“He’s wearing shoes,” an Englishwoman says.
Someone screams at him in Cantonese.
“Is that a guitar?” a husky voice.
Gombe laughs long and loud. The orange light fades and the shapes coalesce with the heated dark. “Yuh don belong here fuh certain. What happen mon? Yuh dig yuh swimmin pool too deep?”
Laughter all around him not quite sane.
“On yuh way to a gig maybe? They be trowin a righteous party all the time down along dat way I hear. Righteous party fuh true.”
“That’s right,” says Niko, his own voice flat and thin and airless. “I’m on my way to a gig.” He’s stopped walking now.
“Sneakers an a coat mon.” Gombe laughs. “Yuh from California fuh certain.”
Niko’s face heats. You have got to be fucking kidding me.
“Yuh long way from home ma friend.” Gombe is getting closer. Niko hears the man’s footsteps crunching on the unseen ground.
“Maybe Gombe jus take yuh shoes an send yuh on yuh way. Yuh play yuh gig barefoot like de bluesman hah?” Gombe laughs.
Once more orange light smears the distance like a comet’s ghost and now Niko sees Gombe there before him. The man’s skin glistens with crawling shapes. He is covered head to foot with enormous roaches. Their crawling traffic on his naked body is unceasing, even about his face, but Gombe pays no mind. Now Niko hears the aggregate rustle of millions of jointed cockroach legs picking their filthy way, millions of fat and glossy cockroach bodies brushing, millions of brown thin wings beating. Gombe steps forward and the ground crunches underneath his naked feet. Niko’s mouth tightens with nausea as he realizes that for some time now he has been walking on a living carpet of the filthy creatures.
Gombe sees his face and laughs. An enormous cockroach crawls across one eye. “What the matter mon? Yuh don like how Gombe dress? Maybe soon yuh and him have the same tailor huh. Or maybe yuh give old Gombe yuh shoes an he let yuh go with the res.”
“I’m sorry,” Niko says and hears his voice’s tension, “but I think I’m gonna need them more than you.”
Gombe grins. “Now what yuh be needin fuh to wear runnin shoes here mon?”
“Watch,” says Niko. And runs. The rhythmic crush beneath him is sickening, the rapid crunch behind him spurs him on. Within a hundred yards the yelling pursuit begins to fall away, which is good because although Niko is in great shape he is no track star and certainly no spring chicken. The crushing beneath him lessens as well, gives way to hard pounding on flat stone. Niko slows to a stop, breathing heavily. Why aren’t they pursuing? Could they who do not breathe grow winded?
He feels a tickling on his ankles as he bends panting with hands on knees, a tickling climbing his shoes and calves. Suddenly he drops the hardcase and scrunches up his pantlegs and compulsively slaps at his ankles and shins and calves, goes on to his thighs, his rear, his stomach. Takes off his coat and snaps it before him like a rug. Hears soft bodies patter onto stone. Another shudder convulses him, and he hurries on his harried way.
NIKO WALKS DISCONSOLATE along the midnight plain. Soon the flat ground becomes cracked and broken like the parched skin of the Bonneville salt flats. Earthquake fissures run dark and jagged like frozen lightning shadows. Niko has encountered not another soul although he hears their lamentations in the distance. It’s a lot less crowded here than one would think. Then again it’s goddamn huge and he is only on the outskirts. How big, how long his traveling to come? This geography is not physical or mappable. Cartographers of this sullen abyss might light black candle and cast bone and carve rune and paint in chicken blood on parchment skin and still not fix it for the eye to read because it is not fixed. There ought to be a word for such a notion, for the cartography of Hell.
Hadeography.
From far off comes a freight train rumble. Niko peers across the dolorous distance and faintly sees a giant living thing glide stately on the cracked and broken ground. No, not living. And not gliding either. Sinuously twisting, bottomlit and lifting itself up at points like a woman in a hoopskirt stepping high across a puddle, touching down again capriciously, a tornado heaves across the tortured landscape toward him. The gloom alive with static sparkings like a plague of fireflies. The churning funnel owns the landscape like an Old Testament god, vengeful and malign and bent on wrath and thunder. The locomotive roar of its approach grows deafening as it stoops and gathers writhing clots of feckless damned to bear them up and dance them doll-like in the air around its undulating body in a hundred mile an hour waltz. Their naked skin sandblasted. Fleshy layers flense to raw and glistening muscle and white tendon band, gouting arteries spray particolored tendrils that whipstain the massive shaft before dispersing. Screaming faces filed down to glossy bone. The twister touches down again to amble toward another clump of running damned, leaving in its quiet wake a stripped debris of gleaming bone and conscious jelly.
Niko doesn’t even think of running from the whirlwind twisting there before him. He only watches in mortal dread as the vortex lifts to hopscotch over his windswept head and pass mercurial above him. The voice of the whirlwind a leviathan moan. It augers down again behind him to gyre like a mindless deadly battling top. The wind of its periphery whips him and he covers his eyes as sand stings his exposed skin like nettles. Then the wind abates to scour elsewhere on the naked dark.
Niko realizes he has fallen to his knees as if in supplication to some oblivious god. He rises, lucky or blessed or perhaps just insignificant, and walks on. He passes piles of glossy polished bones that clack like windchimes in the remnant breeze. The sockets of sandblasted skulls contain a residue of pureed eye and muscle pulp. The bones appear to writhe with pink maggots until Niko sees that ligaments and tendons and muscle tissues are slowly regrowing, stretching over tortured frames while polished skullteeth chatter as if cold. Purple filigrees of veins spread thickening webs. The twister’s murdered are not dead but are to slowly reassemble to endure new torments that await them when again they are made whole.
The mashed grape eyes of one such skull inflate to fill sandblasted sockets once again. Eyes that track him in their polished frames as Niko navigates the endless gloom. And though these dead are flayed to glossy skeletons he feels certain they are conscious all the while. That their reconstitution is a deep and undiluted pain in every lazarus nerve and cell.
Again pale orange smears the abyss. He decides to head toward the source of the intermittent light.
Enfleshing skeletons rise quaking against the light that glowers through the gaps between their picket ribs and glistens on wet marrow and raw meat. They twitch and shudder and convulse and jerk, uncertain as yearlings in their newmade frames. As they stand they slowly turn to stare at him like vivitropic flowers.
IX.
LIFE BY THE DROP
HALF AN HOUR later Niko encounters his first demon.
The ground shudders beneath his feet, followed by a loud deep boom of something massive smashing on the broken plain. In the distance large square silhouettes are scattered about. Some kind of structures. Temples? Houses? Hard to determine size and distance because there is so little light and because the plain he walks is vast and featureless and without horizon.
A low shape undulates toward him. Niko turns to avoid it and it swerves to meet him, traveling close to the ground in jerky flopping motions like some enormous writhing maggot. Fifty yards away and Niko sees it is in fact a human being, prone and dragging itself toward him with its pale arms. Twenty yards and the shape is a woman, naked and fat and oozing a doubled sluglike trail of her own blood from stumps of amputated legs.