The hounds were huge, about the length of lions or tigers, with low-slung bodies like medieval pictures of wolves, and pelts that appeared almost flat black. I found out later that they looked that way because they didn’t have pelts at all but leathery, scaled hides, something like what you’d find on a Komodo dragon. Then one of them turned toward the place where I was hiding, and its entire pink snout, invisible until that moment, pushed forward out of the rough black sleeve of its face, like a dog’s penis emerging from its foreskin. Even in torchlight the pink protrusion glistened, damp and sticky-looking, featureless but for two huge holes that I guessed were its nostrils. Then the end of the snout opened, revealing a mouth full of inward curving teeth like a Conger eel’s, and I turned and threw up bile, the only thing in my stomach.
I’ve seen a lot of nasty things, but I haven’t seen too many worse than that, because unlike the horrors in the river, these creatures were expressly after me and me alone. When my stomach had finished spasming, I got up and hurriedly made my way across the hillcrest, looking for a place to climb down on the other side. I was still exhausted, but getting an up-close view of the things that were after me was enough to pump a shitload of adrenaline, let me tell you.
To my relief, I could see lights in the valley on the far side of the hill; an array of orange glows that suggested a decent-sized city, twinkling in the mist off the Phlegethon. Closer to me lay a network of roads around the outermost lights, and a winding, torchlit strip along the exterior that looked wide enough to be a highway. I made that my goal and began picking my way down the hill as fast as I could without falling and breaking something important.
It took me what seemed a couple of hours to reach the flats. Once or twice I heard bone-chilling howls from my pursuers in the hills above as they got close. I took more than a few dangerous risks, but I was determined to stay well ahead of them, knowing I had a better chance of losing them in the city than in the wilderness. Also, I needed to find a lifter station, because that was the only way I was going to be able to get down to Abaddon ahead of Niloch and his howling penis-monsters.
The whole time I descended the hill, I saw only four vehicles on the highway: a couple of fancy horse drawn coaches, a simple peddler’s wagon, and a big black car which looked like it belonged to one of the infernal nobility. I didn’t want to get recaptured, but I didn’t want to walk all the way into the city, either, which was miles away, so when I reached the side of the wide road and began following the highway toward the lights, I kept my ears open for possible rides.
I tried to flag down the first one to pass, a coach drawn by a team of horselike creatures (if having human legs can still be considered “horselike”) but the driver lashed at me with his whip and sped on. Perhaps half an hour passed without another vehicle as I trudged on, then I heard the chuffing of a steam engine and saw a grotesque thing that looked half-tank, half-bicycle jolting toward me. I waved and, to my relief, it actually slowed as the driver examined me. Then it hissed to a halt and a door opened on the passenger compartment, which was shaped a bit like Cinderella’s pumpkin coach. I took this as an invitation and clambered up, only to be greeted with the trumpet bell of a blunderbuss in my face.
I was braced to be robbed or shot (or more likely both), but the gun’s owner only surveyed me, then suggested I put my own guns down on the floor of the passenger side. I did as he asked, moving slowly so as not to startle him. Satisfied, the driver engaged his engine again, and we rolled forward.
My rescuer was a wizened, manlike creature with a pockmarked face that sagged on one side and a huge, healing hole in his chest—a hole I could have put my fist through. He saw me staring at his wound and laughed. “Can see why I’m a bit careful, can’t you? Last one I gave a ride left me with that. Tried to take this old darling here,” he patted the dashboard of his vehicle, “but I blew his head off and left him feeling around for it by the side of the road. Never going to find it, though!” He cackled. “Nothing left!”
I smiled (a bit weakly, perhaps) trying to show how much I approved of decapitating wicked would-be hijackers, because I was of course not that kind of hitchhiker at all. “But you still give rides to people?”
“Gets boring on the run from Poor Meat to Tendon Junction,” he said. “Good to have a little company. Keeps a fellow from losing his mind!” He smiled and nodded vigorously.
I couldn’t help wondering if a man who kept picking up hitchhikers after one of them tried to blow him to pieces hadn’t lost his mind already. In fact, as I learned during the ride, he’d had quite a few near escapes over the years. The hitchhikers had come out of it worse, though.
“And now we are companions,” he said. “My name is Joseph. What is yours?”
I made up a name—I didn’t want to leave any more of a trail than I had to. “What city is that?” I asked as the lights spread before us.
“That’s Blindworm,” he said. “Hope you aren’t planning on going there to make friends.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, even though the last thing I wanted to do in any of the cities of Hell was make friends.
“Not from around here? Strange people in Blindworm. City of the Selfish, I call it.” He didn’t elaborate, but he had lots of other things to talk about. He told me he was in the lock business, like the kind you opened with keys. “Blindworm is my best place for sales. Most of what I make on a trip, I make here. They keep me in business!”
As we approached the outskirts of the city I began to see houses, each one with a neat little yard, like some picture-postcard suburb. But although I could see shapes in some of the windows, nobody was outside. I supposed it was the hour—by my reckoning it was somewhere after midnight in Hell-time—and figured things would be different as we got farther in, but although I spotted a pedestrian or two, they all hurried off the street ahead of us, disappearing into doorways or down alleys as if they feared us.
When I asked Joseph, he shook his head. “You really don’t know? I thought you were joking. How could you not know? The folks in Blindworm hate everyone. They keep to themselves.”
If they kept to themselves, why had they built a huge city of tall buildings? Judging by the size, it seemed there must be quarter of a million inhabitants or more. But as we approached the city’s heart I began to see what Joseph meant. In every dwelling or business we passed, there was never more than one person inside. Even places meant to be used by many people at once, like carriage stops or banks, seemed to be divided into individual stalls, so no matter how many customers there were, they never had to see each other. Half a dozen sat at a bus stop we passed, each cramped in his or her own space like farm animals in a barn. They all looked up at the sound of our motor and watched our passing car with scowling dislike.
Normally I would have examined such a weird thing more closely. I mean, how does a city like that work, full of inhabitants who don’t want to see each other? But Joseph was starting to worry me. The closer we got to the center of the city and the towering lifter shaft that dominated the skyline, the more distracted he became, talking to himself and peering at me from the corner of his eye as though I were the one acting strange. I tried to make harmless conversation with him, but that only seemed to make things worse, and by the time we were within a few blocks of the vast square tower of the lifter station, I had fallen completely silent. That didn’t help, either. Joseph was murmuring continuously under his breath, and kept reaching out to touch the barrel of his shotgun, which was leaning against the padded dashboard between us. When he saw that I’d noticed, that only seemed to make things worse.