Escape From Hell (5 page)

“And now?”

“Now what, Allen?”

“Now what do you believe?”

“I don’t know! I believe in you, I guess. You could have got out of here. You know what it’s like! And you didn’t. You believe in something. Tell me what.”

“I believe in justice.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Doesn’t everyone want justice?”

“Some of us want mercy.”

“All right. Justice and mercy. I want to believe that everyone in here can get out.”

“Do you really? Everyone? Doesn’t anyone deserve to be here?”

“Benito Mussolini got out!” I was shouting now. “If he didn’t deserve to be here forever, who does?”

“Allen, you know him. I didn’t. Did he deserve to be here?”

“The man I knew didn’t deserve to be here.”

“And he got out. Don’t you have your answer, then? Allen, why are you so — well, fervent, about justice?”

I laughed. “I always was. My mother would have said it was because I was the youngest in a big family. I needed to know there were rules and fair play.”

“That makes sense, but I didn’t have a big family, and I believe in justice. Jack Lewis said everyone, deep down, believes in justice even if they don’t want it. We know what fair play is.”

“What about you?” I asked. I looked up into the bare–branched tree. “I don’t think you deserve to be here, but there’s no way to get you out.”

“It’s only unfair if I can never leave. Maybe there is a way out for me,” Sylvia said.

“What?”

“Just don’t leave me.”

“I didn’t think Rosemary belonged in here,” I said.

“She wasn’t in here,” Sylvia reminded me. “She was in the Vestibule. Where you started. Where did you lose her?”

•    •    •

W
e were debating the issue, we seven. Why would we have to pray if God knew everything? I had six followers, and they all had opinions.

“Free will. If you really accept God you pray. The one follows the other.”

“And you’re telling me God needs us to praise him?”

“It is commanded that we praise Him!”

“Then He must need praise.”

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow!” Sung, in a pretty good voice.

“Not just any praise,” I said. “I’ve been to the pit of the flatterers. You don’t want to be in there! Hey, we’re here.”

Charon’s ferryboat was different from what Dante had described, bigger, but it hadn’t changed since I first saw it. A medium–sized ferryboat, single deck, ugly, run by an old man with a long beard and a bad disposition. I never saw the propulsion system, but I never saw Charon use his oar except to hurry people along.

There was a big crowd coming when we got there. I waited for them, hoping to get aboard without being noticed. No such luck.

“You again!” Charon shouted at me. “Where’s Benito?”

I pointed up.

“Well, you won’t get away again.” He brained me with his oar, and I fell into the scuppers.

“You are unfair!” Rosemary was shouting.

“Silence!” Charon shouted. “Another word and I put you back ashore.” He lifted his oar to whack me again.

“Don’t!” Rosemary shouted.

Another bolus of people arrived just then, and Charon got busy packing them aboard. I’d seen riders being packed that way in Tokyo, levered into a subway train until they were thick as sardines. Rosemary came and crouched above me, protecting.

Dante had passed out on the boat trip across Acheron, but I didn’t have any such luck. I lay there, dizzy and hurt.

Chapter 5

First Circle

Virtuous Pagans

People were there with solemn eyes and slow,
Of great authority in their countenance;
They spake but seldom and with gentle voices.

C
haron docked at a broad avenue, walled on either side. The road led downhill as far as I could see. Charon used his oar to drive us all off the boat. I staggered off with my arm over Rosemary’s shoulder.

“Auf Wiedersehen!” he shouted at me. The boat backed away.

The crowd surged down the broad avenue. I couldn’t see very far in the dirty air, but I knew where they were going. I wasn’t ready to see Minos again. I thought my best chance of finding someone who’d go with me was right here, if I could get in.

“Why does he say he will see you again?” Rosemary Bennett asked.

She was still with me, the only follower I had left. Where were the others? They must have disappeared while I was dazed by Charon’s blow. Driven to see Minos?

I shrugged. Decided I could stand. “He’s seen me before. And Benito several times. I wonder how many more?”

“More?”

“How many of us are wandering loose? There’s me and Benito, and the exploding man —”

“Where are we?” Rosemary indicated the walls.

“First Circle. Virtuous Pagans. You never read Dante?”

