Read Online Letters From Hades by Jeffrey Thomas - Free Book Online Page B

initial impression was only strengthened. I was getting the sense that the city was built largely of black metal, like Avernus University but on a grander scale even than that imposing institution. This was not some town like Caldera that the Damned had built for themselves; the Demons had to have had a major, even organizing part in it. Why they would provide shelter and community for the citizens of Hell was as yet a mystery to me, that I was not counting on ever fathoming.
    The city grew ever taller and wider, becoming more imposing, like some jagged silhouetted mountain range, reminding me of the towering volcano I had encountered above Caldera. But whereas the volcano exhaled massive clouds into the sky, to further blanket and obscure it, the opposite was the case with Oblivion. The sky above the city glowed orange, as if either dawn or dusk were breaking. The usual layer of clouds that had always blocked the sky from my view before was open in a rough circle above the city. Yet what was revealed was no cavernous ceiling of rock, as I had imagined it might be.
    It was lava. An ocean of molten rock, its light subtly fluctuating. It was as amazing as if it had indeed been an inverted sea. How it could resist gravity was beyond my reckoning. Was this what hid behind the cloud cover throughout Hell? And why was it exposed here? If anything, one would think a city’s pollution would only darken its skies further. Perhaps its pollution had burned away the clouds overhead somehow, eaten them away.
    As I walked, gaping at the city and its molten sky, I heard a rattling sound grow quickly behind me. A look back over my shoulder, then I was jumping off to the side of the broad dirt road as a carriage of some sort sped in the direction of Oblivion. When it grew close enough I marveled at its repugnant weirdness. It was like Cinderella’s pumpkin coach gone rotten. Its body was made of intricately wrought black iron, flowery and filigreed, even the wheels being metal. But this baroque framework supported a huge orange globe that had an organic look, and which possessed a luminous property. The carriage was pulled like a rickshaw by a team of six of the Damned, yoked and harnessed into position. Four men and two women, all of them nude, sweaty and dusty. The two women, in the fore, each wore a leather mask, out of the top of which rose a black plume. Every beast of burden had apparently had their eyes removed, and thick black screws fitted into their sockets to prevent the eyes from regenerating.
    At first I thought that massive orange globe contained the coach’s rider. Then I realized it was  the rider.
    The spherical entity had a vast face across its front, small eyes nearly lost in rolls of gelatinous, translucent fat…a broad nose, and a wide mouth with thick lips that nearly split the globe in half. No limbs, no ears, nothing but that face. Its eyes were entirely black against its glowing flesh. It seemed a half-ethereal creature. I was reminded of how children draw the sun with a benevolent smiling face on it. It also reminded me of the lopped-off head of a huge statue of Buddha. But I knew that sun-like, Buddha-like smile and those jovial eyes were only deceptively benign.
    Did the thing’s eyes like black marbles roll slightly in my direction as the carriage rumbled past me? I lowered my own eyes as if out of respect, but in reality out of fear. The coach did not stop…and soon, thankfully, it was dwindling in the distance…would reach the city long before me.
    As time passed, I saw smaller paths on either side of the main road, winding out of the forest. And more, I encountered people who emerged from these tributaries, to head in the same direction I did. Some stumbled along befuddled, perhaps newcomers like myself…or perhaps they had long ago let go of their sanity. Maybe these poor souls had even been mentally ill in life, exiled here because their minds had never been sound enough to admit the concept of the