Free Hell by Robert Olen Butler Page B

for a while. And when Hatcher finally opens his eyes to look once again upon Hell, he is no longer in the Great Metropolis.
    The car is climbing a narrow, curving, empty road into the mountains that Hatcher heretofore has seen only on the horizon. He puts his face to the glass and tries to look back to the city. He sees the slick gray lumpings and soarings and plungings of the mountains as the car twists with the road. And then Hatcher gasps as the city jumps into his eyes: a vast sudden everything: the far horizon and the extreme periphery of his vision, as if he has been plucked into the middle of the air and he dangles before the immense compressed jumble of a billion rooftops and tenement facades and webs of streets and all of it shimmering—not shimmering, quaking—not quaking, writhing—writhing with vast throngs of bodies, tiny from this distance, but Hatcher knows what these great stretches of huddling masses are: millennia of individual bodies and minds and hearts born into life and cast now into this place, shimmering, yes,I shimmering from his view in the mountains of Hell like a scrub fire on a vast plain. He hangs and sees and hangs and he tries to figure out where his body is so he can pull back, and then the city vanishes and it’s just cliff faces and the huddling of boulders until at last the car rushes into a great level plain hidden among the mountain peaks. And there are stands of trees and a vast grassy meadow, or what appear to Hatcher as these things, which he did not know existed in Hell.
    He feels a slight nudge on his arm and Hatcher looks to Hoover, who has averted his face. But the G-man is holding an upturned hand to him with a stack of three golden-brown squares. “You’ll need these,” Hoover says. “Honey cakes for the dog.”
    Hatcher takes them and they are densely heavy and sticky and their smell is so sweet that it makes Hatcher’s teeth ache. He holds them in his palm and puts his other hand over them just as the Cadillac brakes sharply and fishtails to a stop. Before him is a rustic-style hunting lodge—classically shaped in one story of stacked rough logs with a low-pitched gable roof—but even from where Hatcher sits, a hundred yards away, the lodge is so massive as to utterly fill his sight, the rough wood trunks of its walls as large as sequoias. Hatcher has an instant stab of sadness, realizing that the seeming utter absence of nonverminous animal life and growing things in Hell has always given him a sweet little dangerous pulse of pleasure, that whatever the reasons are for a very high percentage of humanity seeming to be here, there is some code of justice—however severe—at work, since the nonhuman living things of that previous life are spared from this place. What were the sins of these trees? he wonders now, with the bloom of a sharp pain behind his eyes.
    And having wondered about the unworthy sequoias, he suddenly finds himself face to muzzle with three dogs. Or, more precisely, the three heads of one dog, Cerberus. The faces of the Hound of Hell are not, as they are variously portrayed in the earthly life, like combinations of lion or bear or wolf or, in latter days, pit bulls. Cerberus is a rabid, grossly outsized Jack Russell terrier, slobbering and barking and leaping incessantly, his three heads each as big as a midsummer watermelon. For the moment, however, he has ceased his jumping and is concentrating on slobbering and barking at Hatcher’s window.
    “Roll the window down just a bit and feed him,” Hoover says.
    Hatcher grasps the window handle and starts slowly to turn it, bits of slobber instantly flying in and burning acutely on his forehead, the tip of his nose, his chest.
    “Watch your fingers,” Hoover says.
    Hatcher does, opening the window just enough to thrust the end of a cake out, averting his face from the slobber, and he starts feeding the heads. Each one falls silent in turn, and then Cerberus abruptly backs away and trots off, chewing