Moses blinked. “Are you serious?”
“I just escaped from of the city of Necropolis. You know about Necropolis ?”
“Of course I know about Necropolis.”
“And its dog-god Anubis?”
“May his name be cursed.” The response was an unthinking reaction. Moses was intrigued. Semple moved a little closer to the Patriarch, as though she wanted to confide in him. She was aware that the women were still covertly watching. “Anubis just let off one of his dirty little atom bombs, except this one was a bit bigger and more complicated than I suspect he anticipated. I’m surprised you didn’t see the flash or feel the shock.”
Moses’ face stiffened. “We saw the flash and felt the shock. The goats panicked and the herdsmen have only just finished rounding them up.”
Semple smiled knowingly and gestured to the tribe. “That must have been a hard one to explain to the faithful. They don’t look like they’re quite up to the concept of nuclear technology.”
“I told them it was Lucifer spawning demons from the lightning.”
Semple laughed and nodded. “I guess that’s close enough.”
“You’re one of Anubis’s constructs?”
“I’m nobody’s construct, pal. I was only in Necropolis because, out of the goodness of my heart, I went there on an errand for my sister.”
Moses looked at her sharply. “SISTER?”
Unintentionally, he had put the echo and reverb on at full power. Semple clapped her hands over her ears. “Don’t do that!”
Moses cut them off. “I’m sorry. It’s a habit. What about your sister?”
Semple realized she might have said too much. “Nothing, she’s just a sister.”
Moses’ eyes narrowed and he shot her a sly, sideways look. “You’re not Aimee Semple McPherson, are you?”
Now it was Semple’s turn to take a deep breath. “I’m Semple McPherson. Aimee and I separated a while ago. I guess you could say we used to be in the same racket as you.”
Moses frowned, then stared speculatively a Semple. “I think we’d better take this conversation to my tent. It’s a little too public out here. I have to keep up my image in front of the rubes.”
Semple kept her face expressionless. His guard was down now and he was revealing himself for the con artist he really was. This faux Moses could talk about rubes, but she had him as hooked as any carny mark on the midway.
***
His first sight of Gehenna was enough to make Jim wish that he was drunk again. Even before visual contact, the stench that wafted down the river, the stink of punishment and pain, of violated bodies, ozone, sulfuric acid and ammonia, hot blood and decaying flesh, burning hair and unidentifiable toxic pollution, was an olfactory cocktail that boded the worst kind of ill. With it came an amalgam of noise that was equally daunting: massed voices cried and lamented in a seamless howl of screams, shouting, and psychotic laughter. The human wailing was accompanied by a counterpoint of growls and barking that had to come from the throats of things so evil they could hardly qualify as animal. Underpinning it all was the deep rumble and straining grind of unholy massed machinery. And yet the sound and smell were only mild precursors of the full visual spectacle. Hieronymous Bosch was made real with a brutality that leapt quantum measures beyond any mere painting’s imagined nastiness. Those who dwelled there had come to suffer in a manner unimaginable even to one with Jim’s deviant background.
In a massive, smoke-filled crevasse carved out of the living sandstone like an axe wound in the rock made by some god or spectacular giant, creaking and straining mechanisms of suffering labored at their infinitely repeated tasks. While flames belched from fissures in the rocks, pistons rose and fell and steam leaked from huge driving engines. Revolving cam shafts and greased axles turned cogs of wood and brass and long spiral worm gears that, in their turn, caused lacerating steel blades to rise and fall and huge hammers to drive iron nails into writhing flesh. Countless victims were bound, strapped, and secured to gallows, gibbets, and structures so bizarre in the contortions they inflicted on the human frame that Jim was unable to give names to them. Long, slow-rolling conveyor belts moved the damned from one automated theater of cruelty to the next, in endless cycles of relentless automation. Huge cauldrons steamed and bubbled at a slow simmer, each filled to the brim with a foul stew on the surface of which bobbed the shrieking, sobbing heads of submerged humans. Others were crushed, over and over, by huge stone rollers, while more were continuously flogged with lashes as long as the leather traces of teamster wagons.
Although the mechanical structures presented the impression that Gehenna was a dark clockwork universe of meaningless repeating torture, it had no real precision about it. Its mechanisms strained and shuddered; elbows in its maze of pipework leaked steam and dripped boiling water and oil. Its nooks and crannies were thronged with masses of wailing humanity being subjected to less systemized acts of fiendishness. Jim watched while what was left of a man, flesh all but stripped from his bones, was dragged along a dripping, reeking catwalk over one of the cauldrons. A barbed fishhook pierced his rib cage, and the rope attached to the hook was dragged behind a blood-spattered golf cart being driven by a pair of grinning demons. Other victims were enmeshed in tumbleweed tangles of rusty razor wire, while guffawing reptile things, and other strange creatures that looked to be entirely composed of leather, laughed at their agonizingly futile efforts to free themselves.
High on the sides of the crevasse, shackled work gangs of naked, filthy men and women labored, quarrying with picks and shovels, balancing on impossibly narrow ledges or perched on rickety scaffolding, actually attempting to enlarge the valley of pain by the strain of their muscles and the sweat of their brows, while other demons and reptile creatures encouraged them with long black bullwhips. At regular intervals, a worker would lose his or her footing, slip, and fall. Either the unfortunate would be saved by those linked to him on the particular chain gang, or else all would be dragged down, plunging to the rocks and fires below, to the great merriment and amusement of the demons and reptiles in charge.
Gehenna even seemed to have developed it own unique flora and fauna. Amid the machinery and instruments of pain, huge misshapen fungoid growths reared corpse-white and unhealthy, as large as trees. Other things Jim didn’t recognize, like damaged mutant eggs with traceries of poisonous green and purple veins dappling their shells, grew out of the charred black soil between the flame gushers and fire pits, ranging in size from just a few inches to six or seven feet at their widest diameter. Huge rats and scrawny, red-eyed dogs made their own contribution to the misery of the valley’s human denizens, as was to be expected in such a nightmare landscape, like the crows, ravens, and vultures that circled overhead and settled to peck at the miserable undying carrion. The presence of the demons, reptile men, and leather creatures also conformed to a certain hellishly medieval logic. What Jim didn’t understand were the impossible bird-headed women, the bat-winged toads, the hogs with fangs and flippers, or the animated slime that constantly shaped and reshaped itself. They all seemed to have been included as nothing more than horrific additional background.
Once he had taken in enough of Gehenna, Jim turned and looked at Doc. Jaded as he might be, he still felt sickened by the entire wretched panorama of this hideous garden of delights. It bore too uncomfortable a resemblance to one of his old earthside nightmares. “Jesus Christ, talk about the horror and the horror.”
Doc smiled sourly. “You can’t go up the river without meeting it in one shape or form. Ask 01’ Joe Conrad . . . or poor Marlon Brando.”
“Every one of those dumb suffering bastards could leave if they wanted to. Right?”
“That kinda depends. If they’re only set dressing, they haven’t got a prayer; strictly speaking, though, nobody does anything they don’t subconsciously want to do. Those who went there by choice stay there by choice.”