Six wormveined eyes bulge as the insane dog’s straining grates the massive iron plate. Above the basso profundo chorus of snarls Niko can hear metal creaking.
He underhands the jumbo milkbone to the berserk dog and white foam flies as feral jaws snap it from the heated air. Two more sets of beartrap teeth clamp on the central massive neck from either side. The hot air boils with snarls and thickens with a tang of copper.
Niko grips his hardcase and broadly rounds the brawling mass of dog to hurry to the massive gate. The moment he touches it the ancient iron grows hot in his grip. Insomniac rust smears his callused palm. There is no lock upon the gate, no handle. Niko simply pushes and it moves. No creak of hinge or metal groan. Hell’s gate opens inward.
Niko looks up at the flickering neon glow above the archway. Red-edged against it that carven figure perches smirking, pointed chin on taloned fist and exulting in its outspread wings. Horned and smiling.
Niko shifts the case to his left hand and puts his shoulder to the gate and plants his heels and puts his weight into it and the iron gate shudders wide enough to admit a man. In patches of red light the ground across the threshold looks just like the ground out here, flat and baked and cracked. What difference had he expected?
Behind him now the snarling grows to yowls. Niko slides into the opening and his hiking shoe descends upon the undisputed floor of Hell.
Niko dodges as the massive gate slams shut. He tries not to think of the dull boom of its certain closure as omenous, or apocalyptic, or containing any note of doom.
VIII.
WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT
IT’S DARK OUT there. The crashing echo of the gate’s decisive closure is all that fills the silent void surrounding Niko. Somehow the closing of the grated gate has cut off the intermittent neon light and all is starless and bible black. Before him might be a wall or a crevasse or an endless plain for all Niko can see. For all he knows horned cartoon demons leer and taunt with pitchforks just beyond his reach.
The air is sweatshop hot.
Niko takes a tentative step forward. He can sense the wall behind him, feel its mass and presence. Horrible as the wall is, he feels a strange security knowing it is there, the only certain solid thing between himself and utter isolation in a world that’s never known a sunrise, never felt a drop of rain. Endless uncarved marble the boundary between damnation and mere mortality.
Niko turns his hand before his face as if motion might make visible what is not seen when still. He shuts his eyes then opens them and cannot tell if they are open or shut. He stands there feeling foolish and observed and tells himself he’s merely acclimating, waiting for his eyes to adjust and his kinesthetic sense to absorb the notion that his universe might as well end at his skin.
The sudden churning fear. Jesus on a snipehunt Niko what the fuck are you doing down here?
He breathes in deep and summons up an image of a weightless feather in a mason jar.
All right. Okay.
He rubs gooseflesh beneath his coatsleeved arms despite the fact that there’s no wind, no sound, no light, no sense of here or there.
Niko spent a night once in a sensory deprivation tank. A large plastic coffin sealed away from light and sound, holding amniotic saltwater on which he lay suspended and unfeeling. It was easy to believe he was the only thing in the universe, that he was himself a universe and beyond his reach lay untenanted infinity. He had lain still and waited. For what he did not know but that was the sense of it. Waiting. A sense of imminence, of always arriving. Floating soulless in the briny dark.
Then the hatch yanked open and light slammed in and there was Gus’s drunken silhouette to deliver him slapped into the world and saying Hey was that a trip or what?
Like a disembarking argonaut Niko climbed out from the tank, wet and blinking at the alien world where he had beached, beckoning oblivion abandoned.
And there was Jemma naked on the sauna bench and keeping watch outside his little world, a faint worry crease between her eyebrows as she looked at him emerging, a curling paperback book-marked by her thigh, and Niko had smiled remembering why he’d come back to the world and why he always would.
Now in sultry darkness with his back against the wall to end all walls he blinks and catlike shakes his head. It had been so real. Jemma had been sitting right there in front of him on the redwood bench, turbaned in a bluestriped towel, paperback dampened by her sweating hands.
“Stop.” Startled by his own voice in this pregnant dark, as if whispered close beside him by some unexpected other.
A world unto himself he walks.
AS HE PASSES on into the unconstellated night there grows around him a persistent murmur. The cumulation of untold millions in torment giving voice to their despair, wailing their pain, howling their rage, sobbing their unalloyed separation from all the sanguine world. A ceaseless threnody of anguish that constitutes a white noise of the suffering world, the hubbub of Hell. Its collective growl and purr the endless operation of a factory of misery, churning mindless yet somehow alive. It will be with him always here, and he will never get used to it.
Bring up chorus as the Greek approaches stage front.
VOICES HE HEARS voices.
“Oh hey thanks for leaving the gate open, asshole.”
“What’s he got in his hand?”
“They let him in with something?”
All is so amazing dark.
“Shit, they let him in with clothes.”
Dimly as he walks he starts to sense their outlines in the faint infected light. The total darkness giving way to intermittent sickly orange light from somewhere high and far away. Beyond him in the blind world waiting is a sound of shifting figures, murmured voices flattened by enormous open space. How do they see him in this fetid gloom?
“Whose ass you be kissin fuh to get in here like this, mon?” The ground crunches and crackles beneath him as he walks. “You deef, son?” another voice calls. “Boy done ast how come you rate.”
“Now Judge mon. Ah tell you bout callin me boy, hey.”
“You kin tell me all you wont, porch monkey. I’m still gonna—”
“Ah don take yuh shit no more Judge, hey. You don’t be remembrin how long it take yuh to pull yuhself back together after Gombe take you apart like fresh bread mon? How much it hurt? Yuh scream like the woman, Judge. It sound like the old work whistle an yuh know it true. Yeh an it take you longer ta heal every time too.”
“Fuck you nigger. I hung more a you Ubanges than Carter’s got pills, an I taken enough a yo big fat lip to—”
A sudden scream pierces the gloom. Terrified, highpitched, cracking. It does in fact sound very like a work whistle. It goes on longer than any living being could possibly scream.
Niko heads off to one side, aware that those ahead of him have been down here so long their eyes can detect him, aware too that down here the dark at times will be his friend. His instinct is to see why the man is screaming. To help someone in pain. But this is not the country for Samaritans and the dead lie well beyond his aid.
The screaming stops.
“Always save the troat fuh last,” comes Gombe’s voice. “Here yuh go mon. Catch.” Something lands close by with a soggy sound of wet mop slapping concrete. “Now yuh tell old Gombe,” the voice says, closer now, “who are yuh that come here before yuh time?”
So much for stealth. Niko takes a long deep breath, releases it slowly. Readies himself for the violence he hears in the man’s tone.
Again pale orange smears the distant starless air. Niko makes out human shapes again, dozens of them, closer than he’d realized. The closest is dreadlocked and only a few yards away.