Inferno Read online

  “Are we invisible?” I demanded.

  “A moment, sir. Just a moment, please. We’re very shorthanded here, sir. You’ll have to wait, sir.” He made each “sir” a curse.

  “You would be well advised to attend us.” Benito’s voice had that edge to it, a note of warning. The clerk looked around uneasily. He obviously didn’t recognize either of us. Hardly surprising.

  “Your papers, please.”

  “We have none,” Benito answered.

  “Oh my, oh my, one of these days,” the clerk muttered. “Well, if you haven’t any papers, you can’t come in. The rules are very strict. You’ll have to go back for papers.” He turned back to his desk and started looking over the files on it.

  “We have an errand inside,” Benito said. “You do not help your records by delaying us.”

  The clerk looked back nervously. He examined us closely again, noting the slime on our gowns and the stench of our sandals. That seemed to cheer him. “What is your station inside?” he asked.

  “No fixed post,” Benito answered.

  “I can’t help you, sir. I’m only record-keeper for the Sixth Circle. Next window, please.” He turned back to his desk. We waited. Benito whistled something monotonous. Finally the clerk turned back. “You still here, sir? I told you, next window, please.”

  “It is to the Sixth Circle that we must go now.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me,” the clerk complained. “Very well.” He reached into a cabinet and produced what looked like manuscript books and short stubs of pencil. “If you don’t have the proper papers, you’ll have to fill out these forms.”

  They were twenty pages long, covered with small blanks, and there were nine copies. Not only wasn’t there any carbon paper, but the blanks were arranged differently on each copy, although they all asked for the same information.

  “I think we will not bother,” Benito said.

  I flared up. “What the hell do you want all this for? Great-grandmother’s blood type! Why should I fill this out?”

  “You have to.” The clerk was getting more and more irritated. “You can see they’re all blank. You can see they have to be filled out. Right at the top, see, it says, ‘Replacement for lost papers, application for, D-345t-839y-4583, to be submitted in nine copies.’ I can’t do anything for you without that information.”

  “Aren’t there exceptions?”

  “Of course there are exceptions, sir. One was made over two thousand years ago. Before my time, but they still talk about it.” He shuddered. “But you are obviously not Him. Is either of you a living man? Can either of you summon angels? Those are in the book too.” He glanced at the shelf of loose-leaf folios above his desk. “Volume sixty-one, page eight ninety-four, paragraph seventy-seven, point eighty-two—I’m glad we changed to the decimal system, but most of us didn’t like it—it says very plainly, anyone who can summon angels may pass. But if you’re applying under that ruling you’ll have to go to the main gate. Don’t prove you can do it. Just go to the main gate, and they’ll take care of you.”

  “But you will not let us pass,” Benito said. “Not even if I tell you that if you do not you will be in grave trouble?”

  “I know my duty. You will not come through.”

  “Very good. You have done well,” Benito said. “If you had let us in, we would have reported it. Now you have a favorable report coming. Who is your supervisor?”

  The clerk stared at Benito. “Mrs. Playfair, formally a postmistress. But—”

  “Oh, my,” said Benito. “I won’t be able to help you after all. It would do no good to give the report to her.”

  The clerk was unsettled. “Why not, sir?” The “sir” wasn’t a curse any longer.

  “I am not permitted to say.”

  “Ah. You mean—” He gulped. Whatever he imagined was going to happen to Mrs. Playfair worried him excessively. “But what will happen to her people? What will become of me ?”

  Benito looked crestfallen. “You know the rules—”

  “But I’ve done everything properly! My files are in perfect order—oh dear, oh dear, I told her she shouldn’t have let that man in the records room, I told her he wasn’t properly credentialed, I told her! It was all her fault, I told her . . . my files are in perfect order. And they won’t even look at them, they’ll just—” He was actually wringing his hands as he looked around his office at his desk and files.

  Benito frowned. “It would be a waste to have you in the boiling pitch—”

  “IN THE PITCH!” the clerk screamed.

  “Are you certain your files are in perfect order?” Benito demanded.

  “Of course they are! Here, you can see for yourself.” He did something that opened the gate.

  Benito and I crowded in. Benito took down a volume of the rule book and leafed through it. “Keep this up to date, do you? All revisions in place as they come in? Where are your unfiled revision sheets?”

  “There are none,” the clerk said primly.

  “Hmmm.” Benito lifted the forms on the clerk’s desk. “This is not in order!” He leafed through quickly.

  “But I hadn’t checked the seventh copy yet!” the clerk moaned. “I was doing that when you interrupted me! You can’t report me for that, I was trying to give you service, and—”

  Benito handed the forms back. The clerk looked through and extracted a bulky set. There was pencil all over the first six pages, then the writing medium changed to something darker. Benito looked at it curiously. “This is hardly legible.”

  “He used up his pencil,” the clerk said. “Volume four, page ninety-eight, paragraph six, states that no one applicant can have more than one pencil. So I made him fill it out with something else. He used blood.”

  “His own?” I asked.

  “Where else would he get blood?” The clerk turned to Benito. “Who is this man?”

  “In my custody. Witness. Not your case, don’t worry about it.” He handed back the forms. “This seems to be in order.”

