Page 12 of Hellbound

The first shackle of Hell manifested swiftly. Awareness.

Awareness of herself, the passage of time, and the physical form Marian possessed once more. With it came the realization that she ought not to perceive any of it; moments, maybe millennia ago, death had unburdened her of that weight. Hell gave it back.

Then came the next shackle. Pain.

She opened her eyes with a sharp gasp to the murk and was immediately overcome by despair so heavy that her phantom body struggled to draw breath—not that she needed air anymore; she couldn’t die again here. Convincing that body otherwise was an entirely different struggle.

Her heart thudded furiously in her chest. Blood pulsed through her veins. Her skin prickled as the pressure of the atmosphere fell over her. In this place, bone could still break. Flesh still bruised and split, and every nerve in her body remembered how to sing in agony. Such was the fate of the damned.

But Marian would return from this, she assured herself. The physical wounds she suffered here would be temporary; only the memory would endure.

She’d lose her mind thinking about it if she didn’t ground herself. The same tools she used on Earth worked here, too.

Three things you see. Two things you smell. One thing you hear.

What did she see? A sky caught in perpetual dusk, choked by rivers of dense mist. A pall of grayish-orange light barely illuminated the twisted metal structures jutting up from the flat ground that went on and on all around her. Three crimson moons hung overhead in a near-perfect line high in the firmament. Only half of the third and smallest moon could be seen through the haze. Not eclipsed, but gone, a debris field suspended where its lower hemisphere ought to be. Twisted obelisks to her left and right marked a jagged path she knew well. Signposts pointing her toward the gargantuan wreckage of a sprawling city in the distance, its walls and parapets the product of a serpentine weave of metal and stone.

She smelled rust. It coated her tongue so all she tasted was metal. With another shaking breath, she detected the scent of rot in the distance. Foul and sweet all at once, and coming from the direction of the ruined city up ahead.

A low, resounding moan filled the stagnant air, the tectonic shift of a dead world welcoming her home.

A familiar sensation stirred in her chest, an instinct that had been her guide since her first death. It always drew her to the same place nestled in the heart of what remained here.

The Tower. The broken crown of this strange and twisted Hell.

Death never deposited her in the same corner of Hell twice, but it never put her far from the Tower. She’d not explored much of the other ruins; she’d not needed to. Every artifact she’d ever discovered had been in the walls of Hell’s most intact structure.

The key, she thought as she placed a hand over her beating heart, where a spark of purpose ignited. Find the key.

She took off down the winding road.

Marian’s slow footsteps echoed in the foyer, a room far larger than any high-rise lobby or convention hall she’d ever seen. She’d ascended countless steps, climbed over rubble the size of pickup trucks, and slipped through the broken gates into the Tower.

Bare scaffolding and crumbling stone stretched up and up while an off-white, vellum substance tangled between the beams like shed skin. The stone floor stretched on, forming alcoves, narrowing to her left and right into dozens of beckoning hallways.

She’d fallen for their tricks, once. Curiosity had gotten the better of her, and she spent hours walking down a hall that never ended. The walls closed in slowly, until Marian found herself trapped and screaming in a coffin-like tunnel for hours until Elio brought her back.

The walls of the Tower were all depressingly gray, as if something had swept through and drained away every drop of color. Not even the reddish haze of the atmosphere penetrated Hell’s last-standing structure—the pinnacle at the center of a ruined city. Who had dwelled here? Demons, the damned, or both in miserable harmony?

She looked up to find a familiar forest of floating staircases yards away at the center of the great hall, all leading nowhere. Above, thick rivers of black flowed toward the Tower’s ceiling she assumed existed, but had never seen. Sludge dripped down, up, left, and right. It gathered on the floor in scattered pools. Experience had taught her not to touch them.

As she walked, feeling out her instinct’s directions, the walls followed. Metal and stone hummed, the skin-like draping dissolving as she fought to stay focused on what the flailing compass needle in her chest was trying to tell her. Change simmered beneath the surface of everything here, bringing chaos with it. For such an untouched place, the Tower always had new, distracting things for her to perceive.

As Marian headed right, new sights emerged from the walls. Violent lines of color and twisted shapes veered so close to forming objects and faces that Marian recognized, and yet they were never right. Rows and rows of what she could only describe as “portraiture” appeared, tugging at a memory from long ago. A museum from a field trip.

But this time, the painted heads had too many eyes and mouths, and mouths where eyes should have been. Bodies burst from other bodies, all piled on top of each other in a grotesque mass of flesh. The sight made her pulse quicken. She watched her feet and the floor in front of her as she sped up.

“Don’t stare at shit that scares you down there. That’s what it wants. You’ll come back to life screaming and you won’t stop, if you come back at all,” Greg had warned her once.

Pictures didn’t scare Marian. The thing Marian feared most in Hell didn’t lie in wait for its prey.

It hunted.

A tug at her chest made Marian look up. She grimaced at the sight ahead: a familiar archway adorned by thick, vine-like barbs and a disembodied stone mouth protruding from its keystone—the source of the wide moat of churning sludge like some kind of primordial black ooze impeding the path.

There, her instinct buzzed.

All she needed to do was cross the black spill in front of her. One long stride and she’d be safe. Its surface had calmed, no bubbles in sight. Seizing the moment, she skirted the edge, then took one certain step. Just as the oozing river erupted with a ropey, hip-high geyser. Marian yelped as it splashed her right calf and sizzled through her jeans.