Inferno Read online

  “We haven’t turned,” I said.

  Corbett nodded. “Do a one-eighty and we can get out of here. Let’s.”

  Half-facetiously I rapped on a bronze nameplate and read off the name and dates. A translucent human shape formed before me. I stared in horror, then shrugged. What was a ghost among ghosts?

  “Pardon me,” I said. “Can you direct us toward the wall of Dis?”

  The ghost’s voice was faint and reedy. “Wall? Dis?” Faint laughter. “They must have added more extensions in the Mausoleum. I don’t remember anything like that in Forest Lawn.”

  “Very funny. This isn’t Forest Lawn.”

  The ghost seemed vexed. “I was supposed to be buried in Forest Lawn. I paid for it before I died. It was in my will. Where am I?”

  “Would you believe Hell?”

  More faint laughter, as if from a great distance. “Certainly not. I don’t even believe in ghosts.” And then there was nothing but the wall.

  I jumped when Corbett spoke behind me. “It’s a risk, but are you game to try a cross-corridor? I think if we turn left and keep going straight we’ll be headed up again.”

  T

  he scenery changed. Now there were niches with urns in them, much closer together. We came to a T intersection and turned and returned to the right direction when we could. Then another T and a Y and a big round empty space with corridors off in all directions and a big monument in the very center . . .

  . . . and we were in the good section of town. The sarcophagi were no longer buried in the walls. At the ends of short alcoves were huge marble oblongs, ornately carved, guarded by traditional statuary. Knights and vague sexless winged beings that were supposed to be angels and might have been faggots; reproductions of famous religious statuary; original creations, all done with enormous competence, all in monstrous bad taste. Sculpted Bibles open to John 3:16. Replicas of European cathedrals, done in perfect scale, bronze toys.

  One alcove was blocked off by a gate and enormous lock. All the nameplates were of the same family, ornately carved with relief pictures and bronze replicas of their life’s signatures. We looked in, grinned at each other, and went on.

  Pride. Unbelievably ornate monuments purchased at an unbelievable price: expensive tombs turned prisons. I wondered if they matched monuments left behind on Earth. Sure, I decided. Big Juju has a sense of fitness.

  Fitness?

  In this one case, yes, fitness.

  The corridors twisted again and again. The dead were high walls on all sides of us. Our footsteps were dull intrusions on music for the proud dead. The dead walked among the dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead! Word and reality echoed with each step. Word and reality hammered at my soul. Dead. Dead. Dead. Presently I sat down against cool marble.

  “Allen? What is the trouble?” Benito’s anxious voice was far away.

  “Come on, let’s get moving. This place gives me the creeps.” Corbett shoved at me with his toe. “C’mon.”

  I tried to speak. It wasn’t worth the effort, but finally I heard my own voice saying, “We’re dead. Dead. It’s all over. We tried to make lives for ourselves, and we didn’t make it, and we’re dead. Oh, Corbett, I wish I’d died like you.”

  The gay sweet music mocked me. Dead. Dead. Dead.

  Green light blinked on and off in the corner of my eye. It was annoying, a disturbance, an irritant in the thick cotton closing about me. I could see the source without turning my head, but it was an effort to move my eyes. Why bother? But the light winked on and off, and eventually I looked at the source, a neon sign blinking far down at the dead end of a corridor of the dead. It echoed my thought:

  SO IT GOES

  SO IT GOES

  SO IT GOES

  —off and on, endlessly, in green neon.

  Unreachably far away, on another world, in another time, Allen Carpentier had been buried like a potato in a closed coffin ceremony. The fans had come to the funeral, some of them, and a few writers had come, and afterward they’d gone off to have a drink and talk about new writers. Carpentier was dead, and that was all there was to it. I could speculate forever about Big Juju’s moral superiority, I could wander forever through Hell, and so what?

  SO IT GOES

  SO IT GOES

  Corbett’s voice came dimly. “We may have to leave him. I saw this happen to a guy, once, in the war. He’s going autistic.”

