Escape From Hell (9 page)

“Same way Dante did. I used the formula. ‘This has been willed where what is willed must be.’ ”

Sylvia giggled. “That’s not what Dante did! Virgil threatened Plutus with Michael the Archangel.”

“Plutus.”

“Yes. Mythical god of wealth.”

“A mythical god in a monotheist Hell,” I said. “Does that make sense?”

“It might. Before God revealed Himself, this world was fair game for everyone. Angels, devils, angels who wouldn’t choose sides and liked to play at being gods. Maybe even gods. In Arabia they were known as djinn.”

“And you believe that?”

She laughed. It was a cheery sound in an awful place. “I remember believing it when Jack Lewis was explaining it to me,” she said.

“Plutus. You have a better memory than I do.”

“Allen, I’ve had a long time to think about this place. I remember a lot of Dante, especially his best scenes. All right, you got past Plutus. What else did you find in the Fourth Circle?”

•    •    •

I
noticed the woman first, from old habit. An amply endowed blond woman, she sat with her back against a big spherical boulder. She stood as we approached, and smiled at me. She’d been a beauty once.

The boulder loomed above her, glowing with a blue translucency. The woman stood as if she could hide it.

Rosemary knew her. “Vickie Lynn.”

The blonde looked puzzled. “They don’t call me that anymore.”

Rosemary laughed. “Anna Nicole, then.”

“Where did you know me?”

“Wal–Mart. We were both clerks. Before you got famous.”

“Oh! I’m sorry, I should remember you —”

“I’d have been shocked if you had,” Rosemary said. “Allen, you wouldn’t know about Vickie — Anna Nicole. She was Playmate of the Year, then she married a billionaire. Scandals everywhere after that.”

Vickie glared.

I said, “Nice rock.” She didn’t answer, so I asked, “Why are you here?”

“I don’t know!” Vickie wailed. “Everyone said I married Howie for his money, but I didn’t! I mean, well, he knew what he was getting! And he got it! He got everything he thought he would. I made him happy.”

“J. Howard Marshall was eighty–nine. She was twenty–five,” Rosemary said dryly. “It was her fourth marriage.”

“Third! And I was twenty–six! And he died happy. I earned everything I got from him.”

“I just bet you did,” Rosemary said.

“You’re not being fair,” Vickie–Anna wailed.

“But why here?” I asked.

“I don’t know! I didn’t cheat anyone. I wasn’t unfaithful.”

“We’re getting out of here,” I told her. “Out of Hell. Want to come with us?”

Rosemary didn’t look happy, but she didn’t say anything.

“I think I’ll wait,” Vickie–Anna said, her hand in touch with the blue boulder.

“Good thinking,” Rosemary said. She pulled me down the path. It got steeper, then leveled out.

This part of the Fourth Circle was empty. We were in a lot the size of the Rose Bowl, surrounded by hedgerows. The ground was hard clay, packed down and baked in the heat.

“What is this?” Rosemary asked. She pointed to some deep grooves in the hard–baked clay. “What would have made those?”

“Hoarders and Wasters,” I told her. “They roll big rocks at each other. The rocks are diamonds, big ones with the facets worn off. I’ve seen it.” I realized this wasn’t making much sense. “You’d have to read the poem, I think.”

“I wonder if rolling rocks would be better than running after banners? There aren’t any wasps here. What makes them keep rolling the rocks if they get tired of doing it?”

I shrugged. “Whatever it was, it must have stopped. It looks like these have escaped. One of the rocks got left, and Anna’s hoarding it.”

“Escaped. Could that have been your doing?”

“I don’t think so. This doesn’t look much like the way I came last time. We sure didn’t see any half–naked old man with a crown. Or Playboy Bunnies, for that matter. I still can’t figure what she’s doing here.”

“Waster,” Rosemary said. “She got a lot of money when her husband died, and went through it all. Booze, drugs, men. Playboys and princes. Classic Waster.”

We crossed the field and looked for a way through the hedge. Sure enough, there was an opening, as if someone had rolled an enormous rock at the hedge at high speed and crashed through.

The ground dropped off on the other side of the opening, but not far enough to mark a new circle. We were standing at the lip of a pit. Far below was smoking waste: twisted steel, smashed concrete and black char, stench of rotted and burned meat and blood. Rising above it, rising up to the level where we stood and then far above that, were ephemeral transparent images of buildings.

