedral…and Chara was leading me straight toward it.

Behind me there was a shriek like a sea bird. More followed it, blended into it. Another glance behind me revealed the source of the unsettling chorus. A group of ten or more Celestials had emerged from an alley further down this broad street, in which had been laid the track rails that the cathedral used to move about the city. The Celestials had spotted us…

Chara was bolting directly for the stairs that led to the front double doors of the black iron structure, and I didn’t have time or the breath to question this tactic. Shots began to crack behind me. I heard the metallic ring of automatic fire as it ricocheted off the building’s mechanical face.

A blow like that from a pickaxe to my shoulder blade launched me forward, squarely onto my face. The bones in my nose exploded. The shotgun went skittering out of my grip and one of the pistols in my waistband was dislodged as well. For a moment I lay dazed, but in the next moment Chara was hauling me to my feet and half dragging me toward the cathedral again. I saw that the double doors had opened, and two Demons were in the threshold, firing back at the approaching band of Celestials to cover us.

The two soldiers parted to let us through, and then they were closing the double doors, bolted them with a ringing clang. I heard more bullets sing against the metal skin of the structure. Frustrated by its armor, no doubt, the Celestials took to firing upon the red stained glass windows. The circular one high above the doors shattered, and we skipped back to avoid the rain of red shards, which turned to crystal grit at our feet.

"Where is Juvart?" asked one of the soldiers who’d covered us, and I recognized him now as Cresil, whom I’d accidentally wounded.

"He’s dead," Chara panted, doubled over, one hand on her knee.

"Killed while you went to collect your lover," Cresil spat. "A fine death for him!"

Chara lifted her eyes, then straightened her entire body. "This is no time for us to fight each other, Cresil. But if that’s what you want…" Her fist still gripped her shotgun, and seemed to tighten.

Cresil looked at me, then whirled away and shouted, "Let’s get this thing moving before they find a way inside!"

I noticed the raised desk in the center of the room, where the skeletal Demon with its huge spherical head had seemed to scan me before my psychological and emotional torture. That Demon now lay slumped over his desk, eyes staring with the piercing luminosity leeched from them and that balloon head pierced by bullets, collapsed upon itself, a flood of vile fluid having run down the side of the desk to pool on the floor.

There were about thirty of Chara’s caste of Demons loitering in the large central chamber, some badly wounded, one having lost a wing, several dying, and one of them suddenly pointed, cried out, "Up there!"

Somehow, the Celestials had been scaling the outside of the cathedral, and one of them appeared in the remains of the circular window high above the front doors. In the exchange of bullets that followed, two Demons went down dead, two others wounded, and the Celestial was blown backwards out of sight.

A lurch made me stumble; I was still dazed from my injuries as it was. Chara caught my arm again. There was a torturous screaming of metal as well. I thought it might be the machine building rising once more, for some typically inexplicable reason, but I realized quickly that the Black Cathedral had begun to move along its track.

"You’ve hijacked it," I muttered, my mouth full of blood.

"You killed the Demons who were in it…"

"Not all. Some joined us. We tried to herd the others out alive but they decided to fight. Does it bother you?"

"Not if it doesn’t bother you."

The two Demons wounded by the Celestial were carried off to the side to be tended to, the dead ones exclaimed over. Chara returned her attention to me as the commotion settled a bit. "Come on with me…you need to rest until you heal."

I allowed her to take my pillowcase of belongings, and lead me unsteadily toward one of the many doors that lined the central hall.

"This is why I had to wait to come for you," Chara explained, as she led me beyond the door into a very narrow corridor with a very low ceiling, which made me feel as if we were in a submarine. It was humid with steam that hissed from vents. "We had to plan all this."

"I take it we’re not just riding across the city…"

"No. We’ll be at the entry point to the lower levels soon. There are tunnels down there, linked to other cities…"

"Does it pilot itself?"

"Yes, but it’s programmed on its course, and we had to find a trustworthy Demon who could reprogram it. We were lucky and found two engineers from one of the torture plants who were willing to escape with us. Its next stop would have been elsewhere in the city, but the engineers have laid in a course for the furthest city on its line, instead…a place called Gehenna. From there it won’t be terribly far on foot or by wagon to Pluto. Some of these soldiers will go all the way to Pluto with us, and some will choose to remain in Gehenna."

More doors opened off this corridor. Chara ushered me through one of them and into a small chamber with two sets of bunk beds bolted into its walls, obviously meant for the cathedral’s regular attendants. A body was covered by a blanket on an upper bunk; perhaps one of her warrior comrades who hadn’t survived his injuries, or one of the crew they’d been forced to kill. Chara helped me onto a lower bunk. I groaned at the pain in my back, but the thin mattress was as close to Heaven as I would ever get.

"I’ll sit with you," she said, lowering her bare bottom to the opposite bunk.

"To guard me against your friends?"

"No one will hurt you. Much as some of them would like to."

I stared up at her face. So savage, terrifying only minutes before. Now beautiful.

"I’ve spent more time longing for you than with you," I said. "I was beginning to wonder if I was only imagining that you’d really come back for me. Imagining that there was really something between us."

"Humans. So insecure. So lacking in faith."

I smiled against my pain. But more serious, I said, "I’m sorry about your friends who’ve been killed. Really."

She nodded, turned her face a little. I wanted to hear her say she was sorry for the Damned who had suffered, as well. Suffered at her own hands. She even looked like she wanted to say it, but she didn’t. I think she felt it, but was too confused by the feeling, and still too proud a warrior, to admit to such a weakness.

