Tartarus, in comparison, was dead, rotting from the inside and filled with maggots. It was not just the capital of the dead, but a corpse of a city laid out on a mortuary slab. There was no sun, but it was hot and sticky, and everyone crowded together. The bodies on the sidewalks moved listlessly; everyone looked exhausted, beaten. There were no children. Oliver thought he had never been anywhere so devoid of hope. It was a terrible place, ugly and overwhelming. It smelled like garbage, and there were flies everywhere—the largest flies he’d ever seen: they moved quickly, little carriers of disease.
Looking down at the twisted streets, he thought that one could easily get lost forever in its serpentine alleyways. As Mimi had said, in Hell there is no past, no future; only now.
And so Tartarus was a jumble, a hodgepodge, an ugly patch-work of buildings that had no rhyme or reason to be standing next to each other. Everything clashed, colors, styles, zon-ing—there was no order, there was no aesthetic design. Parts of it looked like a strip mall on steroids: all blinking lights and tiny little shop fronts with peeling paint and antiquated video posters. Otherwise, there were dozens of abandoned empty lots, and almost everything—the walls, the sidewalks, the streets—were covered in grime and soot.
“Come on, this is only the outer ring. We need to get downtown,” Mimi said, leading him toward what looked like a subway station.
The train that roared into the station was covered with graffiti inside and out. E
very seat had been vandalized—windows scratched. When the announcement crackled, it was all static; no one could understand what had been said. They hopped on. Mimi seemed to know where she was going, and Oliver trusted her to lead the way. She drew some stares with her platinum hair—the brightest thing in the dark city—but other than that they were left alone. No one threatened Oliver.
The only palatable emotion he could sense was massive indifference. No one cared. Their indifference was a physical entity. Oliver could almost feel them not caring; not at all interested or curious about their presence. It was an active, hostile disinterest, the likes of which he had never experienced. It gave him the creeps.
The subway lurched forward, and they rode it for a few stops.
Finally they reached their destination. “This is it, let’s get out,” Mimi said.
Oliver noticed a sign right above the exit from the subway: ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE ENTER HERE.
Not for the first time did he wonder what he was doing down here. This was no place for a human being, let alone one who was alive.
Back outside, downtown was even uglier than midtown, or wherever they had been. The streets were even more tightly packed, the air smelled like ash and cinder, and it was becoming more and more difficult to breathe. Oliver saw the trolls chained with their painful silver collars. They worked as cab drivers and waiters and swept the streets, which looked impossible to clean. He recognized the demons with their slightly red faces and small protruding horns above their foreheads; their ugly scowls. But the very worst were the creatures with faces that were so beautiful they were hard to look at. Their eyes were flat and cold; their indifference was the strongest of all.
“Croatan,” Mimi whispered.
Oliver shivered. The demons were rough-looking and beastly, but the Silver Bloods, who had been angels once, had a corrupted beauty, like paintings that were smeared in excrement.
“They won’t bother us down here,” Mimi said. “Even if we saw the Dark Prince himself, he wouldn’t care.”
“Is this why they want earth?” Oliver asked.
“Yes. Hell is dead. Nothing grows here,” Mimi told him.
“It wasn’t always this way, but that was how the world was divided in the beginning. All the light at the top, and darkness below.”
“Where is Lucifer?” Oliver asked.
“Probably past the ninth.”
“What’s that?”
“The core,” Mimi said. “The center of the underworld.
Where the Dark Angels were made. No one is allowed there.
We barely got permission to get here, in the seventh.” She explained the hierarchy of Hell. On top were the Croatan, Lucifer, and his Silver Bloods. And right below them were the demons of ice and fire, who lived in the underworld. Then there were the lost souls, humans who’d been judged upon entering the Kingdom of the Dead and were consigned to the un-derlayer for all eternity. Then there were the shackled trolls, who were neither angel nor demon nor human, but another creature entirely—no one knew for sure, except that they carried out the demons’ wishes. They were the lowest of the low, the underclass, the lowest caste, the untouchables. “There are Hellhounds too, of course,” she told him. “But they’re very rare—probably down in the ninth with Lucifer. After they rebelled and stood with us in Rome, he brought them to heel.
Gabrielle held out hope that she could bring them back to our side one day, but who knows if that will ever happen.”
Oliver regained his bearings. If Tartarus were New York, it looked as if they were now on the Lower East Side, before the hipsters and trendy wine bars and fancy hotels had moved in, but without the cozy Italian delis with the made men in ve-lour sweats playing cards by the front doors.
In the middle of the neighborhood was a dark building with a large crowd standing in front of it. music—droning, tuneless music, but music nonetheless—boomed from the doors. Oliver noticed that the crowd waited anxiously, and that a beautiful demon, her horns filed into sharp sexy little points, was sitting on a lifeguard’s chair, looking down dis-dainfully at the crowd. Once in a while she would motion with her tail, and the burly trolls—bouncers—would push through to help the chosen few make their way to the front of the velvet rope.
Oliver was all too familiar with the practice. They called it
“face control” or “working the door,” and it trafficked in rejection and humiliation, doling out both in spades, along with low self-esteem. It was Hell, and Oliver thought he should really stop thinking that. It was getting a bit clichéd. Next thing he knew he would be trapped in an elevator with strangers.
Mimi was making her way toward the teeming, anxious crowd. “Well, are you coming?” she asked, turning around when she noticed he was dawdling behind, hesitant.