The images changed like dreams. Each one appeared, hung there just long enough that you thought it might stay, then faded into another shape, or vanished leaving nothing but the black pit below. I could make out tiny human figures that persisted longer, wandering through the phantom pictures, changing them with a gesture, sometimes fighting. Sometimes when a structure vanished the people fell, down and down into the pit.

Tremendous, beautiful buildings replaced each other too fast to be appreciated. Other, smaller cubistic ghosts rose out of the pit. Some were silly. More than one was unbelievably ugly. They flickered on and off, none ever solid. A line of elevators running up a fluted cylinder was suddenly gone, and tiny human shapes drifted down.

“Allen, what is that?” Rosemary demanded.

“I have no idea.”

“It looks like — Allen, it’s the World Trade Center! Ground Zero!”

I remembered the World Trade Center. My publisher had taken me for dinner to the Windows on the World restaurant at the top. It looked out on New York Harbor. Far away and far below was the Statue of Liberty. I’d been up in the lady’s crown once, and that was high enough to give anyone acrophobia. Now I was looking down on the torch!

“This doesn’t look anything like the World Trade Center,” I told her.

“Oh! You died before September eleventh. Before the Millennium.”

“Well, yes —”

“Allen, the World Trade Center is gone. Both towers.”

“Gone? They decided to tear down the tallest buildings in the world? Now there’s waste!”

“No, no, they were destroyed by terrorists. Muslim fanatics. They hijacked airplanes and flew them into the towers, crashed in about two–thirds of the way up. The fuel burned and burned, and then the towers collapsed, just fell straight down into a pile of rubble. There were people trapped on the upper floors, above the fires. Some jumped. Allen, it was a long nightmare.”

“Both towers?”

“Yes. Two planes for the World Trade Center towers. The third plane hit the Pentagon. No one knows where they meant to crash the fourth airplane, probably the White House, or the Capitol, but the passengers took the plane back and crashed it in an empty field.”

It sounded like the kind of story I might have written, but Rosemary was dead serious. “Flew them into the towers. You mean deliberately?”

“Yes. Some of them took flying lessons from American flight schools. One told the instructors he didn’t need to learn how to take off and land. Just how to navigate and fly the plane.”

“Why would Muslims want to harm the United States?”

Rosemary sighed. “Allen, there’s so much you don’t know! During the Cold War the United States supported Muslim fanatic insurgents against the Soviet Union. We gave them weapons and money, and they built organizations. When the Soviet Union collapsed —”

“The Soviet Union collapsed. The Cold War is over?”

“Yes, it came apart after the Gulf War, our first invasion of Iraq, and —”

“The
first
invasion of Iraq. You’re right, it’s too much. I’m still trying to get my head around the airplanes. They intended to crash? To die with the planes?”

“Yes, of course. A suicide mission. There have been a lot of suicide bombings. I guess most of them happened after you died. They started in Palestine, bombers going into cafés in Israel and blowing themselves up.”

I remembered the bearded fanatic I met on the ice. “Were there a lot of those?”

•    •    •

“S
uicide bombers!” Sylvia was excited. “We could use them, if you can find some! But I bet you won’t find any in this grove. This is too peaceful for them. Allen, do you think they get to wander around blowing themselves up?”

“Sure seems like it.”

“What would happen if you could get one to come here? What would happen to me if I got blown into — well, into sawdust and splinters?”

“I don’t know —”

“Allen, it’s worth trying!”

“You really want out of here, don’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, Allen, I do.” She sighed. “Oh, well. Tell me the rest of it.”

•    •    •

T
here was only one way around the pit, a winding ledge just wide enough for both of us. The last time I’d been in this circle I could hear the Hoarders and the Wasters smashing their boulders and yelling at each other, but there was none of that here. There was a cacophony of sounds, sirens, people yelling, screams. They got louder as we went around the lip of the pit.

The trail led us to a building. It looked like a construction shack, only a lot bigger. Clapboard and plywood, it looked very temporary. The trail led to the door, and there wasn’t any way around it.

“What is this place?” Rosemary asked.

I shook my head. “Never saw it before. There’s a sign.”