“No. Italian, wasn’t he? Some friend of Mussolini’s? Virtuous Pagans sounds nice. I was a pagan. Well, if being an agnostic Universalist is pagan, and I guess it is. I think I’d belong there, is there a way in?”

“I was agnostic. I thought I’d fit in there, too, but they threw me out.”

“Why?”

“They didn’t want me. Maybe I wasn’t virtuous enough.”

“Oh. Maybe I wasn’t, either.”

Wherever Charon had dropped us didn’t look anything like what I’d seen the last time I was in this circle. The pavement beneath our feet looked like macadam. The walls were smoother and higher. They rose up on either side of us, higher on my left, and a different color of stone. The construction was different, too. The wall on the right showed each course of stone, every ashlar defined. The left one had been plastered over, all one smooth surface.

One thing was the same. There were no smells. There was no smell to the air at all, neither pleasant nor stenches. It was just air.

I walked between the high walls, hoping to find a gate. They didn’t like intruders in there, and my wasp stings had me in a nasty mood. But the stings were healing, and there wasn’t any gate. Benito and I had climbed, that first time. Benito had been incredibly strong. I thought it was because he’d been strong in life, but no one is that strong.

I didn’t see any handholds at all. If I were going to climb, the left wall was far too smooth. The right didn’t look much better, but at least there were some grooves between the courses.

“It’s nice here,” Rosemary said. “Thank you. I should have taken the ferryboat a long time ago.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Scared. When you hear stories of what they do to you farther in, the wasps don’t seem so bad. ‘All hope abandon.’ We’re dead, how could there be hope?”

“Ever think of prayer?” I asked.

“Sure. Well, not me so much. Some did, but I wasn’t sure who I should pray to. Did you pray?”

“Not really — well, yes, once.”

“Did it work?”

“I didn’t think so at the time, but that’s when Benito came and got me out of the bottle.”

“Maybe we should try it,” Rosemary said.

“I wouldn’t know who to pray to, either. And I guess I wouldn’t mean it.”

She giggled.

“What?”

“Bertrand Russell’s prayer. ‘O God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.’ ”

“As I said. I guess I wouldn’t mean it.”

We’d come to an intersection of sorts. The left–hand wall went on, but the right–hand wall turned a corner, making a T intersection. We turned right just in time to avoid a crowd rushing down the main path.

“Why are they in such a hurry?” Rosemary asked.

“Dante says they want judgment. Driven by guilt.”

“I don’t feel all that guilty,” Rosemary said.

“Me, either, but we both started in the Vestibule.” And maybe I did, a little. I’d seen what others got for doing things not a lot worse than I had.

The path ahead was rough. It looked like an old streambed, muddy, clogged with debris and random boulders. You had to really want to go that way.

“Is that a bridge?” Rosemary pointed way ahead, down the path to the right.

“Your eyes are better than mine.” I led her down that way. It was difficult. We could go over the rocks, or we could hop from rock to rock. Neither way was much fun. I lost my footing and took a header into a boulder. It hurt like crazy.

“It’s a bridge,” she announced.

It looked like an old wooden railroad trestle, about two feet above the walls. There were more boulders under it, and it seemed I might be able to climb the boulders and get high enough to reach the trestle.

“Worth a try,” I told Rosemary.

“But what is it?” she asked.

I thought about it. “Maybe there are different kinds of Virtuous Pagans. They keep them segregated, but there’s a way to get from one part to another. I don’t know why the Builders would do it that way.”

“Builders?”

I explained that there was a time when I thought this place was a vast amusement park, Infernoland, and I thought I could psych out the designers.

“You don’t believe that!”

“Not now. Seemed reasonable once.”

I scrambled up onto the boulders. The trestle was just too high to reach even if I jumped.

Rosemary came up behind me. “Lift me.”

That was how I’d got over the wall the first time. Benito lifted me up. I helped Rosemary climb on my shoulders. When we both stretched she could get a grip on the trestle. She pulled herself up.

“I didn’t think I could do that,” she said. “I worked out, but I was never that strong.” She lay on one of the trestle braces and reached down. “I think I can catch you if you jump.”

