Escape From Hell (21 page)

“Neither did I,” I said. I remembered a year I’d spent in a Catholic high school. The Brothers lived in their own building, and the rules were strict. No student was ever allowed inside the door. Once I was sent to deliver a message for Brother Ignatius. It was raining, and when Brother Henry answered the door he said he would go get Brother Ignatius, leaving me standing outside in the rain. We all imagined terrible things the Brothers must have been doing in there, but they all involved women.

“Aren’t you going to tell them?” Sylvia asked.

“About the way out? No. Someone else can do that,” I told her. We ran on.

There was a dike ahead. It wasn’t quite as high as my head. Fire–flakes fell heavily as we got closer. “Aargh! My hair!” Sylvia shouted.

I boosted Sylvia up, then she leaned down to help me. The dike was a good forty feet wide at the top. Beyond the dike was a streambed, with trees. A ribbon of red blood ran through. Steam rose from the stream and formed an arch over our heads. No fireflakes came through. Sylvia brushed the last of the fire out of her hair, then came to help me pluck off a sticky flake from the back of my neck. We stood there as the pain slowly faded out and we healed.

“That was too easy,” I said. “So why isn’t everyone scrambling up here?”

She shook her head. “Dante never explained.” She looked thoughtful.

Hurrying close to the bank, a troop of shades
Met us, who eyed us much as passers–by
Eye one another when daylight fades
To dusk and a new moon is in the sky,
And knitting up their brows they squinted at us
Like an old tailor at the needle’s eye.

“And then one caught at Dante’s gown and he stooped down to look at him,” Sylvia said. “It was Dante’s old teacher. Dante liked him and was sorry to see him here. But none of the group tried to get out of the fire. Oh! Now I remember.”

O son, said he, should one of our lot rest
One second, a hundred years he must lie low,
Nor even beat the flames back from his breast.

“I remember now,” I said. “But Dante never told how that was enforced.”

“Or how they measure time,” Sylvia said.

We went on downstream in comparative comfort. It was hot and muggy and smelled like boiling blood, there were screams from the desert, but we were out of the fire and moving downhill.

“How far is it?” Sylvia asked.

“I don’t know. We were in a fast car most of the way,” I told her. “Maybe twenty miles?”

“Dante saw lots of people on the way,” Sylvia said. She gestured expansively. “There’s no one around us.”

“Want to go looking for people?”

“No!”

“You’re looking normal,” Sylvia said. “Scars healed.” She pushed back her brush–cut hair. “I’m sure I’m still a mess.”

“Not at all. You look good,” I told her.

“Thanks.”

In fact she looked quite attractive. I wondered what that meant. It wasn’t a sexual attraction. I hadn’t felt anything like that since I woke up in my bottle.

“Anything wrong?” she asked. “You’re quiet enough.”

“Just thinking. You bought that Catholic stuff.”

“What do you mean, ‘bought’?” she asked.

“I don’t know, I shouldn’t bring it up.”

“Why not?” Sylvia laughed. “Are you trying to save my faith or something?”

“No — well, yes, actually. If you’ve got something to believe in I sure don’t want to take it away from you.”

“What makes you think you can?”

“Erasmus.”

“Erasmus? Oh. You mean contradictions, like the Donation of Constantine being a fake.”

“Yeah. It was a fake, you know.”

“Well, sure it was,” Sylvia said. “Even Dante knew that! Allen, Erasmus picked holes in a lot of silly practices of the Roman Church, but he never left it, you know. Neither did his father.”

“His father? How in the world do you know about Erasmus’s father?”

“Allen, it was a novel everyone read.
The Cloister and the Hearth.
It’s all about Erasmus’s father. There’s one scene where an old monk denounces half the practices of the Roman Church as pagan in origin. He was right, too.”

“And still you believe in all this?”

“Well, I didn’t. I was Unitarian, you know. But —”

“But what?”

“Allen, look around you!”

“Yeah. I see it. But the churches want you to believe in stuff that just couldn’t have happened.”

“Such as?”

This wasn’t a conversation I liked, but Sylvia seemed interested. “Such as Herod killing all the children in Bethlehem,” I said. “That never happened. If it had, someone would have recorded it! People would have rebelled! It’s just silly.”

She stopped and laughed at me.

“What? Sylvia, you never struck me as any true believer.”

