Abaddon - Chapter 22

1: Beachcombing

He was cold and wet, and somebody was tugging off his clothes. Also, he was inhaling water.

Spluttering, he pulled himself upright. He was sitting down, legs outstretched, waist-deep in ice water.

“Totis inferis, we got ourselves a live one.”

The voice was speaking Latin, but a more inflected, cultured Latin than the worm-Latin of the City. Since the shadowy figure at his left elbow had said we, he turned and saw another, larger figure to his right. He could see nothing else but a vast, spangled emptiness arching high above, which surely could not be a sky.

He was on a shoreline. A shoreline of smooth, roughly oval rocks big as Australian stromatolites, curiously regular in size, almost as big as a man’s head -

“Didn’t you see the change come on him? It was as bright as lightning -“

“I was rubbing my eyes. You let me try and tug the trews off someone who was marked to live? Are you trying to kill me, Kane?”

“No-one’d be happier than you if I could, and you know it, Ahasuere.”

“They’re coming for us. You know they are. He said they are. They’ll set us free. Free to die. Free to live, like men.”

Percival’s hands tried to push him upright, but found only slime, as if he were becalmed in the mouth of some great cold fish. His left hand found what appeared to be a firm purchase, and came out of the water as a femur.

A human femur.

“He makes ‘em”, said the one who had been called Kane. “Well, probably not makes ‘em - just makes sure everything else as falls in Cocytus gets broke down, excepting bones. He likes bones. No idea why. Don’t think he’s got none hisself, maybe.”

Percival stared hard into the dark. The rocks on the shoreline stared back at him, out of hollow cavities where eyes had once been. Almost as big as a man’s head.

He started and began struggling to his feet.

“Heh! Heh!” commented Kane. “Always the way with new bugs, the jumpy screamy thing, once they realize what they’re lounging around on. Though you scream less than most, I must say. Odd old jalopy you came down in. They really do go for making machines out of the shiny stuff up top nowadays, eh? We’ve seen one or two like it, but you’re the first one he’s marked out to live.”

“That’s the he who said they were coming?” said Percival.

“No”, said the one called Ahasuerus, shifting about nervously. “That was a different he.”

Then Percival turned around, looked up again, and stood still as if he had been impaled to the spot.

"Been waiting for you to do that", said Kane appreciatively.

"They always does", said Ahasuerus.

"It's..." said Percival.

"Big", finished Ahasuerus.

"Though I think the Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus is bigger", said Kane critically.

"Not any more", said Percival.

It was...it was big. Unthinkably so, as much because nothing that shape and that size had ever presented itself to him as for any other reason.

And it certainly should not have been hanging right over his head.

It looked more like a marine organism than a made thing. Three great illuminated arms spread out from its main body, merging like graceful flying cathedral buttresses (or starfish feet, or cephalopod tentacles) with the Abyss walls. A single majestic spire soared upward at the junction of the arms, like a minaret or a bishop's mitre or the body of a giant squid; and, like the body of a giant calamary cruising in waters black as night and thick as lead, it was alive with tiny points of light. White light. Blue light. Smokeless, sparkless. Fluorescent, technological light.

Beneath the junction of the arms, a second, smaller spire jutted downward like a squid's beak. Percival could see tiny human figures at the tip of the spire, standing on a flimsy wooden platform, busying themselves with a contraption of wire and fabric. What they were actually doing was anyone's guess. The spire, and the huger spire on top of it, and the buttresses, and the lights and the little human beings were all poised dizzily and directly overhead.

"The Bridge", said Kane. "He lives there."

"He", said Percival, "has an electrical generator. Changing the subject, meanwhile, if I stay in this water any longer, my fingers are going to drop off through frostbite.”

“Ah, they’ll grow back”, said Kane airily. “Mine always do.”

Both of the men, despite the coldness of the water, seemed to be wearing nothing on their feet.

“Helps you grub about for bits on the bottom with your toes”, winked Ahasuerus, seeing Percival’s stunned expression. “Bits of metal feel different to normal bottomy stuff.”

“Found a bit of wing here”, exclaimed Kane. He held up a riveted metal panel, crumpled and ripped as a piece of tissue paper.

“Ah, guidance, I think”, said Percival. “Not strictly a wing as such.”

