Robert Butler - Hell

“Driver,” Hatcher says.

Porphyrius rears at this and his hands flail and he turns his face to Hatcher and he calms down. But Hatcher hardly sees these things. He is focused on what he must do and he sees the driver looking at him and it occurs to him to ask, “How do you find the streets, when you are driving someone?”

Porphyrius reaches to the glove box and opens it and pulls out a folded map.

“May I have it?” Hatcher asks.

Porphyrius hesitates.

“You’ll wait for me till I return,” Hatcher says.

Hatcher can see the man thinking. Porphyrius looks at the map.

“You know who I am?” Hatcher says, touching his powder-blue neck-tie for emphasis.

Porphyrius nods. He reaches his hand across the seat and extends the map, his brow knit tight, his hand trembling slightly. Hatcher reaches into the car, takes hold of the map, pulls it free. And the hand of Porphyrius bursts into flames, roiling, heavy flames that rush instantly up his arm.

Hatcher recoils, pulls his own hand and arm and the map safely out of the car. There is no possibility of giving the map back. The driver is vanishing utterly in the flames that race wildly up his arm and over his shoulders and head and down his torso and legs, and then as abruptly as it flared up, the fire vanishes, leaving only a pile of ashes and a chauffeur’s cap.

Hatcher stares at them, stunned for a moment but happy to have the map in his hand. The ashes are beginning to stir a bit. Reconstitution is beginning. But Hatcher uses his newsman’s instincts: the source gave what he gave, which he shouldn’t have given, and he paid the price. But you’ve got what you need for the sake of the story. Hatcher walks off.

Before he leaves the empty plaza of Administration Central, Hatcher pauses and looks more closely at the map. It is a map he knows. A thumb-smudged Standard Oil gas station map with a detailed drawing in blue, red, and white. The image once shaped a fantasy in his thirteen-year-old mind: beneath the Standard Oil sign the gas station guy in his Standard Oil ball cap and bow tie holds one end of an unfolded map, with the other end in the grasp of a Tuesday-Weld-cute blond behind the wheel of her convertible. They are both looking at the place on the map where she’s going to drive right now and wait for him till he gets off from work. Sometimes it’s in the woods along the river. Sometimes his bachelor pad over the paint store downtown. A few years later, Hatcher even spent a summer pumping gas at the Pittsfield Standard station, and at the back of his mind, he was always waiting for that Ford Fairlane convertible to roll in and the blond to honk her horn and ask him directions.

Hatcher begins to unfold the map from the Duesenberg. It unfolds and unfolds. He opens his arms wide to hold it and backs up to give himself plenty of room on the empty concrete. He lays the map out and kneels before it. The Great Metropolis, a vast tapestry of Peachtrees. He lifts the map and turns it over, and on the other side is a tiny-print index of all the streets. He bends forward, bringing his face close to the print, as if he were praying toward Mecca. He can make the names out clearly. He finds the coordinates for Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, lifts and turns the map again, locates the place of the Old Harrowing and Admin Central and plots his course.

His destination turns out to be quite close. The trick is to turn down Peachtree Street Street Avenue off Peachtree Way, and a few hundred yards along, Peachtree Street Street Avenue renames itself Peachtree Avenue Street Street and then makes a sharp left turn and instantly takes on the name Peachtree Way while the parallel stretch of the previous Peachtree Way goes for a couple of blocks under the name Robert. Meanwhile, back on the new Peachtree Way, the intersection of Lucky Street should be coming up soon.

Hatcher walks between dingy brick urban warehouse facades with boarded windows and three-story pilasters mounted by terra cotta demon faces, and the crowd here has lessened only slightly. The street is still full of people pressing ardently onward. But they mostly have long beards and wear rough-cloth cloaks and animal skins. This is an old neighborhood, of course. Ahead is the place where it is understood that long ago the Harrowing occurred, when this was the site of merely a foul, sulfurous well and an edge-of-town campsite for some of the standoffish Old Ones. And now Hatcher approaches the very place: Peachtree Way and Lucky Street.

On three of the corners, the intersecting streets’ grimy buildings end in gaping rubble-filled lots, one concertina-wired, the other two open basement pits. On the fourth corner is a low, curve-edged, metal-fronted deco building. Hatcher pushes through a revolving door beneath a large gilt sign: AUTOM AT.

Inside, the two non-street walls are full of small, glass-doored food dispensers. In the center of the floor is a change booth barely as wide as the man within, who is beardless but massively mutton-chopped and dressed in frock coat, high collar, and wide-ribbon bow tie. Hatcher does not recognize Cornelius Vanderbilt. Above Vanderbilt’s barred window is an official sign, nickels, and propped on the floor against the front of the booth is a cardboard sign with fading handwritten letters promising MEAT TOMORROW. From its dinginess, it has obviously been sitting there for a long, long time. All around are tables filled with intently conversing groups of mostly men wearing sackcloth tunics and with the hair at their temples unrounded and the edges of their beards unmarred. A smell of stewed carrots and creamed spinach and sweat and goat hair fills the air. Surveying the room, Hatcher finally turns his gaze to the table in the corner at the window. One man sits there alone, his isolation perhaps due to the fact that he is the only customer dressed in suit and tie. The face is bowed as the man moves his fingertip in a spread of salt on the tabletop before him, the shaker sitting nearby. The top of his head, with its tight right-side part and faint cow-lick, is familiar.

“Carl?” Hatcher says.

Carl Crispin looks up. His gaunt face draws even tighter in a flat facsimile of a smile. “Hatcher.”

Hatcher moves to the table and sits across from his reporter.

Carl answers what he assumes will be Hatcher’s first question. “Once I finally found it, I didn’t want to lose it again.”

Hatcher looks at the salt. Carl has lettered there: TAKE ME.

When Hatcher looks back up, Carl shrugs and backhands the salt from the table in a single stroke.

“A little ritual,” Carl says. “We all of us here are searching for the right one.”

Hatcher doesn’t know what to say.

Carl goes on. “Salt, see. Lot’s wife looked back on Sodom and this is what she became. So salt has to be powerful, right? I shouldn’t be saying this. I’m going to pay now.”

And Carl is pulled up from the chair and he stands straight and his body lifts off the floor and a dozen holes open in the top of his head, two dozen, and his body rotates until he is precisely inverted and he begins to jerk up and down as if an invisible hand is shaking him. From the holes in his head a fine gray powder flows out. His brain, no doubt.

Hatcher wonders what would have happened if he’d reached out his hand at Carl’s first rising and held his arm and told him that no one is listening. Would the punishment have stopped?

As it is, though, Carl rotates back to an upright position and descends to the chair. His eyes are empty.

Hatcher waits. And, in time, the gray powder stirs and gathers from the chair, the tabletop, the floor, and rushes back into the top of Carl’s head. His eyes come alive.