“You opening a theme park or something?”
“You looking for a job for eternity?”
“Seriously, what’s with all the urban renewal? Why’d you fill in the razor pits back there? And what the hell are you building over there?”
Spyder pointed into the distance at what looked like the boarded-up mine shaft in the distance, but it was not like any earthly mine. The entrance went up for miles, and each wooden plank across its face could have represented a whole forest. The metal beams that buttressed the planks could each have been melted down and have provided enough steel for a battleship.
“That was like that when we got here. They didn’t even bother finishing Hell before they cast us down here. It’s very rude, I think,” said Ashbliss. “As for the razor pits, they were fun, but never necessary. We had to clear the land for the project.”
“Which project would that be?”
“The only project. The only one Lucifer and the other master demons care about, at least.”
“And that is…?”
“Heaven,” said Ashbliss. “We’re building Heaven.”
“Interesting. I kind of thought there already was a Heaven. And they kicked your sorry asses out.”
“That’s God’s Heaven. This one is for us.”
“I get it. God looks down and sees your new and improved Heaven and slaps his forehead, realizing you fallen angels were right all along. Then—bang!—you win the argument.”
“You’re not as stupid as most of your kind. But you make up for it by talking to much.”
“Is that what that city is, beyond Pandemonium? Part of the new Heaven? Is that what Hell really is, one big hardhat zone?”
“You tell me,” Ashbliss said. “Behold.”
When he was still a child, Spyder had found a book of his mother’s. It was an art history text, left over from her brief attempt at community college. She’d lasted less than a semester and bad-mouthed the curriculum, the teachers and the other students nonstop whenever the subject came up. But even as a child it puzzled Spyder why she’d kept her school books if they brought back such painful memories. It wasn’t until years later that he realized that it was probably his father’s nagging that had propelled his mother out of school. Spyder’s father considered all forms of self-improvement, short of studying innovations in Detroit horsepower and chasing strip-club tail, useless and, in all likelihood, un-Christian. Spyder never understood why his mother had said that he was so much like his father. He knew that they were nothing alike, and he’d hated her for saying that. He hated his father just because.
The picture in his mother’s art history text that had captivated him as a child was the Hell panel from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. It wasn’t the clever and artful ways the demons tortured the damned souls that had fascinated Spyder. He’d studied the top, the far background of the painting, where none of the sexy tortures were happening. That section of the painting depicted a ruined, burned-out city, or a city that had been built along very different aesthetic lines from a human city. The buildings and the sky above were black, as if grimed under a permanent layer of soot. Shafts of lemon-colored light shone from the windows of each building and sliced through the smoky darkness, which only added to the feeling that this was ground zero for some unknown holocaust.
All those memories and images came back to Spyder as Ashbliss led him down the chorus-line road and into the enormous construction site for Heaven 2.0.
The scale of the project was so vast, Spyder’s mind couldn’t take it all in. Looking at the place was like being in a car accident—it came to him as a series of still images flashing into his brain, but the whole of it was beyond his comprehension. In the far distance entire mountain ranges were being blasted away or gobbled up by machines whose steel jaws were almost as large as the tops of the mountains themselves. A white sea of activity surged around the giant machines and Spyder realized that this ebbing and flowing tide was made up of millions of souls moving the ore mined by the machines to the horrible open-pit foundry nearby. Flames, miles high, rose from the foundry and molten steel flowed into molds down dozens of chutes, each as wide and as deep as the biggest river Spyder had ever seen.
There were workshops nearby where demons supervised souls in some of the more delicate work needed for the structures: the polishing and cutting of precious stones, the stripping of huge sheets of mother-of-pearl from enormous shells, the goldleafing of delicate statuary. Outside the workshops fortunes in diamonds, rubies and sapphires were piled, along with amber boulders the size of a man.
Millions of tons of concrete sluiced into giant foundation holes from thousands of storage tanks. At the bottom of the holes, souls were directing the lines that spewed the wet concrete evenly across the floor. Souls too slow to move or too clumsy to escape slipped under the gray, oozing mess like they were drowning in quicksand, and disappeared. The skeletons of a thousand new buildings were being lifted into place by massive claws and welded together by souls linked to other machines through yet more umbilicals. The one constant Spyder could make out in all the chaos was that the demons were the supervisors, while the damned souls were the work-gang slaves. This knowledge was nailed down when Spyder looked to the far side of the site and watched demons feed the bodies of injured and unruly souls into huge presses that squeezed all the fluids from them. The liquid was drained into tanks to be used as lubricant for the construction machines.
Spyder’s heart was beating fast. His brain was on overload. This was not the Hell in the books. A demon grabbed a soul sporting a mohawk, kneeless black jeans and a safety-pinned T-shirt, some squirming, hard-luck punk, and tossed him into the fluid press. A stray thought popped into Spyder’s mind: Jenny, you would love this.
FIFTY
Holy Shit
Spyder and Ashbliss skirted the edge of the construction site and entered Pandemonium by a side street in what appeared to be the butchers’ quarter.
Heavy-muscled demons in stiff rubber aprons hacked, gutted and sliced mystery meats in stinking shops on a dim boulevard whose gutters ran black with blood as thick and dark as chocolate syrup. Wriggling tentacles and the snouts and bellies of giant coal-colored hogs hung on rusty meat hooks next to the egg-white entrails of horse-size beetles.
They rounded a corner and entered a wide public plaza. The place was spotlessly clean and a pleasant scent of roses filled the air. Across the boulevard was a great, domed crimson building. Below the large central dome were a cluster of smaller domed outer buildings, with spiraling white minarets at the cardinal points. The place reminded Spyder of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, though this structure was a dark and dismal parody of the ancient church-turned-mosque.
“Is that the palace?” Spyder asked.
Ashbliss pulled him quickly through the plaza. “Of course. Keep your head down. Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to, slave.”
“Let’s walk by the entrance and see if there are guards.”
“There aren’t. We’re going to my master’s home.”
“I don’t trust you. Five minutes isn’t going to kill you.”
“It will if one of Beelzebub’s other attendants sees us and asks questions.”
Spyder stopped in his tracks, but Ashbliss didn’t notice. When he reached the end of the chain, he was jerked back and almost fell over. The demon yanked Spyder with all his weight.
“Move, slave.”
“No.”
“We had a deal.”
“Let’s walk by the palace.”
“Someone will see us!”