Sweet Pandemonium

Chapter 5

“So this is Hell.” Several volcanoes erupted at once as Ire gestured around, and the entire horizon flashed with crimson light. “It’s divided into…” she tried to add, but quickly lost her own voice in the deafening roar as entire mountains cracked open, and great columns of smoke crackled with lightning. Maria yelled something in the din, but Ire shook her head and waved her down the dirt road to the tiny waystation. Even Hanan, a native like Ire, plugged his ears and ran as the hot brimstone began to rain down. They quickly piled into a tram as it crawled through, and the noise calmed down to a tolerable level. “It sucks here,” Ire concluded.


Maria rubbed her ears and coughed at the fumes that had followed them into their car. “Should we really travel in this?”


“This whole tram system was built by the demon who built the Circle. It’s pretty much indestructible.”


“Woah!” Maria stood up and braced herself against the side of the tram. “Why are we in a thing that demons built?”


Hanan held on tight to his seat as their tram burst down the mountain over a slope of razor sharp boulders. He gave a satisfied smile at the chance to show off. “This tram was created for my organization. I let a few others use it, if they’re in my favor.”


“What’s your organization?”


“The jailers of Hell itself. We are the Fangvaktare.”


The mountains rumbled again, likely because a demon was listening in and wanted the conversation to be theatrical. Maria was knocked back into her chair as the tram shook on its cable. “I thought… Hell was the prison!”


“Oh Shaitan, no,” Hanan chortled and shook his head, undisturbed by the wide swaying of the tram. “Ire, please explain. You do it best.”


“Hell isn’t prison… it’s exile,” she enunciated over the creaking metal of the cable car. “We don’t get any answers, we don’t earn catharsis, and we aren’t sent here to learn a lesson; we were sent here to be forgotten. We’re souls backing up the toilet, left to float and churn until we overflow.”


The car bobbed to the side and Maria held her stomach… “Gross.”


“Exactly. Now it probably won’t surprise you to know that most people down here hate each other. A lot. Slavers rubbing shoulders with slaves, adulterers with the spouses they cheated on, murderers and their victims, whatever. Some people try to seek vengeance on their own, but it almost never works.”


“Why? There’s just nine circles, right? You just hop across a few, and you’re gonna… what?” Maria trailed off, self-conscious of the incredulous looks she was getting.


“That’s bullshit,” Ire enunciated. “Everything you’ve ever read about Hell is true, but is also only part of the story. Dante’s nine circles exist all right, but he only wrote about those because those are the ones he remembers. Virgil told me they hit up at least forty.”


“Forty? How many circles exist?”


“Millions,” Hanan informed. The tram bobbed and rattled as it lowered into a ravine. The only light here was from the pale light in their car, and the sudden orange hail of brimstone that splattered across their windows. “There is no order to these circles either; something Dante lied about. After all, how can you return to the living, and tell them average potters sit aside pedophiles and murderers, or that some dictators continue to torment their citizens? It all depends on which demon acquired your soul. You are tormented, perhaps for a few seconds, perhaps for a few millennia, but in the end your consciousness is crushed, and you are sent back into the ether between circles. Another demon fishes you out and collects you, and it all begins again, and again, for eternity.”


The ravine ended at a sheer cliff face, and they dangled over an open canyon too deep to measure, the bottom lost in a carpet of smog. “It is possible to journey from circle to circle on foot,” Hanan continued, though Maria stared out over the drop in awe. “But it is ill-advised, especially as the bridges between are always moving, fresh circles are made while old ones are collapsed out of boredom. In such chaos, finding a specific circle or person is as unfathomable as winning a lottery several times in a row.”


“But say you are compelled to find your nemesis. You have nothing else to do with eternity, though you are eager to take satisfaction against your rapist, your murderer, or your slaver. You could spend eons searching for them, or you could come to an organization with means, one that manages all that chaos very neatly for you… for a reasonable price.”


“You can do all that?”


The tram curved about and began an ascent around the side of a knife-thin mountain peak. “Maria,” Hanan gestured behind her as the brimstone and smoke thinned. “The Fangs run this show.”


The tram emerged around the side, revealing another side of the great valley below. The light from the Nephilim fires bled through the thick, brown haze, and the shadows of their owners were cast into twisted, yawning shapes across the plain. Even as the smoke grew thicker, the flames grew brighter, until they were all that could be seen, like bloated suns shining through the pollution.


The tram followed its perimeter, towards a wide, low plateau. It’s top was completely ringed by a thick wall, lit under blinding white flood lights. Towers sported anti-aircraft guns and missile defenses, machine guns poked out from slits, and cages filled with screaming souls dangled out from barb-wire ramparts. “Dawaar,” Hanan announced proudly. “My prison, guarded by an army of over forty thousand, containing fifty thousand of humanity’s most loathed specimens. Yet this is just an average sized facility, one of thousands across Hell. If you ever had a revenge fantasy Maria, come to us, and we can make it so.”


They drew close enough to see the denizens in their cages, some limp and half picked clean, some with distended stomachs and open sores. They reached through their cages towards the tram with feeble hope. Maria stared open mouthed at them, before a desiccated face leered into view. She leapt back into her chair with a cry as they passed by rows of impaled bodies, blank faces tilted up towards the flood lights, their bodies coated in white bird shit and congealment, some picked skinless by persistent beaks. Maria whimpered as the car dawdled past them, then finally docked into its way station.


Hanan sighed and looked at his cellphone. “Shaitan,” he sighed.


Maria twitched towards him. “What’s wrong?”


“My phone is restarting for updates. These take forever now...”


Maria hunched forward and coughed out a thin stream of sick.