Chapter 19 #2
“Wait,” called Dante. “Wait!” He panted as he limped over the mangled spew of people, his face twitching, nerves tightening at his throat.
“Motherfucker, I said wait.” He nonetheless pulled the demon’s hood over his head, then tightened it at his waist, tried to tie some of it at his side so that it wouldn’t drag on the floor.
“Who are you? Where are you taking me? If I’m in Hell, how do I know you’re not taking me to get boiled alive? ”
“Maybe I am, but what choice do you have?” Asmodeus hopped over a limb, stumbled, felt a whip of pain climb up his spine, then winced.
“If the other demons find you, they’ll bring you to Baal.
You don’t want that.” He raised his head, saw that the ground was faraway, pale.
“Come. There might be a way across from here.” Clenching his jaw, Asmodeus walked again, but his foot was now trapped in a churning cycle of pain.
Dante breathed, then followed, obediently bowing his head. And with an apparent good intuition, said, “Your foot fucked up?”
Asmodeus didn’t reply, shuffling along, squinting his eyes, searching for a tunnel in a wall that he might never find.
He had no patience for this. He had no patience for Hell and its eternally twisted ways, its ticking body, its constant rearrangement.
Some of Heaven had been like this, though it was difficult to remember now.
‘There's a saying that the humans have, something like: There are years where nothing happens, and there are days where decades do.’ Asmodeus felt that he’d lived mere days as an angel, but he’d lived a billion years since the fall.
And in this life he had now, he didn’t like the meandering about that the inferno demanded, even when he finally came upon a dim blotch that seemed indicative of rock channels between the walls of Hell.
But only the walls here — it was different above, and it was different below.
It was cold somewhere, it was wet elsewhere.
The place of damnation was quite accommodating, in a sense.
As the demon and the human stepped into a narrow corridor, the soldier whispered, “So, do you have a name?” He immediately hacked hoarsely, stumbled on the ground, which was rapidly turning to stone beneath them, as it took on an incline to the left.
Asmodeus stepped onto the incline, followed it to the left, until he’d stepped on the wall, moved along it, then he was walking on the ceiling on the cave, or rather the ground of it.
Assuming the young man would follow in his steps, he answered, “Asmodeus.” Up ahead, there was light.
“I’m a duke of the demons.” If all went well, the inferno would be leading Asmodeus home; if it chose to be kind to him, at least.
“Asmo…de...us,” the man sounded out. “Huh. Alright.”
Asmodeus glanced backward. “Never heard of me?” He snickered; this wasn’t out of the ordinary, but he would have assumed someone who came to Hell with an angel at their side was likely the religious sort. “I’m in the Testament of Solomon. The Book of Tobit. I’m in plenty of books, films.”
“Whatever you say.”
Asmodeus couldn’t help a laugh. “And what’s your name?”
“Dante.”
“Ah. Of course it is.”
The soldier cursed, again, as he stumbled up against the wall, put a knee on it, as his sense of gravity tilted slowly “Slow down. You didn’t tell me where we’re going, Asmodeus.”
The way he rolled his tongue on the infernal name was taunting, but the demon took no offense, setting a hand on the edge of the rock, peering out and sighing at the sight of more fog.
This could mean he was headed the right way, but it was impossible to know.
Low, hollow moans sounded — non-sexual, something more like groans but too airy and tormented.
“I would answer if I could,” Asmodeus said with a grumble.
“Hell takes you where it thinks you deserve.” With that, he planted his clawed foot forward, breathing shakily, limping forward, feeling something crunch beneath him.
Asmodeus opened his mouth, about to warn the human that this was almost certainly bone and excrement before deciding he didn’t need to know.
Nonetheless, Dante scrunched his nose and lifted some of his shirt over his nostrils to ignore whatever the pungent scent might be.
He blinked a thousand times, annoyed at how much fog there apparently was in Hell, how that didn’t even make scientific sense.
Dante was not a stubborn man, though, and he’d already witnessed shape-shifting and angels and, apparently, a ‘very famous’ demon.
He was going to shut his mouth now, then.
Carefully, he crept into blindness, focusing on the shape of Asmodeus head, listening to each sting and throb of his body, particularly when he filled his lungs.
In fact, the pain was so bad that he was forced to take small, short breaths.
‘Bruised rib,’ Dante diagnosed himself. He’d had a friend in the military college, one of the few that spoke the same local language as Dante and who’d insist on speaking in it even when Dante would reply in the national language.
His friend had suffered a broken rib after training once, and Dante had sat beside him that night, listening to his rasps.
Two sergeants had kicked his friend’s chest in, and they looked away when he tried to kill himself four weeks later. Nothing unusual for the place.
At his peripheral, Dante noticed a shadow, which he would have normally ignored, but then it slumped to the ground with an odd clink.
It was a figure, doubling over, taking clumps of what appeared to be white shards and sand into its hands, then shoving it into its face, presumably a mouth.
It was not a demon, or a human, or even an animal — in every sense, it was a figure.
Gray specks composed its body, which was in the rough shape of a person, though it had no other features anywhere, no face, no clothing, no genitals.
With every movement, trickles of its composition climbed up and away from it, like smoke from a burn. Perhaps, ash.
Dante, heart stuttering, twisted his face forward again, hurried with a shuffle, but only now did he hear all the groans around him in, what he believed to be, hunger.
From every direction — it was coming from.
Sharply, he breathed, then flinched when it stung in his chest, but a hundred figures were appearing, walking without direction.
