Once Upon a Time in Hell (24 page)

"Do you think they'll just leave us alone?" Forset wondered, the question aimed at no body in particular.

"I think they're still angry," said Brother William, "and will want to lash out more before the day is done."

"It depends what happens doesn't it?" asked Elisabeth. "If more people were let in to Wormwood then they'd forget all about us."

"But they're not going to be, are they?" said Billy. "Be honest, it didn't make sense in the first place. 'We're going to do this a few at a time because there are so many of you?' It's sup posed to be the afterlife, not a riverboat."

Elisabeth couldn't help but nod. "It's just as Patrick said, we're puppets with our strings being tugged."

"I don't understand it," bemoaned her father, "this was supposed to be something beautiful. An amazing experience. Not this... horror."

She held his hand. "I'm sorry." She had always suspected that his lifelong obsession with the miraculous Wormwood would end in disappointment. Not like this, of course, her expectation had simply been for an empty field and a gradual sense of disillusionment. This was much worse. To discover that the

myth was real but then be cheated of fully exploring it. More than that: to be left with the inescapable impression that you had been had, that a greater plan was at work and its intentions were vaguely hostile. She knew he must be suffering a great deal.

The carriage shook again.

"Oh God," said Forset, "they're back."

"I'm not sure," said Billy, "that didn't feel like people pressing at the outside."

The carriage shook again, and Billy was right, this wasn't an external pressure, they were rocking on their wheels.

"Someone's trying to get her started," said Forset, the idea somehow even worse to him that a simple attack. This was his creation, his great invention, that it should be manhandled by these idiots...

The Land Carriage began to move.

A
LONZO STEPPED ALONG
the shores of The Bristle lake like a crane hunting for food, constantly darting away from the lapping liquid so as not to ruin his boots.

After a few minutes he found what he was looking for. With a sigh, he removed his jacket and draped it over a rock. Then he rolled up his sleeve and grabbed at the thrashing torso at the lake's edge. He yanked it back onto the dry shore, letting it roll amongst the thick hairs that grew there. While the torso tried to right itself, fractured arms slapping against the soil trying to tip itself onto its back, Alonzo removed a handkerchief from his pocket and did his best to wipe his hand clean.

They both finished their tasks at the same time.

"Es oo es at?" said the torso, its mouth no longer functioning after its tongue had been wrenched out by one of the other residents of the lake.

"Yes Greaser," Alonzo said, "it's me. You look well."

"Uck aff ant."

Nothing would please me more than to do so, but first a little warning: did you tell them about me?"

The torso was silent.

"Yes, well, that probably answers my question doesn't it?"

"O ice."

"There's always a choice, Greaser, just varying degrees of difficulty in making the right one."

"Reee.."

"I'm sure you are." Alonzo looked at his mostly clean hand and sighed again. "Oh well,"

he said. "One can't keep one's hands clean forever."

He reached down, grabbed Greaser's arm and pulled him back into the lake.

"O! O!" Greaser begged.

"Shush now," said Alonzo, "what's good for the goose is good for the gander, as a place of punitive contemplation, the mortals seem to love it."

Greaser bobbed back into the lake, pulled by various other hands, his shouting mouth choked off by the slopping tide. Alonzo walked back up the shore and thought about what was likely to happen next.

A
S WE RODE
away from The Bristle, the after-effects of the last day or so weighing heavily on me, I found myself sinking lower and lower in my saddle until, eventually I must have fallen asleep.

I woke up later to find I was moving along at some speed, my rakh galloping across a wide field. The grass was a faint yellow. I squinted at it to try and make sure it wasn't hair but we were moving so fast it was hard to tell.

"Elwyn's woken up!" Meridiana shouted, laughing.

Nobody else cared enough to comment.