“Worth a try.” I jumped, and we caught each other in the aerial artist grip, each holding the other’s wrist. She pulled and I reached. Between us I was able to get a grip on the trestle. I really needed her help to pull myself up the rest of the way.

We were on a bridge that led down inside the walls.

On my left, now, was a veldt, host to some dry, scrubby plants. I looked in vain for human habitants.

On my right — but motion caught my eye and I looked left again. A score of small black men and women and even smaller children were standing upright, studying us. The plants must have hidden them.

I stepped to the railing, waved at them, got no response. I shouted, “You can leave here! Follow me!” and heard my speech twist in my mouth, with a lot of clicking in the back of my tongue.

The women and children disappeared as the men drew blowpipes and fired. I threw myself back. Darts struck around me, and two hit me anyway, one on my right leg, one in the neck.

Rosemary pulled me to my feet and we ran, hand in hand. My leg collapsed. She dragged me far enough to hide us, then quit. Darts were still falling.

•    •    •

S
ylvia said, “Warriors can be virtuous.”

I exclaimed, “I see it! Sylvia, they thought I was telling them to get out of their land. Of course they defended themselves.”

“Peasant mentality?”

“I guess. We saw a lot of that on our way down. People in Hell who didn’t want to leave. I don’t know why. Why would anyone want to be here?”

“Not ready to face why they are here?” Sylvia mused.

“Don’t know. Anyway, I found my footing and we staggered away, uphill.”

“Uphill,” Sylvia said. “Of course you went up.”

“Why of course?”

“You wanted to see if you could do it. I heard you, Allen, you’ve been talking to yourself about how hard it is to go back up once you start down. Of course you wanted to know.”

•    •    •

U
pward took us above gardens and mosques. “Not here,” Rosemary said. “I know what they think of women.”

I nodded and took us past. Now a tremendous Mayan or Aztec pyramid loomed above us on the left. Rosemary said, “Not there, either,” and laughed.

The trestle gave way to a swinging bridge with no handrails. We crawled. Below us a garden ran off into the distance. Children ran through the plants, laughing, chasing each other, all sizes, all known colors. Some stopped to point up at us.

I looked at Rosemary. “Think they need teachers?”

She gave it some thought; shook her head.

Maybe next time. We moved on.

We passed a stretch of jungle, and a line of punji sticks half–hidden below us.

The next patch didn’t look a lot different from where I’d landed the last time I climbed a wall. Lots of open ground. Grassy fields. Classical buildings, like Greek or Roman villas and temples, colonnaded porches around a central atrium. Far off on top of a hill was a colossal building I recognized.

“The planetarium,” I told Rosemary. “With every planet and star and galaxy in the universe, as far as I know. I’d still be there looking if they hadn’t thrown me out.”

“Why did they throw you out?”

“I don’t belong here.”

“I feel — Allen, it feels right.”

“Sure. No wasps. It’s quiet, it doesn’t stink, and the ground’s not covered with worms. Why wouldn’t it feel right?”

“Is that why you’ve come here?” she demanded.

“No, I’ve come here to talk them into leaving.”

The bridge reached a fair distance beyond the wall. There were steps at the end. When we got to it, a growing crowd was looking up at me from below the stairs. I said, “Allen Carpenter. How’re you doing?” Recognized a face and called, “Lester!”

One of the nearer souls, toga with purple border, said, “You’ve been here before. We threw you out.”

“Yes, you did. I have stories to tell. Hey, Lester!”

Lester was hanging back in the fringes, grinning, short enough to be half–hidden. He looked younger than he had when I’d known him, but the bearded grin was Lester, all right. Writer, editor, raconteur. His business cards said “Expert.” He was still alive when I died.

“Stories,” a green–robed woman said. “Tell us a story.”

“There is a way out of Hell,” I said. “You can take it.”

“Then why are you here?” the purple–robed man demanded.

“I came back to tell you,” I said. “I have been all the way to the bottom. There’s a grotto there. Quiet. Peaceful. And beyond it is the way out.”

“And you know this? You have seen what is beyond?”

“Up to a point,” I admitted. “Benito climbed out, and never came back. I saw him leave.”

“And you have come back,” someone said. “Just to tell us. Admirable.”