Hell must be a lot like being born in the middle of a war, I decided: there was no chance for anything better to develop. I could almost imagine Gob as a little machine, a thing that had survived intact this long because it did exactly the right things and would keep doing those things even if it was miraculously transplanted into some other situation, like San Judas. I’d known a lot of street kids, but almost all of them had something that showed they were human, a shallow loyalty to each other if nothing else. Hell must grind that out of everyone, I decided. What relationship could survive being worn away over thousands of years of big and little torments?
Hell is a big cylinder. Imagine somebody dug a hole down into hardened lava, all the way down to where it gets squishy and murderously hot again. Now, remember those cake tins Grandma Flossie used to send you at Christmas with ugly-ass fruitcakes in them, year after year? Take a near infinite number of those tins and stack them in the hole on top of each other, so the bottom is in molten goo and the top of each tin is the bottom of the next. That’s pretty much the infernal layout. There are cities on every level but also lots of wilderness roamed by bandits, monsters, and worse stuff. Remember, it’s Hell, so they made it big. Even with the more enlightened sentencing laws of the last hundred years or so, it still has to hold billions upon billions.
And I had to get to the top, or near it, to reach Caz. I knew there was a sort of elevator system—they call them “lifters”—that ran right up through the middle of Hell’s layers like the string of a necklace, but that was like knowing there’s an elevator in Montana when you’re on the Oregon coast. The famous rivers of Hell, Styx and Acheron and the others, also provide a way to travel, but first you have to be near a river, which we weren’t. So at least while I handled my boss Temuel’s errand, I had to make my way up through Hell one slice at a time. Even with Gob’s help, it took a couple of days just to find our way to the next level of Abaddon.
To my surprise, Gob decided to stick with me once we reached the next level, a dismal wasteland of stone and mud and smoking sulfur so godawful even the damned avoided the place. There were settlements, of course, but they were like the smallest, poorest, hottest, driest cattle stations in the Australian outback, if someone had pounded on them for a week with a fifty ton hammer made of compacted fly shit.
Don’t get me wrong: Abaddon was better than most of Hell, but it was still fucking horrible. I don’t know how long we climbed through its levels, from one parched landscape the color of dried shit to another, past ugliness and misery so vast I stopped paying attention, but it must have been at least a week before we found ourselves somewhere different.
Asphodel Meadows was more open than Abaddon, perhaps because the great stone ceiling seemed farther away here, and it was certainly less dry and desolate, but it made up for dry with boiling swamps that could only be crossed by walking on bobbing, leathery leaves, some of which looked (and were, it turned out) more like Venus fly traps than lily pads. We spent days in the weird, twilight swamps, sloshing through mud and kicking our way through thorny vines, dodging murderous flora and fauna and generally besieged by ugly buzzing insects the size of sparrows. To add to the charm, many of the brackish ponds in Asphodel Meadows were surrounded by the bodies of the damned, purple and bloated but still twitching. Poison didn’t kill you in Hell, it just made you suffer and suffer and suffer.
What terrible thirst had driven them down to drink from such obviously unsafe waters? I patted the canteen-bag Gob had stolen for us somewhere back in Abaddon, which we had filled the last time at a clean but unpleasant-tasting spring bubbling up at the edge of the Meadows. The bag had clearly been made from the innards of something or someone I didn’t want to think about, but right now the water in it was all that kept us from joining those bulging near-cadavers, some of them split and venting gases but still not managing to die. I couldn’t exactly feel good looking at these victims of thirst, but I sure could feel grateful I wasn’t one of them.
I was afraid I was beginning to understand Hell.
The flat leaves felt as treacherous to walk on as floating plywood, not to mention that plywood doesn’t bite, but it kept us out of the frothily poisonous water. The fly traps generally left us alone—we were probably a bit too big to digest—but a few of the bolder ones decided we were worth a try. I pulled Gob out of one of them as it folded on him, just before the pencil-sized spines that served as the thing’s teeth sank into his flesh. His leg was all covered with hissing goo. The stuff splashed me as well and it burned like battery acid. When we staggered off the last leaf a few moments later and onto a patch of comparatively dry ground, we immediately threw ourselves down and rolled in the mud like water buffalo, desperate to stop the pain. It took a long time to rub the toxic sap off us, but even so, Gob barely made a sound. That amazed me, since pieces of his skin were coming off his leg in tatters. It was obvious that the crybaby got kicked out of most people down here pretty quickly.
Out of the swamps at last, we climbed talus slopes of spiky, salty crystals and even staggered through a forest of dead trunks in a flurry of caustic snow. Yes, it snows in Hell. All that “until Hell freezes over” stuff is nonsense. It snows in Hell all the time. It just isn’t frozen water. I won’t spend a lot of time talking about it because it’s disgusting, but I traveled through quite a few snowstorms in Hell. Some of them were acid, some were flurries of frozen piss, some of the things that piled up in drifts as we staggered through the gusts weren’t even liquids. But all of them stung.
By the time we’d slept three or four more times, the empty spaces of the Asphodel Meadows began to resemble something a little closer to their name: dark, boggy moors covered with pale flowers. Fog crept in as we squelched across them, eventually obscuring the landscape almost completely. In the mist I could see shapes, many of them upright, but if they saw us they never let on. Instead they wandered among the asphodel stalks, plucking the gray blooms and stuffing them in their mouths as tears dribbled down their cheeks. Eventually, I managed to work out from Gob’s answers that everybody in Hell ate the asphodel flowers in some form, baked into bread or flat cakes (I’d had a few of these; they were bland, even bitter, but mostly unremarkable) but that those who ate the flowers raw experienced the sins of their lives over and over, like a bad acid trip. Worst of all, though, was that the more they consumed and the more they wallowed in their own terrible mistakes and cruelties, the more of it they wanted. The few asphodel-eaters I saw up close had staring eyes and twitching fingers, like Hieronymus Bosch crackheads.
It was hard to remember that, compared to many, these creatures were among Hell’s most fortunate, the few who’d managed to find a place of relative freedom for themselves somewhere between an eternity of slavery in the houses of the demon lords and an eternity in the torture pits.
Eternity? That still stuck in my craw. I knew that some of these people must have been the worst sort of folks when they were alive, murderers, rapists, child molesters. I honestly didn’t mind them getting even a few centuries of hellfire, but . . . forever? Even if the damned remembered who they were and what they’d done to get there (unlike me and my angelic friends at the Compasses) how meaningful could any punishment be after a million years? How many of these walking phantoms could even remember what they’d done? And what about the ones like Caz, who had been driven to their crimes by others? She’d killed her husband, sure, but if anyone had deserved to get stabbed into a bloody hash, that guy had.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it as we trudged through those misty, treacherous meadows, past rows of nodding, death-pale blossoms, the little damned Ballast-boy following at my heels like a feral dog, perhaps having the most fun he’d ever had in his squalid, miserable (but still nearly endless) life. God knows I tried to stop dwelling on the horror of it, but the unwanted thought kept coming back to me again and again.