Escape From Hell Read Free

but I understood the desperation in Sylvia’s voice. She was starved for conversation. People aren’t meant to suffer alone.
    So I tore a branch off above my head and said, “Phylfia?” My lips and nose were still hanging in tatters. The pain was blinding. I resisted the urge to touch my face.
    The branch dripped blood. “Sylvia,” the tree said. “I was a poet. What were you?”
    “Phyenth figshun writher.”
    “Oh, you can’t talk yet. But you’ve been talking to yourself, and I’ve been listening. It sounded like you’ve been everywhere.”
    “Mofe.” Nope, I was pretty sure I hadn’t. Hell is big and a lot more complicated than Dante had imagined. Benito and I had taken the most convenient path down to where he said there was a way out. Later I’d followed a similar path, halfway down from the rim, to here.
    “It sounded like you’ve seen a lot of Hell. You were trying to lead people out. Then you came here and stopped. You’ve been lying there on my roots like an abandoned corpse, for ages. Why did you just stop?”
    “I’ wasn’ worging.”
    “Well.” Her voice dropped. “Why would it?”
    I had been looking for that answer since I got to Hell. What was it all for? I lay there and waited to heal. It occurred to me that she’d gone mute, so I tore off another branch. That felt wrong, as if I were torturing somebody’s houseplant.
    “Eep! So you’ve been traveling. Do most souls do that? Or all but the ones like me?”
    “Moftly they sday where Minos droffs them. Benido … a frien’ buthted me loothe. He led me oud. I know the way oud, Thilvia.”
    “But you didn’t take it.”
    “No.”
    “And you wrote? I’ve seen people torn by the dogs and harpies. They heal. Are you healed yet?” I turned my face up toward the gnarled branches. “Ugh. What did you write? Not poetry. I’d know.”
    “I think I’m lader than you. I wrode sciensh fiction.”
    “Never heard of it. No, wait. Scientifiction? Like in
Amazing?
” She laughed coarsely.
    “Bedder.” My face was healing. Souls heal here, and I’d healed faster since Benito led me into the grotto outside Hell. There had been other changes, too.
    “You mean literature? Like Jack Lewis?
Narnia? Perelandra?
”
    Jack Lewis? “Not like that. Hard science fiction, like in
Analog.
I had a best–selling novel, too. I called myself Allen Carpentier.” Like I was going to impress a poet. “What did you write? Sylvia who?”
    Her voice got formal. The New England accent I’d already noticed was stronger. Every syllable was pronounced with inhuman accuracy.
    And I,
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Sylvia Plath.
    Of course that was my cue to announce that I’d never heard of her; but I had. She’d been married to a man who became poet laureate of England. And of course she’d have known C.S. Lewis well enough to call him “Jack.” And I recognized the poem.
    “I read your novel.
The Bell Jar.
But that was from
Ariel.
”
The Bell Jar
was a self–pitying look at a young and crazy woman poet. Black humor, funny in spots. Better known than most of my books, very well regarded by critics, and I’d liked it even so.
    “You read
Ariel!
”
    I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d heard a reading of that one poem on National Public Radio as a commemoration of her suicide, and what they’d quoted came from a book review. “Ooomph —”
    “I thought you were a writer. You’ve been talking to yourself,” she said. The Massachusetts accent had stuck. Not quite Bostonian. “If you know the way out of Hell, why don’t you go?”
    “I watched Benito go so I could say that I saw it. Then I came back to get other damned souls. It hasn’t worked out. Sylvia, I have to know that
anyone
can get out. If there isn’t a way out, then this is just an enormous torture chamber.”
    She was silent.
    I ripped a branchlet loose. She said, “Dammit! No, I was just