Inferno (20 page)

Eventually the air did come in, in sips, then gulps. I tried to straighten out. It felt as if I were breaking my own back. Maybe my back
was
broken. But the sword would have been worse.

Could I feel my feet? Yes.

Okay. Your spine’s intact. Just lie here awhile. It will heal
. Sure, we always healed.

Hey, Carpentier. Why was it Benito always healed before you did?

Why shouldn’t he? He was one of the paid staff.

Then why did he get hurt at all?

A woman’s voice said, “What’ve you got?”

“Uh?” I still couldn’t get more coherent than that.

“What’ve you got?” she repeated patiently. I moved my head around, slowly. It was dark and gloomy. I became aware of hideous screeching sounds, moans, screams of pain and rage, snarling dogs, the cacophony of Hell.

She was sitting against the sloping side of the trench, naked, her body marked with pustules and the scars of older eruptions of the skin. She didn’t seem more able to move than I was.

But the pain in my back was easing. I said, “Broken back, probably. What’ve you got?”

“Everything. Syphilis. Gonorrhea. Yaws. Trench mouth. Everything you can think of.”

“Uh huh. I know what
you’ve
been doing.”

She wailed, “But I
didn’t
! That’s why it’s so unfair!”

My eyes were getting accustomed to the gloom that hung thick down here in the pit. There were others lying about the floor and the sides of the gully. Most of them looked deathly ill.

Across from me was a man scrambling among thousands of pills. There must have been every variety of medication ever invented or imagined: tablets, capsules of many hues, bottles of liquid, tiny pills and pills that would choke a horse. He groaned in pain as he held up a pill and squinted at it. Finally he decided: he flung the pill back into the bathtub of them next to him.

He sat for a moment. Then he moaned, pressing his hands hard against his belly. “It’s eating me alive!” he screamed. He scrabbled for another pill. This time he gulped it without looking at it. It didn’t seem to help, because he screamed even louder and went back to his inspection routine.

I looked a question at the girl. She shrugged. “He sold cancer cures. They only worked if you didn’t go to a doctor. Somewhere in that pile there may be a pill that cures him.”

“What about the rest?”

“Some don’t do anything. Some make it worse.”

I shuddered, then froze as something came howling past on all fours, foam dripping from its jaws. I’d thought it was an animal, but it wasn’t. It was a man.

“Counterfeiters. Counterfeiters always get rabies,” said the woman. “If they bite you it takes a long time to heal.”

And I couldn’t move! There was nothing to do but watch.

Men and women with peeling scabs and an itch that drove them to tear at themselves. A man with no ears, unable to move and screaming for water.

“Listen!” he shouted. “Tell Satan! Anyone! Tell Satan there is a plot to overthrow him. For water I will reveal the names of the plotters! Tell him!”

A distant voice shouted, “Titus, shut up!” and choked off in a scream.

They were all deathly ill, and they were all in pain—

—except one, and he was startling by contrast. He sat against the slope of the gully, a few feet from the girl and across from me. A middle-aged cherub, comfortably over-weight, his blue eyes twinkling above a mad and happy smile.

Certainly he was mad. Was it a sickness of the mind, or had some vile bacterium reached his brain?

I had to get out of here. The most ferocious contagious diseases ever to wrack mankind were all around me. I tried to move, and stopped at once. My legs wouldn’t obey, and it felt as if my spine were being twisted in a vise. Had I caught something already? Spinal meningitis, maybe?

The madman’s wandering blue eyes found me. He said, “I was a psychiatrist.”

“I didn’t ask.” In fact, I’d already learned more of Hell than I really wanted to know. I only wanted out.
Don’t tell me any more!
I closed my eyes.

“They trusted me,” the mad voice said happily. “They thought we knew what we were doing. For fifty bucks an hour I listened to their life stories. Wouldn’t you?”

He subsided. The woman said, “He’s crazy.”

“Thanks. I really wondered about that,” I told her without opening my eyes.

“Listen, you fell over the edge. Have you been upslope? Have you seen a lot of what’s up there?”

“A lot.”

“What do they do to, shall we say, ladies of the evening?”