“Ow!” Kane snatched away his fingers and sucked them. “This end’s still hot.”

“Probably a steel rivet. Different metal, different specific heat capacity.”

“Don’t you worry about him”, chuckled Ahasuerus. “They still hadn’t discovered iron when he was a lad, never mind steel. Bronze was still coming in, wasn’t it, Kane?”

“You watch it.” Kane lurched about in the shallows. “Got the venturi!”

“No idea why”, said Ahasuerus, rooting closer to the shore, “why the thing on the back of the dingus is called a word that means ‘about to arrive’. Surely it should be on the front.”

“Tain’t the venturi”, said Kane, disappointed. “Just another bloody Roman infantry helmet.”

“In your face, old timer! I got a German hand grenade!” It was, indeed, a Second World War Steilhandgranate, so time-worn that it was only a lump of rust mated to a lump of driftwood. Ahasuerus banged it against the side of his head, as if willing it to go off. Percival backed away gingerly, not wishing to offend, but equally unwilling to explode.

“Them Germans nearly stuck the Romans”, reflected Ahasuerus wistfully.

“It was Attila did for em in the end, though”, said Kane. “And though he was a Hun, he weren’t no German.”

“And Fritigern”, said Ahasuerus, stuffing the grenade into a filthy linen sack hairy with mildew. “Lived near here, too, up top, did Fritigern. Met him once. Stuffed the Romans at Adrianople. And he was a German. Well, a Vizzygoth.”

Percival stared into Kane’s face. Eyes glittered in it, dimly reflecting the spangly light above.

“That isn’t a sky up there, is it?” said Percival.

Kane laughed. It sounded like someone playing a church organ full of custard. “No, it ain’t no sky, young un. It’s the stony outer casing of your new universe. You ain’t going nowhere.” Having laughed, he coughed violently. This reassured Percival that he was talking to a human being. Demons and devils were not on record as being prone to allergic reactions, unless the air in Hell were full of holy water draining from a million upstairs fonts.

“He marked him out for life”, cautioned Ahasuerus.

“He marked me out for life”, harrumphed Kane. “And you. And ain’t life been a breeze ever since.”

“I was only making a point, is all”, complained Ahasuerus. His face was older than Kane’s; both looked Middle Eastern, even Semitic. Kane’s face, though, was handsome, square-jawed, with an impressive array of gleaming teeth, while Ahasuerus’s was that of an old man, as worn and pitted as a limestone pavement.

“You want an ass’s jawbone in the kisser, oldster?” said Kane, picking up a dripping bone - actually a sacrum, therefore technically an ass-bone - threateningly. “That’d be ironic, that would, though technically Samson rather than me.”

“Ha! You kill me dead and I’ll be impressed. And it’s you who’s the old man, you fraud. I wish I’d thought to kill my brother while I was still a good looker.”

“I didn’t kill my brother. That’s a legend.”

“Heh! Heh! Heh! And I didn’t kill Christ..."

"You bloody did. Take that back."

"...mind you, that isn’t strictly in my legend." Ahasuerus turned to Percival to explained further. "Helped hold his arms while the legionaries pounded in them nails, then hammered the nails over flat to the wood at the back to hold ‘em firm...Come on then, kill me, you always do, you big bully.”

“I’ll tap you just hard enough to make you take a hundred days to die. A few days’ screaming’ll oil your whining muscles.”

Ahasuerus growled like an animal and leapt on Kane. The two wrestled, falling over and over in the surf that lapped at the beach of skulls. Brittle old crania crackled underneath them like a carpet of eggshells. Percival, disregarded, disregarded them back, rose to shaky feet and picked his way up the shoreline with care.

There were lights down here as well - lights too white and bright to be made by burning tallow, a line of flickering white motes, spaced out at regular intervals along the strand. As he approached, he could see they were streetlamps, Victorian wrought-iron lanterns, set into the bony gravel on concrete pillars. But the light inside them was not made by burning gas. Neither was there any bulb or filament that might suggest an electrical power source.

Instead, in the centre of an octagonal glass lantern, a single, clearly defined, clearly identifiable fairy, complete with silken wings, gossamer mini-skirt and a fairy wand topped with a five-pointed star, burned with a white fire. Burned, but was not consumed, her dear little lips twisted in an ultrasonic fairy scream. Batting up against the glass like a moth against an insectocutor, or a fly trying to butt its way through a windowpane.