  “I have seen it also. Many times. Would you leave him here?”

  I thought Benito was shaking my shoulder.

  SO IT GOES

  SO IT GOES

  SO IT GOES

  —what was the blinking neon sign doing in this place?

  A horrible suspicion filtered through the blankets and around my brain. I pushed Benito away and surged to my feet. I walked, wobbling, toward the blinking light. So it goes.

  At the end of the corridor was a tremendous square-cut edifice in black marble. The epitaph beneath the neon sign was long and wordy, couched in words of one syllable and short sentences. A man’s life history, a list of books and awards—

  Corbett and Benito stared when I came back. Corbett said, “You look like you’re ready to kill somebody.”

  I jerked my thumb behind me. At first I couldn’t speak, I was that angry. “Him. Why him? A science-fiction writer who lied about not being a science-fiction writer because he got more money that way. He wrote whole novels in baby talk, with sixth-grade drawings in them, and third-grade science, and he knew better. How does he rate a monument that size?”

  Benito’s smile was lopsided. “You envy him that tomb?”

  “If you must know, I was writing better than he ever did before I left high school!”

  “Being dead hasn’t hurt your ego,” said Corbett. “Good. We thought we’d lost you.”

  “He’s got vases bigger than the bottle they put me in!”

  “You were an agnostic. Selfish, but not viciously so,” Benito said. “If I judge rightly from the size of his tomb, he must have founded his own religion. And possibly worshiped himself.”

  “No, they were jokes, sort of. But he did found at least two, not that there ever were any followers. One had everyone telling comforting lies to everyone else. The other was the Church of God the Fairly Competent. Maybe I should have gone in for something like that.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Corbett asked.

  “Because what’s the point of mocking people who’ve found something to believe in?” I turned toward the big, gaudy edifice. “That’s the point.”

  Benito shook his head wonderingly. “I question your sanity. He is in there. You are out here, free to escape.”

  I didn’t answer, but he was right. We turned away. For a time I could see the green reflection blinking ahead of us.

  SO IT GOES

  We were lost in endless corridors of the dead. Benito walked in stolid patience, but Corbett’s face had acquired a grim, set look, desperation barely held in check. I kept my own thoughts to myself.

  But I remembered Big Juju’s ability to distort space and time.

  We’d come a long way. Perhaps there was no way out.

  And what if we did get out of the maze?

  Benito said we had all eternity. Eternity in Infernoland. Or in Hell. Big Juju or God, it didn’t matter; the problem was how to escape.

  I’d built a glider once, and it had flown. Get me through the wall, get me fabric for the wings, and I’d do it again.

  But I’d have to do it without Benito.

  You promised you’d go with him, Carpentier. Down to the center, out his way. You can keep your word or you can break it; but if you break it, it’ll be without his help.

  Suppose he’s crazy? Or an agent for Big Juju?

  Then you’re on your own.

  Nuts. Benito might be able to trick the damned bureaucrats into giving us whatever we wanted. I couldn’t kid myself I’d be able to. Fabric I could get—at worst, by peeling it off catatonics—but how to get through the wall? I’d seen de
mons on the rim. More demons guarded the gate.

  I glanced sideways at Benito. Stolid patience, and iron faith in God and the maps of Dante Alighieri. And Carpentier’s given word. If we ever got out of this maze, he’d go down. We could follow or not.

  I felt heat ahead. We turned a corner and found a wall of red-hot urns. The floor seemed to slant uphill.

  Corbett whooped. “This way! To the wall!” His voice sounded out of place in the mausoleum. I waited for Benito to protest, but he said nothing, and I wondered if he knew something we didn’t.

  “We could make quite a safari,” Corbett shouted. He was over-joyful at finding a way out. “Just open these urns and pour out the ashes.”

  “I went further than that, once,” Benito told us. “I attempted to establish a local government.”

  “Didn’t work?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  There was no answer. It became apparent that there wouldn’t be one. Something else to think about.