I opened my eyes. She was tense, waiting for my words.

“I didn’t notice anything special for whores. Why?”

“I, I . . . Listen, some girls don’t actually sleep with the customers. They take a gentleman to a motel, they get their money in advance, then they disappear. Sometimes you can do better than that. You’re just getting down to business when your boyfriend walks in the door. You see?”

“Sure.” I’d been robbed that way in England.

“Well,” she said, “you’d think that wouldn’t be as bad as being an actual . . . prostitute.” And she looked at me.

Somehow the memory was very dim now, of a time on Earth when a London girl had propositioned me, taken my money, and vanished from a bathroom with an unsuspected second door, leaving me in rage and frustrated lust. If I’d caught her I’d have killed her. But that was long ago, and nothing looked bad next to where I was now.

So I lied. “They’d be downslope from here. I haven’t been there yet.”

Satisfied, she sank back and forgot me in the examination of her ruined body.

The mad psychiatrist noticed me again. “We were just playing,” he said dreamily. “Tinkering with something we didn’t understand. I knew. Oh, I knew. Let me tell you.”

“Don’t tell me.” They kept hurting at me, all of them!

“He was a catatonic. He was like a rubber doll. You could put him in any position, and he’d stay there for hours. We tried all sorts of things in those days. Shock therapy, insulin shock, lobotomy. Punish the patient for not noticing the outside world.”

“Or for not noticing you.”

I meant it to hurt, but he nodded happily. “So we put him in a hotbox and started raising the temperature. We watched him through a window. First he just sweated. Then he started to move around. At a hundred and thirty he said his first words in sixteen years. ‘
Get me the fuck out of here!
’”

The mad eyes found me, and his face seemed to cave in. The cherubic smile vanished. Urgently he said, “Get me the fuck out of here!”

“I can’t. I’ll be lucky to get out myself.” I tried moving again. There was pain, but not enough to keep me in that place. I stood gingerly and started up the slope.

The girl cried, “You can’t do that! Come back here! Come back!”

I kept going. There were rocks to pull myself up, cracks to use as footholds. I’d climbed just far enough when another hydrophobia case raged past, biting and chewing everyone he passed. A rock rolled from beneath my foot, and pain grated in my spine as I caught myself.

The rabid man screamed at the psychiatrist, but the cherubic look had returned and he was smiling dreamily at the opposite wall. When I reached the top I remembered who had been in the last pit on the Eighth Circle. Frauds. Falsifiers. False Witnesses.

23

T

hat
was the last of the
bolgias
. Now the way led across an empty, rocky land. I turned and looked at the ten canyons rising upward behind me, light flickering from some, others marked by rising smoke or rolling heated air. It had not been a pleasant journey.

Far ahead, through a twilight gloom that would just have had drivers turning on their headlights, I saw what seemed a cluster of great towers. There was nothing else to see, nothing at all.

Benito’s evil counsel had brought me this far. Now it was too late. I could get back a little way, probably to the fifth pit, possibly as far as the cliff. But I’d never talk Geryon into taking me up that cliff . . . and there were just too many places where Allen Carpentier might belong.

Could I talk the monster into summoning Minos? That could get me all the way back to the Vestibule. Yeah, and into the bottle again. If I was lucky. I hadn’t forgotten that burrowing this far into Hell might be a crime in itself. Minos had told me that I could choose far worse for myself than “justice.” Maybe I’d already made the choice.

Or . . . I could just sit down. In this empty borderland I could spend a good piece of eternity before some angel noticed me.

I sat down.

It was very peaceful.

It was, in fact, the only completely empty spot I’d seen in Hell. Why? Maybe it was reserved for some brand-new sin, something that hadn’t been invented yet . . . say, a development of brain research or genetics. At some time in the indefinite future I might have to vacate fast.

Meanwhile, it was better than the bottle. I could see my navel.

Time passed without leaving footprints. Days, I think. The stinks of Hell were still in my nostrils. The ever-present background noise might have been soothing if I hadn’t known what it was: millions of moans and cries blended by distance. But nobody was hurting me or hurting at me. I didn’t have to watch people getting sliced up by demon cars, or distorted into obscene shapes.