  “Thank you.” There was relief all over the clerk’s face.

  “One item was very difficult to read. You should be more careful next time.”

  “Yes, sir. Certainly, sir. Are you finished with it?”

  Benito nodded. The clerk took the form—copy seven of nine copies—and tossed it into a wastebasket in the corner. It burst into flames. I started. A man had used his own blood to fill that out? I glanced at the forms the clerk handed us.

  Sure enough, at the top of copy seven, it said “DESTROY.” Copy eight went to “APPLICANT” and copy nine was “TO BE ROUTED TO THE STATISTICAL SECTION.”

  “What will be the charges against Mrs. Playfair?” the clerk asked, his voice low and confidential.

  Benito frowned. “I understand there are shortages in uniforms and supply—”

  “But we don’t have anything to do with that.”

  “Precisely,” Benito said knowingly. Comprehension dawned on the clerk’s face. He nodded.

  “We’re going to check that now,” Benito said. “Keep up the good work, uh—”

  “MacMurdo. Vincent MacMurdo. You’ll remember?”

  “Certainly.” Benito opened the inner door and held it for me. I went through, trying not to hurry.

  10

  B

  enito followed and closed the door behind him. I slumped against the wall, convulsed by silent laughter.

  I jumped away fast. The wall was burning hot. I smelled scorched cloth. Another second and I’d have had a bad burn.

  We were in a corridor that stretched to infinity in both directions. It was about ten feet high and wide, and there were doors at intervals along it. People hurried in both directions, paying us no attention.

  And there were all kinds of people! Men and women in flowing robes, in U.S. Post Office uniforms, in colonial costumes, in the high collars Dickensian clerks had worn, military uniforms, dhotis, Chinese mandarin robes, modern business suits, coveralls with insignia of planets an
d stars and sunbursts, and a whirl of scurrying humanity shoving past us as if we weren’t there.

  Nobody was going to notice us for our funny clothing.

  The old man we’d seen outside rushed past us, almost running. He carried a box of fresh mud and poked at it with a stick as he ran. We watched as he turned through a door and out of sight.

  Someone had stopped beside us and was laughing. He wore a Roman toga.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked.

  “Certainly.” He was still laughing.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  The laughter stopped, and the man glared. He was carrying some kind of wood plank with wax on it. There were letters cut in the wax. “You are new here?” he demanded.

  “From another division,” Benito said quickly. He lowered his voice. “Special assignment.”

  The Roman drew away from us. “Surely you have no interest in Himuralibima? He is our most honored civil servant. Hammurabi’s secretary, you know. Invented record-keeping.”

  “Ah,” I said. Hammurabi? Oh, all right, he’s Hammurabi’s secretary. And I am Napoleon Bonaparte. “You’d think after all these years they’d let him slow down a little.”

  “But he can’t,” the Roman protested. “They’ve offered him retirement, but he has to fill out the proper forms, and in his case, of course they’re in cuneiform. And you have noticed how hot it is in here?”

  I couldn’t stand it. I tipped my head back and roared with laughter. It rolled out, gales of laughter, choking me, as I thought of that first bureaucrat trying to complete his retirement papers before the mud dried from the heat . . .

  . . . Himuralibima’s Bay?

  Benito merely nodded. “Fitting. I am certain you have work, Signor—?”

  “Uh, of course,” the Roman said. “Your pardon.” He pushed past us and walked briskly down the corridor. Our clerk came out of his office. The Roman stopped, and they talked in whispers.

  “Allen, must you ask unnecessary questions?” Benito demanded.

  “I’m a writer. Of course I ask questions!”

  “Please do not. Not in here. For the moment we are safe. They think—” He motioned with his eyes.

  I turned my eyes only. The Roman had stopped someone else and was whispering to him. The man he’d stopped, a young man in a 1930s U.S. Army uniform, nodded. Pretty soon he stopped someone else and both looked clandestinely at us. They stopped others . . .

  “They’re telling stories about us,” I said.

  “Yes. Let us hope they are telling the proper ones. Now we must find the supply center.”

  W

  herever we went we were preceded and followed by whispers. People got out of our way, too. If we wanted to go through a door, if we even looked like we wanted to go through a door, there was a scramble to hold it open for us.

  “They sure are scared of you,” I said. “They know who you are.” Which is more than I did.

  “I think few of them have the least notion of who I am.”

  Oh, really? “You know your way around here.”

  “No. I know my way around bureaucracies. This one is no different from any other.”

  “You were a bureaucrat once?”

  He hesitated. “I suppose you might say so.”

  “Exactly what—”

  An anguished voice drowned me out. We were passing an open door, and a woman’s voice screamed in rage and pain: “But that form is twenty-seven pages long! All that for one tool?”

  I looked in, caught a familiar hawklike profile, turned back and kept walking. “Don’t look now,” I said out of the corner of my mouth.

  The other voice followed us. “You should keep better track of your handsaw. The rules are very clear . . .”

  At the next door there was a long line of naked people, fat men, pretty girls, ugly women, studs, every form and variety of mankind: the reception desk at a streaker’s convention. They were trying to get to a counter where some fat guy handed them clothing while two beanpole women took information down on more forms.

