The Fall of Hades (2 page)

3: THE RAVENOUS

A service ladder of rusted metal was bolted into the side of the great shaft, but it was above the level of the suspended net of her father’s raw anatomy. She looked around herself, scuffing further through the husks of dead crabs. Uncounted generations of them. At least these creatures could achieve the peace, the release, of death.

There was another, taller metal door on the opposite wall of the room, and she went to it. It had a small glass window at face level, but the room beyond was in utter darkness. By way of consolation, the window afforded her a look at her reflection. Her face didn’t surprise her so she hadn’t forgotten that, at least. Stringy reddish hair framed the pale face of young woman whose age, alive, she might guess as late twenties. A longish pointed nose she might have liked to see more dainty, a small mouth with thin lips she would have preferred to see fuller, and her own eyes however familiar disturbed her, looking both hollow and intense at once. They were a striking shade of blue, like gas fire.

She tugged on the door’s handle, but it wouldn’t give. She could probably break the window but it was too small to squeeze through. She worked at the handle for a long time, until her palms were half flayed, until she had to concede that the door was heavily barred on the other side.

She squatted down with her back against the wall, waiting for her hands to mend enough that she might use them again. A living crab emerged from the layer of its dead brethren as if it had sniffed her out and wanted a taste, its pincers held high. The woman leaned forward and smashed it against the floor with the heel of her fist.

She returned her attention to the ladder running up the interior of the shaft. After regarding the situation a while, until her hands were sufficiently healed, she stood up and acted on the only conclusion that had occurred to her. She walked to another spot along the wall, equidistant between two of the iron rings, where there was more slack in the net. She crouched low, then sprang up and seized hold of the slick web, fought against the immediate revulsion the touch of it engendered. Then, bracing her bare feet against the wall, she struggled to pull her body up between the wall and the outer edge of the net. Finally she was able to crawl up onto the net and stand, dancing across its bowing surface to keep her balance like a trapeze performer who had fallen in mid performance.

“Hey!” the head protested, dangling like a long rotten nut inside its bronze shell.

The woman walked bouncily over to where the ladder extended past the opening of the shaft. Just below it, she again hunched down, again sprang, the web giving her more springiness. She grasped the bottom rung, her legs kicking at the air until, with a grunt, she was able to lunge upward for the second rung. Soon, she had hoisted herself up, and poised on the ladder, looked below her at the grid-like body of her father. She wanted to call down to reassure him that she would be back for him, but she couldn’t say for sure that she would. Ultimately, she said nothing, turned her face upward and began to climb into the murk above. She heard the head’s muttering diminish beneath her.

As she hoisted herself up the ladder one of the rungs started to come out of its socket, its left end crumbling into brittle flakes of rust that spun away below, but she quickly switched to the next rung up.

Those white spores swam about her like plankton, so thick the higher she climbed that she breathed through her nose to keep from ingesting them.

She blinked flakes off her lashes, snorted them away from her nostrils.

As she drew closer to the fan behind its metal grille, she took note of a number of strange life forms that adhered to the sides of the shaft and even the rungs of the ladder like barnacles, and they did in fact resemble some kind of primitive sea plant or animal. They were white clam-like growths standing vertically from a sticky base, and the halves of the clams opened and closed rhythmically, revealing accordion-like insides that seemed to breathe in and out like a bellows.

While she paused to observe the nearest of these curious life forms, she noted that white flakes occasionally alighted on the rungs and appeared to stick or take hold there, and then noticed several tiny bud-like growths sprouting along the rungs. She realized these were immature versions of the barnacle-things. She intuited, then, that the spores were air-borne seeds or the like that were giving birth to these creatures.

As she poked one of the budding organisms with a finger, a clicking sort of rustling sound from below caused the woman to gaze downward.

She felt a start inside to see that a good number of those orange crabs were slowly but persistently working their way up the ladder after her. Had they homed in on her fresh meat at last, or were they even making an attempt to prevent her escape?