"Sleep," she told me. "I’ll be here when you wake up."

"Thanks," I whispered to her. I reached across toward her. After a beat of hesitation, she accepted my hand, and continued to hold onto it until I faded from consciousness.

When Chara told me that in order to take us out of Oblivion the Black Cathedral had to be reprogrammed, I envisioned some sort of computer system. Yet when I saw the cockpit, if such it might be called, it was more like the cab of an old steam locomotive crossed with a boiler room and the inside of a giant grandfather clock. Reprogramming had entailed the substitution of various gears, which were kept stored in metal footlockers, and the repositioning of the levers which covered the walls. There were valve wheels that controlled the flow of steam, and some greenish fluid bubbled in a thick glass tank heated over a ring of jetting blue gas. Like blood, this liquid seemed to circulate throughout the migrating building via pipelines hidden in its walls.

At the fore of this room, which was in actuality the rear of the cathedral when it was stationary, there was a single stained glass window, red on the outside like all the others but on the inside giving a clear, unobstructed view of the path ahead of us. Again, as in the torture rooms, the interior of the window seemed more to me like a kind of television screen.

In the short time that I’d napped, the cathedral had already traversed much of the city and traveled down an incline into the tunnels below the streets. I was reminded of the subway system by which I was first transported to Avernus University.

The building threw no light of its own, but there were caged gas jets set into the walls out there, giving me a gloomy view of the tracks ahead, the curved tunnel which seemed bored through solid bedrock. We passed some off-shooting tunnels, and there were catwalks here and there and sometimes pipelines and conduits along the walls or arched ceiling. At one point, I saw several ragged figures scurry across the tracks and duck into the tributary of a narrow maintenance tunnel. I’m sure this subterranean labyrinth was home to a good many of the Damned, who down here were less likely to contend with the tortures of the Demons.

The two engineers, the male Thamuz and female Allatou, were making ready to stop the wandering church near the outskirts of Oblivion. There, Chara whispered, another twenty or so Demons would board before we continued on our way. I watched the engineers throw levers, turn wheels, and the cathedral squealed on its tracks, shuddered, began to slow.

Looking over at Chara, admiring her oddly flat profile, the heavy pout of her lips, I felt the familiar awe and even fear she inspired in me. I wondered what kind of relationship we might really be able to forge, with me feeling so much weaker and inferior than she, so ordinary compared against her exotic and animal-like nature. I had to remind myself that she, in turn, as a kind of manufactured organism, without an immortal soul, never having experienced the world of the living, might feel unworthy of me. Still, pathetically, her strength and perceived superiority challenged my sense of manhood. I’d have to work on that. We’d have to find a balance with each other that we could both be comfortable with.

I noticed the wound on her shoulder had been cleaned and was already partially healed. Gently I touched the skin around it but she brushed my hand away and looked at me sternly. I suppose she was embarrassed to have me display physical affection with the other two in the same room.

With a final whistle of steam and a grating jolt that made me stagger, the Black Cathedral pulled up to a stop beside a sort of raised subway platform dimly visible in the murk outside.

"How many days will it take us to reach Gehenna?" I asked Allatou, wondering if the slow progress of the church would be increased once we were outside of the city’s borders.

I smiled. "Never mind."

"We should go meet the others," Chara said. "I have some good friends who will be boarding here."

Before I followed her out of the cockpit, I shot a look through the window and saw shadowy figures collecting on the subway platform, their silhouetted wings giving them away as Demons. I never thought I’d find such an ominous sight reassuring.

As we entered into the high-ceilinged central chamber, I said, "I hope they have paper in Gehenna. I’m running out of room in my journal."

"May I read your journal?" Chara asked without looking at me.

"Yes. Please. I’m flattered that you’d ask."

"I just want to see what you say about me," she said dryly.

Most of the other Demons were gathering near the front doors of the cathedral, and preparing to unbolt them. The broken glass there had been swept up and the two dead Demons removed.

The doors were opened, and the Demons flooded in. Chara had said there would be about twenty, but I counted only ten.

"Get the doors closed, hurry!" the last one through shouted. "The Celestials are everywhere…more and more of them! And troops of Angels have been coming, too!"

Angels. They might not be as skillful and strong as the Celestials, but they couldn’t be killed.

"Where are the others?" cried Cresil.

"Nergal," Chara breathed. I imagined it was one of the friends she had expected to join us.

Another of her friends, who I would learn was named Uphir, rushed over to meet us. He barely acknowledged me as he panted, "The fight could rage for a long time…but not openly. Only if our people hide in the secret places, and strike as guerillas. Open combat is quickly turning in the favor of the Celestials; too many of them are pouring into the city. The whole army of Heaven, I swear! And now this army of Angels. Not to mention, not all of our people are fighting with us…less than I’d hoped…but more may change their minds as the danger grows…"

"The Celestials don’t care if they die…that’s their main advantage," Chara said. "Whereas I personally want to stay alive. Relatively speaking," she added for my benefit.

"They’re like the crabs," Uphir agreed, obviously referring to the mindless swarms of flesh-eating crustaceans I had encountered near Caldera.

The doors were bolted again. The cathedral could now resume its journey.

"We need to talk to the others," Uphir went on. "There’s a small group of sympathetic Demons in Pergamos; we should stop there and pick them up as well."

"Won’t the arrival of so many Demons in Gehenna and Pluto get back to the Celestials?" I asked. "Won’t the Creator Himself see it?"

