Escape From Hell (20 page)

Seventh Circle, Third Round

The Violent Against God, Nature, And Art

Part Two

The Valley Of Desolation

There is a mountain there, that once was glad
With waters and with leaves, which was called Ida;
Now ‘tis deserted, as a thing worn out.

W
e were ready. We thanked Father Camillus and said our goodbyes, then hesitated at the door.

“Turn left or run uphill?” I asked Sylvia.

“Uphill,” she said firmly.

“What if it doesn’t work? We’ll be in the fire until we give up and go left. Maybe it would be better just to turn left and run.”

“Don’t be silly,” Sylvia said. “Neither one of us was sentenced to this desert. There won’t be a way to make us stay here. Isn’t that right, Father?”

“Truly I do not know. I confess curiosity, but not so much as to advise you either way.”

“Straight uphill,” Sylvia said. “Come on, Allen!” She opened the door and was gone.

I had to run after her. She scampered across the desert, ponytail flying, still joyful to have a body. As we ran the woods seemed steadily to get closer, and after a minute I gave up worrying about it. We ran hard, avoiding others. As we got closer to the woods there was no one around us. The woods were as desolate as ever, but that didn’t bother Sylvia.

“See! We’re here!” she said. “Now we keep moving, before I root again.”

“Do you think you might?”

“No, silly. I think I’m forgiven. Allen, you should have confessed.”

“Maybe, but I’m not sure what I ought to confess,” I told her. “Sure, I did a lot of bad things. I know I did, and I’m sorry about them. I was sorry about them before I died. I was sorry about the damn–fool stunt that killed me even when I was falling down the side of that building.” I took a deep breath. “And my worst sin was after I came here. I judged Benito and threw him in that pit.”

“You’ve already confessed that. And you rescued him. Don’t forget that.”

We turned left and moved along the edge of the woods, just above where fire fell but before the trees started. There was a little strip of grass here. It wasn’t peaceful. Fire flickered over shadows in the desert to our left. We could hear crashes and groans and screams to our right, and more screams of pain to our left. It stank, too, of burning flesh and moldering leaves.

“But Sylvia, I wasn’t sent to Hell for anything I did in life. I was in the Vestibule. Lukewarm. Not even enough conviction to be a heretic! So what do I confess, that I didn’t believe in God and I didn’t believe in atheism, either? What kind of sin is that?”

“Were there atheists among the Virtuous Pagans?”

“As far as I know, Lester was,” I told her.

We kept walking briskly along the perimeter. Sylvia was quiet for a long time. “But you don’t really know he was an atheist, do you?”

“Only what he said.”

“What a writer said. Poets don’t always mean what they say,” Sylvia said. “Oh, sure, when we’re saying it, but we don’t always think things through. I sure didn’t. Don’t. Not like you.”

“Like me?”

“You’re a thoroughgoing rationalist. You have to make sense of everything even when it’s obvious to everyone else that it’s not going to make sense.”

“I suppose —”

“Allen, don’t worry about it. When you know what to confess, there’ll be someone to confess it to.”

“And how do you know this, Ms. Great Theologian?”

“Because it’s good poetry.”

“And God is a poet?”

“Of course He is, Allen!”

There was a hill ahead of us. A long ridge that stretched out of sight both to left and right, running down into the fiery desert and uphill into the wood.

“Your valley must be just ahead,” Sylvia said.

The trail led up the ridge, trees on one side, fireflakes on the other. It was steep. We didn’t need to breathe, but the memory of having to must have kept us from talking. We reached the top.

The scene below was a nightmare. Bulldozers, oil sludge pools, a river of brown sludge with purple streaks paralleled by a freeway and crossed by a gleaming suspension bridge that was sheer stark beauty. The noise was incessant.

“God, that’s awful,” Sylvia said, and coughed.

“Arrogance of power,” I said. I caught a whiff of what was on the wind, like a bomb gone off in a Cal Tech chemistry lab. I stopped breathing again.

“What? But power doesn’t have to be ugly! Power lets you do wonderful things. Open new canals. Change climate for the better. Make a beach. We were going to the moon! Allen, did we get there?”

“Yes.”

“See! Power doesn’t have to be like that!” She waved at the desolation below.