  We hit a T corridor and were back in cool marble. We followed it a short way, anxious lest we find ourselves back in the endless tombs. It turned left again. I rounded the turn ahead of the others and found myself facing red heat. I shaded my eyes—

  “Your papers, please?”

  I squinted through my fingers.

  I faced a towering wall of red-hot iron, with a divided door in it. There was a counter on the lower, closed half of the door, and someone behind it, half-hidden in the dark interior framed by bright red light. He held a stack of papers. The bored face showed no sign of recognition. It might have been the same clerk or a different one.

  “Papers? Come on, I haven’t got all eternity.” He pushed the stack of papers toward me. “You’ll have to make these out before you can go uphill. It’s in the rules.”

  I backed around the corner. To the questioning looks of the others I said, “Don’t ask. Just turn around.”

  We went back the way we’d come, looking for a right turn. Presently we found it, and—

  “Your papers, please?”

  I walked toward the booth, but I was studying the gate behind the clerk. Iron glowing red, but it was only waist high. We could jump it.

  The counter turned white-hot as I approached.

  “Papers? You’ll have to fill out the forms. No exceptions.”

  I looked at Benito. He shrugged and turned away. After a moment I followed, hating him. He wasn’t going to help.

  And he’d known it all along. We had to go downhill.

  15

  T

  he music went with us wherever we went: nature themes, melodramatic sweetness, singing violins, but never funeral dirges or somber tones. The cheerful music was more depressing than any funeral march.

  Gradually I realized we could hear something else as well. I don’t know if it had been with us the whole time, waiting for us to become aware of it, or if it began as we threaded our way deeper into Hell.

  The sounds came from the tombs. Groaning. Whimpers. Croaks of rage. Mumbled curses. Once even gay whistling, a tune that jarred against the canned music.

  Gradually the clammy air warmed. It was our first sign that we were moving out of the maze.

  We followed currents of warming air. Where the air turned steamy hot we found a doorway.

  Unnerving sounds reached us through the doorway: screams of agony torn from throats that could contain them no longer, blended with animal war cries and the most vicious curses I’d ever imagined.

  Corbett plunged ahead, but Benito caught him. “Carefully,” he warned us.

  We looked out and down. The ground fell straight away from the doorsill, first vertically, then angling down to a forty-five-degree slope. The dirt was baked adobe with jagged edges of protruding flint.

  The bottom of the cliff was obscured by steam, much like the marsh outside Dis, but this was hot. The steam roiled about, leaving occasional clear patches. Gradually the picture formed.

  We were looking at an enormous discolored lake. The shore curved away to either side until steam hid the endpoints. Men and women stood waist deep in steamy red water, and they howled. They were packed like a public pool on a Kansas summer Saturday, and they wanted out.

  Some tried it, but they didn’t make it. Armed men patrolled the shore between us and the scarlet water. The guards were dressed for a costume ball, in the military garb of all places and all times, but they walked like sentries whose officers are watching. Their eyes were uniformly on the lake, and they held weapons ready.

  Weapons: there was every hand weapon known to history. Pistols, bows, crossbows, throwing-sticks, slings, pikes and lances, AR-15 rifles, all held at the ready. When someone attempted to leave the lake, the sentries fired.

  I saw a woman in black military uniform cut nearly in half by a burst from an automatic rifle. She shrieked in agony and waded deeper into the lake, where she stood, healing.

  Healing. The implications of our inability to die began to get through to me then.

  One man in a long beard wore a golden crown on his head and clustered crossbow bolts through his chest. He was stubborn. He’d move toward the shore. The crossbowmen would fire, and he’d stagger back, the scream hissing through clenched teeth. He’d pluck the bolts from his chest and throw them contemptuously into the water—and wade toward shore again.

  And again. And again. He was a fool, but a brave one.

  “I take it the guards won’t be on our side,” I whispered.

  Benito shuddered. “No. On the contrary, if they catch us, we—” He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to.