SUBMIT DESIGN PROPOSALS INSIDE

“Design proposals?” I said.

“I know! Allen, it’s a contest. They have a contest for the design of the buildings to replace the World Trade Center. It’s supposed to be a memorial for all those who were killed, a monument, but the land’s valuable, and everyone wants to do something with it. They keep coming up with new ideas.”

We went inside.

Inside it looked much bigger, one big room with cubicles and a long hall through them to a door at the far end. Almost every cubicle had people in it, at least two, sometimes more. They looked through big stacks of blueprints. Every now and then everyone in the cubicle would vanish, poof! Just gone. When I tried to talk to people they ignored me, or shouted. “Can’t you see we’re busy! Go find another inspector!”

We went down the central corridor toward the far door.

People were coming in the door. They all carried blueprints and they’d rush down to find an empty cubicle to spread out their blueprints on the drafting tables. Others would come join them in the cubicle. They’d all shout at each other.

I couldn’t stand this. I led Rosemary into one of the empty cubicles and waited. There was a stack of blueprints already on the drafting table. They looked to be for a skyscraper, but none of the drawings made any sense to me. “Can you read these things?” I asked Rosemary.

“No.”

“Me, neither. They don’t seem right, but I don’t know why.”

Two men came in with more blueprints. They spread them out on top of ours and invited us to look.

“What are we looking for?” I asked.

“Hey, Mac, we don’t have much time! Look at this, will you?” He was a big guy, burly, dressed in work pants and a short–sleeved shirt and a hard hat, and he was all business. “Come on, come on, we have to find the flaws!”

“Why are we doing this?” Rosemary asked.

A woman came in. Short hair, knee–length skirt, stockings and heels, but everything was filthy. There was mud in her hair. “Quick, oh, please, quick!” She was frantically tracing out designs on the blueprint. The drawings were changing as she moved her finger over them! “Look, maybe this was it, maybe I got it, I think I have it!”

“You sure?” The burly man sounded doubtful. He looked up at me. “Hey, Mac, what do you think?”

“Sure, looks good,” I said, for no reason.

“All right! We’ll go for this.”

Everything changed. We were in another room. Bare steel, no furniture. There was a window looking out on Hell far below. We were near the top of a very tall building. Rosemary was gibbering. “Allen, where are we? What’s happening?”

“What is happening?” I asked the burly man. “I’m Allen Carpenter. I —”

“Hey, I read your books. Gus Bateman. You’re new here, then?”

“Yes. Where are we?”

“In the new World Trade Center. Maybe — maybe this one will stay!”

“Maybe it will stay?”

“You are new. I thought you were dead a long time ago.”

“I was, but what are we talking about?”

“If we get the right design it stays up, and we get to stay here and — oh shit!”

Something snapped below us, a girder maybe. Floor and walls shuddered. Outer walls broke free and slid. Then it all turned transparent, and the floor started to fall away from us, and we were in midair, supported by nothing, and falling.

Bateman screamed, “Somebody has to be in charge of choosing a design!” His arms, legs, head made a five–pointed star.

I kept thinking I’d done this before, and wondering if I’d end up in a bottle the way I had the last time. It took forever to hit the ground.

I wasn’t in a bottle. I just couldn’t move. Every bone was shattered. It hurt, as bad as it had hurt when I was blown to pieces. I knew I’d heal, but what I really wanted was to pass out.

Rosemary was in a fetal position next to me. There was rubble all around us. By the time I could stand up she seemed solid enough, but she didn’t want to move. “Come on!” I told her. “Before they build another one above us!”

She didn’t move.

“Rosemary! You don’t belong here! Whatever’s going on, you weren’t part of it. You didn’t even live in New York.” I was babbling, because none of this made any sense to me, and there were shadowy walls forming around me. “Rosemary! Come on!”

She got up, but I had to pull her along as I looked for a way out. The walls were more solid now, but there was an EXIT sign leading to a stairway. I pulled Rosemary up to a door and ran through it. We were on a street. Dust blew everywhere. There were sirens, and people screaming, and everyone was running away. I could feel the panic, and it must have been contagious because Rosemary ran with me.

I don’t know how long we ran. At first we were in city streets, then we were back in the pit on a narrow trail that led upward until once again we were blocked by a building.