The good part was that I was only one level below Abaddon now. The bad part: I was only one level below Abaddon, and that’s where the commissar, his hounds, and his troops would be looking for me, and if they were thorough, they might come looking for me here as well. Then I’d be in Niloch’s nasty, rattling hands.
No, I realized, if I was captured, Eligor’s crab-grenade was going to go off in the middle of my thinkers, and then my next conscious thought would be, Oh, shit, I’m in the Infernal Transfer Lounge for Souls and everyone’s staring at me. After that, the real pain would begin. Eligor had held back from my utter destruction because he wanted something from me, but the big bosses of Hell wouldn’t be so kind. The whole operation here was expressly set up for just the kind of things they’d be doing to me, and they’d do them forever.
So I did the only thing I could do at that point. I pulled up my big boy pants and headed out into the Forest of Suicides.
It would have been an awful, awful place even if it had been right beside some lovely college town, five minutes from great nearby schools and nifty places to walk your dog, but as it was, a real estate agent would have had trouble finding anything cheerful to say. The Grey Woods were halfway to being a swamp, the ground treacherous and squelchy, and the constant mist made it difficult to get any idea of where you were or even where you’d already been. But I knew the way up to the next level would be somewhere on the outskirts, and that fact alone was what gave me any kind of chance of finding my way.
In theory, all I had to do was keep the lifter station behind me, and I’d be heading straight out across the level on a radial track. Problem with that was that once I was a hundred steps from the station, I could no longer look back and see the huge lifter tower through the murk. I’m not joking. The tower was the size of the Empire State Building, a giant cuboid reaching all the way to the roof of this level, and it was already hidden by the dense mist. All I could do was try to maintain my direction by picking an object that I could see, then heading toward it, then picking another target by my best guess at the same direction. Efficient and fun, especially in a drizzling gray nothingness of skeletal trees and deadly quicksand bogs. And it got worse when I began to encounter the suicides.
In The Inferno, written in the days when the Church and other important moral influences still thought suicide was a cheater’s way out, the Wood of Thorns was where all of those folks wound up after death, stuck inside the trunks of trees. “Stuck inside a tree forever,” you say, “hah, that doesn’t sound so bad.” But in the poem, there are all these harpies flying around, things that looked like tubby owls with women’s breasts—which doesn’t sound frightening so much as just plain weird. The harpies would pluck limbs off the trees, which apparently really hurt, and would make the suicide trees weep. All together, a creepy setup. Tip of the hat, Mr. Alighieri. But if you offered every one of the souls in the real version of the Woods their choice, I think they’d have voted unanimously to move to Dante’s version, which would have seemed pretty much a romp in the park compared to what they had.
I didn’t know that yet. I didn’t know that until I stumbled across my first self-murdered soul.
At first I thought he was a large lump of moss dangling from the limb of an ancient, gnarled oak tree, but as I got closer the mist cleared between us, and I could see the whole shape, including the pale feet and hands. Compared to some of the things I’d already seen, that wasn’t much. Then as I got a bit closer I saw that the hanging man was alive and struggling.
I really should have figured it out at that point. I mean, Forest of Suicides, right? If killing yourself was a crime—or had been when these people were judged by Heaven—why would they be allowed just to hang around peacefully in Hell, being dead?
As I slogged through the mire toward it, I could see that the corpse was twitching, even clawing weakly at the noose around its neck. Yes, I know, I said “corpse,” because that was sure what it looked like, with all the signs of post-mortem lividity (see, I’ve watched cop shows, too), eyes sunken, tongue black and protruding. But dead or not, this poor bastard was definitely suffering. I pulled out the big knife Riprash had given me, then scrambled up the spider-legged cluster of roots until I could hack through the rope. The first thing the suicide did when he hit the ground was to grab at the noose and loosen it around his throat.
“You shit!” he gasped, his voice as rough as you’d guess with someone who’d spent a good part of forever hanging by his neck. He was on his hands and knees, craning his head around on his lengthened neck so he could glare at me. “What have you done? Why did you interfere? I don’t even know you!”
Interfere? I took a step back. The odor of rot that rose off him was so strong that even demon-senses couldn’t entirely deal with it.
He struggled to his feet, although he could barely stand, and to my astonishment he began trying to throw his now-shortened rope over the branch so he could hang himself again. I took a breath before stepping closer, then grabbed at him but caught only his decaying clothes, which tore in my hands. His rope had been tied to the tree at one end, and I had halved its length by cutting it. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get enough rope over the branch to hoist himself aloft again. When he turned toward me, I saw to my astonishment that he was weeping, viscous tears like snail’s tracks edging down his bluish cheeks. “How could you!” he half-shrieked, half-wheezed, then clumsily began to swing his fists at me.
I had only a moment to figure out what was going on and to remind myself that my philanthropic efforts never did me much good even outside of Hell, when something dropped out of the fog that surrounded us and attached itself to the struggling corpse like a vampire bat in a Friday night horror movie. The hanged man was screaming in pain as well as weeping now, and although I knew I’d almost certainly regret it, I had to try to help him.
Remember when I mentioned Dante’s harpies, the creatures who policed the suicide woods in his literary version of the Inferno? The real ones were a lot less pleasant than owls with tits. They looked more like gobs of phlegm the size of koala bears, with insect wings and faces that were mostly flat, square teeth. And it wasn’t just one of them dropping down out of the murk, it was quickly becoming a lot of harpies, and they obviously weren’t just there to punish the suicide, because another one of those horrid vampire boogers leaped onto my neck, beating its horrid fly’s wings in excitement as it tried to gnaw a hole in me. By the time I managed to impale it on my blade, three more were crawling over my body, looking for a way to burrow headfirst into my guts, and I could hear the wings of dozens more as they swarmed toward us through the mist. And while all this nightmare bullshit was going on, my enemies were only getting closer.
forty-one:
the pain report
SO THERE I was, being attacked by winged mucus-monsters in the Suicide Forest, wondering what could possibly make my day any worse, when I heard the one thing that unquestionably could: the distant baying of hellhounds. It was like a dagger made of ice right between my shoulder blades.
Not that I could do anything about it right at that moment, because the toothy little snot-harpies were swarming me, experimenting with different ways to get through my skin. The suicide I had tried to help had staved off his own attacker long enough to get his shortened rope over a lower branch. He tied it, then let himself go limp until the noose began to strangle him once more, this time with his feet on the ground. As he choked and struggled, the harpies rose from him like flies off a buffalo’s back and headed toward me instead. Unpleasant as they were, there was no way I was going to throttle myself just to get rid of them, and there were far too many to stab or shoot, with more dropping out of the murk every moment. So I ran like a motherfucker.