Escape From Hell (10 page)

This wasn’t a construction shack. It was a proper office building, featureless. They were building a lot of offices like that in the years before I died. I’d always thought them ugly, but everyone who was supposed to know anything about art and architecture raved about their functional beauty or something like that.

We stopped to look back. The kaleidoscope show had started again: buildings rose and vanished in the pit behind us. Sometimes one would stay long enough to start looking solid before it faded out to drop its inhabitants down onto Ground Zero.

“I just don’t get it,” I said.

“Tell me again about this place,” Rosemary said.

I watched a rococo design like an extratall Tower of Pisa form in the pit, rise to a ridiculous height, and then collapse. “Hoarders and Wasters,” I said. “Misers and Spendthrifts.”

“Materialists?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “People whose whole lives revolved around possessions.”

“Then I think I know what’s going on,” Rosemary said.

“Tell me.”

“Bureaucrats. Either they have to spend their entire budget so they can ask for more, or they hoard it so that they’ll still have something to be in charge of.” She turned to the door ahead of us. “I’m scared of this place,” she said. “But there’s no other way, is there?” She opened the door before I could ask why she was afraid.

Inside looked like a typical office building, a long corridor with offices on either side. There was no one in sight, but behind every door there were voices.

“Give me my money!” The voice was querulous, trembling with rage. “It’s mine, I’m entitled!”

“Let go of me! Security! Help!”

Sometimes there were sounds of blows mingled with screams. “You just keeping my money because you won’t let go! I know you, you never worth anything, now you got my money and you won’t let go.”

It was that way all down the corridor.

I went to one of the doors. “No!” Rosemary tried to pull me away.

I got loose from her and opened the door. There was a man just visible under a rabble of jeans and overalls and shapeless dresses. They were pulling at him, or sitting on him.

I shouted, “People! You can get out of here! Follow me, we can leave Hell!”

They stopped tearing at their victim for a moment to look at me. One of them had been sitting on the man’s head. He got up. “You going to give us our rights?” he demanded. “You going to take care of us?”

“I don’t have your rights. I can show you the way out of here,” I said.

“And then what? Who going to take care of us? Like Ms. Jameson here! She’s needy! She got rights same as you!”

“Rights to what? I know the way out of Hell! Come with me!”

“Why we got to go with you? We all right here, soon as this man give us our rights!”

The babble started up again. “Give us! We entitled! It’s ours!”

Rosemary looked stern. “You think this is the way to get him to help you?”

She pointed to their victim, who shook himself loose and stood up. “You will stand in line, and be polite, or I will send for security, and you will get nothing.”

“We got a right —”

Rosemary smiled thinly. “You have a right to make your application in a proper and respectful manner.”

“You don’t have to do anything!” I told them. “Come with me!” I looked at the man who was now back in charge. “You don’t have to stay here. Come with me. Escape from this awful place.”

“To where?” he demanded.

“He get to go, too? He don’t give us our rights, now he getting out of here? No way!”

Rosemary almost pulled my arm off getting me out the door and back into the corridor.

“But I want to know what’s happening.”

“I know what’s happening,” she said. “Come on!” She pulled me down the corridor and kept pulling until we reached the other end of the building.

“Tell me,” I said.

“I knew someone just like him,” Rosemary said. “Harvey Janowitz. He was a clerk in the city welfare office. Got promoted after Katrina.”

“Who’s Katrina?”

“Hurricane, I forgot you don’t know. Allen, there was a hurricane. It hit New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast pretty hard, but mostly it broke the levees. New Orleans was flooded. It was awful. The government was going to do something about it. Harv was in the city social services department, did some favors. When they sent in the Federal Emergency Management Agency people, Harv wangled a temporary FEMA coordinator appointment. It made him important. He’d never been paid so much in his life.”

“Was he stealing the money? There’s a place for grafters, it’s much farther down than this.”

“No, Allen, he wasn’t stealing. He just wasn’t in any hurry! He’d never been so important. People had to be polite to him. And if he gave the money out it would be gone and he’d be back on the city payroll. Whenever people asked him for money or groceries or a trailer to live in, he found something wrong with the application and made them go out and do it again.”

