Pandaemonium no longer seemed like it had when I first arrived, bleeding and near death. It was still dark and grotesque, but now it seemed more like one of those foreign cities you encounter in spy stories, like Cold War Berlin or Bogart’s Casablanca, full of terrible danger, yes, but also full of excitement and possibility. Did that mean I could overlook the monsters in the streets just because I traveled in safety? Overlook the terrible suffering, worse than you could find in the most desperate third-world capital?
Yes, to an extent. I was already beginning to feel like I’d do anything to avoid the horror of being cast out to wander Hell again without allies or protection, forget my principles if I had to, forget my angelic training, forget almost everything. It sneaks up on you that way. But I still couldn’t forget Caz, no matter what else happened. I’m not exaggerating when I say that she was the only thing that kept me from tumbling into the abyss.
I’d guessed that the Dionysus Theater would be like La Scala or something, one of those fancy opera places, a big classical building with columns, meant to proclaim, “Hey, we got culture!” but I was reckoning without Hell’s sense of humor. The theater was a few blocks off Dis Pater Square, tucked in at the end of a wide street full of strange, misshapen buildings, not the high towers of the wealthy but the hivelike habitations that the rest of Pandaemonium’s residents fought to get into, with their bottom floors given over to small shops and other businesses. But the joke, I realized when I saw the electrical sign with its vertical letters glowing through the permanent dusk, was that the Dionysus was a dark-mirror copy of the Apollo Theater in Harlem, a place I’d actually been once—the closest your friend Bobby Dollar had ever come to a religious pilgrimage.
Cars and carriages and even more bizarre forms of transportation crowded the street as the high and mighty arrived, along with interested spectators and crowds of beggars who were one tossed bone away from turning into a snarling wolfpack. The Dionysus had a large troop of brawny house soldiers armed with what looked like most of the history of warfare, from clubs to steam-driven Gatling guns, and since most of the really well-to-do traveled with their own household guards as well, even the most dangerous and desperate of the onlookers kept a respectful distance. But it was a reminder that, like any place that specialized in the snatch-and-grab style of wealth acquisition, the only real security was what you could buy.
As we waited to go in, I asked Vera again who the “Himself” was who was performing. It wasn’t advertised out front, only the name of the opera, The Coronation of Poppaea. I’d never heard of it. Then again, I’ve never been big on classical music or opera, at least compared to what jazz and blues do for me.
As much as I was getting used to Hell, I still had a gut-clenching moment when I saw that the interior was built in the style of one of those old Parisian catacombs, made literally out of bones and skulls, although here they had been crafted into far more than simple walls and doorways. The arched ceiling was paneled with scenes of nature that incorporated the bones of all manner of animals, frisking sheep and placid cows, and of course the human skeletons that watched over them. It might have been the flickering torchlight that made these skeletons seem to move slightly, as though alive but under a spell. Yeah, it might just have been torchlight, but I don’t think so. The immense candelabra, the balconies, the very pillars that supported the building were also made from human and semi-human skulls and bones, many brightly painted in red or gold or white, giving the theater the look and feel of a truly disturbing circus tent.
Grand President Caym waved to us from his private box above; a little flourish of his long fingers that made him look more than ever like some immense bird shaking out its feathers. Vera was thrilled to be singled out in public by the great fellow himself. I tried to smile.
The curtain rose and the opera began. I couldn’t make a lot of sense of it, but it seemed to be about ancient Rome. The first bit was singing gods and goddesses, but the music was something even older than the kind of opera I was used to hearing on television and radio, something from the Renaissance or even earlier, I guessed. For a moment I found myself wondering if Caz would have regarded it as too modern, since she had told me the Renaissance was after her time. The thought made me sad. It was easier to send it away, like an extra being directed offstage and out of sight behind one of the immense brocade curtains.
Not wanting to think about Caz, and not even certain why, I pulled myself back to the opera and the mystery of the “Himself” that Caym had referred to. None of the performers seemed unusual, all clearly talented, none of them recognizable. As I did my best to listen to the lyrics, I came to realize that the opera was about the Roman Emperor Nero, the very same Nero whose crumbling bridge I had crossed to get into Hell. The irony of it amused me. I wondered how many other people in this charnel house of an opera palace even knew that the Neronian Bridge existed?
