She shakes her head. Shadows make her shifting features even more disturbing.
“This is the way in. You can keep a little dignity and jump, or I can push you.”
“Try it.”
I start for her and suddenly I’m airborne. When I land I slide about twenty feet. Medea just smacked me with a hex that felt like a tornado giving birth to a hurricane. I climb to my feet and brush the dust off my coat.
“If you put it that way, maybe I’ll just go ahead and jump.”
“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said since you’ve been here.”
I climb onto the wide concrete railing and tightrope-walk down to where Medea is waiting.
“You’ve got the home-field advantage here, but I bet you can’t throw hoodoo like that back on earth.”
“We’re not on earth, and whatever power you have in this place, I will always have more. Now jump.”
“I’m going to look you up when I get back to L.A.”
“You’re not the first person to say something like that.”
“Yeah, but I’m the first one who means it.”
She gestures impatiently toward the river.
“Go.”
I glance down at the bloody waves and turn back to her.
“I don’t have time for one last smoke, do I?”
“Jump or I’ll throw you.”
I put my arms out and take a breath.
“As a great man once said, ‘I should never have switched from scotch to martinis.’ ”
I lean back and let myself go over the edge, tumbling through the air and slamming into the red river.
I hit flat on my back. It feels just as good as falling fifty feet into blood sounds. I hold my breath and try not to breathe in anything.
I sink and keep sinking, like the gravity in the river isn’t the same as the gravity outside. I’m pulled down into soft mud at the bottom. At least I hope it’s mud. Another gladiator once swore to me that he’d sailed to Pandemonium on a river of shit. I hope there wasn’t any backwash down here.
I’m instantly engulfed in the muck. My lungs want to crawl up my throat and hitch a ride back to Hollywood. The angel in my head chants a serenity prayer. If I could punch my own brain, I would. The angel stops long enough to remind me that everything has a bottom, even Hell.
I’m being squeezed down through sediment that gets harder every inch I go. The sucking soon turns into pushing, like a hydraulic press is pounding me down into the riverbed. This must be what pasta feels like coming out of a spaghetti extruder.
Then I’m fucking falling again. But only a few feet this time. I slide through a tight fleshy opening in the roof and down a steep incline, like a garbage chute. Nice touch.
I slip down another level and slam into the ground. At least I’m not moving anymore. I lie on the floor and breathe. My heart is pounding. I know I’m surrounded by souls, but they’re not paying any attention to me. They’re used to hard-luck cases sliding down the poop shoot.
The angel is awestruck by where we are and pissed about being stuck inside me. It never really believed I’d take us this far. The absolute end of the line.
Welcome to Tartarus.
I FELL THROUGH what felt like a mile of blood, but when I get to my feet, there isn’t a drop on me and my clothes are dry.
It’s cold here and dim, like light that can’t decide what it wants to be. Dark. Light. Or some strange wavelength that’s simultaneously the opposite of each.