Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

The children blubber louder and the demon puts his hands on his bladed hips and looks disgusted. “Crybabies make me sick.” To prove it he opens his beak and spews a chunky yellow bile that hisses where it strikes the children. The children in front jump back and all begin to scream fullout. But they remain standing in a perfectly straight line.

“Maybe you twins is over there.” Raven indicates the lengthy barricade of spitted damned. “Maybe you mommies and daddies is over there. Let’s go see.” He raises a metal whistle from a leather lanyard round his neck and puts it to his dripping beak and blows it even though he has no lips. “Ready, march. Hup two, hup two, hup two.”

Raven pulls the children along and Niko sees now that a rod runs through their bellies to connect them in a single line. A shish-kebab of little boys and girls. Raven tugs the rod to urge along the naked children who must either march in step or jostle one another and increase their pain. The demon slows and speeds up and stops altogether and jerks randomly on the rod, all the while exhorting them like some gungho camp counselor. “Cmon cmon. Calvin, getchoo thumb outta you mouth or I make you eat it again. Mei Lin, izzat you daddy over there? Whaddayoo mean you dunno? What iffiz eyes was inniz head, wouldjoo recognize him then? Oh stop you bawling. Trina wouldn’t cry if she saw her daddy, wouldja Trina? Whatsat? It’s not you daddy? Well wave to him anyway you little fetus eater.” And pulls them along toward the next stop on their eternal and demented tour.

Niko’s face heats with the shame of his inability to help. Even children then. No one is spared, no one is spared.

Now he sees a crowd of meandering adults carrying their frowning perplexed and severed heads before them like Diogenes with a jackolantern. They bump into one another and stumble and fall over themselves and drop their heads. The bodies grope blindly about, watched by their own helpless rocking heads that cannot call instructions because they have no lungs. Eventually bodies encounter heads and lift them up and an obscene charade ensues as rightful heads and bodies try to reunite.

Niko wants to ask the demons about the tormented. Ask the damned about their deeds. He wants to know the reasons for such punishments, for like everyone who wants to believe there is somewhere a cosmic balance sheet dispensing justice Niko can accept the meting of the cruelest torment if the punishment fits the crime. But though he knows old phrases and keys and abjurations, dark geographies inlaid along a chromosomal tunnel untold generations long, unlike Dante Niko has no Sherpa to conduct his harrowing and much of what he meets with here will remain a mystery.

The undiscovered country. I have awakened inside Bosch’s sleep.

MILES LATER THE platform and its suffering scarecrows yields to a vast and lightening plain bestrewn with casual atrocities and manifest ironies. A molten glow in the distance eventually becomes an enormous banked bonfire attended by demons who stir the sluggish coals with their tridents. The demons squat before the bonfire like cowhands at the end of a long day, heating their irons and joking and laughing and punching each other on the arm until they withdraw their makeshift brands and lazily press the whitehot points against the carefully exposed wet muscle of thousands of flensed men nailed to the plain with iron spikes. When muscle takes the kiss of hissing brand the sickly air becomes a cauldron of screams.

A wooden rack stands by each man and on each rack is fixed the outspread leather of his tanning skin stretched taut and drumming in the fire’s breeze. A barbecue smell hangs on the air. A constant snow of ash descends.

Several demons sit on thickframed chairs and read thick books by the glow of tall white candelabra oddly necessary in the angry shifting light. The bonfire’s constant crackle an enormous beast charging through a dry and brittle forest. Even a hundred yards away Niko’s forehead grows wet from the heat.

He means to give the bonfire a wide berth but a voice behind him stops him in his tracks. “Guten Abend, Herr Doktor. Sind Sie deutsch?”

Niko turns to see a demon standing near him, black and saillike wings outspread and drumming in the bonfire’s wind. She would look carved from onyx if not for her pendulous breasts.

“£um Beide, nein,” he replies. “Kein doktor bin ich, auch kein deutscher.”

The demon looks surprised. “Nein? Sind sie nicht Herr Doktor Faust aus Heidelberg?”

“Nope,” says Niko, “I’m a musician. An American.”

“Ah, the mortal. We heard about you.”

“News travels fast.”

She grins. “You know what they say about idle hands.” Her dagger teeth are obsidian as the rest of her. Her eyes are black and have no color but what they reflect.

“Why did you think—” and realizes as he says the next three words that he has just spoken that language “—I was German?”

“Most everybody in this section is.” She indicates men staked beside their drumhead skins. “The guests, I mean.”

“Why are these men here?”

“Well. They were bad.”

“But why this torture? What was their crime?”

“I’ll show you.” She indicates the bonfire.

Niko hesitates. “I’m really trying to get to the center. Can you tell me—”

“It’s an infinite plain, bucko. Ain’t no center.”

“There’s a head office I’m sure. Somewhere the boss parks his ass.”

“Hey hey.” She lowers her trident meaningfully. “Do I show up where you work and piss on the french fry cooker?”

“Never mind. Sorry I asked. Have a nice day.” He starts away. Onyx frowns, one long claw laconically scratching a breast. “Make you a deal.”

“I’ve had it down to here with deals.”

She cocks her head uncertainly. “A trade then. Play some music for us and I’ll tell you how to reach the—” she grins frighteningly “—head office.”

Niko considers. “One song.”

She grins. “You have dealt with us before.” She holds up three knobby dangerous fingers. “Three.”

“Two.”

She claps her hands. “Done.” Her dark wings flap and furl and rustle when she moves toward the bonfire. “Ahh. Nothing like hot air under your wings. How you mortals stand not being able to fly is beyond me.”

“We fly.”

“What, in airplanes?” Her wings convulse. “Never get me up in one of those things.” She shoves three inches of clawed finger into her fierce broad nose and swabs it and yanks it out and then examines the lump that quivers there. She flicks it away and it hits the ground and squacks and scampers off. She puts her finger in her mouth and turns toward the bonfire. “Walk this way, mortal man.”

“If I could walk that way.”

“Don’t start with me.”

THE CHAIRS ON which the clustered demons sit are made of bones removed from the staked men, who cry out every time a demon sits or stands or shifts about. The demons make a point of sitting or standing or shifting about a lot. Onxy tells him that the men staked here are nazis. “They feel everything we do to them, even after we take them apart.” She pulls a wad of green mucus from her catslit eye and stretches it like taffy and loops it round her palms. “We have a lot of latitude with the guests. And we’re very efficient you know. No part of the nazi is wasted.” She forms the band of mucus into a catscradle. “Thumbsies?”

Niko ignores her and sets his guitar case on the shadowcrawling ground.

A demon reading on a thighbone chair uses a strip of blond scalp to mark his place in the skinbound bloodlettered volume of Mein Kampf he peruses by the light of humanfat candles glowing in an armbone candelabrum. The demon tosses the book into the crackling bonfire and in the distance someone screams in pleading German.