“What happened to him?”

“Nothing.”

“So the clerk was hoarding. I can see that. But what about his clients? Why are they here? What were they hoarding?”

“Hoarders and Wasters, you said. They’re people who felt entitled to the money. There was federal money coming. Everyone was grabbing what they could get. It was free money. Let the good times roll!”

“Blaming the victims?”

“Allen, for a lot of people being a victim is a way of life!”

“Oh.” I thought about that. Wasters? Wasting your life chasing victim status? “Why were you scared of that place?”

“I was in the prosecutor’s office.”

“Was fraud and waste your job?”

“In a way. Allen, the prosecutor’s office is very important in the Code Napoléon. Unless the prosecutor takes an interest, it’s almost impossible to get official attention to crimes. Real or imagined.”

“So you took bribes.”

“No! Well, not real bribes. I never made any money at it. It was much more subtle than that. Allen, everyone was doing it! There was all this money from the federal government. It was all around us.”

“But you didn’t take any?”

“No! It didn’t work that way. The commissions are filled with old friends, the people I had dinner with, the wife of the man who sponsored my membership in my club. What am I supposed to do? Most projects do take longer and cost more than anyone expected. That’s sure better than thinking all those people are crooks. They aren’t crooks! These are the best people in New Orleans!”

“Like the Levee Boards.”

“Exactly!”

“So where was the money going?”

Rosemary shrugged. “It takes money to run a city. You have to do favors. Some groceries for precinct captains, election day workers. You have block parties. Scholarships to Louisiana State. If someone who worked for you had kids who needed college, shouldn’t you try to get them a scholarship?”

I thought about that. “So putting the best people in charge didn’t work very well.”

“But it did, Allen! A lot of good things did get done, you know. And we did try to take care of the poor. There were good times!” She opened the door at the end of the long hall. “Now, can we please get out of here?”

•    •    •

“Y
ou wanted to hear about everything,” I told Sylvia. She was silent so I broke off a small branch. “Is that enough detail?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Hear anything that helps?”

“I don’t know. You’re looking for justice. Do you think you’re finding it?”

“It’s too much,” I told her. “Yes, I can see there’s something fitting about things here, but it’s always too much!”

“It’s a high–stakes game, Allen.” She laughed. “And it goes on for a long time. All they had to do was follow you, and they wouldn’t. I have to be blown to bits before I can do that!”

“Do you still think that will work?”

“I sure haven’t thought of anything else that might.”

She was a tree. She couldn’t shudder.

Chapter 10

Fifth Circle

The Wrathful And The Sullen

And I, who stood intent upon beholding,
Saw people mud–besprent in that lagoon,
All of them naked and with angry look.
They smote each other not alone with hands,
But with the head and with the breast and feet,
Tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth.

T
he door at the end of the corridor led outside. There was a small landing, then an open steep wooden stairway that went down and down forever. Far down there was a forested slope leading to a marsh with steep banks. It looked a lot like the area where Benito and I had built our glider. Beyond the marshy area was what looked like a mangrove swamp that gave way to black open water. Far across the water were lights, and a dim red glow.

The air was murky and seemed to get thicker as we went down the stairs. I’d long ago stopped worrying about things like that. Laws of physics applied here, but they weren’t invariable. The exceptions had a logic, but I didn’t have the key to it.

There were landings every couple of hundred steps, but nothing else changed. We didn’t see anyone else when we got to the lowest landing.

It all looked familiar. There was scrub forest, young sassafras trees, saplings covered with kudzu vines, all lush and green and too thick to let me see more than thirty or forty feet ahead. Our last sighting of the marsh was from the stairs above the last landing. I’d estimated that open water was maybe half a mile ahead and a couple of hundred feet lower.

“Which way?” Rosemary asked.

“Downhill,” I said. “We have to find Phlegyas before someone pulls us into the mud.”

“Why would they do that?”