Uphir turned to me with a forced patience, obviously out of respect for his friend. "There are good numbers of Demons of our sort in both cities; we’ll blend in. But if we must continue to run, if we must spread ourselves thin, separate, then that’s what we’ll do. After all, the object isn’t to organize an actual rebellion, or even an army, but simply to escape the genocide within Oblivion."

"As for the Creator," Chara said, "He’s senile. On His death bed, as He has been since nearly the beginning of existence. In creating life, in creating this order of things, His own life was sucked out of Him. He’s little more than a vegetable."

"That’s only a belief," Uphir cautioned. "But even if it is true, He can still rouse from His coma at times to reach out and squash us, if He cares to look hard enough to notice us. Some think when He realizes we’re spreading out of Oblivion, He’ll flood all of Hades in lava, and kill every last Demon so He can start again with all new ones of every species. While He’s making them, the flood will withdraw and the Damned will reconstitute." He almost looked like he wanted to shudder. "Let’s not even talk about Him…please. We have enough to worry about…"

The cathedral gave a jerk as it shuddered back into movement. I was thankful for that, after what Uphir had said about the state of things above us.

"Goodbye, Oblivion," I muttered to myself.

I thought about what Chara had said about the Father being half-dead. I also thought about what certain other laborers had suggested regarding the purpose of the factory where I was working. "We keep the Creator running," one man had whispered to me. Were places like that plant and the machine building a kind of life support system that kept the Creator alive? Or at least, which harnessed and focused His force? If such places were to be destroyed, would we kill the Creator? And if He were entirely killed…would we be free, or would we His children perish along with Him, without His breath to keep inflated the illusory balloon of our pseudo existence?

"I’m going to confer with the others," Uphir said.

"I’ll come with you," said Chara.

"I think I’d better go and get some more rest," I said, rotating my arm to test my healing shoulder. I winced at the ache.

Whether the seagull screams or the gunfire came first I can’t recall, but all three of us spun in unison as four of the doors in the central hall burst open and Celestials began surging forth, submachine guns sputtering and bucking in their fists.

It was obvious that they had scrambled up the outer sides of the Black Cathedral during our brief layover, and had shattered windows to gain entrance into four of the torture chambers. It looked like as many as twenty of them had found their way inside…

"Go!" Chara yelled, pushing me away. But I yanked my remaining pistol out of my waistband, determined to stay and fight alongside the Demons. After all, I was the only passenger aboard who couldn’t be killed.

I saw a Demon whack off the gun hand of a Celestial, who without missing a beat drew its own sword, and in a second their blades were clanging against each other. The Celestial even whipped its wounded arm in an arc to fling blood from its stump in the Demon’s face, to distract him. I viewed this as a cheap trick so I shot the being in the ear. The Demon looked down at his crumpled foe, then up at me in blank surprise. I almost felt guilty for cheating him out of an honest fight, but in a blink he was racing off to meet another enemy.

My actions hadn’t gone unnoticed by the Celestials, either; a burst of gunfire whizzed past me, even flicking my hair over my left ear. I dove behind the central desk for cover, but apparently someone else engaged the shooter because they didn’t come around the desk after me. Or maybe, in the confusion, the bullets had even come from a Demon’s weapon.

Wildly looking around me for Chara, I couldn’t make her out in the chaos of bat wings and muzzle flash, shouts and thunder, but I did see Uphir with one wing hacked off and the other hanging half-severed, holding onto both wrists of a Celestial with a bloody sword in one fist. Before I could point my handgun to help him, another Celestial came up from behind and drove its blade deep into the Demon’s lower back. I saw Chara’s friend drop…her third friend whose death I had personally witnessed.

I still meant to shoot at these two, but before I could that shorn-headed female with the MAC-10 had sprayed them both pretty thoroughly.

There was definitely an effort on the Celestials’ part to converge on the door into the control room, obviously to sabotage and disable the cathedral. There were maybe eight of them already at the door, two of them squeezing through the threshold, pressing on despite the wounds in them. I decided to emerge from my half-shelter and add my efforts to stopping them.

Cresil, yelling like a berserker, had scooped up a shotgun from the hands of a dead Celestial and ran straight at the knot before the cockpit door, pumping off blast after blast as he went. I bolted in the same direction, pointing my pistol and squeezing off the last few of its shots. I was still in my forward momentum as the pistol clicked empty. Now I was without arms, only my legs sending me right at those androgynous, nearly ethereal warriors.

But several other Demons charged after us, adding their own bullets to the storm, plus a thrown iron javelin which actually went through one Celestial and into another, bringing them both down in a writhing shish-kabob.

By the time Cresil and I had reached the door, five of the Celestials there were dead and three were in the control room, where it sounded like the navigator/mechanics Thamuz and Allatou had met them squarely. Gunfire ricocheted in there. If it should shatter delicate instruments, that tank of burbling green liquid…

Cresil was the first to clamber over the corpses that choked the threshold, with myself on his heels and another Demon directly behind me. I wanted to call out to him not to fire his shotgun in the room, but he seemed to realize this risk himself, despite his mindless ferocity, and instead swung the gun by its truncated barrel like a club. The force of his blow was so great that he broke the wooden stock off the gun, which itself spun entirely out of his hands as a result, but he had successfully caved in half the head of a Celestial, leaving only two alive in the control room.

I saw that Thamuz was dead, shot several times in the chest, but Allatou had a long curved sword like a katana in the guts of one Celestial and was twisting and wrenching at the handle as if it were one of the levers that controlled the cathedral. Unwilling harakiri was the result. Another Celestial fell.

