Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [104]
“Don’t panic,” said a figure with its back to him. Gerold crawled forward, dragging his dead legs behind. He wasn’t sure what his impulse was. To see? To confront the figure that had pulled him out of the boat and into this . . . this place?
Or to jump back out?
“I can’t believe it,” the figure said. “The coordinates were right—we made it!” And then the figure turned to face Gerold.
Gerold screamed again, loud and hard. “You’re a monster!”
The figure let out a snide chuckle. “Actually, I’m a Troll, thank you very much.” His voice sounded like any normal man’s, but everything else?
Gerold screamed a third time.
This . . . Troll stood hunched over, shirtless, with greenish brown skin stretched over hillocks of muscles. He wore pants that looked like burlap and boots that were stitched up the middle. Each wide hand possessed only three fingers and a thumb and had nails like a bear’s. And his head . . .
“Man, your head’s all fucked up!” Gerold bellowed in ceaseless horror. “It looks squashed.”
“That’s ’cos when I was in jail, they put me in a Head-Bender. Don’t worry about it.” Now the figure took a candle off the side of the interior wall and touched it to each fingertip of a severed hand. “Hand of Glory,” the Troll informed. “Got no time to explain, just that it keeps the outer Observation Egress of the Nectoport invisible.”
Gerold shuddered where he sat.
“Yeah”—the Troll glanced out the large circle before him in which the red sky soared—“we’re safe now, er, at least for the time being.”
“WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING!” Gerold shouted.
The Troll sat down on an outcropping in the wall. “Look, man, I know you’re confused and scared and a million other things. My name’s Krilid, and yours is Gerold, right?”
Gerold nodded, teeth chattering. Suddenly he was aware of stifling heat.
“You’re in Hell,” Krilid said.
Gerold gaped.
“I don’t have time to answer all your questions—we gotta be somewhere else, like, real soon. But I’ll give you the short version—”
“I’m in HHHHHHH—Hell?” Gerold managed.
“Only Hell’s probably not what you imagined.” Krilid picked Gerold up by his armpits, and held him up to the circular opening so he could look down.
Gerold screamed yet again.
“Hell’s a big city, the biggest in history. It’s bigger than all the cities in the Living World all put together.”
Gerold felt frozen as he looked down out of the opening. There was a city down there, all right—a leaning, shrieking, smoke-gusting city without end—
“It’s called the Mephistopolis, and this thing you’re in is called a Nectoport, the most sophisticated mode of transportation in the Abyss. We bootlegged the technology. It can travel great distances in seconds by using occult mathematics to collapse values of space.”
“I-I-I-I . . . WHAT?” Gerold blabbered.
“I understand. Just listen, though, and make of it what you will, okay? Clairvoyants in Heaven foresaw your coming here; that’s how I was able to pick you up. I’m a Troll in Hell but I work for God, and a Fallen Angel named—well, forget all that, no time. I pulled you out of your boat for a reason . . .”
“A reason,” Gerold droned.
“I’m on a mission, and I’m hoping you’ll go along with it.”
Gerold’s head spun and spun. This couldn’t be happening. It had to be a nightmare but then he somehow knew it wasn’t. Whatever this thing, this Troll, this . . . guy named Krilid meant, Gerold found incontemplatable.
The opening continued to soar through the scarlet sky.
“You were gonna kill yourself, right?” Krilid asked, keeping one eye out the opening. “ ’Cos you can’t walk?”
“How do you know that?” Gerold snapped.
“Same way I knew you’d be in the Reservoir. It was foreseen. And let me tell you, it’s a good thing you didn’t kill yourself ’cos if you had, you’d be here.”
Gerold stared agog. “I already AM here!”
“Yeah, but not as a member of the Human Damned. You’re still alive, man. You’re a member of the Living World, but you’re in Hell. Why? Because of a fluke.”
Gerold pushed his hair out of his face. “Yeah, I’ll say.”
“If you had