Then the singer portraying the emperor made his entrance, and for the first time I sensed something odd going on. It wasn’t anything about the performer, at least, not to look at. He wasn’t particularly handsome, a bit thick-faced, with a sagging, wrinkled neck, and his legs were a bit skinny for the toga he was wearing, but I sure didn’t recognize him. Others did, however, and he was greeted with applause and, to my surprise, a few catcalls and some laughter. Also, unlike the other singers, he did not look particularly comfortable on stage, which made him an odd choice to play the monarch. I supposed he had a fabulous voice to make up for it, because everyone else in the cast seemed world-class. I was mildly startled when he got ready to sing, because his throat swelled like the bulging neck-sac of a bullfrog, though even that didn’t seem unusual: a lot of the other cast members and most of the audience bore some physical sign of what they were. But when he finally began his aria, the emperor’s voice was a distinct disappointment, more than a bit rough and not very strong. Some in the audience actually laughed, which made him falter, and the jeers grew louder as he doggedly pursued the song, his throat sac distending and shrinking like the bellows on an accordion, his face growing more fearful by the moment as the crowd shouted at him.
He finished and someone else began singing, but the spell of attention had been broken and many in the audience were talking or laughing out loud. I couldn’t figure it out at all, but as I wondered why such a poor singer should be trotted out in front of the nobility of Hell that way, I was distracted by a late entrance in the upper boxes. A hush fell over the crowd and some poor soprano’s aria was suddenly less important than everybody turning around to see who was being seated in President Caym’s box.
The late arrival didn’t look the same as the last time I’d seen him, but I still knew him instantly. He was dressed in a beautifully-cut white dress uniform, the kind of thing you’d expect to see at a royal funeral in some old newsreel, except that the white fabric was so artfully splattered with arterial splashes of scarlet that I had no doubt it had been designed that way. The only question was whether it was real blood or just dye. I thought I could guess.
Grand Duke Eligor looked less human than he did on Earth, but for the moment he also looked less demonic than the monstrous form that had overtaken him as he dangled me by my neck a couple of feet above his office carpet back in San Judas. His blond hair was shaved very close to his head, and his facial features were bonier and older than on his Kenneth Vald persona. Less like a California billionaire and more like the fascist dictator of some imaginary Northern European country, a creature of hard angles and fierce, unyielding principles. But it was definitely him, Eligor the Horseman, my least favorite demon. My hackles went up. I was relieved I was in shadows, that my treacherous, underwhelming disguise wasn’t visible to him, even from this distance.
Only as I (and most of the other patrons) sat staring at Eligor settling into his seat did I have a moment of wondering where Caz was. That only lasted a moment, because once the grand duke had seated himself, one of the guards at the back of his box opened the door, letting in a gleam o
f pure white gold.
That was Caz, of course.
twenty-four
fickle
MY HEART felt as though it had stopped, literally stopped, and would not start again. Caz’s face was rigid, blank as a mask. She wore a long red dress whose spatters and splashes of white made her a mirror of her master, an even clearer mark of Eligor’s ownership than the guard who seated her next to the grand duke and then stood behind her chair like a jailer.
Oh, God, my heart. Everything came back in a moment, our desperate nights together, the months of longing since, and it was all I could do not to climb out of my seat and run toward her. The crowd, many of them still whispering, had turned back to the action as the emperor stepped up to sing again, but I couldn’t look away. I can only imagine what my face must have looked like. Finally, Vera’s elbow applied briskly and with obvious anger to my ribs brought my attention back to the stage, but I could think of nothing else for a long time. I snuck a few glances at Caz, but she was never looking at me or anyone else in the audience, not even looking at the performers. Instead she sat like a frightened schoolgirl, eyes downcast. Eligor ignored her, watching the action below through a pair of opera glasses.