“I’m not, but you’re the one being silly, Allen. Bethlehem in that time would have been a village of under a thousand people, no more. How many would have been male children two years and younger? Three? Five? Ten? Twenty even? Allen, Herod was a horrible man. The Romans have lots of records of what he did. He killed off whole villages. Starved people. They didn’t revolt. Why would anyone notice a few kids in a little village a dozen miles from Jerusalem?”

“But …” I let it trail off. She’d beaten me on the math!

She was giggling. “And you’re the rationalist,” she said.

“Oh, shut up.”

Fireflakes drifted down on the desert. Sometimes winds drove a storm of fire to the area near the dike, but up on the dike we were safe under the blanket of steam from the river. The steam obscured the view, but we had glimpses of people out in the desert. Most of them ran. None seemed interested in us.

“No Pi shapes,” I said.

Sylvia frowned.

“Two carrying a third as an umbrella. That meme doesn’t seem to have come to this side of the valley.”

“Hey! Mister!”

I looked down to see a teenaged boy. Dark hair, brown eyes. His skin was mottled with burns. He managed a smile.

“Give me a hand up!”

“Sure.” I put down the pickaxe and reached down to help him. He scrambled up onto the dike.

“Thanks. I’ve been trying to get up here for years. Seems like years, anyway. I’m Angelo Corvantis. From Los Angeles. I — uh, like I died just after the millennium. Big car wreck, shouldn’t have let Tony drive, he was loaded. Piled us all up. Don’t know what happened to the others. Just me and Lorna when I woke up. Don’t know what happened to her, either, that Minos thing dropped me here.”

“So now what, where we going?” he demanded.

“We’re going out. Down and down, all the way through Hell,” I told him. I shouldered my pick and started downhill.

“Cool! Can I come with you?”

“You may,” Sylvia said.

He looked puzzled.

“We don’t all make it,” I told him. “Sylvia means you can come along, but it might not work out.”

“Gotcha. Well, we can try, yeah? It’s sure better up here than down there.” His easy smile was infectious, and we wanted to like him.

“Did they tell you anything when they put you in there?” I asked. “About having to keep moving?”

“Not me. There’s some said a demon told them they had to keep moving.” He shrugged. “Nobody told me anything. I kept running to dodge the fireflakes. But I couldn’t climb up here without help. Helped one guy up, but he didn’t stay to help me once he got up here. Bastard. Hope the motherfucker fell back in.”

Sylvia looked shocked.

“Sorry, lady, that’s what he did,” Angelo said. “It’s why he was here.”

“And you?” I asked.

“You first. And what’s your name?”

“I’m Allen. This is Sylvia. I wrote science fiction. Sylvia was a poet. I woke up in the Vestibule. Sylvia was a suicide.”

“What’s a Vestibule?” he asked. “Sylvia? Suicide? You Sylvia Plath?”

“Why, yes —”

“I had a teacher who used to read us your poems. Never knew what they were about, but they scared me.”

“I’m sorry —”

“Why? I ought to have been scared. I should have been scared to get in that car with Tony. How far do we have to go here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “A long way.”

“Yeah. Well, like it ought to be a long way.” He looked across the dike to the desert and shook his head. “Never saw either one of them out there.”

“Either one of what?” Sylvia asked.

“The priests. The ones who done me.”

“Priests — did you?” Sylvia looked bewildered.

“Yeah, sure. That’s why I’m out here.”

“You’re in Hell because you were abused by priests?” I demanded.

“Well, yeah, man, look, I got to liking it. And after Father Steve hanged himself, I heard Father Danny looked funny at some of the altar boys, so I went and found him, and like, yeah, he really wanted it, I could tell, so I went to his place one night. He didn’t want to do it, but I got him to. It was great. What’s the matter?”

Sylvia was staring at him.

“It was Father Danny used to read me your poems,” Angelo said. “He really dug that stuff. I’m sorry, it didn’t mean much to me, but he said it was like rad so I was like I liked it, too, until one night I stole his book and hid it so he wouldn’t be reading it to me anymore.”

Sylvia turned away.

“Guess she’s mad at me,” Angelo said. “How far is it? We nearly there?”

Sylvia walked in stony silence. Something was eating at her. I wondered if it could be the same thing that was bothering me. What was Angelo doing here? Sure, what he’d been doing was awful, but did he know that? It was a priest who got him started.

“Angelo, how old were you when Father Steve abused you?”

