Read Online The Fall of Hades by Jeffrey Thomas - Free Book Online Page B

shadows. This time she had a better look. A small, wiry man with a dome of black hair, his face painted red—with blood?—and various piercing through his face, including a long iron bolt through his nostrils. In his hands he had been carrying a metal rod; as a club, or a blowgun? Vee knew he must have been from some Amazonian tribe. Of course, not having subscribed to the one favored faith, he and all his ilk would have been condemned to the netherworld.
    “I hope he’s just curious,” Vee muttered, slowing her pace warily,
    “and not baiting us.” Maybe his whole tribe lurked in these doorways, waiting for the right time to ambush her.
    But no more of the Indian’s kind manifested, and Vee finally reached the end of the hallway without confrontation. After the length and grandeur of the great hall, she was surprised to see the doorway was of modest size, with a thick metal hatch that stood open, looking scorched as if some weapon or explosion had forced it. From a distance, it appeared that sparse white flakes of snow blew out from the doorway, and had whitened the black marble floor, but Vee recognized this as Essential Matter. Nevertheless, for some time now the air had grown steadily colder, and now it came through that portal as an icy wind, adding to the illusion of snow.
    “Look,” Vee said, stopping and angling Jay so that his one eye could see what she was indicating: clusters of tiny white mushroom-like growths had sprouted up from the layer of Essential Matter that carpeted the floor in front of the open doorway.
    “Fascinating!” he hissed.
    “I’m not sure I want to go in there,” Vee said, shivering as she peeked into the room beyond. It looked like a great chamber, taller than it was wide, filled with bulky industrial machinery, all of it lost in a combination of sparkling frost and more Essential Matter—flakes of which alighted on her lashes and upon her lips, like crumbs of a sacramental wafer. “Well,”
    she said, “we’re not going to freeze to death, are we?”
    “I suppose not,” Jay said unenthusiastically.
    Vee stepped through the portal, the frozen crust of Essential Matter crackling beneath her boots. She saw the flakes were blowing in through a huge whirring fan up near the chamber’s high ceiling, the source of that arctic blast. She picked her way between the hulking, sugar-frosted machines leerily, trying to minimize the sound of her footfalls and watching for any tracks on the floor, bare feet or otherwise. She reached the far wall, composed of metal streaming rust from its bolts and seams.
    A ladder was fixed to the wall. Vee took hold of a rung, winced at the cold, pulled her hand away with some resistance as the frost tried to adhere to her flesh. But steeling herself, she placed a foot on the lowermost rung and began to climb, after first snapping the flap of the ammunition pouch over Jay to hold him in place, lengthwise.
    As she climbed, she again threw looks over her shoulder, expecting a pack of Indians to burst into the room firing metal darts and arrows up into her back, but no one appeared in the doorway. At the top of the ladder she hoisted herself up to a smaller hatch, and pushed it open. A corridor beyond, through which warmer air circulated. Ahh! Vee stepped through it gratefully. And so they continued on…to no known destination.

9: THE MASS PRODUCED
    They had been mounting an iron staircase bolted to the concrete interior of a titanic smoke stack or silo. The mesh steps were rusted, and the concrete cracked and stained with dampness and grease. The staircase—distressingly narrow and with no handrail—had already taken Vee so high that below her the floor was engulfed in darkness, so that she could not see the mouth of the corridor that had delivered her into this gigantic silo. The staircase spiraled around and around it like the coiled skeleton of a monstrous serpent.
    Once, weary, she stopped to rest, perching her bottom on one of the steps and