I sat and dreamed of the past. I wondered idly about the looming towers I could see in the dark distance. I wondered at Benito’s ultimate purpose in luring me here. But none of it seemed to matter. I thought even curiosity had been burned out of me.

That would have been nice. I would have liked to turn my mind off for a long time. But it wouldn’t turn off. Whatever quiet I’d found here, there was still Hell around me, and I hurt with the need to know why.

God had created human souls; could He not uncreate the failures? God had created sleep; could He not put the failures to sleep, forever? There were no good excuses for Hell. I thought of some unsettling bad ones:

The universe would fly off its axis if Hell’s agony did not balance Heaven’s bliss.

Or: Part of Heaven’s bliss was the knowledge that lots of nasty people were suffering terribly.

Or the old standby: We were in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.

I got restless. The towers kept catching at my eye: blurred gray shadows on the horizon. Skyscrapers? A city in Hell? Quarters to house the maintenance crew for Infernoland? Or were they the true entrance, the tourist entrance?

But I was only playing with plots. I didn’t believe in Infernoland anymore. This was Hell, and I knew it. I finally realized what was really bothering me.

To all intents and purposes I was back in the bottle.

I got up. I walked toward the towers. No harm in looking.

They weren’t towers.

They were giants, enormous humanoids, buried in the earth from the navel down. I stopped well out of their reach to study them. Their enormous eyes found me and pinned me to the landscape like a butterfly on a board, then shifted away. I was not worth their attention.

I was glad. Unreasonably I felt that those tremendous deep eyes could see everything there was to know about me.

One was mad. He looked down at me hopefully and said, “Ildurb fistenant imb?” His face fell when I did not respond. Alien language, alien being. What were these aliens doing in human Hell?

Not serving Big Juju. Not hardly. Miles of chain bound their arms to their sides.

There were giants in the Bible and Titans in mythology. But no archaeologist had ever found human bones this size. And how could they survive Earth’s gravity? The square-cube law should have flattened them into mountains of hamburger.

Maybe they weren’t from this universe at all. An attacking army from another universe made by another creator? The science-fiction writer in me, the late Allen Carpentier, wanted very much to see their legs and feet. They must be disproportionately large and sturdy to support their weight . . . unless they had developed in a lighter gravity field . . .

While Carpentier the trapped damned soul was examining the chains that wrapped another of the giants.

For the giants were buried just outside a chin-high wall: their chins, not mine. The wall looked too smooth to climb. I walked up to the chained giant, ready to jump, but it wasn’t necessary. The chain looked like anchor cable. Whoever had wrapped it round him had a fine eye for detail. He’d have been lucky to shrug his eyebrows.

Now, what would Benito have done here? Climbed the giant, of course.

The thought of climbing such a monster gave me pause. Yet I was sure I could do it. Up the chain, stepping in the links, as far as his shoulder; beware of snapping teeth. Then onto the wall and down.

If Benito had told the truth . . . if what I remembered of Dante was true . . . I would then be in the last Circle of Hell, the Circle of Traitors. Traitors to nation, to overlord, to benefactor, to parents and siblings. A great ice plain, and the Traitors embedded in it. There would be nothing but the cold to stop me from crossing it, and I knew I couldn’t freeze to death.

It looked so easy. What had Benito left out?

I remembered the great ice plain well enough. The college boy had been jolted at finding part of Hell already frozen over. Benito hadn’t said anything that jarred with my own memories of Dante.

But there had to be a joker in the deck somewhere. Benito had been a power in Hell. He’d given orders to others of Hell’s minions. He’d demonstrated demonic strength against a tank of a man in the great swamp.

Carpentier, why didn’t he do that to you?

Maybe it was guilt that stopped him. He’d writhed and torn at the ground, but he hadn’t actually hit me, not once. He’d uprooted jagged rocks while trying to use them as anchors, but he hadn’t tried to hit me with them. And for all his presumed safe-conduct, he was back where Minos had sentenced him, with the Evil Counselors.

Maybe Satan or God or Big Juju had rendered some kind of judgment against Benito. With me as the agent. But
why hadn’t Benito fought
?