“Go on, then, love,” said Riprash in an encouraging tone. “It’s Deva, isn’t it?”
She nodded and seemed to find courage. Several more eyes emerged. “When I was alive . . . well, I was a very bad person. I’m sure I deserve to be here.”
“What did you do, dear?” Riprash asked. If you’ve never seen a ten-foot-tall monster making nice, it’s quite an experience.
“I lost my little babies.” A few of her eyes retracted into the forest of noodles or whatever they were. “No, that’s not right. I didn’t so much lose them as . . . I did away with them.”
I might have made a noise of surprise, but nobody else did. “Why was that, dear?” Riprash asked.
“I’m not certain now. I was frightened, and they were so sick, and I had no money to feed them. They were always crying, you see, even though they were terribly weak . . .” She trailed off. She was down to only a few eyes still showing. “I tried everything, really I did. I sold myself to men, but I could never make enough, and the woman who watched them for me when I was out, well, she didn’t . . . she didn’t take very good care . . .” The creature named Deva curled her fingers and tugged at her tendrils so hard I thought she might break them off. “She drank too much toddy, that one, and one day she let my youngest one wander, and my little girl fell from the window down to the courtyard and died. I came home with the smell of a man still on me and found her there on the stones. The bitch taking care of her had not even known she was gone!” The damned woman shook her head, or the lump near the top that I assumed was a head. “I knew then that I would be going to Hell. And the others were still sick, still crying, getting thinner and thinner.” After a long, long silence that nobody interrupted, she said, “So one night, I took them out when everyone else was asleep, took them outside the village and drowned them in the river. It was so sad, because even as I took them down to the bank I was looking for crocodiles. I was going to drown them, but I was still worried that a crocodile might get them!”
She broke down at this point, and it was a while until she could talk again. The strange thing was that the other damned, and even the demon members of the congregation, all waited for her to continue. In a place where nobody even bothered to look twice at a badly injured person writhing on the ground, or a child being beaten or sexually assaulted, these Hell-creatures were waiting patiently, even kindly, for one of their own to find her way back to herself.
“They stoned me to death, of course,” she said finally. “Even the woman who let my littlest one die threw a stone! I have been here a long time. I cannot even guess how many centuries. On and on and on . . . It will sound strange, but even though I am dead, I did not truly know I had been alive until I heard Riprash speak, heard him speaking of how we might someday be lifted. Since I awoke here, I have been like a mole who lives in the ground, go forward, go backward, every day in the dark, and knowing nothing else. My children—I did not think of them. I could not think of them. I could not remember them, because my heart was burned away inside me. But when I heard Riprash talk of the lifting, I could feel myself again. I knew nothing could ever take away my wickedness, that what I had done would be a terrible curse in the mind of God forever . . . but I could hope that someday, perhaps when Heaven and Hell themselves come to an end, I might be forgiven. One day, no matter how dark and dreadful my act, I might see my little ones, my babies, again, so that I can tell them how sorry I am that they were ever born to such a mother—” She bowed her head, and all the tendrils shuddered together. “Ah, God! I am so sorry! So sorry!”
My eyes were dry as I sat in that crowd of damned, doomed folk and listened to her keening apologies to her dead children, but that was only because the demon’s body I wore had no tear ducts.
sixteen:
a filthy river runs through it
GOB AND I hid out at Gagsnatch’s until the second beacon had been lit, then our new friend Riprash buried us (carefully) under a load of ship’s provisions on a wagon and drove us down to the docks. My view was entirely of the undersides of coarse sacks full of dried maggots, but I’m not sure it was any worse than seeing the actual city of Cocytus Landing, at least judging by the astonishing variety of unpleasant noises and odors that made their way through the cushioning layers of bagged demon yummies.
Riprash unloaded the provisions himself to make sure we weren’t accidentally beheaded by one of his helpers, then hurried us up the swaying gangplank.
“You’ll stay in my cabin,” he said, gesturing proudly around the low-ceilinged room, which would have been adequate for us if Riprash never came in. As it was, he took up so much of the space that it felt like sharing a bathtub with a humpback whale.
When day had passed and only the afterlights burned, the dockworkers went home. Riprash took us out on deck and showed us around the ship like a retiree displaying his rhododendrons. The Bitch was halfway between a garbage scow and a Chinese junk, long and low, with sails that must have looked like bat wings when they unfurled. It was built with timbers that didn’t seem to match, and was so smeared with tar all over that the ship might have been made from chewed licorice. But from what I could gather from Riprash’s proud descriptions, despite its age and decrepitude, The Nagging Bitch was state of the art when it came to things like shackles, cages, and tools of punishment. I tried to smile and look impressed, but when you’re looking at a thing with metal teeth meant for digging into someone’s crotch to prevent escape . . . well, like I said, I tried to smile.
Riprash had apparently decided he liked me. He showed this newfound solidarity by clapping me on the back from time to time, hard enough to make my bones creak. He also introduced me to the hellish rum he liked to drink, which tasted like bile and gasoline and packed the clout of pure moonshine. No, I didn’t ask how it was made, or from what. Riprash loved to watch me trying to swallow the stuff and rewarded me for the entertainment of seeing me cough, retch, and sputter by telling stories late into the night when I would rather have slept.
But the liquor helped, and it wasn’t that the stories were bad. In fact, by Hell standards my new, large friend’s tales were quite sweet, really, of a simple ogre and his slave ship having interesting adventures around the infernal world. By local standards, Riprash was really an okay guy. Yes, he’d killed a few people—a few hundred, more accurately—during the course of his life, and he had trouble thinking of the damned souls he trafficked in as anything other than mobile meat, but once we got to know him I never felt afraid of him, and there’s very few hellfolk I can say that about. Including my girlfriend.
The ship set sail just before the first day-lamp was lit. Riprash let us out on deck once we were underway so we could look around. The Nagging Bitch had so many black sails that the masts looked like some kind of vampire nesting trees. Weighted down with a hold full of caged slaves, she wallowed so low that the river was constantly slapping over the gunwales, and the deck was always at least ankle-deep in Cocytus sludge. but I was delighted to breathe the (comparatively) sweeter air outside the cabin.
That first night, as the city fell away behind us and we sailed into the dark, the great black snake of river soon became invisible. With only the distant beacons on the walls of Hell for light, we might have been traveling through a universe of flickering red stars. I felt suddenly lonely, lonelier than I’d ever been, even with Gob beside me, open-eyed and open-mouthed as he journeyed into what must have been a life he’d never dreamed of living. I was desperate for Caz and that unique moment of completeness she’d given me, I was badly in need of friends like Sam and Monica, and I missed my familiar haunts. You’ve been there, I’m sure, but it feels different in Hell. Chances were very small I’d ever see any of them again. Little Gob was company of a sort, but he wasn’t exactly chatty, and since I was planning to ditch him before things got really dangerous, I didn’t want to get too close, either.