The last Celestial, swiveling madly, firing a pistol as it did so, snapped its eyes onto me. And a moment later, the muzzle of its revolver snapped its focus on me as well. I could see the tips of several remaining bullets in the front of the cylinder.

Without a weapon, all I could do was raise my spread hands as an ineffectual shield and hope that the pain of regeneration wouldn’t be too drawn out. That was when Cresil slammed his arm down on the Celestial’s, so that the gun discharged at the floor. The rebounding bullet ended up whining off the metal wall behind me before its flight was spent. And before a second shot could be fired, Cresil swung his other hand in a fist into the front of the Celestial’s throat, knocking it back against the wall behind it. It hovered there stunned, only a moment, before the Demon who had barged into the control room behind me jammed a short sword into its skull, then tugged savagely down on the grip so that the creature’s brains slithered out from between its levered-apart eyes. It slid down the wall bonelessly, leaving me to turn and see that the Demon who had followed me closely into the cockpit was Chara, awash in blood, her eyes seeming to glow in a speckled mask of arterial spray.

"I think that’s the last of them," she panted. There was no gunfire to be heard in the huge central room, outside.

Cresil and Allatou knelt over Thamuz. Wearily, with multiple wounds streaming inky blood, Cresil rose and I caught his eyes. "Thanks," I told him.

He just grunted and slipped past me out the door.

"Let’s throw these immaculate misconceptions off the train," I said, lightly kicking a dead Celestial in the side. I helped drag them out of the room.

The front doors of the Black Cathedral were opened, so that we could toss body after body out onto the dark tracks that receded behind us. It was unfortunate, but we ended up deciding to leave behind the bodies of our comrades as well. But for this, we stopped the cathedral, and carried them out to lay by the side of the tracks, unburied, but at least not splayed across the tracks themselves like refuse. Then, quickly, lest even more Celestials swarm on board, we were in motion again.

After several hours, three of the wounded died…leaving twenty-six Demons of the original combined sum of forty still alive. And myself, of course. The convert.

Today we stopped briefly beneath the smallish city of Pergamos, to pick up another band of rebels fleeing that town. Fortunately, no Celestials boarded this time (the Pergamos Demons hadn’t seen any in their town at all), and we resumed our journey without fuss. This brought our number up to thirty-eight. One of the new men nodded at me respectfully. One of the new women sneered at me as if she’d discovered me on the ball of her heel.

Chara sleeps in the bunk above me, not in the same one with me. For the sake of appearances, mostly, though the bunks are awfully narrow. Though of course, twice now we’ve managed to both crowd into my bunk to make love, unobserved.

In my dream I was again a prisoner in Oblivion, as when I first arrived. And again, I shared my cell with that poor blighted creature who was apparently mentally ill or, as another prisoner claimed, autistic. His improperly regenerated head was ringed in anus-like openings through which dangled twisted dry gnarls of brain matter, and he was hugging his bony knees, thumping his head back into the wall in a ceaseless rhythm while he muttered something repeatedly, mantra-like. I was in the cell with him, but despite this, in the dream I felt free. Not a prisoner like him. I stood across from him, watching him…and out of curiosity and compassion, I drew nearer to the tormented prisoner and bent over him a bit to listen to what he was saying.

But when I grew near to him, and saw his eyes, which were fixed in space and wouldn’t look into my own, a vast realization entered into me. For a moment it made me straighten up sharply, but I resisted the urge to back away from him.

My realization was that this creature was the Creator Himself. And no one had recognized the truth before but me. Not even the Demons who had stuck Him in that cell. The Demons who had tortured Him. Our Father, who had created us and all around us but had been drained and gone mad from the effort.

Despite this awesome awareness, I still felt gently concerned for this being, who suffered like the most miserable soul in all of Hades. I took a step nearer to Him, and bent down again to listen to what He was murmuring.

"I’m sorry," the prisoner was saying to Himself, or to me, over and over and over. "I’m sorry…I’m sorry…"

Chara has been reading my journal from the beginning, which has flattered me but also made me nervous, in regard to how she might feel about the entries concerning herself. So far she has been complimentary, and I’ve even caught her chuckling over a few passages, which I guess is a good thing.

Today she came to the entry for Day 40. Coincidentally (or not), that was when I was imprisoned with that being I dreamed about yesterday. In the course of that entry I also described how I had learned to communicate with Lyre, and how I had asked him what would happen if I tried to pry his eye out, or if I removed his skin which binds this book. Would he finally regenerate fully as a man? At the time, he had told me he wasn’t sure what would happen.

That was when Chara had broken off from her reading, and suggested to me that Lyre could in fact be freed. And this rather disturbingly gifted Demon amongst our group could probably handle the job.

I watched him use a simple filleting knife, produced from his ominously pouched and tinkling tool belt, to skin the binding of human leather from the covers of my journal, and I ached to think that the process might be harming Lyre. But even before attempting this operation, I had asked him if he wanted us to go through with it, and with his blinking code he had told me that he did.

Like a chef deftly flipping an egg without breaking the yolk, the torturer was able to remove the skin with the eye intact and still blinking. He lay the patch of flesh down on my bed, and then we tore the remaining covers off my journal and burned them, because there were still remnants of Lyre there, rooted like grass into them, and this way his remaining soul was concentrated into the one most viable hunk of flesh. The Demon advised that this would better insure that the flayed flesh binding would regenerate as a man…rather than decompose, with Lyre regenerating on the covers again instead.

