"I'm no demon. Can't they tell?"
"They seem to think, these baby bolshies, that anyone human should've rallied to their cause already."
"Therefore, we're not human."
"A slippery syllogism, but enough, to knot around our necks, I m afraid."
The man was slight and precise, an aristocratic sparrow. His hawk-like triangular face seemed to seize upon each new morsel of fact and try to wring from it every savor of significance.
Markham looked up the line of hopeless, dejected captives, to the booths beyond. "What're those things?"
Delightful little telephone booths? Electrocution chambers, actually."
As Markham watched, two of the guards took a stiff-faced man out of the line and slapped him.
Then they spat questions at him in heavily accented English.
The man was fat but was well muscled, too, with a quick intelligence in his eyes. He licked at some blood that trickled from his lip, eyeing the two guards with contempt. Markham wondered if the resemblance to the Spanish dictator. Franco, was coincidental. Apparently none of the others noticed it.
But this figure had a certain dignity, a sturdy patient endurance that bespoke a past of authority.
"Where you from?" a guard asked the bleeding man.
"I live down the valley."
"Where that?"
He told them it was near the river that ran down on the other side of the far hills.
"Why you come here?"
"Trying to get away from the rest of you. You burned my house."
"You stay where you are, you okay. Why come here?"
"I thought the fighting would be down below."
"Why you think that?" the other guard asked suspiciously, prodding the fat man with the rusty barrel of his Springfield rifle.
"I thought you'd be brave enough to attack the demons. They were all along the river."
"You think we run?" the guard demanded sharply. The fat man smiled with undisguised disdain and said nothing.
The guard spat oat angrily, "You work with demons."
"Bullshit."
"You not demon maybe but you work with."
"Did you see them tear some of your friends apart? Back there on the road?"
"You there?"
"Sure. I saw a lot of you run away."
"Not us!" the guard said too quickly, too loudly.
"The big yellow ones, they pulled the hands off first. Then they broke the elbows and then the knees."
"We not retreat!"
"Somebody did."
Markham noticed one guard was clenching and unclenching his hands, breathing hard, eyes white. "You from demons!"
"No."
"You let demons give it to you in the ass."
The fat man said slowly, "If you are going to kill me, do it without all this.
This is stupid."
"You like the way they make you take it, face down in mud?"
The fat man said with dignity, "I hope your little trick with the wiping works. I do not want to remember you at all."
The guards both swore at him and grabbed him by the arms. They dragged him to the head of the line and thrust him into the tall booth. They attached a lead to his right foot and then pulled a kind of wire cage down over his head, making contact with the back of his neck. The fat man looked at them disdainfully, as though this was an irksome social encounter with his inferiors and he would be glad to get out of it and back to something interesting. Markham could not tell whether the man was being brave or just acting. Either way he kept it up right until the end, when a guard tripped a switch and abruptly the fat man jerked and twitched and his tongue shot out, huge and purple, his eyes bulging, like a grotesque gesture of final contemptuous farewell.
He stayed erect until the harsh rasping buzz stopped and the body collapsed, a puppet with its strings cut.
Markham bunked. "I wonder if he was...
"Bight. Franco, I'm sure of it," the Englishman said with clipped certainty.
"I saw him in person once."
"He didn't want these guys to know?"
"They'd have tortured him."
"Electrocution? Why not just shoot him?
"At first I imagined this bizarre device was to save ammunition, but I think not. The diesel, the electrical wiring-no, too complicated." His face wrinkled into a grim mask. "That wire cage around the head is the point."
"What's it do?"
The guards were dragging Franco s body through the booth. They threw it downhill, its arms flailing with false life, muscles still jumping. The eyes showed only white, the tongue lolled. It rolled into the pile of corpses, jerked a few times and lay still.
The Englishman said abstractly, gazing into the distance, "I gather from overheard talk that the booth destroys memory."
"What?" Markham felt a cold horror.
"It runs current through the easily accessible lobes. The high current then bums out the short-term memory. It may even affect the personality--not that these lot would care."
"So what? Well be reincarnated somewhere else.
"Ah, but there is some evidence that you carry your mental information with you." The man's impish eyes danced. Markham had a vague memory of this face, as though he had known of him in his past-his real-We. But where?
"Well, sure-"
"We retain our memories, else how is one to make progress?"
"Who says we do?"
"If we don't, what's the point of reincarnating us with all past memory of Hell intact? Otherwise, the Devil or Pseudo-God or whoever-whatever-runs this place might just as well begin each of our little Hellish 'lives'-" his eyebrows arched in exaggerated humor "-fresh.
Anew. Straight from our earthly graves."
"So you think there s a purpose to ...this place?"
"A man's reach should exceed his grasp," the man cackled, "or what's a heaven for?"
"I ... see." Markham was unsure if the man was merely antic, or insane. With British intellectuals it was not always obvious.
The Englishman said with grave calm, "They plan to wipe our frontal lobes."
"Jesus ...why?" Markham shifted uneasily. Up the line the guards took a swarthy young woman in black and strapped her into a booth. She didn't seem to care, just stared out at the gray sky of endless roiling clouds. "Apparently they regard us as minor functionaries, trivial demons sent to spy. If they kill us and erase our memories, then we cannot bring information back to the devil and his cohorts."
"And if we aren't..."
"Bight, Brain damage."
"I won't!"
"Haven't much choice."
"Oh yeah?" Markham shook a fist at the man. "Watch. As soon as there's-"
Without waiting for him to complete his sentence, Hell provided what he wanted. A shriek echoed across the broad hillside, from somewhere below. The cry held absolute terror and pain, mingled with a despairing surprise that transfixed everyone. It was a human wail confronting something from the deepest recesses of fear. Everyone stopped and turned toward the sound.
"The demons come," someone whispered.
Markham stepped out of line. A guard saw him and came running over and Markham spread his hands, as if in explanation; He put an expression of submissive anxiety on his face arid set his feet and waited for the right moment. The guard pointed the rifle, jabbering. Markham slapped his hand around it and jerked it free.
They think a cat in the hand means the world by the tad, he thought sourly, and before the roan could react Markham slammed the butt into the guard's face.
Shouts.
Shots.
Markham instinctively ducked. He grabbed a belt of ammunition from the guard's shoulder and rolled away. It had felt good to do that, finally take some action. He reversed the Springfield and fired off a round in the direction of the booths.
"Let's got" he shouted at the Englishman. He ran for the nearby pines, jacking a cartridge out of the breech and slamming it closed again, feeling the new round slide home from the clip.