Escape. Despite her thoughts of finding some mother whose face she couldn’t recall, some brother whose name eluded her, or finding some assistance for a father she remembered more as a remote, two-dimensional image than a man, she had to admit to herself that the real reason she was attempting to leave this chamber and go forth was simply the primal instinct to find a more hospitable environment. To remove herself from a place of pain. Yes, she was trying to
escape
.

Wherever one might be able to escape
to
.

She hastened upward again, to distance herself from the ravenous, pursuing crustaceans. Just above her now the shaft dead-ended at the grille, behind which the fan turned in occasional languid spins. She reached up and curled her fingers in the slats, then put more of her weight into it, but the grate wouldn’t budge from its frame. She glanced down to check on the progress of the crabs, now saw the lowermost rungs were turned orange with their massing bodies. She switched her attention to the sides of the shaft again, with a mounting sense of urgency.

There: a small service hatch of some kind, and it was slightly ajar. She leaned out from the ladder and caught the edge of it, pulled. It resisted a bit, screeched in protest, but opened wide enough to permit entrance. The woman looked downward dubiously, but there was nothing else to do but take the plunge and hope her father’s body would break her fall if she didn’t make it. Well, a fall wouldn’t kill her, anyway. The crabs couldn’t kill her. But nobody likes pain, not even the dead.

She threw herself off the ladder, caught the lower edge of the opening with both hands, braced her feet against the wall as she fought to hoist herself up and in. Grimacing with the effort, she dragged herself through, crawled on her belly using her elbows until she was fully inside. It was a horizontal chute that barely permitted her to rise in a crouch, the walls and ceiling bearing thin metal pipes and rubber-sheathed cables stapled there in bundles. There was light at the far end of the chute, and she was about to crawl toward it when she heard a ghastly, warbling cry from below.

Thinking it was her father, she turned around and poked her head out the hatch to have a look downward.

Not her father. She saw that some crabs were even finding purchase on the pocked walls of the vertical shaft itself, and were biting into the strange white barnacles. Their bellows-like bodies were pumping more rapidly, and it appeared that the shrill, ululating cries—more of them now, as more barnacles growing on the walls and the rungs of the ladder were attacked—came from the barnacles themselves. The woman felt a vague pity for the creatures, whatever they were, but a relief that more and more of the crabs were being diverted toward them in their hunger. She withdrew into the service duct again, this time hauled the hatch shut after her.

Moments later, she heard the tiny scraping of the first crab to reach it. She doubted that even in numbers they could maneuver the hatch open, but she didn’t remain to find out. On her haunches, she made her way toward that distant light.

4: THE REMAINS

There was a more spacious chamber at the far end of the service chute, and the woman had no sooner crawled out into it and risen to her feet when she saw the three skeletons that occupied the room.

The room itself was like the interior of some very complex giant organ, an industrial womb. Thick pipes hung down from the low ceiling, upheld with brackets, intertwined with thinner, flexible pipes that snaked down the walls, even across the floor in places. It was like a riot of tree roots grown through the roof of a sepulcher. And the inhabitants of that sepulcher were the three skeletons.

One was propped in a sitting position against the far wall. One sprawled on the floor. The third slumped in a seat in front of a computer terminal, or at least that was what the woman took it to be. It looked like a computer as imagined in the 19th Century, with its thick oval glass for a screen, its riveted iron casing, the brass knobs on its side and levers and toggles jutting up from a keyboard like that of an ancient manual type-writer. The keys themselves were ivory—or was that bone? More cables than seemed necessary, or logical, ran into the top and back of the bulky thing, some as thick as her wrist. One rubber hose had leaked fluid, its dried residue crusted around the breach. The crystal screen emitted a pale, ghostly light like a fading afterglow that wouldn’t entirely fade. There was the faintest suggestion of hissing static, if she bent her head over the keys.

There was another computer station near the first, but the computer here had been removed, apparently; the rear cables lay on the desk disconnected, the severed rubber hose having dribbled its contents down the side of the desk to pool and dry.

