They passed from the Forest of Lies into the Valley of Lost Desire. The place was eternally shrouded in a thick fog and lovers wandered through the gray desolation hearing each other's calls, but never finding one another. Ash from a nearby volcano drifted down into the valley, making the fog worse. It looked as if the volcano had erupted sometime in the recent past. Hard-baked bodies lay strewn across the valley floor, like a museum exhibit about the destruction of Pompeii. It wasn't until Spyder tripped over one of the heavily ashed corpses and heard a steady scraping from inside that he realized that the crusted forms each contained a trapped soul. Spyder tried cracking open a few, but the rocks he used always shattered without making so much as a crack in the stony prisons.
They passed from the Valley of Lost Desire into an overheated swamp that on the map was marked only as Rage. Faceless souls chased and savagely beat other souls in waist-high bogs of boiling blood. Once each attack had been accomplished and the victim beaten senseless or drowned, the victim and attacker would exchange roles and the whole process would begin again. The souls didn't seem to notice Spyder and the others as they inched by on a narrow ledge. They were grateful to make it out of Rage without incident.
They passed from Rage into the frozen Plains of Misery. The sullen, suicidal and malicious, who took nothing from existence but pain and who made others' lives as empty and excruciating as their own, lay half in ice, cursing and trying not to look at each other. As they went, Spyder looked down and saw other souls completely submerged in ice, swallowed up by the diamond-blue glacier that inched back and forth across the scarred open land.
They passed from the frozen Plains of Misery into the overgrown Fields of Greed. Souls dug enormous golden thorn bushes from the rocky soil with their bare, bleeding hands and tried to carry them away, only to have the bushes stolen by other souls, driven mad by avarice.
When they tried to carry too many at once, souls ended up buried beneath piles of golden thorns. Others ripped their ghostly bodies to shreds as they fought frantically for the bushes with other souls. A bleeding woman fell at Lulu's feet and when she tried to help the wounded soul, the woman tried to bite Lulu. She clutched a small collection of golden thorns to her breasts, cutting herself to the bone. "You keep away," the woman told Lulu. "These are mine."
When they were finally through the Fields of Greed, the skyline of an enormous city glistened in the distance. "Pandemonium," said Spyder who, despite himself, felt a little shuddering thrill inside as he spotted the place. The city possessed a brutal but elegant beauty, as if the Manhattan skyline had been dropped into the city of the biggest oil refinery in the world.
What puzzled Spyder, however, was the city that lay just beyond Pandemonium. Though the other city was farther away, it towered over Hell's greatest metropolis, dwarfing its tallest towers. The graceful mother-of-pearl domes and minarets of this other city shimmered in the light from an artificial sun that was suspended by some magical force high over the place. In the false but dazzling light, the buildings appeared to be trimmed in gold and silver and inlaid with precious stones. Construction cranes huddled silently at the edges of the bright city.
"That looks brand new," said Spyder.
"Shit," said Lulu. "Demon condos. Yuppies'll even gentrify Hell."
Forty-Seven
Miss Fuckin' Manners
According to the map, they were at a place called the Razor Pits of Merry Vengeance.
Only there were no pits and no razors. Just a cracked alkali plain whose surface had been scraped flat sometime in the not too distant past. Mounds of crystallized mineral salts and dry soil dotted the plain where they'd been left and never removed.
"Are you sure?" asked Spyder. "We've been off the path for a long time. Maybe we're lost."
"I know exactly where we are," said Shrike. "Things are just different."
"So what?" said Lulu. "Shit changes. Those carts over the Bone Sea weren't always there, right? The devil's building Barbie's Dream Hell House. Big deal. Pandemonium's right over there and so's the book. What are we going to do about that?"
"Go and get it, I suppose," said Spyder.
"Just walk in?" Lulu asked.
"We hadn't really worked out a plan yet." He sat down by one of the alkali piles.
"No shit, Dr. No. And under a cloak of darkness isn't going to cover our asses 'cause this place is nothin' but a cloak of darkness."
"Shrike, what do you think?"
"We need to know what's ahead of us. And I only trust that demon so much. He could be leading us into a trap or a dead end just for his own amusement."
"Well, I don't see a Chamber of Commerce to get a new map."
"One of us is going to have to go into Pandemonium, take a look at Lucifer's palace and see if the book is really there."
"I hate this plan."
"If he has the book, it should be easy to find. Lucifer will probably have it on display, a war trophy. Do you think there will be many guards?"
"How should I know?"
"You're our Hell expert."
"Let me tell you, this place isn't exactly like the books said. But, I guess, the psychology's the same."
"How does that help us?" asked Lulu.
"There's this old story about Vlad the Impaler, this kill-crazy Romanian prince. He's the guy Dracula is based on," Spyder said. "More than anything, this guy loved killing Turks, and he loved killing them by impaling them on long wooden poles. He'd stake whole fields with thousands of dead and dying Turkish POWs. Everyone was afraid of ole Vlad. A story goes, that he left a golden goblet by a waterfall on the road to his city, a place where travelers could get a cool drink on the long road. This goblet was worth a lifetime's wages for anyone in his kingdom. But people were so afraid of this psycho that no one ever stole the goblet. They didn't want to end up like one of those Turks."
"Thanks for taking us there, bro. But what the fuck does that mean?"
"Vlad left the goblet so people could get a drink. He also wanted to prove what a badass he was."
"There won't be any guards at all," said Shrike.
"That's my guess," said Spyder. "Lucifer knows no one has the balls to steal from him. I bet the place is going to be wide open."
"Who's going to find out?" Lulu asked.
Before any of them could respond, there was a sound. Deep, ponderous and rhythmic, like diesel engines the size of mountains driving wheels the size of skyscrapers. Spyder climbed to the top of the alkali mound and peered carefully over the top.
"What is it?" asked Shrike.
It was an army. At least, that was Spyder's best guess. There were demons and damned souls marching onto the plain to Spyder's right. They were clad in armor. Or maybe not armor, he decided. Machinery? Parts of the souls were definitely machine-like. In fact, some were variations on the spider machine they'd seen back at the Bone Sea. Others were Frankenstein patch jobs, trailing long umbilicals attached to still larger machines driven by demons.
"Lulu, tell me you've still got your shotgun," said Spyder.
"An armed society is a polite society and I'm Miss-fuckin'-Manners."
"I take it we've been found out," Shrike said.
"Found out, sold down the river and the river frozen over."
"You've got the magic knife. Think what Shrike and I have'll stop these demons?" asked Lulu.
"I doubt it. But if they're going to snuff us, I want to send a few home with bad dreams."
"Wait a minute," said Spyder. He shifted position on the mound. "Fuck."
"What is it?" asked Lulu.
"Deja-fucking-vu."
"What?" asked Shrike.