I tried to sit up but found that some considerate soul—let's be honest, it would have been Meridiana—had tied me to the saddle with my reins. I suppose I was glad of it, some sleep was better than none and at least I hadn't fallen off and been trampled on. Now that I was awake, though, I just felt trapped and stupid. It took some wriggling (and my rakh couldn't have made its disgust at my writhing around clearer had it written me a letter on the subject) but I eventually got myself loose and was able to sit up.

The terrain around us now was very different to the deep red gloom of The Bristle. The sky still held a stormy weight but everything was much more open and light. I'd almost have called it pleasant if I wasn't being beaten up ass-wise and still in an utter state of confusion.

I wondered how long I'd slept. More to the point, how long did we still have to ride? I asked as much but either nobody heard me above the sound of beating hooves or nobody could be bothered to answer. The landscape was all but bare, the occasional dead tree throwing aggressive finger gestures at us as we passed. If The Bristle had been a place of constant horror this was a region of absence, plain and empty stretching on seemingly forever.

We stopped about five minutes later, giving me a chance to climb off and do a proper job of untangling myself and straightening my clothes.

"You were like a baby," said Biter, "riding along on its mother's back."

This amused him so greatly I decided to be nice and not punch him in the face.

"How far have we got to go?" I asked.

"Another couple of hours should do it," said Lucifer, staring out towards the horizon, at absolutely fuck all as far as I could tell.

"You don't drag your heels when he's by your side," said Biter, offering the old man his usual doe-eyed look. "We've been flying!"

"Literally?" I had visions of waking up in free fall.

"Well, no, but we've been riding real fast. We passed through the Archimedes Belt in, like, twenty minutes!"

"Good," I wasn't going to ask, I'd sit down and nod at a map one day should all this pan out fine. "You think they know we're coming?"

"Of course they do," said Agrat. Her mood, as far as I could tell was getting even worse, the closer we got to the Dominion of Clouds. "Omnipotence is hard to beat you silly little man."

"Alonzo's not omnipotent," said Lucifer. "And, in my experience, the Boss was only ever as omnipotent as he could be bothered to be. Being able to know everything is fine, caring enough to do so is another matter." "You two obviously got on real well," I said, the ramification of that slowly starting to sink in. Maybe I could see why Agrat was so foul-tempered; how stupid did you have to be to pick a fight with the supreme being?

"I loved him," said Lucifer, "but I don't believe the feeling was reciprocated."

Those of us that needed it took a few mouthfuls of water then we got back in the saddle and continued on our way.

"W
E'RE GOING PAST
Wormwood," said Brother William, leaning out of the window.

"Get your head back inside," said Elisabeth, "before someone tries to shoot it off."

"I don't think there's much risk of that now," said her father, "they're happy to ignore us back here now they have control of the engine."

They had left the camp behind and the view out of the windows was of the empty plain in front of Wormwood.

"But why steal it in the first place?" wondered Billy. "You wouldn't think they'd want to just high-tail it out of here, not while there was still a chance of their getting into Wormwood."

"At least it's got us clear too," said Elisabeth. "If we can take back control of the engine we're in a much safer position than we were."

"Yeah," said Billy, "take back control of the engine. Because that won't be difficult at all will it?"

"It depends what they have in mind," said Lord Forset, "as you say, I can't believe they're planning on just driving off, so they'll likely stop soon and we need to be ready to fight them off when they do." 

S
COTT
C
LAREMONT FELT
better than he had in days. The air rushing past his face had beaten away his hangover and he was back in control of his own destiny again. It had been some time since he'd worked the rails for a living. When he'd first left home he'd signed up with the Houston and Texas Central Railway. He'd looked at those heavy metal tracks in the dirt and thought:

T hat's it, that's the way out of here.

Even though he'd run the same route for a couple of years, first as a boiler-man then the engineer, always returning back to the station from which he'd left, the train had represented freedom to him like nothing before. To ride that great, iron beast towards the horizon, wondering if one day you'd just break free of the tracks and keep going. It was one hell of a feeling.

The Land Carriage was a dream come true, all the power without the tracks. He could, indeed, go wherever he wanted. He could stoke that fire and roar through the dirt.