Have I died, and am I in Hell?

“It’s an illusion, lad”, said Kane, coming up behind him unexpectedly and looking at the imp in the glass with a pitying expression. “Leastways, I hope it is. He makes ‘em. It amuses him.”

Ahasuerus, sopping wet, trailed after Kane, who was equally wet, but also slightly bruised. Ahasuerus, meanwhile, was entirely unmarked, and Percival could swear an ugly scab that had formerly dominated his forehead was now no longer present. Even the age lines in his face seemed to have softened.

“Bastard, you killed me once too often. He will hear of this.”

“He knows already, or you wouldn’t be up and walking again. Shut your noise.”

They were walking along the line of lanterns, towards a set of buildings which could have come from any place or time. Big important buildings, Percival reflected, could afford to be distinctive, to be Ionic temples or Toltec step-pyramids or Gothic cathedrals. But for the past Lord alone knew how many thousand years, there had only been so many ways to build a hovel.

Yet even here, there had been pathetic attempts to make each house stand out from its neighbours. The walls, particularly around the doors and windows, were decorated with tattered fragments of civilization - rotted cloth, twisted metal, and even, on occasion, shiny pieces of plastic, which seemed to be accorded positions of special prominence. Possibly, Percival reasoned, if this was just the Abyss at some unimaginable depth, plastic might still be quite a rarity here. One house was tiled entirely in small rectangular tablets of an iridescent metal, lovingly heat-treated to throw back rainbow colours at the burning fairy lanterns.

Titanium votive tablets.

Dear God, I’m still in the Abyss. I’m not in Hell yet.

Unless this is where Hell is.

No. Hell has been proven by multiple independent scientific studies to be in Slough.

At one point the street widened slightly into what could loosely be called a square, though no Saxon cross, village green or war memorial filled its centre. At one end of it, the gravel surged up around the wooden supports of what could not possibly be, but to all intents and purposes was, a gigantic cuckoo clock contained in a half-timbered penthouse. The gingerbread around the penthouse eaves would not have looked out of place in Oberammergau, were it not for the fact that what was carved into it belonged in Tenochtitlan. Bizarrely inappropriate flayed gods, damaged bodies, and grotesque demonesses depicted in the act of giving birth surrounded the structure. As Percival watched, the clock struck the hour. The trapdoor above the clockface opened, and a glittering skull slid out on runners, gnashed its teeth twice, and slid back in.

"He", said Kane with feeling, "built it. If he hadn't we wouldn't know the time of day down here. It's clockwork. It's the job of one of us every day to wind it. Some days the guy on the winding rota forgets to wind it, and we have no time."

“Where are we?” said Percival.

“On the Mole”, said Kane.

“Mole”, said Percival. “As in subterranean burrowing device.”

“No”, said Kane. “Mole as in big fuck-off dam. A mole should be a breakwater, of course, not a dam, but we prefer Mole on account of Mole being more undergroundy, as you rightly pointed out. And this big wet thing you just crawled out of should be called the River Styx, on account of it being what you get cast up on the shores of once you die, but it’s more of a lake, more of a reservoir, so we calls it Cocytus.”

“The water is held in place by a dam”, said Percival.

Kane nodded. “You’re standing on it. Must be all of a hundred yards high, all told. You were lucky you didn’t drop in close to the sluices, or you’d have been sucked under and diced by the wires in the outlets.”

The windows of the town - hardly a town, only two or three long rows of tiny houses - glowed with a soft purple radiance. It was a second or two before Percival realized where he had seen light of that type before.

“UV”, he said. “UV lamps.”

“They’re proving quite popular”, said Kane. “Interesting toys you upworlders keep inventing. A Russian fellow who came down in the 1970’s made the first ones, and they sold like thirteen-year-old virgins. Folks use ‘em to grow plants, real plants, from seeds that flow downhill to us, erm, in human shit, mainly. Tomatoes are a big favourite. You folks sure do seem to shit tomato seed a lot.”

“It’s called pizza”, said Percival absently.

