Inferno. Part 17

Half a ton of demon slammed into the rock.

Billy rolled away. The demon moaned and tried to gather his knees to his chest.

"Now run!" cried Benito. "Billy!"

A troop of demons was almost on us. I raced for the next pit, stopped at the edge. Where was Billy?

Billy had retrieved the demon's pitchfork and was raising it for the kill.

I yelled, "Never mind that!" and then it was just too late. Billy yelled triumph and brought the pitchfork down hard. He raised it for another thrust, and they had him. I jumped into s.p.a.ce alongside Benito. Three-inch fingernails clicked shut behind my neck.

CHAPTER 21

The side of the gully was rough rock falling almost sheer. I glimpsed it in free-fall, and when I saw that there were no handholds I simply gave up. A couple of seconds later I lay broken at the bottom, staring up at the non-sky.

In the sea of pain I couldn't tell what was broken and what was only braised. But I remembered that you're not supposed to move an accident victim. I didn't try to move.

Rustling near me.

"Benito?"

"Over here."

"Are you hurt?"

"Yes."

"Me too."

"We are out of their path, I think. We need only wait to heal."

Whose path? I was afraid to turn my head, but I turned my eyes. I found myself looking up along the fluted robe of a life-sized golden statue. No information there.

I said, "What about Billy?"

"Poor Billy. His urge to violence betrayed him."

"Don't be so d.a.m.ned philosophical. We've got to get him out of their hands!"

"How?"

"Well... first we wait to heal, I guess. Where would they put him? In the pitch with the Tammany types?"

"Look up along the edge of the gully."

Something like an endless length of rope was falling in loops across the sky. It dropped very slowly, as if almost weightless. As it came near I saw that it was thicker than rope, and there was a tuft on the end... Where had I seen something like that recently?

Above our heads it hesitated, then descended like a blind worm. For seconds it was hidden behind the rock slope. Then it began to rise... and the end was coiled around something that moved. Billy.

"Minos," I said. "It's his tail."

"Yes."

Before we could move, Billy would be back on the island in the river of blood-- or in the river itself; he'd left the island, of his own free will. He was beyond our reach. I sighed and turned my eyes from the tiny struggling figure and the infinite sprawl of Minos' tail.

And the statue had moved.

It had gone past me about one yard. I turned my head, regardless of consequence. My neck wasn't broken. And there were two bare human feet beneath the hem of the golden robe. One moved a good six inches as I watched.

"Benito. There are men in those things."

"And women too," said Benito. "Religious hypocrites."

He stood up carefully, testing to see if anything had healed. Apparently it had. He tried to help me up, but pain yelped in my ribs. I sat down against the slope to wait some more.

Golden robes moved past like snails. There were men and women in those golden idols, but I saw only bare feet and shadowed faces within enormous hoods. One stopped, and turned with the same excruciating slowness that characterized his walk, and said, "Are you lost?"

Benito said we weren't. I asked, "Are you?"

"Why, no. I think this is my proper place." His accent was thick and hard to identify. "I have been here long enough to be convinced that G.o.d thinks so too."

"How long is that?"

"Over a thousand years have pa.s.sed on Earth, I'm told."

"That's a little hard to swallow," I said. "The English language isn't that old."

"I know," said the priest. "We teach each other. I learned this language from one who came here recently, an Amie Semple MacPherson. There is little else to do as we wander this endless channel, and you may imagine that it is easier to teach each other than to search for some companion who speaks our own language."

"Why," I asked, "don't you stop and sit down?"

The tired gray eyes studied me from within the golden cowl. "I could fall on you. But it may be that you do not know what you say. If I stop this robe grows hot. It is too hot now. It grows hot slowly, and it grows cool slowly. Now, goodbye." He began to turn away.

Benito said, "We could walk along with you."

"That would please me." He finished his turn and took one lurching footstep.

I got up. The ruined ribs only twinged. "How heavy is that robe?" I asked.

"I never weighed it. They tell me it is gilded lead. Perhaps a ton?"

"What did you do?"

"Does it matter? I was young, I had not been a priest for many years. But the end of the thousand years since Christ was born were drawing to a close. People began to fear the end of the world. I urged them to give away their property. To the Church. We became very wealthy."

"You could have given it back, afterwards."

"We did not."

"Did all of you end up here? The whole order?"

"No. Some truly thought the world would end. Some believed a wealthy Church could serve souls better. But I never believed the Second Coming could be predicted, and I enjoyed the wealth. I-- do you need to know more? It was a good thing to be in the Church in those days."

Benito tapped my shoulder and pointed. "There is our way out. The rubble from the bridge."

It had been a bridge, high and arching like those we'd crossed before. Now it was a sloping pile of shattered rock. I looked at it curiously, but it didn't seem different from any other rock I'd seen, and I could see that normal laws of material strength didn't hold down here. It wasn't a surprise.

"What happened to it?" I wondered. "Earthquake?"