I’d forgotten. People thought that way deep into the 1960s. Science was still a wonderful mystery, power was good, and the world was going to be a great place. All it would take was money, and we had that, and we could build a great society, a beautiful place where everyone was happy.

They taught that sort of thing in colleges in Sylvia’s time. I’d forgotten.

I started down. “Stay out of the lowlands,” I said. “Heavier stuff accumulates there. Like nerve gas.”

The path led straight to the bridge. It was a beautiful bridge that spanned a great part of the valley, a suspension bridge nearly as large as the Golden Gate. That beauty was entirely out of place here.

There was no one else on the bridge when we started across.

Down below us was desecration. Bulldozers and oil wells. Pools of sludge with people sunk in up to their necks and struggling to get out. Tarred and oiled birds flopped helplessly around the shores of the pools.

A power plant was running almost below us, and a train track was feeding it coal. We ran through the cloud of goop pouring up from the great wasp–waist chimneys. We held our breath, but it still got us in the eyes.

There was a highway under us. Great trucks roared down it. Some fell into pits or ran out of control into the hideous river. After a while I stopped looking down, but I could hear the endless noises of the assaults on nature.

We reached the other end of the bridge. Several paths led upward to the ridge opposite the way we’d come. There wasn’t any obvious reason to choose one path over another. Which way?

“They all lead up,” Sylvia said. “Take the path less traveled by.”

I laughed. “And that will make all the difference?”

She snorted at me. She started up a path and I followed.

We rounded a bend to find more desolation. Muddy streams ran past us. Up ahead was a huge scaffolding with ropes and cables that held up a large hose. A stream of water gushed out of the hose at enormous speed. The water smashed into a hill and ate it, dissolved the hill into rushing mud.

“California gold country,” I said.

She nodded. “I read about it. Mark Twain. Bret Harte. They tore down whole mountains. Washed towns down with the mud. For gold. Why are we seeing this, Allen?”

“Why?”

“We chose this path. There must be a reason.”

“You’re the one who accuses me of looking for reasons when there aren’t any. Let’s keep moving. I don’t want to be taken for a claim jumper.”

A large crew was working on the scaffolding that held up the hydraulic mining system. They were all dressed in Levi’s and flannel shirts, and most wore hats and work gloves.

A foreman stood on top of the scaffold and barked orders. Two men tightened cables to move the stream impact from one part of the hill to another. Others seemed to be concerned with keeping the structure from shaking itself apart. None of it looked strong enough to hold.

The scaffold began shaking harder. I broke into a run. “Quick, before it collapses, we have to get uphill,” I said.

Sylvia ran ahead of me. The trail led through a tent camp, then up farther. We got clear of the camp and were fifty feet above it when there was a terrible roar. The scaffolding collapsed and the water jet played against the hillside just below us. We scrambled uphill to get away from it.

The hill began dissolving. In seconds a river of mud washed through the camp. A dozen men clung to the wreckage of the scaffold as it tumbled through, broke apart, and fell into the rushing water. They were washed down with the mud, down into the valley. In moments they were gone.

“That was awful.” Sylvia watched the flood until the last of it was past. “Allen, there’s a man down there.”

He was not too far from us, waist deep in mud. I grabbed a shovel from a pile of tools in the camp. We ran downhill and waded out through the mud toward him. Sylvia was up to her knees in mud before she could reach him. A safety rope was tied around his waist, but it stretched out downstream. When we got to him I pulled on the free end of the rope. It came dragging a plank.

Sylvia took his hands and tried to pull him out of the mud. “Allen, I can’t move him. Help me.”

Even using the shovel, then both of us pulling, it took a long time to get him free. We kept sinking into the mud and having to pull each other out before we could resume the rescue. Eventually we got him loose and dragged him out through the mud. When we reached the edge I picked him up and carried him to the remains of the camp. He seemed unconscious, but as we got him to dry ground he stirred.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

He untied the rope from his waist and dropped the end to the ground. “Fat lot of good that safety line did.”

“Allen, we might want that,” Sylvia said.

“Sure. Mind if we take the rope?” I asked.

“No skin off my butt,” he said. “Crew boss may not like it, but we lost the whole rig this time. How’s he to know? Sure, take it.”

“Thanks.” I began to coil the rope.