Because there is so little of him, I’m told it will be a long painful process for him. I hope he finds it worth it.

I’ve turned over my narrow bed to him. That’s all right; I’ll squeeze into Chara’s after all. To Hell with what the others think.

Despite Allatou’s laid in coordinates, we became lost for a few days, as it turns out. She thinks maybe it’s because of the battle that took place in the control center; a struck valve, a nudged lever, a jarred gear. But everything seems to be corrected now and we’re back on course…having reversed our direction along the tracks for most of today, and switching into another tunnel that branched off to one side.

But we must be nearing the general vicinity of the colder region, because you can feel the outside air coming in through our shattered windows. I hope they aren’t so accustomed/adapted to the cold in Gehenna and Pluto that they don’t use heat from steam and fires!

Lyre looks like a man now. A man dissected by first-time—and blind—medical students, but a kind of man…though he’s too incomplete and in too much pain to talk. Still, I sit on the edge of his bunk and talk to him, for company. I tried to hold his hand but it hurt his exposed nerves and broke small blood vessels so that my palm came away wet. Poor guy. We writers suffer for our art.

I told him the plot of the great novel I had always planned to write. "Now don’t steal my ideas," I warned him. But I won’t summarize it here. I don’t want to cash in its magic prematurely, if you can get what I mean. Sometimes you can talk and think a novel out of your system before you even type the first word.

Whether this novel, set in the mortal world, with mortal concerns and absolutely no sense of an afterlife, will emerge as I had planned it…or whether it becomes informed by what I know now…I can’t yet say. We’ll see when I get there. I think I’ll write that next, instead of a second volume of this journal. I can always catch up on my memoirs later on. After all, they’ll be an on-going, endless series. Whether my readership here in Hades would be better entertained by—better relate to—my experiences in the afterlife or by fictions of the world they once knew, I can’t say, either. But I’m so anxious to begin. Talking about it to Lyre has rekindled my old enthusiasm for it, minus my former debilitating, fatalistic despair that had me take up a shotgun instead of a pen. Or, keyboard, that is.

I want to ask Lyre what he plans to write when he is whole again. Maybe we can even collaborate on something…

The sky here is as white and featureless as the ground, and in fact I’m told it is a solid ceiling of ice, and that sometimes chunks of it break off and come crashing down onto the town. Gehenna is much smaller than Oblivion, the tallest structures being only about six or seven stories in height. Most structures are black, but their sides frosted over with a lace of wind-blown crystalized snow, and snow packed in a solid layer on their roofs. Pluto, with the majority of its structures built from bricks of ice, is even colder than this? I’m almost tempted to remain here myself, but I’ll get used to it. Chara has taken to wearing clothing for the first time since I’ve known her. Oddly, seeing her in clothing stirs my lust anew. Seeing her thighs tightly gripped by coarse tan pants, teases of her breasts peeking out from the shawls she’s wrapped around her middle and between the obstacles of her wing roots. Her nakedness now will be all the more alluring, as will her hair unveiled from the kerchief she has made over her head.

There are very intimidating, very primitive Demons here like bears, or huge shaggy hyenas, that lope around on four legs as often as they shamble along on two. But my comrades have satisfied them with this story and that. I’m supposedly a servant, and they’ve been told not to mistreat me. My heart goes out to the hard-faced, empty-eyed Damned of this town, though, for the mistreatment they suffer. Too many of them have no shawls, kerchiefs or pants against the whistling, white-misted winds that weave between the long, low buildings.

The Demons of Chara’s ilk who live in Gehenna have been trusted with the knowledge of the genocide in Oblivion, and our flight from it. Though we suspect there will be resentment about the possibility of Celestials tracking the fugitives to this place, the overwhelming sentiment appears to be one of sympathy and solidarity.

By now Lyre could stand in the doorway of the Black Cathedral and gaze outside, wrapped in blankets, but he wasn’t quite up to venturing forth. The animal-like Demons had been instructed not to harass him, either. He was very gaunt, I found, and nearly bald…though maybe he’ll fill out and his hair grow back some more, before he’s done.

Already Allatou had reprogrammed the Black Cathedral, and was about to send it away unmanned, backwards, off in another direction to throw any pursuers off our trail. But a request from Lyre made me ask that she hold off for a little while longer…

"I think my father is back in Oblivion," he told me. "Not to make you feel guilty…but I was hoping not to leave there. I thought maybe somehow, sometime I’d find him. If I ever got out of that book…as unlikely as that ever seemed…"

"You didn’t tell me," I said, feeling guilty nonetheless.

"Well…it didn’t seem like enough of a possibility for me to resurrect and do anything about it. I was helpless. I couldn’t even bring myself to communicate it to you. Communication was difficult enough without trying to articulate how I felt, and…"

"Frank, you know, I’ve never met anyone who ever encountered a relative or a loved one or even an acquaintance from life. Somehow it seems like they place us so far apart in Hades, it being so vast, maybe infinite, that we can’t possibly cross those distances. And for all we know, there are more Hells than this one…"

"I know that. I’ve heard that said. But I’m telling you…one day when you had me propped in the window I swear I saw him walk along the street. I swear it was him." He wagged his head, averted both his eye I knew so well and its long missing twin.

"Hey, you know you’re free to do anything you want now, Frank…but…"

"Genie in the lamp set free, huh?"

"It’s a dangerous town these days."

"It always was. Always will be."

I nodded, mocked a disappointed pout. "I was hoping you’d tell me about what you wrote, that pissed off the Creator so much."