He had worried for a moment that the controls would be unfamiliar but it had been the work of a few minutes to get the engine rolling. The engineer had kept the boiler lit, no doubt using it to power the other facilities back there, lights and such, so all he'd had to do was stoke it up and let her rip.

He looked around for a whistle, wanting to shout to the world that he was on his way.

Pulling the chain he laughed at the high, piercing note that soared through the air.

He looked at Wormwood as he drove past, snatched glimpses of its empty streets and buildings. "I came a long way to see you," he shouted, "and I'm damned if I'm going to be kept waiting any longer!"

He laughed again, pushing forward into the desert beyond the town, wanting to put a decent chunk of distance between them.

It had taken him a short while to get the hang of the directional controls. When you were on the tracks you only needed forward and back, but, now he was in the open he found the measure of them, carving out a wide curve so that, after ten minutes or so, he was facing back towards the town.

"Last stop, the ever-after!" he shouted, pulling on the whistle again. He began to stoke the boiler even higher, piling on the pressure. When he hit Wormwood he wanted to be going as fast and as heavy as possible.

T
HE FLOATING ORB
led me out of the garden on the other side of the quad. The arcade was identical and I walked past more empty rooms and blank spaces as I trailed along after my ethereal host.

"Is dinner served, perchance?" I asked it. I didn't expect a reply and it failed to surprise me, simply floating a few feet ahead, casting its faint, amber light on the blank white walls and pillars.

We ascended a set of stairs which opened out into a huge hall. Like everything else it was blank, white and featureless, at the far end of its cavernous space sat a table, ornately laid and featuring guests. "Well thank the Lord for that," I said. "I was beginning to think there was nobody else in this entire place but me."

To the left was a well-dressed gentleman who would have cut a dapper figure were it not for his face. He had a blank patch of skin where his eyes should be. He barely acknowledged my arrival; I forgave him for not looking up, of course, but he might have said hello.

Across the table from the surly fellow was a far more congenial couple. A beautiful young girl of negroid descent and, well, my first assumption was that I was dining in high company indeed...

"Oh," I said, on spotting him... "You're not..." I wondered if I should bow.

"His name's Soldier Joe," said the girl. "Don't let the beard and hair fool you, he's as much a stranger around here as you are."

"My name's not actually Joe," the man admitted, "though for the moment I can't rightly remember what it is so I suppose it'll do for now."

This was shaping up to be like every publishing dinner I'd ever known: a table filled with the aggressive, the beautiful and the mad.

"Well, as a man who has had his own surfeit of names I can understand the confusion," I said. "I'm Patrick Irish, but up until recently I wrote under the name of Roderick Quartershaft."

This provoked a veritable slab of indifference. Clearly I was not in the company of devotees.

"I've not been much of a reader," said Soldier Joe. "Up until very recently I've had... a number of health problems."

"Please," I lied. “It hardly matters! Not everyone's a reader, after all. How about..." I looked to the other gentleman and immediately shut my terribly stupid mouth. "I never seem to find the time," he said and smiled. It wasn't a pleasant smile. Rather a sharp, hostile thing. The kind of smile a man offers you so that you know that, while he is aware of your insult, he is far too scary and violent to let it upset him. Though he is probably going to kill you anyway. I couldn't think of anything to say that might make matters better so I just shut up for all of ten seconds and then changed the subject.

"And your name?" I asked the girl.

"Hope Lane," she replied.

"Lovely. Like an address. To a particularly wonderful house."

Oh I r ish, you wer e not at your best. She was polite enough to laugh.

"Well," I said, "this is all very nice isn't it?"

I'm English you see, we like to deal in intangible conversations for as long as possible.

"Nice?" the blind gentleman asked. I supposed I should have asked him his name too but I was avoiding any contact unless under direct force.

"Well," I said, sitting down as far away from him as was possible given the limited space available. "You know... erm... dinner in Heaven. I've been in worse situations. Especially of late.