I felt different on the inside as well, but it was impossible to know whether all the new sensations flooding into me were because I was wearing a new body or because I was in Hell. Still, I reminded myself, this body might be strange and the skin tones might be un peu poison-dart frog, but what was important was that my new demon shape was like an astronaut’s suit; it was going to help keep me safe in this very unhealthy place.
I already told you what happened on the Neronian Bridge. Here’s what happened when I stepped off it and into the hot, thick mist at the edge of Hell.
I had been expecting something like the old border crossing into East Berlin or maybe even the Black Gate into Mordor, but instead entering the Bad Place was as easy as stepping out of a taxicab—at least at first.
From what the guardian Lameh had planted in my memory, I knew I must be in the Abaddon levels, somewhere in the upper middle of Hell. But if this was upper middle, I knew for sure I didn’t want to visit anything lower, because even before I could see any of it, I could smell it. Abaddon stank. I don’t mean simple, ordinary foul odors like shit or rotting meat. I mean a combination of every foul smell that biology and geology could create, blended into a heady bouquet that combined not only all that a nose would normally detest, but wafts of things so odd and unexpected—like copper and burning hay, just to throw out a couple of examples—that I simply could not get used to it. I never really did, either. The architects of the underworld were, excuse the pun, fiendishly clever: They knew that a single stench, or even a million unchanging stenches, can become familiar after a while. But small changes can keep anything new, no matter how horrible. As long as I was there, I never learned to ignore the stink.
As I left the bridge behind and walked through the swirl of stinging, acid mist, voices filled the hot, damp near-darkness, some human, some animal, some horribly in-between—shrieks, moans, arguments, even tatters of laughter that sounded as though they had been jerked painfully out of whatever spawned them. The noise of the damned. Pretty much what you’d expect. The air was horribly hot and slimy, muggy as the worst August day in the New York subway times a thousand. Already I could feel the gears grinding at the interface between what my mind expected my body to do—pump gallons of sweat as quickly as possible—and what the demon body actually did, which was nothing. This was normal, you see, and the body I wore treated it that way. One hundred and forty degrees and drippy as a Florida swamp? No problem.
Lovely day, sir and madam. Expect it might rain diarrhea later so I brought my brolly, eh what? Cheerio!
As I emerged from the mists near the bridge I could see for the first time where I actually was.
According to Lameh’s briefing, facts now stuck in my brain like some kind of half-forgotten college survey course, Hell is a monstrous cylinder, wide as a small country and almost infinitely high and low, its countless habitations piled in layers like some impossibly huge core sample, the pith of an entire world. Abaddon, like much of Hell, was a sort of self-contained country made up of several levels, and its cities were built almost entirely from the wreckage of other cities.
“Wreckage” sure seemed to describe what lay before me. Stones and mud had been dragged into new arrangements, the rubble of old towers and walls rebuilt into a thousand new shapes to make an immense insect hive with scarcely two shoulders’ width of passageway between the stacked structures, and every bit I could see teemed with hellish life. The variety of body shapes was astonishing. Some of them could hardly be called bodies in a normal sense, being little more than moving piles of goo (often disconcertingly full of eyes); others wore the shapes of beasts or half-beasts, or upsetting reworkings of the basic human form. One of them a short distance away from me, crawling up a muddy facade of linked and interconnected holes over flimsy ladders of wood and mud and twisted rawhide, looked like one of those giant Japanese crabs with incredibly long legs, except each of this creature’s legs had a row of human hands growing down its length. The head perched on top of the crab shell was human, too, and looked as if it was whistling a tune.
But now I noticed something even stranger than that. Just a few yards behind me in the mist lay the near end of the Neronian Bridge, a path that led both in and out of Hell, but nobody on the Hell side seemed to realize the bridge was there. I watched people walk into the mist and go right past the end of the bridge as if it were invisible. Maybe it was, for them. All those people stumbling around in misery only yards from a way out that they couldn’t see. Suddenly, I felt sick. If I had not yet truly realized where I was and how bad it was going to be, I began to grasp it then.
There was no sky, of course. The makers of Hell hadn’t needed to bow to physical reality any more than the folk who built Heaven, and the very shape of the place was meant to be a constant reminder of confinement and punishment. Parts of Abaddon, however, did stretch very high above me, especially along the walls where crude materials were scaffolded upward many times the height of a man; but above it all was a great roof of jagged, pitted rock. We looked up at the bottom of the level above us, not at sky.
Weird and new as all this was, I had very little time to drink it in, because as soon as I stepped out of the mist, I was surrounded closely by noise and stink, bumped and jostled by some of the ugliest fuckers you’ve ever seen.
“Worms!” A froggy-looking guy with no back legs waved a sheaf of blackened, muddy sticks in the air. “Crispy like you like ’em!”
“Gin! Swaller of gin, just a spit.” This from a guy who looked as though he’d been sawed apart by a very bad magician and put back together by the magician’s amateur-surgeon brother. His off-kilter eyes caught me staring. “You, there. You look like you need one. Guarantee you’ll not have a clear thought again ’til last lamp. Only a spit!”
Last lamp. Lameh’s inserted memories stirred. There was no daylight or moonlight here, so first lamp was lit to signify morning, a second at midday, then one of those was put out and they went back to a single lamp until day’s end. (The fiery cracks in the walls, which provided the only brightness after day’s end, were called “afterlights.”) And a “spit” was an iron coin. The gin was almost certainly made from something horrible and did not tempt me in the least. Hell is remarkably realistic compared to Heaven, which I guess makes sense—real nakedness, real food, real shit, real money, you name it. The fairy lights and muted, pastels of the Celestial City were looking better and better by comparison, and I’d only been in Hell for a few heartbeats.
The gin peddler shuffled nearer to me, offering me a cup that dangled on a piece of rawhide so long that the cup had been dragging in the dirt. I was feeling pretty thirsty, but even if that filthy thing had been the Holy Grail I wouldn’t have lifted it to my mouth—I could smell the ghastly odor of the “gin” past the thousands of other stinks of the place, and no oblivion was worth that. (I really thought that then. I changed my mind later. In fact, by the time I’d been in Hell awhile, I was slurping down whatever I could get, just like back in the real world. If there’s ever a place where a person needs a stiff drink occasionally, it’s Hell. Hell and parts of Oklahoma.)
But the guy with the booze was interrupted before he could finish his spiel, shoved rudely out of the way by something very large that loomed above me like an arriving bus. The newcomer was female, in an Alice’s-Duchess sort of way. In short, she looked like a bitter manatee in a wig.