"It doesn’t take much."

I turned away from the white vista beyond the doorway to face him directly, suddenly inspired. "Frank…would you take the diary back with you? You carried it along with you all this time anyway, right? You can bring it to Necropolitan Press for me. Have it published right there in Oblivion…"

"That’s a great idea…sure, I can do that. But—hang on, now…if the authorities ever see a copy, they’ll know where you are. Where you all escaped to."

"True. Shit. Huh. Well…ahh…I could tolerate a little editing, if you’re up to it. As long as you’re a sensitive editor, and don’t mess with my style."

He smiled. "Don’t worry. I don’t like hands-on editors either. Sure…I’d be pleased, and honored. And somehow or other, some way, I’ll get some copies of it back to you. If you don’t stay in Pluto, just be sure to leave enough of a trail that I can follow."

"I will." Grinning, I clapped him on the shoulder. "If it takes a while for you to get copies to me—assuming they actually want to publish the thing—don’t worry. It’s not like we don’t have the time to find each other, sooner or later."

"And I’ll want to be seeing that novel of yours when it’s finished, too. I’ll come back here in maybe a year. How about that? We’ll set that as a date. Then I’ll bring your novel back to Necropolitan with me when I return to Oblivion, if you have it done by then."

"That sounds like a plan. But don’t you forget to write your own work while you’re at it."

"We’ll see." His smile looked frozen by the frigid air. "We’ll see if my muse reincarnated with the rest of me."

And so, after the delay in departure, the rest of us will now watch the cathedral’s dark shape recede across the icy frozen plain beyond Gehenna’s walls, and then vanish inside a cave-like maw in the side of a rocky cliff, to incline down into the underworld again with its sole passenger. Soul passenger. These will be the last lines I write in this book. But it’s appropriate, as I told Frank Lyre, that it should be carried back in his arms, its text having so long rested within the binding of his skin.

Rather than have him omit certain crucial details, I’ve given him permission to change them where needed. For instance, I am not going to Pluto. And I was never in Gehenna. But I’ve heard enough about them to conjure them. They will serve as useful destinations to mask the real ones. In fact, so that he won’t be persecuted himself—since he intends to return to Oblivion—and tortured for information on our actual whereabouts, he has adopted the rather unsubtle pen name of Frank Lyre to use throughout this book in place of his real name, which I had been using.

My lover, in fact, is not really named Chara. Lyre will call her Chara, now, as he polishes and edits my humble manuscript.

And he will omit references to my own name. Much as I have ached for the imagined glory of publication, of readers eagerly bending over the words I have set down, I want to protect our identities, to make our tracking more difficult. We will assume new ones. We will reinvent ourselves. Reincarnate ourselves. Lots of authors use pseudonyms, after all. Look at Samuel Langhorne Clemens. So Lyre will eradicate all instances of my real name within the book. And my new name, my pen name, that will appear on the cover will be Dan Alighieri.

It’s time to send away the Black Cathedral. To hand these glued leaves back to Lyre. Chara will walk beside me to see him off. I might dare to encircle her waist with my arm, even in front of the other Demons. It’s just something they’ll need to get used to. Things are changing, one of the Demons said…if it’s possible. And it seems to be possible.

Tomorrow, the Demon whom Lyre will dub Chara and I will set out for the destination Lyre will replace with Pluto. I hope these last minute revelations about certain subterfuges and fictional tweaks in my story don’t make you doubt its veracity. Truth transcends facts. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. My suffering has been real. And the scraps of happiness that I have gnawed from its bones are real as well. The setting, the events, are true in essence, and that’s all that’s required.

As far as this memoir is concerned, I am the Creator.

As Goethe said in Faust: "The spectral drama thou thyself hast made!"

I have escaped from Oblivion. I have fallen in love with the enemy (maybe it’s the Helsinki Syndrome; or rather, the Hell-sinki Syndrome)…and the enemy loves me. I have learned that God is the Devil at worst, at best a sad, lost soul Himself. I’m confident I will finally be published, posthumously, and I have more worlds yet to create with words. Being dead has brought me back to life.

Now here’s Lyre. Smiling, hand extended, waiting. He has to wait a few moments more. I want Chara to read these last couple of pages.

"Don’t I get anything more to do or say?" she grumbled.

"You just did," I told her.

There. She’s finished.

Author’s note: The following short story, Coffee Break, formed the inspiration for Letters From Hades. It was publisher David G. Barnett’s idea that I take the concept of this story and open it up to novel length, a suggestion which I eagerly ran with. While my two versions/visions of Hell are not entirely compatible, one will see how the longer work drew breath from the shorter. Coffee Break originally appeared in the publication Strange Days (#4, 1992), and was reprinted in my collection Terror Incognita (Delirium Books, 2000).

Hell didn’t have to freeze over; it was already icy cold in places, and Fleming was as glad to get in out of it as he was to get out of the roaring flames in other regions. The windows of the café had glowed warmly to him across frigid expanses of white tiled floors with drains to collect the rivers of blood. Now, here he was. Bells tinkled when he opened the door.

Chani looked over from behind the counter; after a moment to recognize his cold-blackened face she smiled and waved. Fleming grew warmer. Chani’s cat Bast looked toward him also. The black cat had liked to ride on Chani’s shoulder in life; now it was fused there, inseparable. Her punishment for loving animals but not the Son. But like some punishments here, it was actually in Chani’s favor. She had loved Bast dearly and now could have him with her through eternity. Though all animals automatically went to Hell, that didn’t guarantee that pets and their owners were reunited in the afterworld.

