Shaken, I stepped over the greasy flakes that remained and walked on.
Whatever the crumbling horror might have been, it was not the only one of its kind. I caught up with the next gray thing before too long, another man-shaped blob creeping toward the still invisible walls of Hell. I tried to poke this one gently enough to get its attention. It seemed as fragile as sea foam, but just the feel of it on my fingertip made me queasy. How could something with no substance hold a shape, let alone crawl forward with such blind determination?
But this is Hell, I reminded myself, or at least the suburbs. Nothing normal applied here.
I poked it again. Like its predecessor it turned, but this one reached for me with its shapeless hands; in fear and disgust I stepped back and kicked at it, catching it square in the hindquarters. With a whispering crunch it broke into several large pieces. I waded through them, though they were still slowly squirming, and kicked several of them into the abyss. I didn’t stop to watch them fall.
As hours passed, or would have anywhere else, I encountered more of the hideous things. I’d given up any idea of communicating with them and simply kicked them out of my way, wading through the sentient scraps. When I had crushed several of them I began to notice an odor on my skin, like faint traces of lighter fluid in the ashes of a barbecue pit. The things were slow and mindless as dying termites, and disgusting in a way I can’t even explain. I wanted to grind each one of them to powder, to scatter their very atoms to the void. In fact, I was losing what little remained of my mind.
What saved me, strangely enough, was Hell itself. After fighting my way through an entire squirming pack of the things, showering myself and the emptiness on either side of the bridge with ashy fragments, I bent over in a cloud of the last swirling bits and realized that the bridge no longer narrowed to nothingness in front of me. The terrible span had an end point, something I had only believed because I had to. Now I could see it ahead of me, a wall of broken black stone with a titanic gate of rusted iron in the middle of it, tall as a skyscraper. But thousands of the gray, mindless things still squirmed between me and that gate.
I’m betting that some of you can’t imagine what was so bad about having to fight through things that offered no resistance of any kind, that collapsed under my touch like fireplace ash. Try thinking about it this way: there might have been nothing left of them but crude shapes, like the dead of Pompeii preserved in the fiery ash that spewed from Vesuvius, but they had all been people once.
You see, as I came up that last span, fighting my way through the creeping shapes, making a storm of floating, powdery fragments until I couldn’t see my own feet or the bridge, I finally realized what they were. Not damned souls—that would have been bad enough. These weren’t prisoners of Hell, they weren’t trying to get out, they were trying to get in. The shapes were souls who had been sentenced to Purgatory, the essences of countless human lives—failed lives but not irreparably evil. And for whatever reason, these things, once men and women, were so consumed by self-hatred that they crawled forever toward the place where they felt they truly belonged.
I should have pitied them but understanding only made it worse. As I neared the walls of Hell the things flocked as thickly as insects swarming around a hot light bulb, driven by a self-destructive urge they couldn’t understand. I was too exhausted to say anything, but inside I was screaming. I thrashed through the clotted mass as if I were swimming, until everything I was and had ever been dissolved into a madness of greasy flakes and swirling, kerosene-scented dust, until I no longer knew where I was, let alone where the bridge was—the only thing between me and oblivion. The fact that I did not fall is the only testament I will ever need that something or Someone bigger than me wanted me to survive.
Grunting, gasping, I stopped to suck in air and realized abruptly that nothing stood before me now but the massive, rusty entrance and bare black stone: I had reached the shadows beneath the gate. The swarming crawlers were now behind me, confined to the bridge as if by an invisible fence. The pathetic, self-loathing things didn’t belong in Hell, they just believed they did. They would not be admitted.
But Bobby Dollar? Apparently I was different. No guards and nothing to keep me from walking in but the good sense I had surrendered a long time back. By Hell’s charming standards, they’d pretty much put out the welcome mat. But I don’t think I’m giving away too much when I tell you it wasn’t going to prove anywhere near as easy getting back out again.
one:
pillow talk
WE ONLY had one night together, really. And I remember every moment of it.
“So what’s it like, living in Hell?”
“Oh, it’s great. We drink ice cream sodas all day and play pool and smoke cigars and never, ever turn into donkeys.”
“That sounds more like Pleasure Island, from Pinocchio.”
“Shoot. You got me.”
“Come on, woman, it was a serious question.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to answer it, Wings. How’s that for serious?”
We were both naked in Caz’s secret hideaway and had just made love for the first (well, technically first, second, and second-and-a-half) time. Her head was on my chest and her legs were clamped around my thigh like a bivalve mercilessly trying to compel surrender. I stroked her hair, a gold so pale you could only tell it wasn’t white in direct sunlight.
“That bad, huh?”
“Oh, you beautiful, stupid man, you can’t imagine.” She lifted herself on one elbow so she could look me in the face. She was so gorgeous that I promptly forgot what we were talking about and lay there staring like I was brain damaged. By any normal standards I must have been, because otherwise why would a minion of Heaven be making naked squishies with a tool of Satan in the first place? “Not just bad,” she told me. “Worse than you could possibly imagine.”
I kept wondering how anyone, even the lords of Hell, could want to harm that radiant beauty. The official version would be that she had a face like a Renaissance angel, beautiful, delicate, full of lofty thoughts. But the truth was that she looked like the most innocently wicked graduate of a very, very expensive private school. If I hadn’t known for a fact that Caz had been around since before Columbus sailed, I’d have been feeling very, very guilty after all the things we’d just done. I was beginning to believe I was in love with this woman, but of course she wasn’t actually a woman at all, and she came from Hell. Think about that a little and you’ll probably understand why I didn’t want to consider our situation too closely.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything . . .”
“No! No, thank your lucky stars that you don’t know, Bobby. I want you to stay that way. I don’t want you ever to know what that place is like.” And then she suddenly hugged me so tightly that for a moment I thought she was trying to crawl through me somehow and out the other side. Her small, hard body seemed both the most real and the most vulnerable thing in the world.
“I won’t let you go back,” I said.
I thought she laughed. I only realized later that the noise had been something else, something far less simple. Her legs tightened on my thigh; I could feel her wetness pressing against me. “Of course you won’t, Bobby,” she said. “We’ll never go back, either of us. We’ll stay here and drink ice cream sodas forever. So kiss me, you dumbfuck angel.”