“I have heard of your strange Earth ‘pizza’”, said Kane. “It is a circular bread furnished with olives and tomatoes. One day we hope to create one with our primitive pre-pizza-age technology.” He bent to a window and let his face be bathed in a violet radiance. “Some folks claim it keeps ‘em healthy just to stare into the glow.”

“Ess Ay Dee”, said Percival, without thinking.

Kane was confused. “Esse deus? To be a god?”

“No, SAD. ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder’, in my own language. It’s a, ahm, a German language. SAD is a sort of melancholy caused by lack of sunlight. Common in, ah, polar regions where the winter nights are long. People in a place like - ah, wherever this is - would contract it; no sky, and hence no daylight. Doctors have only just started treating it with UV.” He thought a moment. “Staring into a UV light for a long time could cause cancer, mind you.”

"Cancer!", spat Kane, pushing open a door apparently entirely made of welded votive tablets. "Cancer is the least of our worries here."

The door concealed a short flight of steps leading down to a room dimly lit in ultraviolet. UV lamps were the centrepieces to several irregular tables where shadowy figures lounged creakily on bone furniture, nursing thumbnail-sized glasses of what could only be, in glasses that size, pure alcohol.

There was some interest as Kane, Ahasuerus and Percival entered. A man stabbing holes in a table around the template of his fingers with a knife that was clearly only a sharpened shard of votive tablet, looked up abruptly, continuing to stab as he did so, continuing to stare challengingly at Percival.

thunk - thunk - thunk -

Dominating the scene was a huge stone fireplace almost as big as the room was. A coal scuttle made of riveted votive tablets stood on the hearth, and was full of almost every conceivable combustible substance saving coal. Every now and again a grizzled lunatic would get up, caper across the room to the scuttle, and pull out a chunk of thin, twisted metal dripping with an amber liquid, which flared into stinking brilliant life when chucked onto the flames.

Percival sniffed in horror. The smell was one with which he had recently become only too familiar.

"Aluminium and kerosene. He's burning rocket fuel."

Kane nodded. "And part of a rocket."

"The other V-2's. He's burning part of another V-2."

"If you say so. The, the engine in that one, it stopped before it started to break up", said Kane. "And the fuel tanks survived intact."

"Played havoc with my poor old back pulling 'em out of the muck", complained Ahasuerus. "It was the death of me. Twice."

- THUNKthunk. THUNKthunk. THUNKthunk -

"Curious", said Kane, "a metal that burns."

"Does he know", said Percival, "how dangerous that is?"

- thunk THUNK - thunk THUNK - thunk THUNK - thunk THUNK -

"This is our place", said Kane, frowning. "Here we'll be as dangerous as we please. And here", he said, gesturing at the tabletops, "we eat and drink only the fruits of our own labours. Not what he has cooked up for us."

The food on the metal plates on the tables (hammered out from votive tablets) certainly looked man-made, at least insofar as no woman Percival could think of would have admitted to having made it. Percival suspected that dead bat, lichen, and blind cave animals would figure heavily in its ingredients. Its prominent colour, under the UV lights, was grey and purple.

- THUNK thunkthunk THUNK thunk - THUNK thunkthunk THUNK thunk - THUNK thunkthunk THUNK thunk -

Not content merely with endangering the physical integrity of his fingers, the knifeman was now attempting to incorporate a 3-2 rhythm into his stabbing.

"Who's he?" said Percival, settling gingerly into a rickety chair made (as he had suspected) of human long bones, and finding the tabletop to be made of a suspiciously fine tan hide. By he, he did not mean the man with the knife.

"You know who he is", said Kane, grinning as he sat down opposite with Ahasuerus.

Percival looked up at the winged crowned figure which formed the entire lintel and mantlepiece of the fireplace. Its tail was as the tails of scorpions.

"Abaddon", he said.

The name, used in such a cavalier fashion, appeared to arouse the interest of a number of the regulars. Glances were cast in Percival's direction.

"Don't kid yourself you're anyone special", said Kane. "He only saved you like he saved the rest of us. We were all supposed to be special. All supposed to be the next best thing since sliced bread. Weren't we, Ahaz, old buddy?"

"Not speaking to you", muttered Ahasuerus. "Killed me again."

"And he sent us all downstairs, to see how special we all were", said Kane. "Some of us even came back. The others, well, no-one's ever found out where the others went. There is, you see, a downstairs. You are not at the bottom."

