Escape From Hell Read Free Page B

I start?” It was a familiar question; I’d written scores of books and far more short stories, and every one of them needed a beginning. “The grotto.”

Chapter 2
    The Tenth Circle
    Ice
----
     
    Whereat I turned me round, and saw before me,
And underfoot a lake, that from the frost
The semblance had of glass, and not of water.
    T he grotto looks jeweled; it’s brighter than it ought to be. It’s not very large. I took a tourist trip to Lourdes once and it reminds me of that. A stream of clean water runs through it. I had a drink from it, the first cool, sweet water I’d tasted since I died.
    The grotto is at the very bottom of Hell, through the lake of ice and down. There are two ways out. One is straight up, and if Dante’s right, that’s a four–thousand–mile climb to the Earth’s surface. That’s the way Benito took, dwindling to a dark mote on a bright dot, then gone. I went the other way, through an opening walled with coarse black hair.
    That’s Satan’s leg. Satan is covered in coarse black hair. He stands over a mile tall, buried halfway in ice. There’s space between the hair and the ice, room enough for a man to crawl and crawl and crawl. Like a flea. Once he shifted and almost crushed me. I’m pretty sure it was deliberate, but the hair was too thick and I just kept coming until I was back on the ice.
    The lake of ice is huge! The air is thick and murky so you can’t see all the way across, but it’s flat, so there’s no horizon the way lakes and oceans have on Earth.
    I crawled. The Devil said — Sylvia, the Devil tried to talk to me, but I kept crawling. There’s a wind that leaches all the heat out of you in an instant. At first I was crawling over bodies sprawled any which way under clear ice. Their eyes were open. They saw me. Then faces started protruding, ice on their eyes, snow in their mouths.
    “Hello? Is someone there? Moving?”
    I hesitated. These were traitors. “Here,” I said.
    “Is there a way out?” He had a long face, dusted with ice.
    “I haven’t thought of one for you. Who are you? What did you do?”
    “I built an atomic bomb,” he said. “I do have a solution. Boil the ice.”
    I laughed. “Will Rogers?”
    “That’s right, he was going to win the submarine war by boiling the Atlantic. He didn’t have a power source.”
    “Why are you here?”
    “Quantum physics would tell us that everything is by chance.”
    “I don’t believe that!”
    “Neither do I, but I don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. How are you able to move, here?”
    “Some of us are loose. Like Benito, or — him.” Someone was walking toward me across the ice.
    He was naked. No robe. Long black beard and hair. He wasn’t crouching against the wind. He shouted something at me, not in English, but I understood him anyway. “What are you laughing at, dog?”
    I patted my face. It was frozen in a great wide grin. I understood then that I was still grinning from my triumph. I’d fought my way out of Hell, and I was back of my own will, knowing why. I’d come back to rescue others, like Benito had. Paying the debt forward. I felt
good.
    I shouted at him, and managed to wrap my words around his speech. “I know the way out of Hell. Follow me!”
    We approached each other. He was grinning, too. When he was close enough, he wrapped his arms around me and exploded.
    •    •    •
    I waited for Sylvia to react, but of course she said nothing until I ripped a twig loose.
    She said, “Exploded? Like he’d swallowed nitroglycerin?”
    “Just like that. Like a fool, I let him hug me. I thought he was just very glad to find me. Some peoples are demonstrative —”
    “I know. Italians,” she said. “What was he speaking? Irish?”
    “Maybe. I don’t know, but I could understand it. I’ve understood everyone since I came back from the grotto. I’ve been given the gift of tongues.”
    “You’re a
saint?
Lucky you. Then what?”
    “Bang. He must have blown