The snickering and jeering resumed as the singer with the bulging throat laboriously climbed the mountain of his aria, looking more than ever like someone who desperately wanted to be somewhere else. The catcalls got louder; then, as he strained for and badly missed a high note, something came hurtling out of the lower galleries and past his head. He did his best to dodge it and suffered only an unpleasant stain on his tunic as the clot of mud or excrement bounced off him.
For a moment, as I watched what looked like a small riot beginning in the seats below us, I almost forgot Caz, so tantalizingly close. I assumed that whoever had tried to assault the performer was being caught and hustled out, but it quickly became clear that the ruckus was more general. Something like anarchy broke out on the floor of the Dionysus Theater, and before a few more bars of the aria had wavered by, a heavier projectile hit the emperor right in the gut, knocking him to his knees. Something else struck his head. Blood coursed down the side of his face and onto his white imperial tunic. For a moment he cowered as more missiles hit him, arms wrapped around his head for protection. The jeering grew louder and a whole cloud of rocks and rotten food and less pleasant things arced out of the crowd, seeking out the cringing singer as though he were the condemned at a public stoning.
The music played on but the singer was on his hands and knees now, bloody and weeping. The crowd shrieked at him, an animal sound that seemed to grow louder by the second. Then they quickly, if not uniformly fell silent, and all eyes turned again to the grand president’s box. Caym was standing at the rail, and the contortion of his crowlike face showed he was furious, but instead of berating the unruly crowd, he leaned out and pointed a long, clawlike finger at the performer.
“Get up, you tub of mischief! Who do you think you are? You have been brought here to sing, and sing you will!”
The actor looked up, his face bloody, his throat sac deflated and hanging over his chest like a dirty bib. “Please, Grand President, please . . . I cannot!” A rock hit him in the shoulder and he almost fell. “It hurts! It hurts me so!”
“Shut your mouth, you pathetic ingrate. You wanted to sing, and sing you shall. And what better role for you than your own wretched life?”
For an instant even Caz and my hated enemy Eligor fell out of my thoughts as I finally realized what was going on. This was Nero himself! The emperor who had tried to cheat Hell, singing the story of his own wretched life for the amusement of Hell’s high rollers.
Like I’ve said before, nobody can carry a grudge like a demon.
Order was restored, but it only got worse for Nero from there. Time and again he would begin to sing and be pelted by garbage and shit or knocked down by stones, some of them big as a baby’s head. I distinctly heard one of them break his arm, but Caym wouldn’t let him stop, although it was harder and harder to distinguish his singing from shrieks of pain and terror. I kept sneaking looks at Caz. Her face showed no emotion whatsoever, but Eligor was clearly enjoying the spectacle, laughing and whispering with Caym. At last, nearing what seemed to be the middle of the opera, a thunderous barrage of larger missiles, great jagged things that might have been broken paving stones, crushed Nero to the stage, and though he struggled to get up it was hopeless. At this point things went completely mad. Members of the audience leaped up on stage and began to kick him and beat him with the largest pieces of stone. Nero offered no resistance—it all had the feeling of a ritual enacted many times. Even with the musicians still playing gamely along, it sounded like someone jumping up and down on a barrel of eggs.
As Nero was reduced to a bloody wet tatter I looked up to see Eligor saying goodbye to Caym. Caz was already gone.
“That was his best performance yet,” a man said in a loud, braying voice behind me. “Folded him up before they even got to the part about Seneca.”
In other words, this happened all the time. Two thousand years Nero had been in Hell, and they still humiliated him in public on a regular basis, not to mention tormenting and destroying his body over and over again. What would they do to me if they found out? After all, Emperor Nero had been on their side.
On the way home Vera was quieter than usual, and although she stroked my hair as she liked to do while we sped through the red-flickering streets of Pandaemonium, she did it roughly, distracted perhaps by what she had seen, so that again and again she pricked me with her fingernails. As for me, I should have been as excited and terrified by seeing Caz as I had been during those first moments after she entered the theater, but instead I was suddenly exhausted. Too much for one day. I was finding it hard to keep my eyes open as the roar of the steam boiler and the red strobe of the city lights dragged me down into a half-sleep. For a moment I imagined myself on that stage, broken and bleeding, laughed at by Hell’s leading citizens, but even that horrific image couldn’t keep me from being pulled down, down, down.