  What was this? The supply center for Infernoland? Were these employees, or spectators, or—

  —or what?

  We got in line, the only ones with clothing who did. A thin guy in a medieval bachelor gown came in, went behind the counter, and whispered to the supply clerk. The clerk summoned his two biddies, and they whispered together.

  Finally one of the women came out from behind the counter. She wore a coverall of a kind I didn’t recognize, dark blue with strange insignia. “What may we do for you?” she asked. She was trying to be pleasant, and it was obvious that she’d never learned how.

  “This man was given the wrong clothing,” Benito said. “He is wearing the same thing I am. In our section we do not give a junior courier the uniform of a supervisor.”

  She frowned. Benito didn’t look like he was dressed as a supervisor. He looked like an escapee from the violent ward. So did I. But he only stared back, and after a while her eyes dropped. “What should he wear?” she said.

  “Loincloth. And there are nine senior men in my section who have loincloths and no gowns. It is intolerable.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t know what to make of that. She went back and whispered to the other biddy.

  Meanwhile the line moved up. The clerk looked at papers and then at the fat man at the head of the line. He went into the shelving stacks behind the counter and came back with bright gaudy clothes, slashed velvet sleeves and tight trousers. They were obviously too small.

  “Ungood. Double plus ungood. Too small. Wrong period,” the fat man protested.

  “Tough shit, buddy. We all got our troubles. Next!”

  The biddies came over to him and whispered. He looked at us. “Uh, you sirs—can I help you?”

  T

  hree helped carry the gowns, and a fourth brought up the rear with stacks of papers flowing with seals and ribbons. Benito paid no attention to me; he just walked ahead as if he assumed we’d all follow, which we did.

  We turned a corner, and he stopped. “This will do,” he said. “Give those things to Allen. You have your work to do, and this is his task.”

  “Certainly, sir. Is there nothing else we can do for you?” This one wore a policewoman’s uniform, vaguely American, though the shield was shaped strangely. She talked without using articles. When she spoke to her subordinates she used a language I didn’t know. I was afraid to ask her death date.

  “I said this will do,” Benito said. “We will be met by others. You may go.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The sow turned and stalked away, followed by the others.

  When she was out of sight Benito seemed to wilt. His straight posture was gone, the high angle of the chin vanished, and he slumped.

  Then he laughed. “So. Nothing changes. Now we must get out of here before someone tells this story to an internal security agent.”

  “They think—what do they think? That we’re important officials?”

  “No. Of course not. They know we are only pretending that.”

  “Then what—”

  “But they cannot be sure. We might be important officials. But most of them think we are secret police.”

  “But how do you know there are secret police?”

  Benito looked very sad. “Allen, there have to be. You cannot run a bureaucratic state without them. Come.”

  We found a door to the outside, and Benito surrendered one of the documents he’d collected. We passed through and were out on the mud flats again. A stinking breeze wrapped itself around me, deliciously cool, and I said, “Ahh . . .”

  Far to our right the old man had just filled his box of mud again. He ran for the gate, writing frantically.

  11

  I

  was smiling as I turned. The robes I held stacked on my head, an ungainly load. “Now what?”

  Benito was staring across the swamp. “I don’t know.”

  “Ah?”

  “We cannot possibly persuad
e Phlegyas to take us back. I fear we must swim.” He set his own stack of robes down, shook out the top robe, and used it to tie the rest together.

  Swim? Through that? It wasn’t the garbage that turned me off. It was the bubbling of angry people in and under the water. If we met anyone like the guy Benito had thrown back into the water . . . if we met half a dozen of them while loaded down with heavy wet stacks of robes! “Wait a minute, Benito. Let’s try something else.”

  “Lead on, then, Allen.”

  I stopped to tie my bundle as Benito had tied his. Then I turned right along Himuralibima’s Bay. The choice was deliberate: here there were windows and doors along the wall.

  I was wading thigh-deep and not liking it, but it was the only way to learn what I wanted to know. At worst I was postponing our swim. At best—“We’ve got plenty of time. You keep saying so.”

  “So we do. I wonder what you expect to find.”

  My foot brushed something soft.

  She was clearly visible beneath two feet of water: a long-boned black woman with her hair floating like seaweed around a slack face. I asked a stupid question. “Is she dead?”

  “Of course,” said Benito.

  She was curled in a fetal position. She stayed rigid as I rolled her to bring her head above water. There was no sign of decay, and no sign of life. But I felt for a pulse in her neck and found it.

  “Catatonic.” And I started to get mad. “Another catatonic. Of all the dirty things. We don’t persecute crazy people for crimes. What right do the Builders have to put crazy people in Hell?”

  “The Builders?”

  “Never mind. Of all the dirty things. Benito, can you handle two bundles for a minute?”

  He took my robes on his shoulder. He waited while I reached into the water to adjust the woman’s position.

  Catatonia. It’s a rare enough disorder, but almost incurable. You can find one or two catatonics in almost any mental hospital. They afford opportunity for endless jokes, all identical, for a catatonic will take any position you put him into and hold the pose indefinitely.