“Abused. That’s a good word. They called it molesting,” Angelo said.

“Molesting?” Sylvia said, and laughed.

“Anyway, how old were you?”

“Ten. We carried on till I was fifteen. That’s when he hanged himself.”

“Why did Father Steve hang himself?” I asked.

“Like somebody snitched on what he was doing.”

“Somebody?” I asked.

“Yeah. Well, okay, like it was me. But it never got out who told.”

“Why did you tell on him?” Sylvia asked.

“He wouldn’t give me any more money,” Angelo said.

“Was he giving you money?” I asked.

“Yeah, but like it wasn’t enough.”

“Did he have more?”

“Well, he could have had more,” Angelo said. “There was plenty of money around that church.”

“So you snitched on him because he wouldn’t steal money from the church and give it to you?” I asked.

“Yeah. I mean, like it wouldn’t have been hard for him to get some more money. He just wouldn’t.”

Sylvia shouted at him, “Don’t you see how awful that was?”

Angelo edged away from her. “Sure didn’t work very well.”

“It was wrong whether it worked or not,” Sylvia said.

“Well, I don’t know, it was, like it might have worked. He wasn’t so happy with me anymore anyway, he’d found Malcolm. I told on him and Malcolm. I never let on he was doing me.”

We walked along in silence for a while. Sylvia came over to me. “You understand French, don’t you?”

“Sure, I understand everyone. But everyone understands me, too.”

She was speaking French, but I heard it as English. Or as something I understood, anyway. It was clear that Angelo didn’t understand her. “I know. Allen, do you think that boy belongs in here?”

“You mean in this circle, or in Hell?”

“Either. Both.”

“Dante would say so.”

“Dante was medieval.”

“And you?” I asked.

“I guess he does, but I’m wondering what good it does to put him here. He doesn’t seem to have learned anything from being put in Hell.”

“Pour encourager les autres?”

“Allen, that’s horrible! It can’t be justice to punish one person so that others will learn from the example. Can it?”

“Especially if no one knows,” I said.

“Allen — he’s not ready to leave here.”

“If you really believe that, the remedy is obvious,” I said.

“Sure. But I can’t do it.”

“Me, either.”

“Oh, you can,” Sylvia said. “You’re strong enough. You don’t want to. I don’t think I can do it whether I want to or not.”

Angelo had been watching us suspiciously. “What are you talking about? You talking about me?”

Sylvia turned to him. “Don’t you feel anything? It was horrible what you did to those priests.”

Angelo laughed. “Sure. Both of them buggered me and I’m supposed to be sorry. Can I help it if I liked it?”

“But you knew it was wrong!”

He shrugged. “I know lots of people said it was wrong. But lots of those were getting rich out of it, out of stuff they said happened twenty years ago and they were just remembering it. Bullshit. You get buggered by a priest, you remember it all right. How you going to forget?”

“Why didn’t you tell someone when it first happened to you?” Sylvia asked.

“Why should I? I mean, the big deal to me was that I found out I like being done by a man. I always thought I was supposed to like girls. I never did, but I figured it was because I wasn’t old enough. Then he told me I was never going to like girls.”

“And you believed him?” Sylvia asked.

“He was a priest. It made sense to me, and so what anyway? I liked it, he liked it. Wasn’t anybody else’s business.”

“But you asked him for money,” I said. “You must have thought it was wrong if you could get money to keep from telling.”

He laughed. “Well, I sure knew everybody else thought it was wrong,” he said. “Yeah, maybe I’m sorry about doing that to Father Steve. But he didn’t like me anymore! He had Malcolm. I just wanted him back. But when they found out about him he went and hanged himself. Why’d he do that to me?”

“He didn’t do it to you, he did it to himself,” Sylvia said. “So now he’s a tree. Maybe he’ll be a tree forever. Do you think you ought to do something about that?”

“Nothing I can do.”

“Oh, yes, there’s plenty you can do,” Sylvia said. “If you want to.”

“What good would that do me?” he demanded.

“Well, it would be the right thing to do,” Sylvia said. “And it just might earn your way out of Hell.”

“Why should I earn my way out? I can follow you.”

I told him, “I don’t think you’ll make it. Angelo, there are far worse places than this, and we have to go through them to get to the bottom. There are places for seducers. For thieves. For frauds. And far down there’s a place for those who betrayed friends who trusted them. We have to go through all those places. Any of them sound like you?”