“Tighter,” I heard Vera saying to someone, as if down a pipe or from a long distance. I was groggy, I realized, but understanding didn’t improve anything. Groggy and weak. Why was she talking? Why wouldn’t she let me sleep? “No, tighter,” she said.
“I can’t, my lady,” said a deep female voice—Belle. “It doesn’t fit right, even with his hand growing back. The strap won’t stay.”
“Then tie it. Use a piece of cord.”
Belle was apparently helping her mistress put on her nightclothes, but why were they doing it in my room? Or was I in Vera’s room? And why were they talking about my hand? Wherever it was, I couldn’t be lying in a very comfortable position, because my joints were aching.
I tried to open my eyes, but that wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Even my lids felt weighed down, like someone had set Charon’s heavy coins on them. But I had already made that journey, hadn’t I? I had already crossed the River of Death because I was in Hell. Could you cross twice? I was confused, my thoughts thick like syrup.
At last I got my eyes open, something that took actual hard effort. I was in my own room, all right, and Vera and Belle were indeed struggling with cords and straps, but it had nothing to do with Lady Zinc’s nightware because Vera was still dressed for the opera. The cord in question was being tied around my wounded arm, which apparently had kept coming out of its restraining strap. My other arm with the whole hand hadn’t been a problem for them—it was bound securely to the headboard of the bed.
As Belle pulled on the cord knotted around my arm just below the elbow, I realized for the first time what was going on, although for a moment I didn’t quite grasp the why of it. Had I fallen out of bed? Injured myself? Why was I being restrained? But then the first cold gust of reality blew through me and some of the grogginess receded.
“You may go now, Belle,” said Vera when both of my arms were pulled out straight on either side. My ankles had been bound as we
ll, and I was helpless as any sacrificial victim. “I have things to say to Lord Snakestaff that require privacy.”
“As you say, Mistress.” But Belle clearly didn’t want to go, and she paused in the doorway, filling it with her huge frame, to look at her handiwork: me, trussed like a turkey about to go in the oven.
Vera was pacing back and forth beside the bed, the color in her cheeks darker and deeper than I had ever seen.
“Ingratitude.” Her voice had changed. All the charm and life had gone out of it, and although it’s hard to believe, I promise you that her cold tones frightened me in a way that even the straps hadn’t. “Ingratitude and fickleness. Again. All of you! I thought you were different, Snakestaff! Oh, I had such hopes for you!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was hard to make words properly. I felt drugged or drunk.
“All men are liars.” The hatred was so strong in her voice I couldn’t believe it was the same woman. “Whores! You call us whores! But you are the ones without shame! I saw her! I saw you staring at that filthy, white-haired slut of Eligor’s! Why do you like her? Why do you like her?” She came to my side and grabbed my hair so hard some of it came out, shaking my head until I thought she’d snap my neck. She was stronger than I’d ever guessed. “I gave you everything! I gave you my love! I would have given you more than that! I would have made you one of my immortals! But now you’ll rot in the dung heaps of Gehenna. Pig!”
Even as Vera was shouting at me, tears of anger running down her red cheeks, she clambered onto the wide bed beside me. Helpless, I could only turn my face away, certain that she was going to hit or scratch me, but instead her fingers plucked frenziedly at the strings of her bodice as if it were too tight and she couldn’t breathe. She put a knee squarely on my belly and then pulled down the front of her opera dress, spilling her breasts. She was beautiful and, perversely, never more so than at that moment, her chest heaving, dark hair swinging as she straddled me. I braced myself again to be hit, but instead she bent and fumbled with my trousers. I yanked at my restraints but couldn’t pull either my arms or legs free, and although I did my best to buck her off me it was like wrestling with some great, wild cat. She flattened herself between my legs as she pulled down my clothes, then she sat up straight, my legs locked between hers. She reached down and grabbed my cock and squeezed it until I shouted in pain.