"I figured that out for myself, thanks", said Percival. "If there's a mole, a breakwater, a dam, then there's a further down the water would fall to if that dam didn't exist. What is down?"

Kane leaned over and patted Percival on the knee. "Well, if you happen to find out, be sure to come back and tell us, old buddy."

thunk SHICK. thunk SHICK. thunk SHICK SHICK SHICK.

Percival looked across the room. Expertly, with his tongue jammed into the corner of his mouth, the knifeman was stabbing his fingers off. The makeshift blade he was using was not suited to completely severing digits, so a good deal of twisting and chiselling was called for. Finger pieces flew here and there as his right hand moved in a savage blur. Eventually, having reduced not just his fingers but the carpal bones of his hand to a bloody mess, he impaled the blade down through the back of his hand into the tabletop, which was made of a thick, round piece of wood with a central metal boss. Percival wondered if it had once been a Greek hoplite’s shield.

Finally, the knifeman ground his teeth hard together, and it was only after Percival had watched his jaw work back and forth in intense concentration for several seconds, blood seeping from his lips, that he realized the man still had his tongue poking from the corner of his mouth. At length, with a final herculean effort, the man managed to bite off his own tongue, gobble it up in mid-air after it dropped from his mouth, and swallow it, gulping it down with gusto. He winked at Percival in a matey fashion, then turned his attention back to the remains of his hand.

On the table, his hand was glowing.

It was a soft radiance, like torchlight shining through the hand of a child, though it seemed to be coming from inside the flesh. A lesser, gentler aura seemed to hang in the air around it. The glow was brightest around the multiple wounds the knifeman had inflicted. Percival swallowed, feeling his mouth dry. His eyes also itched, and he felt warm all over, and giddy, as if the blood was rushing to his head. Something was happening here that was affecting not just the man’s stricken hand, but everything in the room around it.

Then he noticed that the glow was moving over the hand. Moving towards the fingertips. Where the fingertips should have been -

“A, a, a, a”, said the tongueless knifeman, as if willing the glow on. A second glow was making silhouettes of his teeth inside his mouth.

The hand was intact again. Still nailed to the table. But then, horribly, uncannily, the wedge of steel jammed through the hand into the wound began to rock gently backwards and forwards.

“A, a, a, a, a”, said the knifeman.

The knife began to wiggle in the wound. Then, suddenly, it shot up out of the man’s hand, did a graceful somersault, and buried itself point-first in the ceiling.

The man held up his hand. It was as good as new.

“La, la, la, la, la”, said the knifeman, the glow fading from his mouth. “TralalaLAAAA!”

The knife shivered slowly out of the roof, and dropped. There was a soft
as it was caught by the knifeman again. Its owner did not look up at Percival, or at any other occupant of the taberna. Instead, he turned the knife in his hand, as if considering it. Then, he drew it across his throat in one swift movement, rocked out of control in his chair as blood vomited out of a second mouth in his larynx, then sat up straight again as a line of fire drew across the wound, closing it, leaving nothing but pale, malnourished skin. He drew the knife over his throat again, slumped in his seat again, sat back up again as the wound healed. He drew the knife across a third time, and this time the reaction was so fast that his throat zipped itself up almost as quickly as he was able to unseam it.

He pulled the knife up in front of his face and stared at the blood sadly.

"Yes", said Kane. "We can't even kill ourselves."

"Can't even wound ourselves", said Ahasuerus reproachfully, as if this was a great source of discomfort to him.

Percival stared at the blade of the knife. It appeared sharp and solid. There could have been no trickery.

Then he clicked his fingers and pointed across the room to an elderly man, his face hidden by a beard that had not seen a razor in a century, who was sitting staring glumly at a table full of tiny glasses. "Him. He's been hugging his stomach in pain for the last ten minutes."

Kane shrugged. "That's just Fisher. A Roman legionary serving in Dacia Inferior, I believe; fell into the Abyss after running wounded from a battle. Fisher, you see, was already injured before the change came on him. If I was to walk across the room now and stab Fisher up, the wound would heal. But here's the thing", he continued, his eyes shining with grisly delight, "if I was to walk across the room and stitch up Fisher's wound, the wound would unstitch itself. The wound gives old Fisher no end of pain. He has to drink like, well, a fish. Me and Ahaz here, we was luckier." He put a comradely arm around Ahasuerus, whom Percival was now almost certain he had recently killed.