  The guards looked silly in those costumes. I knew some of them. Nazi swastikas and American GI’s. Coldstream Guards and Cameron Highlanders. Blue and gray of the Civil War. World War I helmets. Redcoats and the blue-and-buff of Washington’s Continentals. Fuzzy-wuzzies and Chinese Gordon’s Tommies, and more: Roman legion, Greek hoplite, vaguely Asiatic uniforms, long gowns and wicker shields, spears with golden apples on the hilts; and more still, yellow men in animal fur, red and black men in little besides war paint, blue men stark naked. Blue? Britons in their woad, marching beside legionnaires, followed by men and women in coveralls carrying tiny machine guns of a variety I’d never seen.

  And they watched the lake, constantly, vigilantly. “They won’t see us up here,” I said. “Now what?”

  “We must cross the lake,” said Benito. “There is a place, far around, where it is only ankle deep. Elsewhere it rises to above our heads in the deepest parts. The damned stand at a depth appropriate to the violence they did on Earth.”

  “That water looks hot. It steams.”

  “It is boiling blood.” Benito laughed without humor. “What would you expect for the violent?”

  A frozen moment stretched endlessly. Then Corbett shouted, “We can’t walk into that! No!”

  “Jerry—”

  “I’ve been burned before, remember? We’ll never make it! When our ankles are cooked we’ll go to our knees. When the legs are cooked we’ll be lying in it!”

  “Yet you see that every man and woman in the lake is standing.”

  The calm voice halted Corbett’s panicky monologue. He looked. I’d already seen that Benito was right. If they could stand, their cooked legs must still be operating. They also wouldn’t stop hurting . . .

  “The guards will not allow us to wander freely in Hell,” Benito cautioned us. “Without instructions regarding our sentence, they may well force us to the deepest spot and keep us there. You have noted that their weapons do not kill, but they can disable.”

  Let’s stay here, Carpentier. I’m starting to like the music.

  “They must not notice us. We must do as little screaming as possible.” Benito spoke seriously, without a trace of humor. Benito had been in Hell so long that suffering was not remarkable to him, or even unusual.

  “There may be a better way,” Corbett said slowly. He pointed. “Allen, what do you see?”

  “An island
.” Half-obscured by steam, it stood very low in the lake, a good mile to our right. It was more crowded than the water around it, the water that Benito said was boiling blood.

  Poetic justice. Infinitely exaggerated, as everything was here. No doubt the people boiling down there were murderers in life, or torturers, or kidnappers, arsonists perhaps. The violent. Well, at least we knew how to get across. “Benito, can we cross on the island?”

  He stared pop-eyed, his big square jaw thrust forward. “I had no idea there was an island in Acheron. Dante did not describe it.”

  “I suppose he mentioned boiling blood?”

  “Of course. He also described the ford I used before. The ford is heavily guarded, and perhaps the island would be better.” He considered. “Dante did not mention the ship in Acheron either.”

  “Ship?”

  “Yes, Allen, a wooden sailing ship sunken on the other side of Acheron. The decks are just awash with blood. I have been aboard it. There are grills in the deck and souls beneath the grills.”

  “Slave traders,” Corbett speculated.

  “Probably,” said Benito.

  But how had Benito been aboard? Was that where he had escaped from? Or from deeper down? I didn’t dare ask, yet how could we trust him until we knew his crime?

  How could we not?

  “Slave traders aren’t our problem,” Corbett said. “I suppose the best plan would be to circle up here until we’re just opposite the island, then make a run for it.”

  We looked at each other and nodded agreement.

  We turned back inside to parallel the shore, passing walls of shelves packed with crematory urns. I savored the cool, damp air. I was going to miss it. The cliff edge was just beyond that wall.

  Why bother, Carpentier? Why not stay here?

  No. We’ve got to get out of here. Minos would track us down eventually, and then what? We have to escape.

  Hey, Carpentier, what makes you think there’s a way out?