One figure of ash ran into another, and then fell and, before they’d hit the ground, they both withered away, disappeared into the fog.
The other figures, though, paid no mind, most doubling over to feast on the bone-earth.
“Don’t stare too much,” Asmodeus warned.
“They eat and they vomit and shit all that out, then they eat it again.” Dante sighed.
“I know you’ve heard all the screams everywhere.
But if you’re scared, it might comfort you to know the humans who burn are less than the humans who wander like this.
There are more souls trapped in endless chases than in the inferno.
” Before Dante could ask, Asmodeus explained, “Humans are weighed down by their sins. Most of them land in Hell and those who don’t are on Earth, in the leaves and such. ”
“What about,” Dante asked carefully, “Heaven? The humans in Heaven?”
“I’m a demon. I can’t answer that.”
As a person of ash walked past, and Dante accidentally brushed against them — he jolted back, tried to apologize on instinct, but he watched it stagger back, its arm unspooling between them, then the rest of its body with a soft, barely audible cry.
‘Fuck.’ However hardened he thought he was, Dante clutched at the cloak with his only hand trembling.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ he wanted to say, but the figure was gone.
“You’re saying you don’t know if humans. .. go to Heaven?”
“I suppose so.”
“God isn’t real,” Dante said; he was thinking of the disgusting pyramid of flesh, the screams he’d heard as he fell eternally, feeling himself roast, never dying. “God can’t be real if this place is.” He’d half-expected for the demon to argue, but he’d heard a laugh, then:
“You might be right.”
They strolled further through the field of bone and feces, until all the people of ash began to disappear into the fog, their miserable moans fading with them.
A few times, Dante witnessed what Asmodeus warned him of — the vomiting, the defecating — but the horror was quickly replacing itself with pity.
There was an existentialism sinking in, of course — a ‘What will happen to me?’ — but Dante knew to wait for when it was a better, safer time to ponder.
The demon, however, in what was becoming eerie silence, said that no matter where humans land in Hell, they are not individuals anymore.
The living dream of their sins resulting in specific torments; they dream of all those in the inferno to see them and know who they are, what they did, what they believed was worth risking this suffering.
But no — they are all the same now. Death is the great equalizer.
There are no rich and poor in Hell, nor are there beautiful and ugly.
To ash they all return, and all ash looks quite the same.
Dante’s shoes tapped on more solid rock, suddenly, and he startled.
Looking down, he saw now a trail of cobblestone, though reddened in rust. The path scaled up — a hill, which Asmodeus panted as he climbed.
Dante, as he’d been doing, followed. For a few entire minutes, there was nothing, but just as he was beginning to tire, even opened his mouth to ask the demon if they could consider resting, he saw a stout, circular stone building come into view, something like a cottage with sparse windows and an overgrown garden.
But there was crowding outside of it, a large demon with a laurel crown and horns — Baal — and other demons.
On the ground, there were two figures kneeling, held in place by grips at their hair.
One of them — Dante saw as he inched behind Asmodeus, trying to hide and have a shield at once — had shoulder-length hair with two small braids framing his face and warm brown skin and a loose, but rather modest, tunic.
Beside him, there was a pale person with curled golden hair in a single, thick braid; on his body, there was a scandalously sheer, red robe beneath golden chains and colorful jewels.
“Asmodeus,” Baal grunted in greeting, red eyes narrowed, mouth twitching; this was the last Dante understood of the conversation before the demonic language overrode any human understanding.
“I tried to be kind to you because you returned to Hell willingly. And now what the fuck is this? Don’t try to tell me it was an accident. ”
Dante couldn’t see Asmodeus’ face, but he spoke with a tightness that tensed the soldier’s muscles.
To demon ears, the duke of lust was saying: “It’s me you want.
Rosier did nothing wrong. Let him go.” Rosier jolted a little.
“And Armoni has nothing to do with this.” Armoni was the pale one, who grimaced in what seemed shame. “I hadn’t even come home to them yet.”
“Well, you won’t be coming home for a long time, fucker,” Baal said.
“You have no idea what you’ve done.” He waved for the other demons to release their hold on Rosier and Armoni, but then added, “I hope you enjoy prison before we put you on trial for treason to Hell.” Asmodeus laughed. “And who’s that behind you?”
When all the demons’ gazes suddenly swiveled toward the soldier, Dante’s blood ran cold.
“I found him,” Asmodeus said casually. “He’s a human.
He must’ve come down with that angel.” He stepped aside, revealing Dante, who tensed but knew better than to raise his gun.
If anything, he should prepare to aim it right into his mouth.
But Baal did little more than stare, jaw set, eyes calculating, before he turned to say a few words to a demon standing beside him.
Hushed, Dante asked, “What’s happening?”
“We’re about to be imprisoned,” Asmodeus explained without fuss, then nodded his head. “Don’t struggle.”
“Wait,” Rosier was saying to Baal, about to rise to his feet only to be stopped by Armoni’s hand grappling his forearm. “We won’t leave Hell again. You don’t have to bind him or that human. I swear to you that I’ll keep them both here.”
Armoni said, “Rosier,” low, in warning. But then he addressed Baal with a determined, yet frantic gleam in his eyes, “I know this angel Dina you’re talking about, Baal. Imprison me too.”
Baal snorted. “Prison won’t save you from Moloch, Armoni, but come along then.”
As the demons went to cuff everyone but Rosier, Asmodeus told Dante again, “Don’t struggle.”