“The wrathful aren’t friendly,” I said. “Quarrelsome. They pull each other into the muck for sport. Or lie there and brood until they build up a rage. I tried to help one of them, last time I was down here. It wasn’t a good idea.”

We pushed our way through the brush. Progress was slow, and in five minutes we were lost. The stairway behind us was invisible, and we weren’t really leaving any kind of trail. The way got tougher as we went. There were laurel trees and kudzu vines everywhere, and the farther we went the thicker they got. The fog got thicker, too, and it stank. It was hard going, crashing through the laurel thicket and kudzu.

If I’d seen clean water … well, we were both still filthy from the Circle of Gluttons. We reeked. It bothered her more than me. She’d been fastidious about her appearance even back in the Vestibule. The ground was getting soggy. Soon enough we were wading, but it wasn’t water you’d use for washing.

A shape rose out of the swamp, a giant, all muscles and no neck. He growled, “Where do you think you’re going?”

Rosemary shied back. I stood my ground. “Out. Want to come along?”

“No. Tell me a story.”

“Say what?”

“No, I mean it. Nothing happens in this place, and I’m lonely. Everyone thinks I want to fight because I look like this.”

I started to laugh.

“When we were wrestling we had community. We were part of something bigger, a show for the marks. We’d work out the moves ahead of time. Once I was supposed to be thrown out of the ring, and that was the end of it, only I landed on a lit cigar butt. And I had to lie there … your turn.”

“I tried to fly out of here. There’s a wall around Hell, and we thought we could fly over it. Built a glider. It flew, but we never got high enough. We crashed in the red–hot tombs.”

“Sounds awful.”

“We got out, though. I can show you the way.”

“Too many angry people. They’ll never let us through,” he said, and sank into the mud. Not one of the Wrathful, I realized. Sullen, one of those who lived their lives refusing life.

“Are we going in circles?” Rosemary asked. “It seems like we’ve come an awfully long way.”

“We’ve been going downhill all the way,” I told her. “We can’t be going in circles — unless someone’s fiddling with the rules.”

“So you know where we are, then?”

“Fifth Circle of Hell. It’s a swamp. Hah!” We’d come to a clearing. Cliffs rose on both sides, and behind us was the laurel and kudzu thicket. “This looks familiar! It is, Rosemary! It’s where we built the Fudgesickle.” I pointed up to one of the bluffs above us. “We dragged it up there for launch.”

“Fudgesickle?”

“Silly name, but that’s what I called the glider Benito and I built out of robes and saplings and vines.”

It wasn’t a large clearing. Some of it looked different, but there wasn’t any doubt about where we were. Over where I’d lofted the glider there were saplings staked down in the form of a small airplane. Next to that was a store of saplings I’d cut and trimmed, and a neat pile of robes we hadn’t needed. I felt a twinge of nostalgia. I’d really thought I understood what was going on back when I built that glider with Benito’s help. I was sure, then, that we were in an alien amusement park, built for their unfathomable reasons. I’d solve it the way my characters had, in stories of the far future. There was nothing supernatural about Hell … It seemed about a million years ago.

There were improvements I hadn’t made. A hut, made out of saplings and woven kudzu vines, covered with fabric from my leftover robes. There was a fire pit, with fresh ashes.

Someone cursed downslope. Two voices, male and female, strident, blended with others. The voices rose to shouts, then there was the sound of blows. Someone screamed in pain. The scream was cut off by a splash.

Rosemary gasped. “Allen, what was that?”

Before I could answer, a big burly man came running into the clearing from down below. He was followed by a muscular long–boned woman. I’d seen both of them before.

“This is our place,” the man screamed. He stopped to stare at me. “You again.”

“Just passing through,” I said. I was watching the woman. The last time I’d seen her she was catatonic. She was moving all right now. “But you can come with us if you like. We’re getting out of here.”

“How?” he demanded. Then he laughed. “Last time you tried to fly out. Did you make it?”

“Yes, but not in the glider. Benito was right, the way out is all the way to the bottom.”

“Sure it is. Just go across the Styx, bash your way through the city walls, and head down. Make sure the demons don’t catch you. Sure.”