Then the hissing and the trembling crested and the lifter started to drop. I stared in dismay. The mud thing looked back at me, as disinterested as a statue.
“We’re . . . going down,” I said finally.
The thing gave me as much response as it thought my observation deserved, which was none.
“But I’m going up,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. “That is, I need to go up. To Pandaemonium. It’s important.” The thing just stared at me with those glowing egg-yolk eyes. “I’m not joking! I need to go to Pandaemonium!”
At last it opened its mouth. The words came out in sticky chunks, like someone digging in a bog with a shovel. “We have taken control of the lifter. We have been given a priority task by the Mastema. Use of the lifter will be returned to you when we have departed.”
The Mastema was one of the most powerful tools of the Adversary, a security group of sorts, like the SS were to the Nazis. But I had already guessed that this guy was bad, bad news.
In the silence that followed his proclamation, I heard the announcement voice whispering in my ear as we flashed past Gravejaw again, then Greedy Pile, Cellar of Organs, Cocytus Delta, Brownwater, Toe, and Cocytus Landing. In just a few moments we would be hurtling down through Abaddon where I had first entered Hell. My heart was hammering, but I was so obviously outclassed and outranked by the mud man that I dared not make a fuss. Perhaps once he got out, I could simply make the elevator go back up again.
Did I really think it would be that easy? Well, let’s just say I was hoping.
The lifter was dropping faster now, the voice spitting the names of the levels into my ears like a racetrack announcer trying to call a close four-horse finish. Abaddon Heights. Disease Row. Necro Flats. Acheron Fork. Lower Acheron Fork. Abaddon Waste. And then we were through the Abaddon levels and still plunging downward. At first I thought it was just fear that was making me feel feverish, but then I realized that the lifter cage was getting hotter and closer by the second. The sweat vaporized from my skin as soon as I squeezed it out. My blood hammered in my ears.
The mud man ignored my gasps, immersed perhaps in thoughts of the horrible place he was going, the horrible things he would be doing, but now he began to change. His hide, or whatever it was that had made him look like he was smeared with something sticky, peanut butter or some less pleasant material, was beginning to harden like clay fired in a kiln. As he dried his skin grew smoother, stonier, until he really did begin to look like a statue, a seven foot tall golem, dead but for the smoldering, piss-yellow eyes.
I could barely understand the announcements now, the words running together so that I could snatch only fragments: “Flensing Scar Tissue Junction Hook Burning Shrike Fistula . . .” But it wasn’t just the heat that made me feel like I was dying now, it was the words turning into pictures in my brain, with no work from my own imagination. Somehow the depth acted on me like increasing pressure, forcing images into my head, endless halls full of screeching voices, reflex cries for help that the screecher knew wasn’t coming, chambers as big as grand ballrooms full of stone tables, each table with a ruined but still living body writhing atop it, animals without eyes, rooms full of thunder and blood spray, the pounding of metal against vulnerable flesh, barking dogs, howling wolves, and through it all a sensation of unparalleled misery and hopelessness that squeezed my skull like a monstrous pair of pliers.
“I can’t,” I gasped.
The clay thing stared at me for a moment, then looked away, as if I were a leaf that had blown across its path.
The pressure grew stronger, but the other passenger had simply become more compact, more shiny, as if it had been glazed and fired in a kiln.
Punishment. Punishment. Punishment. Every name the voice whispered into my head seemed to have that word in it. Punishment. We were heading down into the ultimate depths, where the worst work of Hell went on in endless night, pain measured out in just the right size doses to last as long as the universe itself.
Even worse, though, I could feel something else now, something that enwrapped and increased the other bad feelings like a crushing, ice-cold fist. I can’t explain it—I’ll never be able to. Although it came on slowly, when I finally could pick it out from the other kinds of horror, it was the worst thing I’ve ever felt. Freezing cold, but I’m not talking about temperature, like ice and snow. This was the cold of the absolute dark, the cold in which nothing could live, the point at which even the play of atoms slowed to a stop. Empty. Nothing. The end. But what was most terrifying about it, what blasted even the horrors of all Hell’s pain and suffering out of my head, was that this bleak void at the bottom of everything was alive. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. It was alive, and it thought, and even though it was still tremendously far away, its presence sent my own thoughts shrieking in all directions like chickens trapped in a henhouse by a bloody-mouthed wolf.
I realized that I had fallen on my knees, clutching my head to keep my skull from exploding, retching out what little was in my stomach. Still the pressure and the sense of the thinking, waiting darkness grew worse. I was shrieking, babbling—I might even have screamed that I was an angel, for all I know—but the clay creature sharing the lifter paid no attention. I could feel my eyes forced out of their sockets from within, could feel my guts crushed like I’d been rammed from both sides by garbage trucks, could feel what was left of my sanity pouring out of a me-shaped hole like dirty water down a drain. And then we stopped.
When the shuddering ended, I lay in a limp blob where I was, unable to stand or speak. Something closed on me like a claw in one of those arcade games, lifting me up until I dangled in midair, wheezing and moaning. I could dimly see the stale yellow eyes of the mud man as he looked me over, then the door of the lifter opened and he threw me out like a dirty shirt. A moment later, as I wriggled on the baking stone floor outside the lifter, helpless as a waterlogged earthworm, the lifter door hissed shut. I heard the pressure build again, then it was gone, the cage clanking and groaning as it dropped into the depths.
For the longest time I just lay where I was, boiling inside like an Ebola victim. The physical constitution of my demon body was apparently enough to keep me alive, but not enough to save my mind if I went any deeper. I didn’t think I’d last very long even if I didn’t—my head was still hammering so hard that I could barely think. I had no idea where I was, but I knew I had to get out, go up, even though moving my fingers was nearly impossible, let alone my entire body.
Up, damn you! I stared at my hand, willing it to extend, to help me lift myself, then I saw the feet of the first thing approaching. They were hooved, but not with anything so simple as cow’s or horse’s hooves. The great single toe and its nail were metal, dull gray metal. It stopped beside me. I would not have looked up even if I could have.
A moment later something else flapped down and landed. All I could see were legs as thin as a flamingo’s but with blue human hands for feet. A third creature joined the first two, thick legs ending in a cylindrical foot, covered in thick hair and gleaming spines.
“Well, look here,” said one of them in a voice like a rusty leg trap being pried open. It was pretty clear what they were looking at. “Breakfast is served.”
“Let’s make it run first,” another said in a scratchy mumble. It might have been a parrot with half its beak torn off. “I like them when the blood’s really moving. Warm and tender.”
“Piss on that,” said a third, gruff as Baby Bear on steroids. “I’m hungry. Let’s just divide it up now, then you can make your piece run around all you want.”
twenty:
block