"Some", muttered Ahasuerus darkly, "Are luckier than others. Some was daft enough to fall down here when they was young enough to spot the edge coming."

Kane laughed, kissed Ahasuerus on the cheek like a beloved uncle, and snapped his fingers at what appeared to be a bartender.

"This is Hell, then", said Percival.

Kane guffawed. "Will you lighten up! Hell, boy, is a thing you folks invented way after my time. Useful thing, I'll grant you, a place of burning torment you go to if you don't do what the king and the rabbi tell you." He spread his arms out wide, as if scaring children. "Wooooo!"

"So, where is this?" said Percival. "Did we base our ideas of Hell on this?"

Kane considered this. "Maybe. Maybe you based your ideas on tales some of us have told. Sometimes he lets us back out on the top floor, as it were, to let off steam. Time off for good behaviour. Still can't kill ourselves, though. His old magic goes with us wherever we are. You may have heard of some of us."

Percival cast a cautious glance around him. "I think I know who I'm supposed to think you are...though I'm not sure I believe it. Fisher, for example. We do have legends of a man called the Fisher King, a man with a wound that would neither heal nor kill." He nodded across the room at the bearded gentleman, who was now snoring flatulently, blowing little flecks of vomit out of his beard.

Kane's eyes bulged. "Fisher, in legends? You're kidding me. Whose legends?"

"Christian ones. In the stories of King Arthur, the Fisher King is the lord of the Grail Castle. Though some people", said Percival, "ah, think that the legend comes from, uh, Mithraism." His voice tailed off.

"You saw the Parsee temple on the way down, then", said Kane. "Beautiful statuary. I've passed it many a time."

"You're telling me", said Percival, "that you can get up to the surface."

"It is not easy. ‘The Gates of Hell are open night and day, smooth the descent and easy is the way...’”

“’...But to return and view the cheerful skies, in this the task and mighty labour lies’, returned Percival. “So you’re telling me it’s more difficult than coming down.”

“Coming down’s easy as falling off a log”, said Kane. “Well...several thousand logs, arranged in series. Going up’s more difficult. The way up is mapped only by the imperfect memories of those who have gone before, and the terrain changes in between attempts at the ascent. You’d think the locals’d leave us alone after all this years, as they’ve figured out over those years they can’t kill us. But they don’t because they’ve also figured out by now that, since we regenerate lost body parts, we’re a constant and infallible source of food. All in all, it takes around a hundred years for a fit man to claw his way back up the rock. And you’ll die a thousand times in the attempt, falling from face to face, being eaten up by hunger, freezing to death or being eaten up over and over again by cannibals. The world you return to will not be the one you came from, either. That pretty girl you wanted to see one last time before you die will be a corpse long rotten in the grave.”

“That’s no problem”, said Percival. “My pretty girl was the one I wanted to see one last time before she died.”

“Well”, said Kane huffily. “That’s as may be. But like as not they won’t even speak your language. God will move among them and confound their speech.” He sighed, and looked deep into his ethyl alcohol. “Happened to me. Again and again and again.”

“What about flying machines? We on the surface can build flying machines now.”

“We know, but he doesn’t like them - not if they fly upwards, at any rate. Reckons they demean the bold striving spirit of pitting yourself against the rock to climb to the surface.”

“So you’ve been back there. More than once.”

“Aye - whenever I simply couldn’t bear cowering down here shivering in the dark any longer. Returned home to the land of my fathers, first of all - everyone does. Was recognized by an old man who’d been a child when I was young, and developed an unfortunate mythology. Came back at intervals, was nailed to crosses, chased across the battlements of Elsinore and rowed across the water to Avalon with depressing frequency.”

“But you kept on coming back.” Percival gestured round the tavern walls. Small mementoes hung around them could only have come from the world above. Cigarette cards, cigarette packets, beer mats, campaign rosettes proclaiming VOTE FOR TAFT IN ’22, photographs of faces almost certainly long since dead. Gold coins from a myriad mints, nailed to the walls like Ahab’s sovereign. Weapons, of great value in so many other places, were here only interesting curios from cinquedeas to Stechkins, loaded automatic firearms hung up to rust like the obligatory farm implements on the walls of pubs in Essex. But as well as firearms, there were flowers - preserved flowers, silk flowers, plastic flowers, covering every wall in a dead dry carpet, with not a single fresh petal among them. Percival saw tulips, roses, Passion flowers, lotus blossoms, and a single colossal sunflower, stapled to the ceiling like an enormous spider.