The skeletons were dressed in identical rubbery black jumpsuits with zippered closures and pockets, the elbows and knees padded more thickly; there was also some ribbed padding across the chest. The back of each suit was open, however, to accommodate the wings these beings had possessed in life. The bare struts that were all that remained of these structures spread out from the bodies like elongated fingers of bone.

The trio had not passed away peacefully. The one sitting on the floor had ragged holes blasted in its chest despite its suit’s padding. The one lying on the floor had apparently been shot in the back while trying to flee this nest of pipes and cables. The one in
the chair had been struck a terrific blow with an edged weapon—an axe or sword?—that had cloven its skull, long colorless hair hanging down to obscure its bisected face. This being had been a female, tall and slender and long-limbed like the naked woman herself, and hers was the only uniform that had not been torn open. The naked woman was not squeamish; she took the scarecrow-light body under the arms, eased it to the floor (the split head dropping back alarmingly but remaining attached to its neck), and began unzipping its black rubber garb.

The woman had trouble tugging the snug material onto her own body, which was slick with the mock sweat it shed, so with her palms she gathered chalky dust that had collected on the computer table and smudged it over her arms, legs and sides like powder. It made the donning of the second skin a little bit easier. Once it was on, it clung to her like a scuba suit but didn’t squeeze uncomfortably; she found it easy to flex her limbs and draw breath however much it looked to constrict her waist. Even the calve-high black boots with their thick treads fit her perfectly. She might have imagined that the dead woman was some future incarnation of herself, except that her own reddish hair was shorter, falling just to her shoulders, and for the fact that her shoulder blades—left exposed by the uniform’s back, open almost down to the cleft of her buttocks like some daring evening gown—did not sprout huge bat-like wings.

Demons. And someone had killed them, long ago. Yes, they had been killed…Demons could die…she remembered that now. Demons did not have immortal souls, such as she and her father possessed: their bodies
were
their souls, in representation. They regenerated the most grievous wounding; the Demons did not. Demons were essentially machines, manufactured things, mass produced golems or homunculi. All right, then, but who had killed them, and why? The only thing she knew for sure was that these beings had been her captors, her shadowy torturers. No wonder those tortures had ceased long ago. But if someone had come to rescue the Demons’ captives, they had overlooked the woman and her father.

She took in the computer again. Had these Demons been able to inflict some of their tortures remotely at the touch of its keys? She stepped closer, looked at the worn symbols on the circular keys and was rather surprised to see that they pretty much agreed with those of a computer with which she would be accustomed, aside from a few that bore odd symbols.

The alphabet dominated, and when she spread her fingers over the home keys she found they did indeed conform to the arrangement she remembered from a life that she had otherwise mostly forgotten.

Randomly, she depressed the
A
key, and it made a clacking noise, but what startled her was the oval screen coming to life with an image: a grainy stationary camera shot of a small room, apparently a cell. No one was inside it, but it seemed to contain some elaborate torture device poised over a surgical table like a giant scorpion, with pincered limbs and barbed tail. The woman searched out and pressed the
B
key. The screen changed again, but this time showed only the feeble blank glow it had started with.
C
and
D
were also dead, but
E
revealed a view of another cell deserted except for more torture equipment. She went through the alphabet, finding that most of the cameras in these cells were out, but the few that were still functioning showed only vacant chambers. It wasn’t until she reached
U
that she found an occupant: a human body in extremis, teased out into a web, its dangling head encased in bronze gone a corrupted green with age. Her father.

He was
U
. And so…

She hit the
V
key, and a camera that she had never noticed within her own cell showed that cell with its broken remnants of her stone coffin.

From here the Demons could have monitored her lonely suffering, though no one had peeked at her in this way for a long, long time.

“So I’m
V
,” she said aloud. She smiled sourly. It was as good a name as any. Besides—she wasn’t so sure she even wanted, or needed, to learn her true name anymore.

Keys
W
through
Z
were blanks; dead air. But there were those keys with unfamiliar symbols, most of them gathered off to the right. One of these appeared to show the outline of a pistol. She pressed this key, and at once heard a gasp very close to her…followed by a long, low moan like that of a sleeper roused from a bad dream.