Free Letters From Hades by Jeffrey Thomas Page A

numbers, rounding up the populace, dragging people out of their flats. Even workers in the torture plants."
    "Why?"
    "There is no reason we can comprehend. But I suppose, just so the citizens would not feel too complacent. Too sheltered. A lot of us escaped. The last I saw from a distance, my city was in flames."
    "It’s the incomprehensible that scares me the most," I confessed to her. "More than pain, I think." After a few moments I asked, "Did you have friends and family in your city?"
    "Friends. Friends from Hell, not friends from my lifetime…and I’ve never encountered family here. My friends were scattered in all the chaos. I hope some of them will find their way to Oblivion."
    I nodded. "Have you ever seen a famous person or a celebrity in Hell? Like Ted Bundy…Lee Harvey Oswald?"
    The little Indian woman gave me an uncomprehending frown. "I died in 1927," she explained.
    "Oh. I’m sorry. People all seem like contemporaries here. Well…anyway…back at Avernus University I thought I saw Danny Kaye one time in a hallway. He was a film actor, a comedian; I loved his movies as a kid. But we were being herded along by an instructor so I didn’t dare ask him. I remember thinking that if Danny Kaye is in Hell, then there’s no hope for humanity. He’s the only celebrity I might have seen. No Jimmy Hoffa, no Hitler…"
    " That  name I’ve heard mentioned," the woman said.
    "You’ve been here for a long time—do you think it’s possible to escape?"
    "Escape? Hell? Oh, no…no, no…"
    "Well, you know, look at the visions of Hell writers like Dante and Swedenborg, prophets and so forth have given us. Hell mentioned in the Bible…places like Hell in all these different religions and cultures. Where did they get their glimpses of it, unless they might have come here briefly and then returned?"
    "Part of them may have come, a projection, but it is more likely that a window was merely opened for them to see through. Or perhaps they only sensed Hell instinctively. But in any case, no one who ever died and was damned to Hell could ever escape."
    "Orpheus went to Hell and back."
    "Only a myth."
    "I used to say Hell was only a myth."
    Some people weren’t heading toward Oblivion, but coming from it. The traffic grew more congested the closer the city loomed…and now it did indeed loom. It towered above me like the skyline of a great Earthly city, the tallest towers seeming almost to reach the sky of magma, which was now above my head. Looking up at it, and the ebony skyscrapers, was a vertiginous sensation. Orange light reflected on metal and glass, and sent a diffused glow everywhere, so that faces took on the look of people gathered by a fire.
    Many of the smaller buildings appeared to be made from bricks that were either cut from black pumice or baked from clay that had been painted black, nestled between the larger structures like tenement slums. On their flat roofs were tents and lean-tos in a kind of elevated shanty town. The most imposing buildings, however, were even more mechanical than they had seemed from afar…covered in external circulatory systems of pipelines, and in clockwork gears that turned and pistons that pumped and grooved belts that flowed along recessed tracks in the rusty hides of the sooty black edifices, all to no apparent purpose.
    Not only were there several titanic towers that might rival the Empire State Building, but some buildings that were not so much tall as vast overall, covering many blocks, and one of these didn’t even seem to have a single window in it. Most of the towers had rows of windows like Earthly skyscrapers, but some were lit while others were dark, some with glass intact and others smashed. Many were boarded over.
    There was a clamor arising from Oblivion; not of cars and their horns as in the cities I had experienced, but of multitudes of voices, of gnashing and clanging machinery, and the hiss of steam that billowed up out of brick smoke stacks and out of strange