I SWEAR I would have managed to turn myself over eventually, but someone did it for me, scooping me onto my back as easy as a fry cook flipping a burger—not an association I wanted to make, believe me.
I was in a high-roofed chamber, the Punishment Level equivalent of a lifter station, but it was clear this station didn’t get many casual travelers. The ceiling looked like it had been liberally splashed with things meant to stay inside of people, which had then dried into stalactites. The cracked rock and dirt of the floor beneath me was splattered with dried black blood and scarred with the countless marks of prisoners and cages being dragged across it. The location was the least of my problems, though. The pressure of these depths was still so strong that it took long moments to lift my head and focus on the creatures surrounding me.
The last one who’d spoken, Baby Bear, looked more like a hairy washing machine than any cousin of Smokey’s, his already disturbing body made more so by all the bits of machinery that had been awkwardly attached to him with bloody rivets. The other two, who I’ll call Bird and Porcupine, were just as unpleasant in their own way: A cross between a stork and the victim of some terrible Third World, flesh-eating virus, Bird had feathered bat wings, a jaggedly sharp beak, and eyes that were only holes in the bird-shaped, partially exposed skull. Porcupine was even less humanoid, four-footed, with huge flat front claws like a badger and a series of bumps on his back which could have been heads, because they all had eyes.
“I’m . . . suh-suh-suh . . .” I was finding it really hard to talk because of the pressure in my head. Hard to think, too. On the plus side, the feeling hadn’t got dramatically worse since I’d been thrown out of the elevator by the mud man, and I was beginning to think the pressure alone might not destroy me, at least not right away. That was the only good news. “I’m somebody . . . important.”
Bird clacked her beak as those empty sockets looked me up and down. “Hark at the creature! Of course you’re important, little thing. You’re our num-nums!”
Porcupine growled and pushed at me with his front head. I couldn’t see a mouth, but even through the general stench I could smell his hideous breath. “Too much talking. Eat it. You two take what you want, then it’s my turn.” He reared up, legs spreading wide like a caterpillar climbing to a new branch, and I finally saw his mouth, which ran down the vertical length of his belly like an unfinished autopsy incision, lined with sharp teeth as if it was an ivory zipper.
I confess that I might have made a noise of dismay. Okay, I sort of squealed like a terrified pig—the unwilling guest at a very ugly luau.
Baby Bear folded one of his claspers around me, crunching muscle and bending bone. I shrieked again and rolled with it, since if I didn’t he was going to tear my arm right off. “Stop!” I wailed. “You don’t understand! I’m . . . I’m on an important mission. For the Mastema!”
A moment of silence followed this. Well, it would have been silence except a low growl was coming from Porcupine’s horrible red, toothy stripe of a mouth right next to my ear.
“Just eat it,” Porcupine said. “It’s talking shit.”
“No, I’m not!” It was so hard to think! “I was . . . attacked. While I was on the Mastema’s business. You don’t want to have that on your heads, too, do you?” I looked back at the more-than-necessary number of eyes regarding me. Baby Bear was drooling what looked like motor oil from a mouth full of crude metal teeth. Bird had tipped her skeletal head sideways as if thinking. “If you get me back on the lifter, I can make my report! You’ll all be rewarded.”
“Hah.” Porcupine dropped back down on all fours and shoved me with its lumpy head. “Now it’s really talking shit. Reward? Eating this little piece of gristle is our reward. Enough of this.”
“Hold a bit, dearie-dove,” said Bird. “Maybe we should take it to the Block. I know you’re aching for your nummies, but you shouldn’t ever fuss with Mastema business.”
Porcupine growled again, and Baby Bear echoed him. “Mastema business,” said the furry half-appliance. “Fuck ’em sideways. What have they ever done for us?”
“It’s not what they’ve done for us,” said Bird sweetly, still watching me with those empty eye holes. “It’s what they might do to us. Do you remember what happened in Lesser Organs? When they came for Mudlips?”
Both Porcupine and Baby Bear quickly took a step back, much to my relief.
“Can we eat some of it, at least, before we take it to the Block?” Porcupine whined. “I’m so fucking, scabbing hungry!” I could hear its stomach-incisors clicking together.
“The Block,” said Bird firmly. “But don’t feel bad, chummy—we still might get to eat it all. Maybe play with it a bit, too.”
“We’d better,” said Baby Bear.
I could barely walk, but it didn’t matter, because Baby Bear dragged me behind him like a toddler’s toy. I had no idea what the Block was. All I knew is that the needles on my Going To Get Eaten Now dial had temporarily swung back out of the red. I had a feeling that I might have been able to beat these things or at least escape them if we were someplace else, but here in the crushing depths it was all I could do to stay conscious and even slightly sane. It wasn’t just the feeling of pressure that was crippling me; everything I had felt on the way down, especially that singular, fearful . . . presence . . . was still in me like an awful sickness, a horror hangover that had me trembling, nauseated, and all but helpless.
The trio of demons dragged me down long corridors echoing with screams and less articulate noises, past room after room, each one a laboratory where new kinds of pain were devised and put to use. I saw prisoners torn, smashed, pulled to pieces, scalded with steam, boiled into nerve-spaghetti and then stretched on hot wires until the nerves vibrated like plucked violin strings in screams I could feel without hearing. On we trudged, through long stretches of flickering darkness, past horror after moaning, gurgling horror, until what little command I had over my thoughts began to slip again. It felt pointless to keep struggling, to try to stay sane. Why fight? Even if I got out of here somehow, Hell was practically endless, and I still had to walk right into my enemy’s stronghold and try to steal Caz right from under the grand duke’s nose, then escape him and all his power and somehow get back out of Hell again.
The word for that, it seemed pretty clear, was “impossible.” I hadn’t thought it was a great plan even before I got to Hell, but as my friends often tell me, I have a tendency to be way the fuck too optimistic.
At last, after I had been dragged past too many rooms full of shrieking meat to care anymore, we arrived at a desk in front of a big, black door. The female creature sitting behind the desk had a lovely golden-curled head like a postcard angel, but the rest of her body was a giant centipede’s, and she had to coil her segmented body around the arms of the chair to stay seated properly behind the desk. She eyed my captors with suspicion.
“Wha?” The golden centipede girl had the slurred voice of an ancient rummy or a punchdrunk fighter. “Wha you want?”
“We have to see the Block, lovely one,” said Bird. “We need to show him.”
“Nah gon’ habben.” I could see now that the reason the receptionist (or whatever she was) talked that way was because she had a mouth full of smaller centipedes. A couple of them fell out onto the desk and then began to climb their way back up her body, heading toward the mouth. “The Block do’ wanna be disthurh . . . disturh . . .” She paused to gulp down the ones who’d returned, then lifted a pincered claw to keep the rest from making an escape in the confusion. “Disturbed.”
“Oh, he doesn’t?” snarled Porcupine, but Bird waved a feathered claw.
“He’ll want to see this, sweetling. He truly will.”
Golden Girl stared at Bird for a moment, her head so completely human that I couldn’t help wondering if she’d looked that way in life, like a goddess of dawn. Then the reception-thing broke the impasse by slithering over the back of the seat and making her way, on all those tiny little legs, along the wall to the door, head waggling like the unstable burden it must have been. She pulled the door open a bit with her front legs and said something through the opening, causing several more little centipedes to tumble out of her mouth to the ground, where they began their long crawl back to, presumably, comfort and safety. Then the ruined goddess swiveled her golden head around to us and said, “It’s to go in alone. The rest of you lot stay out here.”