"I am told that all h.e.l.l shook at the moment of Christ's death," said the ex-priest.

"So says Dante," Benito added. "Afterwards, He came to h.e.l.l and threw down the great gate in the Wall of Dis."

"He must have been mad about something. I suppose being crucified could do that to you."

"I would be less flippant, Allen. Look around you." Before I could answer, Benito had started climbing the ruined bridge.

It was still a ridiculous picture. Christ was supposed to be gentle.Using a whip on the temple money-changers was one thing; behaving like a comic-book hero was something else. I tried to imagine the bleeding, wounded, near-naked figure ripping those tremendous iron gates from their hinges, while the halo flamed angrily about His Head-- Then gave it up and climbed up after Benito. I tested each foothold, but some of the slabs slid down anyway. Near the top the rockslide ended, and we climbed by fingerholds and toeholds. There it was that I had to repress a sudden, violent urge to giggle.

Benito wouldn't have appreciated it. But-- no wonder Christ was so upset. Some clerk must have tried to hand Him Form D-345t839y-4583.

The seventh pit was enormous. I stood at the end of the bridge and marveled at the thin fairy-span arching across. Carbon steel wouldn't have taken the stress; yet it was made of stone without mortar, like the fallen bridge behind us. Another miracle, and so what?

We started across.

It was dark down there. What I could see had a vaguely reptilian flavor to it: constant slow slitherings, and sudden flurries of violent motion.

Benito pulled at my arm. "Why do you dawdle, Allen?"

"What's down there?"

"Thieves. Theft is the most profitable of sins, and very popular. Tell me, Allen, do you expect to see anything that pleases you?"

He had me there. I didn't. But-- "I'm a writer. I've got ten men's curiosity. What's the hurry? Are we in danger here?"

"I remind you that we are fugitives."

I stared in astonishment. "Geryon could have stopped us. Minos could have stopped us. They didn't."

"The demons behind us would have. Oh, very well, Allen. The real danger is at the next pit. We must cross that quickly."

"Okay." And I looked down again.

Reptilian, yeah. There were men and women down there... and lizards ranging in size from Chihuahua to Great Dane, and snakes whose range was even greater. I watched a tiny scarlet lizard leap from a crack in a rock to bite a man on the neck. The man burned like flash paper, dazzling me. When I looked again he was congealing from a cloud of smoke.

Benito was watching me, not them. Let him wait.

The land was strewn with rocks of all sizes. A stout gray-haired woman came toward us, running a tortuous path, her eyes fixed on her path-- It didn't help. Somehow she stepped between two-rocks and fell sprawling, yelling in despair. The python that had been following her caught up as she tried to run on the ruined foot. It climbed her leg and bit her on the navel.

Woman and snake, they lay immobile. They began to change.

"Allen--"

I made a shushing gesture. They were changing, the snake sprouting arms and legs and head hair, the woman melting into a smooth limbless shape. Presently there was nothing left of the woman.

The slender man who had been a snake stood up smiling. "Thanks, Gladys," he said, and walked away.

"He stole her shape," I said. "I'll be b.u.g.g.e.red. He stole her shape!"

"She will grow it back. In life she was probably a buyer of stolen goods, what do you call it? A fence."

"Yeah. Wow."

"Are you ready?"

"Yeah." I turned and followed him. Wow. He stole her shape. How does a science-fiction writer explain that? A computer-drawn hologram. Could be. It was pretty dark down there. But I didn't believe it.

The bridge dipped. We climbed down. Benito turned left on the ledge between the seventh and eighth pits. Benito was clearly uneasy. Interesting things were happening in the darkness on my left, but I looked into the darkness on my right for the danger Benito expected.

It looked like a swarm of fireflies, or like a freeway seen from an airplane, or-- This aye night, this aye night, Every night and all, Fire and sleet and candlelight, And Christ receive thy soul.

Sleet I'd found in the Circle of Gluttons, and fire on the desert. Here at last was the candlelight: huge candle flames moving in darkness.

From the next bridge it was no clearer. Benito kept trying to hurry me along. "You will not see anything here. Are you so fond of h.e.l.l that you would linger?"

Slender flames moved down there in the yellow-and-black murk... and stopped, and cl.u.s.tered beneath us. I said, "Who are they?"

"Dante calls this the Bolgia of the Evil Counselors."

"That doesn't tell me a lot. And I still don't know what you're afraid of."

A voice answered from below... a voice with little of the human in it. It thrummed like a harp. It was coming from the tip of one of the huge flames. "He is afraid of his own homecoming."

I looked at Benito. He nodded, not looking at me.

"Come down!" one of the flames called to Benito. It was eerily compelling, that thrumming voice. The tip of the flame wavered, turned to me. "Throw him down, you, if you're an American! That's Mussolini! Benito Mussolini!"

Jolted, I turned to Benito. He shrugged.

Mussolini?