“Yes. I kept coming back.” It was clear, on seeing Kane’s expression, that this was the hard part. “The Abyss keeps us all on long pieces of elastic. We can never truly leave here. We all find ourselves coming back. He says this is not his fault, that it's all built into the design."

"Is he the one who built this place?"

Kane let out a derisive snort, and stared hard at the corner of the room he always seemed to stare at when mentioning the h word. "He wishes."

Percival thought carefully before saying a thing that might make Kane laugh, then said it anyway. "Then...did God build this place?"

Kane laughed so loud the lights of candles guttered on the wall nearby.

"You", said Percival, pointing at Ahasuerus. "Ahasuerus is one of the names historically given to the Wandering Jew."

Ahasuerus tugged his forelock respectfully. "I thirst for the blood of Christian children, sire."

"And me", said Kane, grinning like a row of stone tablets. "Who do you think I'm supposed to be?"

"I think we both know the answer to that -"

As he spoke, he was cut off by a long, piercing scream.

"I thought", he said, "this wasn't Hell."

"Oh, that's just Prometheus", said Kane. "Pay him no mind."

***

The barman - whom Kane referred to as The Eternal Wandering Barman - brought three miniscule glasses, and filled them with a milky liquid that smelt of chemistry lessons.

"Drink it", said Kane. "We have poor glassware and little control over the distillation process. If you're lucky, it might kill you."

Then came a sound which Percival did not believe possible.

No. I'm going crazy. This really is the last few microseconds of hallucination as my brain is dashed into a gooey pulp on the rock I hit halfway down the Abyss -

Horses? How could a horse get down here?

"I take it from that satisfied smirk", he said to Kane, "that you can hear it too."

"Hear what?" said Kane innocently; and as if by magic, the clip-clopping stopped.

"He's only taking the mick", said Ahasuerus.

"Don't tell me", said Percival. "There's a man out there with two halves of a coconut."

"What's a coconut?" said Ahasuerus.

There was the sound of a door slamming, and a second, more precise , different somehow to the first, though Percival could not quite fathom how.

"A variety of palm", said Percival, "native to the tropics, three tall men in height, growing hairy spherical fruit."

"Don't be daft", grinned Ahasuerus. "How'd one of them get down here?"

The door of the tavern opened, and a crisply-turned-out figure stood at the head of the steps, its every surface neatly ironed and mercilessly starched, presenting a greater contrast to the dispirited grey denizens of the bar than stainless steel did to rust.

"HIS INFERNAL MAJESTY COMMANDS THE PRESENCE OF MR. GAVIN PERCIVAL."

The figure was no taller than a tall man, but Percival knew it was not strictly a man. It stood too stiffly, the brass buttons on its uniform twinkled too brilliantly, and the muck outside seemed hardly to cling to its hooves.

Ah, yes. And it has hooves.

Cloven ones.

There had been no attempt, Percival noted, to put some sort of cloven jackboot on the feet, though the shoes had been shod, with tiny little silver shoes, giving an effect oddly more redolent of Beatrix Potter than the Earl of Hell. The face, if there was a face, was impenetrable inside the shiny silver helmet, though Percival could see his own face reflected in it. His own face looked worried.

He turned to look at Kane and Ahasuerus.

"Do I have a choice?"

Kane shrugged. "He's got ways to make you go, if you try not to."

Percival shrugged and rose to his feet. He felt old.

"Cold getting to you?" said Kane.

He considered pretending otherwise, then nodded.

"Kill yourself", said Kane. "I do it every couple of hours or so. Then his little diabolicules will be forced to rebuild you warm and toasty. Have to drink up enough courage first, mind you." He knocked his drink back and snapped his fist shut around the glass, which splintered. His palm bled briefly, flared with coloured light, and was pristine again. But the glass was still broken. The barman stared at Kane severely.

Percival waved goodbye and walked up the stairs to the outside.