Although Jim and Doc had encountered no other boats in the tunnel, traffic in and around the port was intense. A large number of small craft, from every conceivable period, were moored at the wooden jetties and stone piers. Taxi boats like Venetian funeral gondolas, with tasseled black canopies of watered silk and top-heavy superstructures of ebony inlaid with jet, were poled in and around the stationary craft by caped gondoliers, while a magnificent Mississippi-style paddle-wheel riverboat was majestically emerging from a tunnel similar to the one the launch had just left.
“Not exactly what you’d expected, huh?”
Jim ruefully shook his head. “Not exactly.”
“Wondering how to start begging my forgiveness?”
“I thought . . . ”
“I never believed someone like you would revert so easily.”
“When I read that damned inscription, I . . . ”
“But now you’re sorry?”
Jim nodded ruefully. “I should have waited and seen.”
“But conditioning goes deep?”
“I really am sorry.”
“But you just find it hard to say?”
“I usually try to avoid being put in that position.”
Doc suddenly laughed. “Don’t worry about it, my boy. I’m through rubbing your nose in it. I’ve never like admitting I was wrong, myself. In fact, back when, truth be told, I shot the odd man rather than admit being in error.”
“I’m glad you didn’t shoot me.”
Doc looked at Jim in silence for a long moment. “Do you know how close you came?”
“I think so.”
“Remember that in the future.”
Doc guided the launch into a vacant mooring at one of the granite block piers. He deftly threaded a painter through an iron ring and tied it off, then he turned and looked at Jim. “So? Are we going to Hell? Shall we see what the town has to offer?”
Jim looked up at the waterfront beyond the jetty, crowded with people in transit. “Are we just going to abandon the launch?”
“You looking to go back down the river anytime soon?”
Jim shook his head. “I think I’m done with the river for the time being.”
Doc picked up his filthy duster coat, but then let it drop again as though it were too far gone to be worth bothering with. “So leave the boat. Someone else will make use of it. Easy come, easy go.”
As they climbed the stone steps up to the wharf, Jim wondered what Doc meant by the last remark, but it didn’t seem the time to ask. As soon as they reached the top of the steps, they became part of the crowd and were quickly carried along with it. None of those arriving in Hell looked particularly worried about it and those leaving didn’t appear at all desperate, so Jim, in that moment, decided to put the last of his fears behind him, as well as any curiosity about the origins of the launch and, like Doc had said, see what the town had to offer.
To say that the mob that thronged the waterfront was eclectic could be considered a magnificent understatement. They came in all shapes and sizes, ages and dispositions, from all eras and cultures, and of every sex, multiples and none. A few could not even be specifically termed human. Three Aztec jaguar gods wrangled in an unrecognizable language that seemed to consist of grunts and trilling whistles with a pair of leather creatures similar to those that Jim had seen in Gehenna. Jim looked a little askance at the leather things, wondering at their hellish function. Gehenna had given him a fairly accurate grasp of what their sense of fun was likely to be. A suspension bridge troll and a crusader in full, if rusted, chain-mail armor, having carelessly shouldered each other in the press, halted to curse and abuse each other, and looked likely to fall to fighting. More general and widespread curses were also aimed at a trio of lizard men from the Planet Mongo, so shitfaced drunk they needed to hold each other up, who repeatedly lurched into people while trailing a bile-colored stink of gin vomit and brimstone in their wake.
Once away from the water and the immediate vicinity of boats and piers, the majority of the two-way traffic was centered on a bank of descending escalators fashioned from copper, steel, and dark bronze that seemed to plunge to infinity, flanked by two huge carved angels of death with wings that extended to form the roof of the shaft. As far as Jim could see, these moving staircases were the only way in and out of the cavernous docking area. Jim assumed this was where Doc was heading, and so was surprised when Holliday veered off, going in the direction of a stone colonnade over to their left that housed a number of booths doing a brisk business, if the lines forming in front of them were any indication.
“First thing we have to do is get in line and sell our souls.”
Jim blinked. “Sell our souls? Who in Hell would want to buy our souls?”
Doc shrugged as though it were the most natural thing in the underworld. “It’s the way it works in this Hell. You make your mark and supposedly sell your soul and then they load you up with a bag of the local currency to spend on drink or drugs or women, or gamble away at the tables, or generally dispose of on whatever might be to your own particular taste and downfall.”
Jim’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “That’s all there is to it?”
“Soul-selling is the foundation of the local economy. You got to admit it’s no weirder than a lot of other monetary systems. Ask John Maynard Keynes.”
Jim made a “whatever” gesture and followed Doc to the nearest of the lines. “Still, there’s a slightly ominous ring to selling one’s soul.”
Doc looked back at Jim, starting to lose patience gain. “Shit, Morrison, will you once and for all put ‘ominous’ out of your vocabulary? You’re in Hell, sport. What else can they do to you? Send you to Peoria?”
When their turn finally came, a clerk in pince-nez, business suit, bow tie, and high starched collar, straight out of the counting rooms of Kafka’s castle, stood in the teller’s cage of a Victorian banking house, ready to supervise the transaction. He pushed two moist clay tablets, covered in sparrow-scratched cuneiform, in front of the two men. “Make your mark, we’ll bake them later.”
Jim look doubtfully at the wet surface of the clay. “Shouldn’t we read these things before we sign them? I’ve signed a lot of dumb contracts in my time and regretted it later.”
The clerk sniffed and looked at Jim over his half lenses. “You read ancient Sumerian, I suppose?”
“No.”
“So?”
Jim sighed, reached for the stylus, and made his mark. Once the mark was committed, the clerk hefted two large leather bags onto the counter and pushed one to Jim and the other to Doc. “Move along now, there’s others waiting.”
As soon as they were away from the clerk’s booth, Jim opened his bag and peered inside. At first it seemed as though the pouch were filled with large gold coins, like Mexican double eagles or Spanish doubloons. The moment Jim reached in to pull one out, though, he knew different. The coin was merely gold plastic. “We’ve been had. It’s just plastic.”
Doc wasn’t in the least worried. “They work just as well.”
“Hell ran out of gold?”
“Gold got too damned heavy to tote around.”
Jim had to admit there was a certain practicality to the idea. “I guess that makes sense.”
Doc was scanning the crowd. “The first thing we need is a Virgil.”
“A Virgil?”
“It was the poet Virgil who led Dante Alighieri through the levels and circles of Hell.”
Jim scowled. “Even I knew that.”
“So these days, now that torture has apparently given way to tourism, the tour guides all pretend they’re Virgil.”
Doc indicated a group of old men in soft gray robes waiting, scanning the faces of the crowd moving to the up escalators. “Virgils.”
“Why do we need a guide? I though you knew your way around Hell.”