Fleming took a vacant stool, the red vinyl sighing under his weight. "Man," he breathed.

"It’s been a while, Flem," said Chani. "Espresso?"

She remembered him so well. It felt good. You could still feel good like this, in little ways, in Hell. "You got it. How you been?"

"Bored." Wasn’t that the way? Chani was forever warm in here, never in cold or in flames, always with people with whom to chat. But that was her curse. In life she had been a traveler. Here, she not only never went outside but never even came out from behind the counter. "Where you been to? Someplace new?" Her back was to him as she worked.

"I found a jungle. A lot of animals there, and native-type people. Aborigines. Neanderthals. It was interesting. They didn’t seem to be suffering too much. Diseased and everything, but..." He shrugged. "I did see hunting parties after them, though. One of those chased me out."

Fleming glanced over at a Neanderthal who sat at the end of the counter, in fact. In his loincloth, he was huddled over a hot chocolate. Born before the birth of the Son, the only gate to salvation, he was eternally damned. His heavy brow was forlorn.

At least he could come in here for a hot chocolate. In fiery regions there were far-spaced bars where you could get a beer, ice cream parlors floating in lakes of magma. The Father, in His mercy, gave the damned breaks. Once a year, every damned soul could stop in one such establishment for one hour. It became the anchor for sanity, the reason to trudge on rather than give up and fall and suffer in one spot for all time. It was a place to draw those tiny moments of pleasure. But even that was a punishment. The punishment was experiencing the contrast of pleasure, in a brief, teasing taste. The punishment was having to leave.

Fleming glanced elsewhere about him as his face slowly reverted to its normal color and shape...without pain. Inside these establishments was the only place one could regenerate painlessly. Normally, regenerating from one’s mutilations was more agonizing than receiving them, and much slower. Once Fleming had been overpowered by a gang of drawling Angels in white hoods, who had tied him up and attached a number of hand grenades to him. Reforming after that had been the worst suffering Fleming had experienced in his twelve years in Hell.

At a corner table gazing out the great window was a man with no arms, the stumps closed now and slowly lengthening. He drank tea through a straw. Oriental; shaven head and a robe. Had to be a Buddhist monk. At his feet was a wicker basket with four babies in it. They were healing also, all dozing. He must have found them and collected them up, carried them in here on his back for some fleeting peace. Carved or tattooed on them all were the words found on every unbaptized infant or child: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned."

Fleming looked back around as Chani set his espresso before him. The aroma made him want to cry. He sipped it without waiting for it to cool; extremes of temperature were now second nature to him. He wanted to drink it quickly so he could have more. "Mmm," he moaned.

"Everything you have for breakfast. I want a taste of it all. Pancakes, eggs, sausages, home fries..."

"Ed," Chani called over her shoulder. "Barnyard." She smiled at Fleming, shook a cigarette out of a pack from her apron. She lit it for him while his eyes wandered to a TV up near the ceiling behind the counter. Teasing taste of the upper world. Not some evangelical program to lecture and berate his unsalvageable soul; you could see them on TVs everywhere in Hell, hanging from trees and nests of barbed wire. Here, a sitcom played. Fleming didn’t recognize any of these new actors. It didn’t matter. He ached to be with them. To have sex with that pretty young actress. And most of all, to warn them. They were so dangerously oblivious...

"You weren’t here last year," Chani noted.

He returned his attention to her. "Sorry. Too far away. I stopped in a Chinese restaurant. Had me a Zombie. A Zombie for a zombie."

"That’s okay." She lowered her eyes. "So many other places to explore, anyway. Why always go to the same rest stop?"

"Well," he said, feeling guilty, "this is my favorite one." He meant it.

"Thanks," she said, smiling sadly, reaching up absently to scratch Bast under the jaw.

"Hey, at least you get to explore TV...see the world. Anybody famous die we might be seeing?"

"That serial killer they executed, the one who used to dress up like a clown? He came in here last year. Ate two Barnyard breakfasts. Be careful for his type, Flem; they go around hunting their own kind, folks like you and me. It’s a field day for them. As if the Angels weren’t bad enough."

"Don’t worry, I’ve got a guardian angel." Fleming held his coat open to show her the automatic pistol he wore in a holster. "Got it off an Angel I managed to get away from. I messed that goon up good...not that it hurt him any, but it incapacitated him so I could run. This thing’s a beauty...never runs out of ammo."

The Angels were people who had died in the good graces of the Father. Hell was the chosen Heaven for many Angels, who spent their eternity hunting Demons like Fleming, torturing them when they found them. Raping women. For some Angels, this was more entertaining than the replicas of Disney World and Las Vegas up in Heaven. Of course, they could always go up there and come back here as their moods changed, as they grew bored. No limitations for Angels.

On the specials blackboard behind Chani she had written at the top: "We’re No Angels!" Fleming hoped none ever came storming in here and saw that. Once she had mouthed off to an Angel, a visiting minister, who had chopped Bast off her shoulders with his sword and taken the cat away with him, tossing him into a mile-deep ravine. It had taken months for Bast to return to Chani and pull his sad body up to his perch by her head, there to blend again.

Breakfast came. Chani laughed at the amount of salt Fleming shook across the expanse of fried food. "That stuff’ll kill ya,"she told him.

Sipping his orange juice, he smiled up at her. God...what he wouldn’t give to vault over the counter top and hold her. Make love with her on her side, standing up if they had to. But he would be repelled violently from her floor, and she from his. Magnets of the same pole.

