Inferno Read Free

comfort. Did you not understand? I know a way out of here!”
    “Yeah? So do I. Right over that wall.”
    He laughed. I listened for a while, and it got irritating. Finally he choked it down to a chuckle. “I’m sorry, but they all say that, too. I suppose there is nothing for it but to let you try. After all—we have plenty of time.” He laughed again.
    Now what? Would he turn me in if I tried to climb the wall? I got up, surprised at how good I felt except for the gnats and the smell. My imaginary exercises in the bottle—
    Or wherever I’d really been—
    I started briskly toward the wall.
    Wherever the ground dipped low it became squishy mud, ankle-deep, with small live things in it. I tried to stick to the high ground. The fat man kept right alongside me. There was no chucking him. After a while I said, “If we’re going to walk together I might as well know your name.”
    “Benito. Call me Benny if you like.”
    “Okay. Benito.” Benny sounded much too friendly. “Look, Benito, don’t you want out of here?”
    I hit a nerve. He stopped short, his wide face a gamut of emotions unlike anything I’d ever seen. After a long time he said, “Yes.”
    “Then come over the wall with me.”
    “I can’t. You can’t. You’ll see.” He wouldn’t say anything else, just kept pace with me as I walked on.
    And on.
    And on, and on, and on. The wall was a long way off. I was right about the perspective. We’d been walking for over an hour as far as I could tell, and the wall looked no closer.
    We walked until we were exhausted, and it was still a long way off. I sat down in the mud to slap gnats. “Didn’t seem that far. How high is that thing, anyway? Must be colossal?”
    “It is no more than three meters high.”
    “Don’t be silly.”
    “Look behind you.”
    That was the shock of my life. The river was now maybe three miles away instead of one. And we’d walked for hours . But—
    Benito nodded. “We could walk for eternity and never reach the wall. And we have eternity. No, you don’t believe me. Very well, convince yourself. Continue toward the wall. Continue until even you are certain it can never be reached, and then I will tell you how you can escape.”
    It took me several hours, but I finally believed him.
    The wall was like light speed. We could get arbitrarily close, but we couldn’t ever reach it. Like light speed, or the bottom of a black hole, but like nothing else in the universe I knew.
    We weren’t going out this way.
    And—and just where were we?

3
    I
    sat in the dirt and slapped gnats while Benito explained it again.
    “We are dead and in Hell. This is the Vestibule to Hell, where those who would make no choices in life are condemned. Neither warm nor cold, believers nor blasphemers—you see them in the hills. They chase a banner they will never catch.”
    I remembered then. “Dante’s Inferno ?”
    Benito nodded, his big square jaw heaving like a broaching whale. “You have read the Inferno , then. Good. That was the first clue I had to the way out of here. We must go down—”
    “Sure, all the way.” Something about a lake of ice, and a hole in the center of it. It had been a long time since I read Dante. I couldn’t see that remembering a thirteenth-century book would do me any good to begin with. This couldn’t possibly be the real thing.
    So where was I? “How come you’re so sure this is the place Dante described?”
    “Where else could it be? All of the features are here. All of the details.”
    And I’d been dead a long time. Centuries? What kind of civilization would build an exact copy of Dante’s Inferno ? An Infernoland. Was it part of a larger amusement park, like Frontierland in the Disneyland complex? What might Paradiseland be like? Or was Infernoland all there was to it?
    Who was Benito? A stooge, or a revived corpsicle like me?
    The wall. How had they managed that trick? The wall hadn’t moved, and I certainly had. Some kind of local field effect?