“Why are you here?” Sylvia asked.

“Same reason you are,” he said. “Not enough gold. You a whore from one of the other camps?”

“No, are you?”

He laughed, a short snorting laugh. “Not me. Got some men whores here, but I ain’t one of them. Charles MacGruder. They call me Black Charlie, I guess ‘cause I used to dig mines before I got into this work. You ain’t a whore, what are you doing here, ma’am?”

“It’s a long story,” Sylvia said.

“We know the way out of here,” I told Charlie. “We go up, over that ridge —”

“Out into the fire! I’ve been up there, I saw it. No, sir, not me. I know my place.” He eyed me suspiciously. “You after our claim?”

“Good God no! We’re getting out of here. All the way down,” I told him. “What good is gold here?”

“Plenty good,” he said. “Enough gold we can buy our way out of here. Nuggets, dust, it’s all good! All it takes is gold, you can have anything you want.” He paused. “ ‘Cepting maybe you, ma’am,” he added politely.

“What makes you think you can buy your way out of Hell?” I asked.

“Sure you can,” Charlie said. “Everybody knows that! Ain’t that what the preachers always want? Whatever they say, you got the gold, you get their attention. You got none, you can die on the streets for all they care. There’s a man at the assay office, he told us about it. A train comes through, maybe every couple of hundred years, and if you can buy a ticket you can get out of here.”

“Charlie, it’s not that way at all,” Sylvia said. “Really. You can’t buy your way out, but we can take you out of here.”

“Through the fire,” Charlie said. “Sure. We go through the firefall and get out of here. Ma’am, I don’t fancy calling ladies liars but I have trouble believing that. Reckon I’ll take my chances on getting enough gold.” He looked wistfully around the remains of the camp. “Looks like most of what we had washed out,” he said.

“Does this happen often?” Sylvia asked.

“Yes, ma’am, we get wiped out fairly regular.” He shrugged. “What else can we do? Better here than out there in the fire. Or there.” He pointed down into the valley and shuddered. “It’s awful down there.”

He began scraping mud off his clothes. “Soonest started, soonest done. Ma’am, friend, the crew will be back up here pretty soon. I’d be scarce before they get here. None of us take kindly to claim jumpers, and maybe I know better about you now, and maybe I don’t, but I’ll never convince them.”

“We’ll be on our way,” I said. “You can still come with us.”

“Nope.”

“All right.” I bent to pick up a shiny rock a bit smaller than a baseball. “This isn’t gold, is it?”

“Fool’s gold. You want it?”

“Yes.” I rolled it in the sleeve of my robe.

Charlie laughed. “Fine. See you around.” He went back to cleaning himself up.

I looked at the pile of tools and thought of the ice, then I picked up a pickaxe. Charlie looked at me with a frown, but he didn’t say anything. I started up the hill.

“Charlie,” Sylvia said.

He looked up. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Oh, never mind. Goodbye, Charlie.” She turned to follow me.

Chapter 19

Seventh Circle, Third Round

The Violent Against God, Nature, And Art

Part Three

The River

Now bears us onward one of the hard margins,
And so the brooklet’s mist o’ershadows it,
From fire it saves the water and the dikes.

W
e stood at the top of the ridge. The trail led steeply down into the fiery desert.

“I can see why he didn’t want to go down there,” Sylvia said. “How far do we have to run through that?”

“Father Camillus said an hour’s run.”

“My hair will be burned away in an hour,” she said.

“It grows back.”

“I know. I watched yours. Promise you won’t watch while mine grows in.” She took a deep breath. “All right, let’s do it.” She dashed down the steep pathway and out into the fireflakes.

We ran across the fiery desert. The pickaxe was heavy, and I thought of dropping it, but I hung on. It would be important if we ever reached the ice. There were others out there, but none of them were in pairs using a third as a parasol. Apparently that notion had not made it to this side of the valley.

I tried calling to them. “There is a way out! Follow us, we can get out of here!” If any heard us, they showed no signs of it.

“That man is wearing a cassock,” Sylvia said. She pointed. “There’s another! There are a lot of them! Allen, that’s horrible, priests and altar boys?” She ran on a few paces. “I mean, it must have been happening, look how many there are, but I never heard of anything like that.”