Oh, the damned could have sex. In the flames. On the frigid tiles. And he did. Bleeding, burnt. Some women he met again, some never. But they were in too much agony to find real comfort or release in their clinches. Maybe it was because he couldn’t have Chani that he wanted her. Maybe it was seeing a woman who could still smile. Or maybe it was her smile, in particular.

She had been an environmental activist, besides being an animal lover and a Jew. She had believed in Gaia; that the Earth was like a living, breathing God itself. Ohh...big mistake. On the smooth forehead of her otherwise unmarked pretty face were tattooed the words: "Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God."

They couldn’t mar her prettiness. It wasn’t truly flesh, after all, but the tangible image of her spirit. And how he wished to press the lips of his spirit to hers. And yet he was shy. Of her, of the others around. And there was so little time. So very little time...

Then back to eternity.

Machine gun chatter outside. Screams. Fleming calmly checked over his shoulder. He saw a man slam up against the glass, smearing the blood from the holes in his face as he slid down the surface. Robed, hooded figures came into view, pulled him away. Fleming heard a chainsaw revving up. More screams. Fleming drained the last of his espresso.

"One more?" asked Chani.

She looked to a wall clock. "Ten minutes, about. You came in at quarter to eight."

Only ten minutes left, and yet now Chani was called away from him to tend to another customer down the counter. Fleming was bitter and agonized. He was used to the cold he’d just braved for eight months to get back here. The mutilations, the disease. But it had been a long time since he had had to feel this pain.

When she came back he would take her hand atop the counter, he decided. Squeeze it. He could do that, at least. Link his fingers through hers. Maybe then lean forward and kiss her. Or if not that much, at least he would have broken the ice for next time...

She returned just as he drained his last black coffee. He didn’t have to glance at the clock; he felt the magnetic pull already rising up, like a current, beginning to lightly tug him toward the door. He could resist another minute only...

"Well," Chani sighed. "Hope you liked it. No tip?"

"See you in another couple years?"

"I’ll see you one year from today."

"Oh come on, you don’t have to do that. There are so many other places to see. It’s something to do, isn’t it? To look around? Even at Hell." It was big enough, after all. Much, much bigger than Heaven, with its small and elite population.

"There’s something to be said for familiarity, too," he replied. "Comfort..."

Oh, this was too intense a pain. His body was accustomed to the horrors beyond this jingling door. Humans were so adaptable. Hadn’t he once read that children had still played while imprisoned in Auschwitz? Those children had since told him that in person, since so many of them who had been burned there were here to burn again.

"Well..." he said. The door jingled behind him as a new soul staggered in. He was distracted, and miserable. Her hand, he hissed at himself within. It was there flat on the counter...waiting...

The pull was growing stronger. Insistent.

A man seated himself on the stool directly to Fleming’s left. He hated the poor mangled bastard for it. And yet, it was almost a relief to be forced not to act.

Instead, Fleming reached out to Chani’s hair. Or so it seemed for a moment. It was Bast’s sleek fur he stroked. The cat seemed to remember him also, and purred at his touch. Now he felt a little better. They were linked, Chani and Bast. He withdrew his hand feeling that he had also caressed her, in a way. In a way.

The man to his left began trying to speak, his lower jaw gone. It would grow back just in time for him to eat a little bit of something. Chani slid the man a pad to write his order on. She looked irritated at the distraction also. In fact, Fleming thought her eyes even appeared moist...

The pull yanked him backwards off the stool suddenly; he almost fell but righted himself, leaned away from the pull to fight it a moment longer, caught hold of the counter. No one but Chani was looking at his struggles.

"Next year," he promised her.

"Next year," she smiled.

He slid toward the door. Through it. Out. The bells jingled. The door closed. Warm yellow light came through the windows, but he couldn’t see anything other than that through them. Otherwise he might stay here and watch Chani through the glass until next year. Mouth conversations to her. Maybe they knew he would want that, and kept the glass one-way.

"Hey, buddy," a voice addressed him. Two hooded Angels came sauntering toward him, their robes splashed red, one with an UZI and one with a chainsaw. "Agnostic, huh?" Good guess. It was branded across his forehead.

"Nice coat, clown," the other one mocked him. It was full of bullet holes already, slashed by swords. "Need some new holes?"

Fleming turned slowly and grinned. "How about you?" From inside his coat came the stolen automatic, and he fired. The UZI went off, but he got them good first. Both went down. It might not hurt, and they might regenerate ten times as quickly as he, but he still felt better for it as he bolted away. The air froze the insides of his lungs to crystal. But he laughed. Angry laughter. Sad laughter.

Yeah, those little pleasures. You could still thumb your nose in Hell...in between the Angels cutting it off.

Don’t feel so bad, he cheered himself while he ran. It wasn’t his fault that the breaks were so short, and he’d worked enough years of his life that he should be used to that by now. Bosses were bosses, people were people...as above, so below.

Next year, he’d promised her. Next year, he promised himself.

He had all the time in the netherworld.

Jeffrey Thomas is the author of such novels as Deadstock, Blue War, Health Agent, Monstrocity, Everybody Scream!, Letters from Hades, Boneland and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers. His short story collections include Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Grey (with Scott Thomas), Voices from Punktown, Voices from Hades, Doomsdays, Aaaiiieee!!!, Unholy Dimensions and Thirteen Specimens. He is the brother of author Scott Thomas. They have both lived—and worked—in New England all their lives.