Sir Guy's brows knitted in thought. "'Tis not impossible. And that would mean more traps might be set for your soul. Were I you, Lord Wizard, I should spend much time in prayer! But come, the lady is ready to depart. Summon your friend Stegoman, and I will seek my good steed where he was left after bearing our bound bodies here."
CHAPTER 8
Matt rolled over on his bed of pine boughs, unable to sleep because of Sayeesa's heartbroken sobbing. She hadn't stopped crying since her dream castle had vanished.
They had come back to the campsite, with the witch trussed before him on a sobered-up Stegoman, while Alisande rode behind Sir Guy on his horse. Alisande had cut a new bed of pine boughs, and they had settled into salvage what sleep they could. Now she and Sir Guy were deep in slumber.
It must be nice, Matt thought, to have a clear conscience, though hers seemed a little too clear.
He turned over, trying to shut out the sobbing and clear his mind of what kept gnawing at it. Again, he failed.
Was sin real, or wasn't it? Where he came from, it was probably only a delusion, safe to ignore. But he wasn't where he came from. He was in their world. Did that mean he had to play by their rules?
Not necessarily, he decided. He'd already figured out a few rules of magic, and everything he'd reasoned out about it had worked. None of his theories really required any mystical personality behind the power; they could all work nicely by regarding magic as an impersonal force.
He felt better when he thought of it that way. Reason and logic did work in this universe, which meant that the whole pile of nonsense about Good and Evil were merely human constructs, and sin and Hell were just superstitious folk tales, even here.
He'd simply let himself get shaken up by a new environment. All the fundamental things were really as they'd always been.
With that comforting thought, he opened his eyes to gaze at the warm, glowing coals of the campfire.
A small hole appeared in the ground between himself and the fire and widened like a yawn filled with flames. A leering devil hoisted himself out of the hole - a regulation, scarlet-skinned, horned devil, with a long, tapering face, a moustache and goatee, and a pitchfork in his hand.
"Let me congratulate you on your skepticism," the devil said. "Rationalists make such excellent kindling."
The pitchfork stabbed out, lancing into Matt's belly, knotting his diaphragm while it swung him up, arcing high, and sent him plunging down into the flames.
Matt screamed, and nerve ends shrieked all over his body with the raw, pure pain of the fire. It didn't stop, but kept building. The fire grew hotter. Matt screamed himself hoarse, but the pain grew worse and worse ...
Then the pitchfork lanced down again, tossing him into a locker of dry ice that seared his flesh with absolute cold. He was in total darkness, burning with cold, and his nerve ends doubled their anguish. But they did not grow numb.
"Don't trouble to wonder. It doesn't get better."
Matt looked up in mid-shriek.
A sable, amorphous amoeba pulsed near him, shot with veins of fire. It spoke with the devil's voice. "Why, of course it is me," it chortled. "Nothing has real form or shape in this realm."
Hell, Matt realized.
"What did you expect from a devil? Oh, I know, it's not like your infantile conception of fire and brimstone. Don't you know what Hell is? The complete absence of... the Source."
God, Matt thought numbly.
The blot flinched, shrinking in on itself, and away. "I'll thank you not to use that Name here. In fact, you'll find you can't, now; I've knotted the neuron that caused me such pain."
Matt tried to think of the Name, found he couldn't - and the craving, aching emptiness of isolation surged in. It wasn't just the loneliness he'd known when he'd been in a new town and broke. This was worse, a thousand times worse. And despair whetted the loneliness, because there was no way out, now - not even through death.
The cold of Kipling's wind between the worlds swept through him, chilling him to his ectoplasm. The numbing emptiness of absolute loneliness sank in. Nausea bit, trying to turn the soul inside out, to fold it up, to make it fade away, to escape from loneliness into oblivion. But it couldn't cease; it was caught, embedded in total despair that had no other side.
"Yes," the devil crooned, "Yes - forever. Forever."
Pinpoints of warm light winked in the distance. They swelled into discs, then into spheres. The nearest zoomed toward them, filling Matt's vision. A soul flailed there in anguish, mouth sphinctering in unheard screaming, as tongues of white fire enveloped it, and bright, glowing needles pierced through it.
"This is the hell of a hedonist," the devil crowed. "Hedonists claim the purpose of life is its pleasures. But mortals are quickly sated; the pleasures they're born to soon pall. They end by seeking sensation, any sensation, to remind them they exist; and what began as a search after pleasure ends, if they live long enough to find the extreme, in a searching for pain. They seek to come here, though they know it not. Here they gain the sensation they sought, for all time."
The hell veered off to the right, and Matt found himself staring at more of the glowing orange bubbles. They crowded above, they jostled below, they thronged all about.
"Yes, there are many," the devil crooned, "and there's room for a million times more. Hell is quite spacious. Each sinner's alone, in his own personal hell - for there's no companionship here. And we've no problem fitting a hell to a sinner, for each soul provides its own. You come here to the hell you've built for yourself all your life."
Another sphere swept toward them and filled Matt's view. The air about the soul within it was filled with bright points of light that swooped at it, while its head was tilted back, its mouth open, a steady stream of its substance being drawn out into space.
"No matter how much is pulled out, there'll always be more," the devil murmured. "The bright points of light are microscopic blades, each nicking its miniscule bit from the soul. This being claimed it wasn't guilty for the sins it committed -- they were all predestined, or due to its upbringing, or to the socio-cultural matrix in which it was born. The end of it all is that the soul disclaimed responsibility for itself and sinned to its fullest, caring not a whit what damage it did to others - yet each sin was a breach of its integrity, its wholeness. So it lived, constantly losing itself; so it lives here-forever losing."
Another sphere hurtled up. The soul within was frozen in midstep.
"It will stay forever frozen," the devil confided, "because it cannot decide. In life, it was a follower; when it knew not what was right, it asked its priest, or its minister-or it looked in a book, or asked its employer. It never thought for itself; it never decided. Here it stands, as it lived-but with no one about to dictate its movements. You have heard of 'the agony of indecision'? Behold it."
Matt felt a shuddering revulsion sweep through him.
The sphere swam away; another replaced it. The soul lay at the bottom, looking upward, contorted in honor, at a huge heap of foulness plunging down toward it.
"He knows that some day it will reach him," the devil explained. "We told him it would. Some day - tomorrow, or next year, or in a million years; no matter."
The whole heap plunged downward. The soul gasped, stiffening; but the heap halted an inch from its nose and withdrew. Matt wondered what could terrify it so.
"Its own words, its own thoughts. This is one who was sure he was better than his fellows - more righteous, or racially superior, or of a finer temperament. But each sneering thought, each word of insult, fell here and was stored for his coming. He waits to be buried beneath his own mental filth - and in terror, for he knows what it did to those at whom he sneered."