I had to get up. I could hear my pursuers very close now, perhaps moving along the top of the rise just above me. Everything sensible in me was urging me to get up and run to keep that from happening. By now, the nature of Hell was clear to me. Run and run and run or be punished forever. Sanity demanded I get with the program.
But I didn’t.
Was the thing in my head really only a failsafe against me giving up Eligor’s feather-secret if I was captured? How would it decide that my escape was no longer viable and hit the Destruct button? How was a crab-monster in my head going to judge? And maybe—this was a big one—maybe Eligor had lied to me in the first place. Maybe this was all just some kind of new torture the grand duke had devised, letting me run while all the time the intracubus was transmitting information to Niloch and his hunters as well. The hounds might be following my scent, but the commissar and his gang had certainly found me quickly enough here in the Grey Woods, and now the foreign thing in my head was making it hard for me to escape them again. Could all this be the Horseman’s particularly nasty, drawn-out trick? Maybe he’d given up on getting the feather back, or maybe the intracubus was meant to spy on my thoughts and find out where the feather was really hidden, since Eligor had said he didn’t find it, or my body, in the Walker house.
Once I started thinking this way it was hard to stop, and for some reason it made the intracubus even more fidgety. Nerves and muscles spasmed all over my body as the little ball of hate moved around in my head, and it was all I could do not to cry out and give myself away. One hard clench hurt so badly it knocked me off my all-fours crouch and onto my belly.
No more. I had learned Hell’s most important lesson several times over by now: Don’t trust anyone, and especially don’t trust Eligor. It was time to do something I should have done hours before.
I still had the flask of demon rum Riprash had sent with me, dangling on my belt with the pistols and the swords. I took a long swallow of the godawful stuff and let it burn its way down into my belly like a river of lava, but I didn’t take too much. Next I took the knife in my left hand because I didn’t trust the misfiring, regenerating nerves in the other, and bent until I could rest my forehead on the damp, muddy ground like a monk at prayer. Then I poured the poisonous swill that Riprash had given me all over the back of my head. I swear it burned as badly as Eligor’s crematory flames. I had to shove my face deep into the mud to silence my screams.
Things got worse from that point. My demon hide was healing so quickly that flesh had already grown over the crude stitches, so I had to cut through my own skin just to reach the knots before I sawed them open. Riprash’s knife wasn’t the sharpest, either, and what I was doing set the intracubus into a panic of claws and teeth. I’ll let you imagine the details for yourself.
It’s for Caz, I told myself as the worst of the pain shook me like a million volts, but what really kept me going was another, much darker thought: Fuck you, Eligor. The only good thing about Hell is knowing you’re in it forever.
I kept pouring Riprash’s booze over the wound as I worked. I’m happy to say that the intracubus hated the stuff, but that only made it struggle harder. I came close to passing out several times before I finally got my fingers around the horrible, horrible little thing and yanked it out—it felt like I was taking half the insides of my head with it. After that I did go black, but only for a short while.
When I came back to reality, the intracubus was struggling to escape across the muddy bottom of the ravine on its dozen little barbed legs, still trailing several of my nerve fibers. I guess I didn’t need any of them too badly, or at least not enough to notice in the midst of so much fucking pain. I poured a last dollop of ogre booze into my breached skull and shook my head from side to side to swirl it around in the baseball-sized wound, then I got up on very shaky legs, found a large rock, and carefully ground Eligor’s minion into a scummy smear. Its shrill screams, brief as they were, made little bubbles in the slime.
Oh, but it felt so good to have nothing in my head but my own dubious ideas, I can’t tell you. I even licked the knife clean. Hey, it was my own blood, and I couldn’t afford to waste any more of it.
Niloch and his lynch mob hadn’t waited while I performed self-surgery, of course. Some of the hounds sounded like they’d already found their way down to the bottom of the ravine, which meant they were only a few dozen yards behind me. At least now, when the commissar and his penis-pups caught me, I would have the small pleasure of being able to scream out every secret of Eligor’s I knew.
Yes, I was finally beginning to feel at home in Hell.
I clapped a hand over the hole in the back of my skull to keep inside what brains I still had left, then I began to run again.
forty-two:
this lousy t-shirt
SO THERE I was, hobbling along, oozing brains and blood, at my lowest ebb, my pursuers closing on me, when a miracle happened.
Well, I thought it was a miracle. You unbelievers would probably call it a drainpipe—a big hole gushing water into Suicide Swamp and leading upward.
I probably mentioned before that the rivers of Hell run in and out of the different layers. I couldn’t make a model for you if I tried because the physics are impossible, but Hell has holes. Conduits between the levels allow the rivers and their streams to flow through and down to the next level, and I had stumbled onto one of these conduits—a big stone tunnel. Although the water coursing out of it was as foul and disgusting as you’d guess, I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen or even smelled, because at the other end, one level up, was the Abaddon level that contained my current number one favorite span, the Neronian Bridge. It felt like the Highest was saying, “See? You doubt Me, and yet I reach down and give you an escape route. Still feel like busting My balls?”
No time to celebrate, of course. Niloch and his hunters were sloshing through the undergrowth at the bottom of the ravine not far behind me.
I was lucky it wasn’t an actual pipe, but a tunnel scraped by erosion through the raw stone of Hell itself, because there was no way I would have been able to climb through a real, slippery drain pipe with that much water rushing at me. But the rough stone and debris gave me handholds and footholds. All I needed was a little bit of luck and soon my buddies at the Compasses would be wearing souvenirs that read, “My Co-Worker Went To Hell, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt!”
Of course, nothing really happens “soon” in Hell except the pain reflex, and climbing up that wet tunnel wasn’t the piece of cake I thought it would be. There were a few times when only my toe-tips and the fingernails of my one good hand kept me from tumbling back down into the bog of the Grey Woods. But at last I reached the top of the sluice and tumbled out into Abaddon. I stood there for a few seconds, drenched in the stinking, sticky waters of Cocytus, and coughed out some of the sludge I’d swallowed. Coughing really made the hole in my head hurt, of course. I was knee deep in one of several filthy rivulets that came together there, but more importantly, I was back on the same level where I’d found young Gob and begun my journey, so long ago that it seemed like it had happened to a different Bobby Dollar entirely. And, in a way, it had.