I’d finally made a good decision. As I got farther from the spot where I’d tried to save the hanging man, the harpies began to drop away. Apparently they were territorial. Either that or lazy.
The farther I ran, the more bodies I saw. And “ran” is a relative term here, because trying to go fast over soppy, muddy ground through tangles of thorns and low-hanging branches was a bit like trying to sprint through barbed-wire bouillabaisse. As with the first suicide, none of these were exactly going quietly. Some were drowning in streams and ponds, often in less than a foot of water; others had blown their own brains out, or slit their own throats, or jumped from the tops of trees onto rocks and lay whimpering quietly as their brains, and other things that should have been inside them, dribbled onto the forest floor. All of them were clearly suffering, but I’d learned my lesson the hard way, and I ignored them. Hundreds of souls in pain, and angelic me just running right past them without a second glance.
Behind me, the howls of the hounds rose in volume, but then faded away again, till I began to hope they had lost my trail. The forest was getting darker and the mists thicker and thicker, until I could scarcely see more than an arm’s length in front of me and reduced my pace to a cautious walk. I had gone several minutes without seeing any of the restless dead, so I hoped that meant I was getting close to the edge of the level.
A rock outcropping the size of a small tower loomed out of the tangle before me. No bodies lay beside it, which made me more than ever sure I was getting near the edge of the forest. I climbed it, so tired that my trembling arms and legs barely supported me, but when I got to the top I could finally see a bit of my surroundings past the mist.
Of course the news sucked: the forest looked like it went on forever, in all directions. I couldn’t see anything except foggy treetops and the occasional lump of stone sticking up like an ancient skull eroding from the ground. For a brief moment I considered just waiting on top of the rock until the hounds and soldiers arrived, so I could at least take a few of them with me, but then I thought of Caz, of her face as she sat in that horrible, shrieking theater beside Eligor, and knew I couldn’t condemn her to be that monster’s prisoner forever.
I climbed down and stumbled on in the direction I had been going.
I hadn’t seen any bodies for quite a while, until I stumbled over a girl in the stream, facedown in a very shallow pond that had gone largely red. I stopped, still a prisoner of my treacherous angel reflexes. She looked young when I turned her over, scarcely past puberty, her face white as the most determined goth made up for her Facebook profile. Both wrists were cut so deep I could see the tendons, because the blood had mostly run out. She moaned at my touch and shivered. I fought the urge to lift her up, to bandage her and try to heal her. I shouldn’t have touched her at all, because I really didn’t need any more harpies, but for some reason I couldn’t just ignore this one as I had so many others. I didn’t recognize her, of course, but she looked like the kind of person I might actually know—some poor soul condemned by God’s justice to commit suicide over and over until all the stars burned out. I couldn’t remember anymore what it was like when things made sense.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
Her eyes opened but didn’t really focus on my face. I think I must have been something like a dream to her. “Because I could think of nothing else. Because I even dreamed about it. Because I wanted peace.”
“But you didn’t get it.”
She closed her eyes and moaned again, a sound far too deep and dejected for such a slip of a girl. In the real world she would have weighed no more than eighty or ninety pounds, if that. She should have been playing tetherball or studying fractions for a math test. “God hates my sin.”
“I can’t believe that.” And I couldn’t. I had never lost a client just for suicide; I think the prosecutors have to prove serious selfishness to get a suicide condemned these days. I asked again. “Why did you do it?”
“Everywhere I went, they stared at me.” She shook her head and tried to crawl back toward the crimson water. “No. Don’t make me talk. You’ll bring the harpies. When it stops hurting so much, they come.”
So it wasn’t just the act of suicide, it was the pain as well that you had to keep experiencing here. I thought how, in their last moments alive, almost every pathetic soul in these woods must have thought, “At least it’s all over now,” only to wake up and find out not only wasn’t it over, it had barely begun.
My God, my God, I thought. How could you allow this in Your Name?
I heard flapping in the mist above us then, so I stood. The wrist-slitter turned over and sank her face back into the pond. I hurried away, but I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen.
I hadn’t got past the suicides at all, it turned out, I’d merely been crossing a less crowded patch of the forest. As I stumbled on I passed a seemingly endless variety of living corpses, despairing humans who had killed themselves with fire, or water, or poison, or guns, a museum of final moments that would never end. I had learned not to touch them, and after the girl in the pond I didn’t want to speak to them either, but I couldn’t avoid them. In places they lay on the ground as thick as at Jonestown, other times they remained hidden and almost invisible until I nearly stepped on them, like macabre Easter eggs. And still the suicide forest went on, with nothing changing but the howls and shouts of my trackers growing louder as they began to close in on me once more.
My head was aching with unwanted movement, as though the thing Eligor had put there was excited by the sounds of my pursuers. Even the hardy demon body I wore would run out of strength soon. I had a sword—well, a large knife—but I wasn’t going to have much luck fighting off giant hellhounds with the kind of blade they used down at the hoagie shop to slice rolls. I had guns, of course, and enough bullets to shoot a few of my pursuers and still save one slug for myself, but that idea wasn’t very appealing either, especially not after spending time in this particular forest. More importantly, though, if I gave up, Caz’s last chance was gone. I might not have managed to free her, but at least while I was loose there was still a chance.
I could glimpse my pursuers now only a few hundred yards behind me, dark running shapes that appeared and disappeared in the rolling mist. I wondered if I should go guerilla-style and pick off a few to improve the odds, but I suspected that trying to hide from the hellhounds and their snuffling, wet, pink snouts would be a bad move. No, I was simply going to keep running until I found a good place for a final stand, then make as much of a mess as possible before they took me down.
But plans change. I burst into a clearing and a momentary thinning of the mist, and was startled to find myself only a few steps from a deep ravine. I swayed for a moment on the edge, windmilling my arms to keep from falling in, then began to track sideways along the lip of the canyon looking for a way across. I could see farther here than I had for hours, clear to the other side of the canyon, and I could even make out a deeper shadow beyond the ravine. I tried not to let hope distract me at this crucial instant, but I prayed that farther shadow might turn out to be the outer wall of this level of Hell.
The ruins of an old bridge or causeway lay tumbled on the slope on the far side of the canyon. The near end of the bridge must have rested in the place where I had almost fallen. I started to make my way down the damp, crumbling cliff. Great chunks of earth and stone had fallen when the bridge went, and they provided the handholds I needed. I let myself slide to the ground at the bottom, and lay there in a heap like a sock monkey leaking stuffing. I might even have fallen into helpless, exhausted sleep for a few moments, but the howls of the hellhounds startled me awake again. Worse, either the howls or my sudden movement woke up Eligor’s intracubus too, and the little cancer started moving restlessly in the back of my skull, each twitch shooting a bolt of fiery pain right through me. I had been trying to stand but could only drop to my hands and knees and sag there, facedown, hoping it would stop. But it didn’t. The intracubus was fidgeting like a frog on a hot stone, and each time it moved it made me want to puke my insides out.